Biden is no joke; will vote for him again

coverage in the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...7cba66-fcf7-11eb-b8dd-0e376fba55f2_story.html

Biden administration scrambled as its orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan unraveled
By
Missy Ryan,,Karen DeYoung, Dan Lamothe, and Anne Gearan
Yesterday at 6:51 p.m. EDT

By the middle of the week, as cities across Afghanistan were falling like dominoes to the Taliban and U.S. diplomats appeared increasingly at risk, President Biden’s plan for an orderly end to the United States’ longest war was quickly falling apart.

On Wednesday evening, Biden convened his top advisers to assess the ominous turn of events. One by one, in the cramped Situation Room in the White House basement, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken outlined the administration’s options for ensuring the security of U.S. personnel. Biden asked them to return with recommendations.

When the aides reconvened early the next morning, things had gotten worse. The Taliban was taking control of more and more of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals, most of them seized without a major fight, and the militants were bearing down on Kabul, the national capital. After being briefed by Sullivan and Austin, Biden gave the order to activate a plan deploying troops to secure the Kabul airport and create an evacuation route for Americans on the ground.

Blinken called Kabul, where the U.S. Embassy’s top diplomat was already presiding over packing and document destruction, and told him most embassy personnel would move to the airport. At U.S. Central Command in Tampa, military leaders ordered intensified airstrikes on militants driving toward Kabul, hoping to slow their advance as U.S. personnel and their allies scrambled to get out.

The urgency bordering on panic laid bare how the president’s strategy for ending the 20-year U.S. military effort — leaving Afghan forces to hold off the Taliban for months as negotiators redoubled efforts to hammer out a peace deal — has undergone a rapid dismantling.

The lightning collapse is rooted in misplaced assumptions — including a failure to account for how the U.S. departure would catalyze a crisis of confidence in Afghan leaders and security forces, enabling the Taliban blitz — from the moment Biden announced the withdrawal this spring. It is equally the product of two decades of miscalculations about transforming Afghanistan and overly optimistic assessments of progress that have plagued the war from its start.

After receiving a video briefing from aides while at Camp David on Saturday, Biden issued a statement defending the administration’s response, saying an endless U.S. presence in another country’s civil conflict was unacceptable.

“One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country,” he said.

Laurel Miller, who served as a top official for Afghanistan during the Obama and Trump administrations, said a swift Taliban takeover was among the scenarios that analysts in and outside of government had warned could occur after a U.S. withdrawal, even though few expected it to happen so fast.

“My takeaway is that they priced this into the decision,” she said of the Biden administration. “It’s regrettable, but it was priced in as a tolerable outcome.”

The disintegration of the hoped-for withdrawal scenario has left the administration racing to protect U.S. diplomats and struggling to respond to criticism from Republicans and advocates alike. It has also deepened questions about how Biden will reconcile his realpolitik, including the abandonment of women and human rights defenders, with promises to restore core values to U.S. foreign policy.

This account of how the Biden administration has grappled in recent weeks with the unraveling of its Afghanistan plans is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

Officials say the administration, despite a decision to send 4,000 troops back to Afghanistan to help evacuate embassy staffers and Afghan allies, is not contemplating a reversal of its withdrawal decision, as some former military leaders have advocated, or an extension of the Aug. 31 deadline for ending air support to Afghan forces.

For some critics, including those with deep experience in Afghanistan, the situation is not only disheartening but also offers a troubling message as the Biden administration seeks to turn around the United States’ global image after four years of erratic foreign policy under President Donald Trump.

“If Trump undermined the confidence of the world, Biden’s actions, pulling out and leaving a mess in Afghanistan, may simply be chapter two in undercutting fundamental assumptions about America,” said Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan who serves as the president of the American Academy of Diplomacy.


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more

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continued

'Zero responsibility'
The administration’s decision to withdraw, announced in April, was guided by Biden’s conviction, dating back more than a decade, that the military mission in Afghanistan had little chance of success. The former senator initially supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but by the time he became President Barack Obama’s vice president in 2009, he saw the Afghanistan project as futile.

