News at Home 
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1/24/2021
Trump Inflamed the American "War of Sections." What Comes Next?
by Steve Suitts
2020 shows the south is arguably still the key region in American politics, but it may not be a stronghold of white conservative politics for long.
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1/19/2020
Pardon Me?: The History of the Washington Territorial Government and the Self-Pardon
by Michael Schein
The question of self-pardons by an executive isn't a theoretical one. It was resolved – in the negative – by events in the Washington territory in 1856.
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1/17/2020
The Politics of an Inauguration Unlike Any Other
by Michael A. Genovese
Joe Biden's inauguration will be unlike any other, but he will need to draw on inaugural traditions of declaring purpose and invoking solidarity if he is to begin to repair national division.
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1/17/2020
Confronting "Who We Are"
by Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson
The Capitol riots should prompt consideration of how racism is sustained by mainstream institutions and operates through everyday patterns of thought and action, as much as in open eruptions of violence.
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1/17/2021
The Free Press and Democracy in a "Murder the Media" Age
by Wendy Melillo
Journalism as a profession needs to embrace its historical role as a guardian of democracy and refuse to let objectivity work as a shield for authoritarianism; authoritarians won't accept a free press anyway.
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1/17/2020
Restoring Civil Society by Executive Order?: An Inaugural Reverie
by John L. Godwin
Joe Biden should defend the First Amendment right to peaceable assembly by a temporary emergency order criminalizing the carrying of firearms at public protest events and make clear that the threat of force is not part of the democratic process.
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1/17/2021
The Great Evasion
by Lawrence Wittner
Joe Biden should reverse the nation's long dereliction of duty in leading the world toward nuclear disarmament and reducing the threat of nuclear war.
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1/17/2021
Were Trump's Pardons Even Legal?
by James D. Zirin
Almost all the pundits, constitutional lawyers, and members of the professoriate are laying down their arms, largely conceding that the President has broad powers to pardon anyone in the world, with the possible exception of himself. But are they giving too much away?"
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1/14/2021
Banana Republic or Nut Country? January 6 Put American Exceptionalism in Perspective
by Frank P. Barajas
American political elites have responsed to the Capitol riot by comparing it unfavorably to something that would happen in a "banana republic." The historical record of American interference in Latin America and of our own domestic tumults shows that we may not be bananas, but have had our fair share of nuts.
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1/14/2021
Donald Trump’s Situational Fascism
by Gavriel Rosenfeld
Rather than engage in an unproductive debate about whether Donald Trump is or is not a bona fide fascist, scholars should consider the events of January 6 (and Trump's role in inciting them) as emergent, contingent results of the interplay of factors latent in American liberal democracy.
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1/14/2020
Historians, Insurrectionists and Fragile White Folks
by James Brewer Stewart
A historian of abolition and an advocate of racial justice argues that historians must reject the psychological framework of some recent popular antiracist books and learn from the history of activists embodying Frederick Douglass's call for a "moral revolution" through engagement with others.
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1/13/2021
The Problem with a Self-Pardon
by Robert J. Spitzer
It is likely that the issue of a president's ability to pardon himself will be contested in short order. A constitutional scholar of the presidency explains why such an action cannot be countenanced in a society of law.
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1/13/2021
Trump's Nero Decree
by Frank Domurad
Adolf Hitler coped with the realization of incipient defeat by ordering the destruction of vital infrastructure in Germany as vengeance against a people who had, he believed, failed him. Donald Trump has been taking a similar approach to the nation's infrastructure and the COVID response (except for the border wall).
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1/12/2020
The Long Overdue End of the “Serious Conservative"
by Charles J. Holden
Two darlings of the conservative movement – Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley – found themselves in hot water last week after supporting the false narrative of election fraud that inspired the Capitol rioting. It's part of a long legacy of media-anointed "serious conservatives" whose smarts have been inflated.
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1/12/2021
A New "Trump Precedent" Under the 25th Amendment?
by Devan Charles Lindey
If the vice president and cabinet invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Donald Trump from the powers of the presidency, it would set a new precedent in the largely uncharted territory of dealing with Presidential incapacity.
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1/12/2021
Public Speech and Democracy
by Sandra Peart
American leaders have failed to support public speech that sustains disagreement without violence. That culture of speech must be rebuilt for democracy to survive.
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1/10/2020
Black Women Have Been Important Party and Electoral Organizers for a Century
by Alison M. Parker
Black women's political organizing was a key to Joe Biden's victory and the Democratic Senate victories in Georgia; these episodes are part of a long historical tradition of activists using partisan politics to press for racial and gender equality.
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1/10/2021
Historical Rhetoric Resurfaced in Georgia's Runoff Election
by Alicia K. Jackson
Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock didn't just defeat their Republican opponents on January 5, they defeated a number of racist tropes that have characterized Georgia politics since Reconstruction.
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1/10/2021
Leaders Have Shirked Responsibility When Pandemics Affected Presidents
by Robert Brent Toplin
It's a matter of speculation whether his illness with COVID-19 has contributed to Trump's recent behavior, but it's not unlikely. It's another episode showing the need for rigorous attention to the issue of presidential incapacitation.
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1/10/2021
Will VMI Move Further Toward Change and Away from Stonewall Jackson?
by Wallace Hettle
Removing the statue of Stonewall Jackson from campus is just one step that the Virginia Military Institute must take toward separating itself from the Lost Cause myth and serving all Virginians.
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