James A. Michener on federalism in Poland They were defending their freedom to neutralize the king; they were defending their freedom to keep the newly built towns subservient to their country areas; they were defending most strongly their freedom to keep their peasants in a state of perpetual serfdom as opposed to the liberties which were being grudgingly won in the western parts of Europe; and they were doing everything reactionary within their power to preserve the advantages they had against the legitimate aspirations of the growing gentry. The Golden Freedom which the magnates defended with every bit of chicanery and power they commanded was the freedom of the few to oppress the many, the freedom of a few grasping magnates to prevent a strong king from arising.

I recently finished reading Peter Wilson’s The Thirty Years War, and I regret that I didn’t read it sooner. While the book has received no small amount of attention for its contributions to the history of warfare, or of Germany, or central Europe in general, it can also be read as an important contribution to constitutional theory. The study of the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire – here using the sense of the word “constitution” in its “older” sense, that is, as a package of values, norms, and institutions peculiar to a given political community – can, I argue, furnish insights that are valuable to the study of the constitutional order in the U.S., which has historically been dominated by an obsession with the codification of constitutional rules in the written Constitution, and not the institutions, norms, and understandings that actually comprise the constitutional order. ...

Every so often one comes across a corner of the Internet where someone has written, created or shared exactly the kind of thing you were hoping you’d some day come across. I had that experience recently with a blog post defending the use of the expository tactics of “infodumping” and “incluing” in science fiction: For me, one of the things that fundamentally makes sf, sf, is that it goes out of its way to require more exposition than other literary modes. One cannot just “tell a story” in sf; one must also carefully and complicatedly establish the world in which that story “takes place” in order for the story to be in any way understandable. When you think about it, this is actually quite astonishing, especially considering that it is commonly agreed, or at least commonly asserted, that sf grew out of and to a certain extent remains “popular adventure fiction,” in which the straightforward relation of incident, one would presume, should be paramount. But instead, sf by its very nature frustrates the reader’s continual desire to “find out what happens next.” Is it not truly remarkable that, from the very beginning (wherever one places this: with Gernsback and Amazing [Stories], with H.G. Wells or Jules Verne, with Mary Shelley, what have you), we find sf stories repeatedly stopping dead in their tracks while the narration lectures the reader on various matters of fact, real or imagined? ...

Earlier today the Supreme Court refused, in a 5-4 party line vote, to reconsider Citizens United and struck down a century-old Montana law regulating corporate spending in state elections. You can read all about the gory details elsewhere (it’s worth noting that the ruling might not be that much of a setback to proponents of campaign finance reform); but here are my two cents: First, the Court simply assumed its own facts and basically ignored the Montana legislature’s findings of fact. The incredibly compressed reasoning of the majority seems to come down to this: “The ruling in Citizens United applies in this case; despite what the Montana Supreme Court may say, we say that this case is not meaningfully different, and therefore Montana may not limit corporate campaign contributions.” Much like in the oral arguments in which the justices considered the Affordable Care Act, several of the Court’s conservative justices suppose themselves to be policy experts and are apparently uninterested in deferring to legislatures. ...

Parties as Platforms for Popular Constitutionalism The major parties in the contemporary U.S. are ideologically polarized and, currently, come closer now than they often have in the past to acting with parliamentary levels of discipline. (Well, alright, maybe only the Republicans are currently capable of acting with a high level of intra-party discipline, to the detriment of Senate comity and federal budget policy.) We can complain about how (asymmetric) ideological polarization between the two parties is detrimental to democratic politics, to policy-making, to the state of political discourse, and so on. Certainly, extreme, hostage-taking antics from hyperpartisans did no one any favors during what is now apparently only the first of many debt ceiling battles, back in 2010. But for better worse, the parties are now closer to being ideological coalitions, rather than sectional congeries, or uneasy alliances of groups with interests that sometimes overlap and sometimes conflict. ...