After trillions of dollars and more than 2,000 U.S. combat deaths, as well as the deaths of tens of thousands of Afghan civilians, Biden thought the United States had little chance of transforming a largely tribal, undeveloped nation. For all their differences, Biden’s instincts coincided with those of Trump, whose desire to withdraw was repeatedly deflected by his top security aides.

As a candidate in early 2020, Biden was asked whether the United States had a responsibility to Afghan women and girls in light of a possible Taliban takeover. “No, I don’t!” Biden said. “Do I bear responsibility? Zero responsibility.”

“The idea of us being able to use our armed forces to solve every single internal problem that exists in the world is just not within our capacity,” he continued. “The question is, is America’s vital self-interest at stake or the self-interest of one of our allies at stake?”

As the war approached its 20th anniversary, the public seemed to agree. A recent poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs shows that 70 percent of Americans back withdrawing from Afghanistan, though support is stronger among Democrats than Republicans.

Months before Biden unveiled his withdrawal decision, Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, then the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, warned that a rapid government collapse was not just possible but was the most likely result of a quick exit, according to one person familiar with his analysis.

In weeks of intensive deliberations in Washington, Austin and Gen. Mark. A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, privately advised Biden against a full withdrawal, officials said.

“It came down to where the assessment they were receiving from the military in Afghanistan did not support the preferred policy decision that the administration and certainly the State Department wished to pursue,” one of the officials said. “The bottom line was that DOD was not the loudest voice in the room when it came to stating their candid assessment of likely outcomes.”

But a senior U.S. official involved in White House deliberations defended the process and the Pentagon’s part in it.

“First of all, the military voice was heard,” the official said. “It was heard, it was loud, it was clear, and it was in writing and verbally, and it was unambiguous.”

The official said that no senior U.S. leader predicted that a collapse of the Afghan state could come in August. Generals did warn, however, that they were concerned that a collapse could occur before the end of the year, two officials said.

Once the decision was made, Pentagon leaders, especially cautious after years of civil-military strains under Trump, pivoted to executing Biden’s plan. Concerned about the safety of military personnel, commanders felt the need to quickly pull out the remaining 2,500 U.S. troops, four officials said.

In justifying the decision, Biden’s aides argued that the president’s hands were tied by Trump’s February 2020 agreement with the Taliban, which committed the United States to withdrawing in 2021. If Washington reneged, they argued, the Taliban would resume attacks on American troops.

By July, as the Taliban intensified its march across rural Afghanistan and captured successive district centers, U.S. officials expected that local forces would block the militants from seizing provincial capitals, whose survival was seen as a key indicator of Afghan government strength, according to people familiar with Biden administration deliberations.

When the Taliban began taking some of the country’s more lightly defended provincial capitals in early August, officials recalculated to assume that Afghan forces, bolstered by two decades of foreign training and support, would prevent the Taliban from commandeering the country’s more strategic cities.

But when the fighters rolled into the northern city of Kunduz the following week, making it the first major provincial capital to fall, U.S. officials realized that their scenarios were illusory.

“Kunduz was a wake-up call,” one military official said.

The Pentagon swung into action with plans it had rehearsed months before, just in case, said one senior defense official. Austin also instituted a daily synchronization meeting with senior defense officials on the crisis and spoke separately numerous times per day with the top officer overseeing the region, Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, and the senior officer on the ground, Rear Adm. Peter Vasely.

The negotiated capitulations illustrated the extent to which the U.S. withdrawal had set in motion a crisis of confidence among local political and military leaders that, in some cases, led to an unwillingness to fight.

“What we’re seeing is a tsunami of individual decisions to abandon the Afghan government, and all of those individual decisions have added up to a collapse,” Laurel Miller said.

One intelligence official said some provincial Afghan officials probably cut deals with the Taliban weeks ago. Current and former officials have resisted claims that intelligence agencies failed to forecast the government’s potential quick fall. Privately, some have expressed dismay at Biden’s withdrawal decision, made, they said, despite numerous warnings of a likely unraveling of government forces.

