Terry Newell is currently director of his own firm, Leadership for a Responsible Society. His work focuses on values-based leadership, ethics, and decision making. A former Air Force officer, Terry also previously served as Director of the Horace Mann Learning Center, the training arm of the U.S. Department of Education, and as Dean of Faculty at the Federal Executive Institute. Terry is co-editor and author of The Trusted Leader: Building the Relationships That Make Government Work (CQ Press, 2011). He also wrote Statesmanship, Character and Leadership in America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and To Serve with Honor: Doing the Right Thing in Government (Loftlands Press 2015).
All in Constitution
A president who launches a war without Congressional authorization defies the Constitution. When Congress remains silent, it shirks its Constitutional obligation.
Concerned about a 1785 proposal to use taxes to pay for teachers of the Christian religion, James Madison wrote a powerful dissent. His reasoning can help in contemporary debates over similar proposals for using taxes to support religious instruction in schools today.
The U.S. Constitution contains no requirement that candidates for president knows anything about the Constitution. We assume they do, but that assumption needs testing before an election.
When behavior by a president violates Constitutional norms but becomes accepted as the normal way of doing business, the Constitution is in peril.
The power of the Constitution to protect democracy depends on the private and public virtue of Americans and their leaders. The Constitution’s words alone are not enough.
In the course of American history, the Constitution has been a vehicle to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. It also offers a vehicle to address the controversy over D.E.I. today.
The focus of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on cutting budgets and staff ignores the question of how those cuts will impact the effectiveness of the programs that remain.
The President and Senate must honor their Constitutional roles to assure those names to high office have the character and competence to safeguard democracy.
As we prepare to celebrate Constitution Day, we should recall why the nation's founders feared democracy - and what we must do to reap its benefits and avoid its dangers.
Arguments against the1787 Constitution still show up today. Disagreements among modern-day Federalists and Anti-Federalists are healthy for democracy, as long as remain civil.
Candidates for president need to handle cognitively complex reasoning. How well they remember dates is a poor measure of that capability.
Too many assume that the “red” and “blue” divisions in American cannot be healed. We sell ourselves short.
Americans who prefer as president media celebrities and/or those with no experience in government take risks with their - and democracy’s - future.
At the end of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin gave the last speech. He urged delegates to be humble, judicious and virtuous in implementing the new government. That advice still matters.
When Supreme Court decisions are defied, we weaken the branch of government that is the only barrier against executive or legislative tyranny.
Despite recent calls for a “national divorce,” the United States is a contract ratified by the whole people not a compact of states. Honoring that matters in how we think and behave, as the Constitution’s framers knew.
The words “civility” and “compromise” don’t appear in the Constitution, but it can’t work without their prevalence in practice.
The United States is a government of laws, not men - but only if we understand why this matters and honor it in our behavior.
In our time, the Preamble to the Constitution gets scant attention. It wasn’t always that way - nor should it be now.
The framers of the Constitution didn’t invite everyone into the body politic, but their document has, over the course of American history, promoted a more inclusive society.
