Word: absolutist
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...President Bush normally takes the absolutist position in the war on terror - on Gitmo, on wiretaps, on enemy combatants - and lets everyone else complain that he is too hard over, too much at war. But here the roles are reversed: the president is dug in on the deal and the public, at least as represented by the Congress, is taking the absolutist, no surrender, position...
...justice. During the grand jury investigations, Mary Burton, a servant of the white tavern-keeper John Hughson, admitted under threat of imprisonment that her master was plotting to overthrow the government and make himself the first monarch of New York City. (Of course, New York would not have an absolutist ruler for another 152 years, when the city elected Rudolph Giuliani as mayor...
...other statutes a law that banned guns in school zones, part of the Violence Against Women Act and part of the Brady gun-control law. Conservatives have cheered this as a virtual revolution--although O'Connor, in keeping with her trademark case-by-case approach, has departed from an absolutist position at times. She was on the side of the plaintiff in Tennessee v. Lane, a 2004 decision upholding part of the Americans with Disabilities Act and requiring courtrooms to be accessible to those with physical disabilities. And most famously, she voted in 2000 to step into Florida's disputed...
Thomas also shies away from a substantive debate about the merits of permitting free speech on campuses. He is a free speech absolutist, and comes down clearly on one side of the debate of whether academic institutions ought to be allowed to limit hate speech on their campuses. But he does not engage much with the philosophical issues at play. He finds absurdity in the actions of his ideological opponents, and is probably right on that point, but he does not actually argue why we should all be free speech absolutists as he is. Because he only asserts this...
...over the last four years, Harvard has slowly moved toward its absolutist mode, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing—feudalism wasn’t so fun, either, and anyone who has sat in on one of Harvard’s endless committee meetings knows that it takes a long time to do very little here. But sometimes it’s important to call a spade a spade...