As conditions worsened, officials briefly debated keeping Bagram air base, the country’s most significant military airfield, open longer than initially planned to facilitate airstrikes in support of Afghan forces, four officials said. It was ultimately decided to shut the base down as planned in early July.

Eventually, the military revised its intelligence assessment of Kabul’s fate. Although it had said the city might fall as soon as six months after the withdrawal of troops was complete, it updated that to say it could come within 90 days. That was quickly revised to say it could come even sooner, perhaps within weeks.
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conclusion

'Wrenching'
At the State Department, where many diplomats had worked on Afghanistan or served in Kabul, the mood in the past few days has been grim as televisions in the background displayed images of Taliban triumphs. One official described the emotions as “wrenching.”

Senior officials canvassed the department for volunteers to serve on several crisis task forces, including one dedicated to processing asylum applications and another to support embassy operations in Kabul.

Weeks earlier, Biden had authorized the pre-positioning in the region of thousands of troops who could go into Afghanistan, and he began receiving daily battlefield assessments and updates on contingency planning for the evacuation.

At the same time, the president approved the provision of close air support through the end of August and the sustainment of contractors at Kabul’s airport to keep the Afghan air force flying.

In early August, even before the major Taliban push began, the White House convened a tabletop exercise on the planning for an emergency exit. At the embassy in Kabul, the Emergency Action Committee had taken evacuation plans off the shelf and was refining them, virtually on a day-to-day basis, officials said.

Senior U.S. officials continued to hold talks with Taliban representatives in Doha, the Qatari capital, where on-and-off peace consultations have taken place for several months. They warned Taliban representatives that a violent takeover and the imposition of the harsh rule that had characterized the militants’ government in the late 1990s would not be accepted by the United States or the global community. They said the group would again be international pariahs if it did not halt its offensive.

U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and other diplomats repeated that message in a massive gathering in recent days in Doha, where representatives from neighboring countries, as well as China and Russia met with Taliban and Afghan government negotiators. On Thursday evening, the countries released a communique reiterating those warnings and called for an end to violence and a political settlement.

By Friday morning, however, the entire exercise seemed irrelevant in light of what was happening on the ground.

Abdullah Abdullah, the Afghan government’s chief negotiator, returned to Kabul to try to convince President Ashraf Ghani that it was over and that he needed to fashion some kind of deal to offer the militants that would preserve at least the possibility of non-Taliban participation in a new or transition government.

As the Taliban continued to draw nearer to Kabul, Khalilzad told the militants it was not in their interest to seize the capital immediately. Thousands of U.S. troops were already landing there and would fight if they had to, Khalilzad warned, according to people familiar with the discussions. If the militants would delay the move on Kabul, he told them, they would be in a much better position to achieve their fundamental goals.

The Biden administration, however, has less and less ability to shape events as the Taliban grip grows stronger.

Carter Malkasian, who served as a senior Pentagon adviser and has written several books on Afghanistan, said that the United States can really focus only on blunting the Taliban’s momentum.

“We can try to slow them down from crashing right into Kabul, and try to use our remaining leverage to prevent atrocities,” he said.

Shane Harris and John Hudson contributed to this report.​

 

more reporting in the Washington Post

 

Someone is os trigger-nomiced...

 

It is back. This is Vietnam 2.0.

 

Yeah but given everyting, that's really pretty lame. Gotta admit it.

 

Who is the author? Inquiring minds want to know.

You know better than this.

 

https://www.assumption.edu/people-and-departments/directory/greg-weiner-phd

 

this is a pretty scathing editorial

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-...n-jihadist-9-11-11629054041?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

Biden’s Afghanistan Surrender
The President tries to duck responsibility for a calamitous withdrawal.

By The Editorial Board
Aug. 15, 2021 5:08 pm ET

President Biden’s statement on Saturday washing his hands of Afghanistan deserves to go down as one of the most shameful in history by a Commander in Chief at such a moment of American retreat. As the Taliban closed in on Kabul, Mr. Biden sent a confirmation of U.S. abandonment that absolved himself of responsibility, deflected blame to his predecessor, and more or less invited the Taliban to take over the country.

