Word: modern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After World War II, however, conflicts over warmaking authority could no longer be suppressed. The U.S. emerged as a global superpower, committed to the defense of allies against another superpower, the Soviet Union, and its clients. The chances of shooting incidents multiplied greatly. The terrible power of modern weapons increased the premium on fast action, which could not wait for an old-fashioned declaration of war. The threat of nuclear holocaust dictated the need to limit whatever wars did start. That also worked against declarations of war and simultaneously made difficult, if not impossible, a clean-cut victory...
...doubtful that Pat Nixon ever knit the flag, but the pervasive involvement of every modern President in interpreting the powers granted by the U.S. Constitution is now a hard and often bruising fact of life. If a President does not actually curl up by the fire at night to ponder his copy of the Constitution, in all likelihood he has read some of its phrases during the day and confronted its words in the rush of events...
...countries that exist today, more than 160 have written charters modeled directly or indirectly on the U.S. version. Those states range from the giant Soviet Union to the tiny Caribbean island country of Grenada. While Poland and France became the first to follow America's lead when they drafted modern constitutions in 1791, the largest impact has been recent. More than three-quarters of today's charters were adopted after World War II. Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, could have been speaking for the rest of the Third World when he told the U.S. Congress...
...Irving Kaufman: "I regard reliance on original intent to be a largely specious mode of interpretation. I often find it instructive to consult the framers when I am called upon to interpret the Constitution. But it is the beginning of my inquiry, not the end . . . The framers' legacy to modern times is the language and spirit of the Constitution, not the conflict and dated conceptions that lay beneath that language...
...Does the modern state of Israel fulfill God's biblical promise, which bestowed the Holy Land upon the Chosen People? That question has been the source of considerable spiritual and political debate among Christians ever since Israel was founded in 1948. The problem came to the fore again last week in Biloxi, Miss., for 665 delegates to the national assembly of the 3 million-member Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The Israel issue led to a dispute that stirred passions over six days before the assembly finally approved an eight-page statement. The document is probably the most amicable declaration...