Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

We as a country will have a wild few weeks now while Donald J. Trump is (a) receiving the formal nomination of a major political party for the presidency, and (b) also receiving his probation report and sentence. An odd intertwining of processes. It is a good time to try to put one’s thoughts together with some clarity. So … what do I think? First, I want to set aside the warnings we hear from the former president and his admirers, that “if it can happen to Trump, it can happen to you.” Yes, I know it can happen to me. I’m an ordinary non-billionaire non-celebrity. I'm a schmoe. It has always been the case that “it,” arrest, trial, conviction, sentence could happen to me. The fact that it is happening to Trump means he joins the club in which the rest of us are members, it doesn’t bring the club into existence! “They” don’t have to get through Trump to come after me, They could always have just come after me. When someone like Elon Musk says that, though, he may mean, “since it i...

Now I really must say something about NFIB v. Sebelius , SCOTUS' big Obamacare decision, or you will think me a shirker. Let's start with this datum: Chief Justice John Roberts is only the second SCOTUS Justice in the institution's history with that surname. Its a fairly common surname in English-speaking countries, so I don't know whether 2-out-of-112 is a lot or suspiciously few. Anyway, the coincidence seems worth mentioning because the previous Justice Roberts [ Owen Roberts , a Hoover appointee on the court from 1930 to 1945] has gone down in history as the Justice who made the big switch, who turned the court from one with an anti-New Deal 5 Justice majority into one with a pro-New Deal 5 Justice majority by his own change of heart under political pressure in 1937. Reference Guide The usual accounts of that "switch in time" are sometimes too simply and broadly written, and certainly it wasn't all about Roberts. Chief Justice Hughes...