With that statement of capitulation, the Afghan military’s last resistance collapsed. Taliban fighters captured Kabul, and President Ashraf Ghani fled the country while the U.S. frantically tried to evacuate Americans. The jihadists the U.S. toppled 20 years ago for sheltering Osama bin Laden will now fly their flag over the U.S. Embassy building on the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

***
Our goal all along has been to offer constructive advice to avoid this outcome. We criticized Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban and warned about the risks of his urge to withdraw in a rush, and we did the same for Mr. Biden. The President’s advisers offered an alternative, as did the Afghanistan Study Group. Mr. Biden, as always too assured of his own foreign-policy acumen, refused to listen.

Mr. Biden’s Saturday self-justification exemplifies his righteous dishonesty. “One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country,” Mr. Biden said. But the Afghans were willing to fight and take casualties with the support of the U.S. and its NATO allies, especially air power. A few thousand troops and contractors could have done the job and prevented this rout.

Worse is his attempt to blame his decisions on Mr. Trump: “When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on U.S. forces. Shortly before he left office, he also drew U.S. forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500. Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies’ forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict.”

Note that Mr. Biden is more critical of his predecessor than he is of the Taliban. The President has spent seven months ostentatiously overturning one Trump policy after another on foreign and domestic policy. Yet he now claims Afghanistan policy is the one he could do nothing about.

This is a pathetic denial of his own agency, and it’s also a false choice. It’s as if Winston Churchill, with his troops surrounded at Dunkirk, had declared that Neville Chamberlain got him into this mess and the British had already fought too many wars on the Continent.

Mr. Trump’s withdrawal deadline was a mistake, but Mr. Biden could have maneuvered around it. He knows this because his Administration conducted an internal policy review that provided him with options. The Taliban had already violated its pledges under the deal. Mr. Biden could have maintained the modest presence his military and foreign-policy advisers suggested. He could have decided to withdraw but done so based on conditions on the ground while preparing the Afghans with a plan for transition and air support.

Instead he ordered a rapid and total withdrawal at the onset of the annual fighting season in time for the symbolic target date of 9/11. Most of the American press at the time hailed his decision as courageous.

***
The result a mere four months later is the worst U.S. humiliation since the fall of Saigon in 1975. The Taliban is saying it wants a “peaceful transfer of power” in Kabul, but the scenes are still redolent of U.S. defeat. The scramble to destroy classified documents. The helicopters evacuating U.S. diplomats. The abandonment into Taliban hands of valuable U.S. military equipment.

Worst of all is the plight of the Afghans who assisted the U.S. over two decades. Mr. Biden said Saturday that the 5,000 U.S. troops he is sending will help in evacuating Afghans and Americans. But there are thousands of translators, their families, and other officials who are in peril from Taliban rule and didn’t get out in time. (See nearby.) The Biden Administration was far too slow to get them out of the country despite urgent warnings. The murder of these innocents will compound the stain on the Biden Presidency.

The consequences of all this will play out over many months and years, and none will be good. The illusion, indulged on the left and right, that the U.S. can avoid the world’s horrors while gardening its entitlement state, is sure to come home to haunt. Adversaries are taking Mr. Biden’s measure, and there will be more trouble ahead. The costs will be all the more painful because the ugliness of this surrender was so unnecessary.

Appeared in the August 16, 2021, print edition.
​

 

What do expect from a racist fake president with half of a mind? I went through this already back in 1975 with the fall of Saigon. My mother was in her last trimester while carrying me, she was fleeing for her life and mine, and 2 months later I was born in a refugee camp in Ft Chaffee Arkansas.

The racist fukk went on before Congress at that time said this “ why should we let in these refugees? America don’t owe them anything”. If this vile fukker had his way, my family would have been crucified under the VCs like the way they did my oldest brother, my uncle and my father-in law.

