An Engaged Professor

I often say that students should be "engaged" in their learning. So should I! Learning should be fun. We should all remember that absolute joy we felt as toddlers as we began to explore the world around us. Let's capture that spirit of WOW in what we have to learn now as well. To that end, this blog is a mixed bag of grammar and writing advice, constitutional news, urban history, political news, and whatever else comes to mind for my students. Tell me below which topics will help you most.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

The Rodney Dangerfield of Supreme Court decisions?

I realize that many of my students may never have heard of Rodney Dangerfield, but he is a famous (and intentionally annoying) comedian of my era. His most repeated line is, "I get no respect," after which he launces into a long, sad list of disrespectful things that had happened to him.
Rodney Dangerfield Pictures & Photos

At any rate, I read an article in the New York Times today which talks about the Obama administration's retreat from the Bush administration's aggressive stance on treatment of "enemy combatant" detainees.

Funny thing: the article mentions several reasons that Obama has taken a different stance, mostly crediting world opinion, but it fails to mention the Supreme Court's equally important rulings in the detainee cases (Hamdi, Rasul, Hamdan, Boumedienne, for example) that clipped the president's wings and forced him to share decision making on these issues with Congress and to recognize detainees' rights to habeas corpus. Is the Supreme Court now the Rodney Dangerfield of the three branches?