Harry Litman Spotlights the Society
Writing in his Talking Feds Substack, Harry Litman spotlighted our recent essay by Charter Member Richard Bernstein. In the piece, Rich argues that Donald Trump’s threats to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal “would be both wrong and unconstitutional.”
Litman writes:
I’m happy to present Talking Feds Substack’s first guest essay. It’s by Richard Bernstein, a brilliant constitutional scholar and lawyer whom I’ve known for 35 years, since we clerked together at the Supreme Court. Since retiring from his law firm, Rich has been very involved in a lot of the most important constitution litigation of the last several years, including the presidential immunity case in the Supreme Court. Rich writes at Society for the Rule of Law.
Rich’s essay takes aim at Trump’s imperialist ambitions – or maybe they’re just a gambit – to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal. It’s the sort of bellicose aggression that we associate with authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and that cut completely against the grain of American values and traditions. Rich explains the essential un-American nature of Trump’s territorial saber-rattling before proceeding to a legal analysis that concludes that Trump’s threatened acquisitions would be unconstitutional. I hope you enjoy it.