I want to hear from our Afghan posters in here(if there are any). Please tell us how you feel about this second stain in America’s history.

 

People wanting forever war big mad

 

Jim Joyner:

Biden Blamed for Afghan Fiasco
The collapse is not his doing. But he's accountable for the poor planning.

https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/biden-blamed-for-afghan-fiasco/

excerpt:

As I’ve noted previously, there’s plenty of blame to go around for the debacle that is Afghanistan and Biden likely deserves the smallest share among the US Presidents who oversaw our involvement. But he absolutely deserves the blame for not adequately preparing for the evacuation of Americans and the Afghans whose lives are most in danger for having cast their die with us. Many of us—including some with much bigger megaphones than me—were pleading with him to do this back in April (see here and here) and there has been focus on this issue since the earliest days of Biden’s Vice Presidency.

I am frankly baffled that this was not better planned. Unlike Trump, Biden has decades of experience and a world-class team of competent advisors with whom he has a personal relationship. He knows how to use the resources of the vast intelligence, diplomatic, and military bureaucracies with the necessary expertise to have foreseen this debacle. And he’s a fundamentally decent human being who personally feels the tragedy of the death and destruction that’s unfolding right now. Yet, the rush to the exits was seemingly handled with Trumpian incompetence and indifference.​

 

Lol. Great. Good for you General.

 

Definitely don't expect too much from Os.

 

Nobody is wanting forever war but when you drop the guy that was fighting side by side with our troops like a sack of crap to fend for himself, what do you think the VCs or the Talibans are going to do to that guy and his family?

That was exactly how it happened to my family. My uncle and my oldest brother were in The Republic of South Vietnam army in 1975. The fall of Saigon came in April 30th and of course, they were abandoned to fend for themselves. My family except for my brother were lucky enough to get out with just the clothes on our backs.

A few months after the takeover, the VCs promptly sent my uncle and my brother to their prisons( they called them re-education camps). My uncle got the sentence of 8 years because of his ranking, he was a Col. My brother got 4 years. They starved and tortured both of them and my uncle died in the second year of his term.

My brother was much younger so he survived, but died later in America when he was able to come over through a program called ODP, but he died a short time later through the multiple injuries and illnesses he suffered from the starvation and the tortures.

My father-in law who was a magistrate also got an 8 years sentence, he survived and later died in America similarly to my brother.

Seeing what happened to Afghanistan today just brought back some serious PTSD for me. Is there any reason anybody in the world will trust America again?

Fukk you Biden!

 

Greg Weiner, Ph.D.
Provost and Academic Vice President

Associate Professor Political Science

508-767-7312gs.weiner@assumption.eduLa Maison 002
Download CV (PDF)
Degrees Earned
B.A., University of Texas, Austin, 1991
M.A., Georgetown University, 2005
Ph.D., Georgetown University, 2010

Undergraduate Courses Taught
The American Founding
The American Congress
American Political Thought
Problems in Civil Liberties
Constitutional Law
Political Issues: The Quest for Justice
American Government

Publications & Editorships
Books
Madison’s Metronome: The Constitution, Majority Rule and the Tempo of American Politics,

University Press of Kansas (March 2012)

American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, University Press of Kansas (February 2015)

Old Whigs: Burke, Lincoln and the Politics of Prudence (Encounter Books, June 2019)

The Political Constitution: The Case Against Judicial Supremacy (University Press of Kansas,

August 2019)


Articles
“James Madison and the Legitimacy of Majority Factions,” American Political Thought 2:2

(Fall 2013)

“Machiavelli’s Inflationary Economy of Violence: Notes on the Story of Agathocles,”

Interpretation 42:2 (Winter 2016)


Book Chapter
“‘The Cool and Deliberate Sense of the Community’: The Federalist on Congress,” Cambridge

Companion to The Federalist (in production)



Reference
“John Adams,” Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Political Thought

“Separation of Powers,” Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Political Thought

“Daniel Patrick Moynihan,” Encyclopedia of American Governance



Reviews
Review of John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy by Luke Mayville, Review of Politics 80:1 (2018)

“The Cussedness of Nathan Glazer,” Review Essay on When Ideas Mattered: A Nathan Glazer

Reader, Joseph Dorman and Leslie Lenkowsky, eds., Society (May 2018)

Review of The Papers of James Madison, Retirement Series, Volume 3, David B. Matter, et. al., eds.,

Early American Literature 52:3 (2017)

Review Essay on Reflections on the Revolution in France and Other Writings, ed. Jesse Norman,

Society (July 2018)

“James Madison Problems,” Review Essay on The Mind of James Madison by Colleen

Sheehan,Madison’s Hand by Mary Sarah Bilder, and James Madison and the Problem of Constitutional Imperfection by Jeremy Bailey, Journal of the Early Republic (Winter 2016/2017)

“The Birth of Tragedy,” Review Essay on Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics, ed. Elisabeth Sifton, Society (August 2016)

Review of Ambition in America by Jeffrey A. Becker, American Political Thought (Fall 2015)

Review of The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke by David Bromwich, Society (April 2015)

Review of Edmund Burke: The First Conservative by Jesse Norman and The Great Debate:

Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and the Birth of Right and Left by Yuval Levin, Society (August 2014)

Review of Moynihan’s Moment by Gil Troy, Society (December 2013)

Review of Cosmic Constitutional Theory by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, Society

(March 2013)

Non-Refereed Writings
New York Times
“Impeachment’s Political Heart,” May 18, 2017

“The President’s Self-Destructive Disruption,” October 11, 2017

“The Power of the Courts is Messing Up Politics,” November 12, 2017

“The Scoundrel Theory of American Politics,” December 8, 2017

“How Not to Impeach,” January 2, 2018

“Wayne LaPierre’s Unconstitutionalism,” February 28, 2018

“When Liberals Become Progressives, Much is Lost,” April 13, 2018

“Congress Doesn’t Seem to Know its Own Strength,” June 21, 2018

“Nancy Pelosi’s First Order of Business Should Be to Reclaim the Power of the House,” November 9, 2018

“For Trump, the Personal is Political,” January 19, 2019

“Our Constitutional Emergency,” March 26, 2019

“It’s Not Always the End of the World,” May 26, 2019

“The Trump Fallacy,” June 30, 2019

Washington Post
“It’s all about the president now,” October 26, 2017

“There will be no winners in the Supreme Court’s wedding cake case,” December 4, 2017

“No, Congress should not protect Robert Mueller,” February 1, 2018


Society
“Of Principle and Prudence: Reflections on Lincoln’s Second Inaugural at 150,” 52:6

(December 2015)


National Affairs
“Moynihan and the Neocons,” Winter 2016

“A Constitutional Welfare State,” Fall 2016

“Trump and Truth,” Spring 2017

“After Federalist No. 10,” Fall 2017

“A Madisonian Reform,” Spring 2019

Extensions: Journal of the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center

“Majorities and Madisonian Paradoxes,” Summer 2014


Modern Age
“The Founding Fathers: A Conserving Caucus in Action,” (co-authored with George W. Carey, January 2014)

“Conservatism’s Constitutional Moment,” Spring 2017

Online Library of Law and Liberty (www.libertylawsite.org)

“Congress and Deliberation in the Age of Wilson: An Elegy,” invited Liberty Forum essay, March 2013

“Evaluating the Moynihan Report on the Negro Family 50 Years Later,” invited Liberty Forum essay, March 2015

“He Tried to Warn Us: Hayek on Trump,” invited Liberty Forum essay, January 2017

“The Price of Trump: Reflections on Year One of an Unconventional Presidency,” invited Liberty Forum essay, January 2018

More than 150 other op-ed-length essays on constitutional issues and current events

​

 

continued:

Presentations
2018 “The Dilemma of a Judicial Rencounter,” Harvard University Program on Constitutional Government

2018 “The Telos of the First Amendment: The Case of Campaign Finance,” Constitution Day Lecture, Georgetown University

2018 “Defining Decency Down,” Constitution Day Lecture, American University

2018 “The Politics of Impeachment,” Constitution Day Lecture, Belmont Abbey College

2017 “The Constitutional Status of the Judiciary,” American Political Science Association

2017 “‘The Stable Foundation of Nature’: James Wilson’s Critique of Edmund Burke,” Midwest Political Science Association

2016 “The Old Regime and the New Deal,” American Political Science Association

2016 “American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan,” Kansas City Public Library

2016 “The Old Regime and the New Deal,” Southern Political Science Association

2015 “James Madison and Public Opinion,” Constitution Day panel with Colleen Sheehan

and Jeremy Bailey, College of the Holy Cross

2015 “James Madison and the Bill of Rights,” Constitution Day panel with Colleen

Sheehan and Jeremy Bailey, Assumption College

2015 “Independent of Heaven Itself,” Constitution Day Lecture, Texas State University

2015 “Of Prudence and Principle: Reflections on Lincoln’s Second Inaugural at 150,”

Paideia Colloquium, Assumption College

2015 “‘The Dilemma of a Judicial Rencounter’: James Madison, the Judiciary, and

Constitutional Interpretation,” Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison’ Montpelier (Presentation to Staff)

2015 “‘The Nurse of Aggrandizement’: Woodrow Wilson, World War I and the Executive State,” Assumption College

2015 “John Quincy Adams’ 1791 ‘Letters of Publicola’: Reconsidering the Founding,” American Political Science Association

2015 “Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The Scholar as Statesman, the Statesman as Scholar,”

Midwest Political Science Association

2014 “Restoration without Romance,” Constitution Day Lecture, Boise State University

2013 “Congress’ Constitutional Capitulation,” University of Oklahoma Department of

Political Science and Institute for American Constitutional Heritage (Invited Lecture)

2013 “Why We’re Wrong About Rights: George W. Carey on Individualism, Community

and the Contemporary Condition,” American Political Science Association

2013 “When Veneration Becomes Excessive: James Madison on Constitutional

Amendments,” American Political Science Association (co-authored with Benjamin A. Kleinerman)

2013 “Needles in Madison’s Haystack: Minority Factions and Pressure Group Politics in

the ‘Extended Republic,’” Midwest Political Science Association

2012 “A Conversation on the Presidency,” Assumption College

2012 “James Madison and the Legitimacy of Majority Factions,” American Political

Science Association (scheduled but canceled due to hurricane)

2012 “When Veneration Becomes Excessive: James Madison on Constitutional

Amendments,” Midwest Political Science Association (co-authored with Benjamin A. Kleinerman)

2011 “Quantum Constitutionalism,” American Political Science Association

2010 “Temporal Republicanism,” Brown University Political Philosophy Workshop

2010 “‘The Collision and Contagion of the Passions:’ Factions, Justice and the Extent of Popular Authority in Federalist 10,” Northeast Political Science Association

2008 “‘The Mild Voice of Reason’: James Madison and the Tempo of American

Democracy,” Southern Political Science Association

2007 “The Is, the Ought Not and the Oven of Akhnai: Faith and Reason in Strauss’ Natural

Right and History,” Midwest Political Science Association

2006 “Mr. Cheney, Meet Mr. Agathocles: Torture, Terrorism and Machiavelli’s ‘Economy

of Violence,’” Northeastern Political Science Association

2006 “Raising Money, Raising Hackles: Analyzing Interest Group Response to Supreme

Court Decisions through Direct Mail Solicitations,” Southern Political Science Association (co-author)



Grants and Awards
2011 Jack Miller Center, Chairman’s Award for Best Dissertation in American Political Thought

2010 Georgetown University Harold N. Glassman Award for Best Dissertation in the Social Sciences

2009 Best Self-Taught Course by a Graduate Student, Georgetown University (“The Federalist on Current Affairs”)

2006 Best Graduate Student Paper in Political Theory, Georgetown University (“To Try Experiments Merely Upon Philosophy: Hume, Montesquieu and the Tenth Federalist”)



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