What exactly is 'conservative thought'?

A survey released this week by the Washington-based Pew Research Center shows Republicans have never been more down on higher education.

What exactly is 'conservative thought'?

HARVARD WANTS TO BAN ALL FRATERNITIES AND SORORITIES

The elders at Harvard University are wagging a finger at the “pernicious behavior” of some of its students and are proposing a ban on all fraternities and sororities on the elite campus.

The no-fun proposal was dropped Wednesday morning by a faculty committee tasked with changing the school’s policy on single-gender social groups.

In a 22-page report, the committee recommended single gender clubs be banned by the fall of 2018 and even wrote out the wording of what Harvard should tell its undergraduates:

“Harvard students may neither join nor participate in final clubs, fraternities or sororities, or other similar private, exclusionary social organizations that are exclusively or predominantly made up of Harvard students, whether they have any local or national affiliation, during their time in the College. The College will take disciplinary action against students who are found to be participating in such organizations.”

Blatant First Amendment violations.

Ironically, it'll likely be graduates of Harvard Law School who sue to overturn this, who defend it, and who sit on the court that rules against it.

Is Harvard part of the government?

Is Harvard part of the government?

Bart's still trying to wrap his head around the laws of his own Nation.

How Many Federal Laws Are There? No One Knows.

February 7, 2013

No one knows how many laws there are in the United States. Apparently, no one can count that high.

They’ve been accumulating, of course, for more than 200 years. When federal laws were first codified in 1927, they fit into a single volume. By the 1980s, there were 50 volumes of more than 23,000 pages.

And today? Online sources say that no one knows. The Internal Revenue Code alone, first codified in 1874, contains more than 3.4 million words and, if printed 60 lines to the page, is more than 7,500 pages long. There are about 20,000 laws just governing the use and ownership of guns.

New laws mean new crimes. From the start of 2000 through 2007, Congress had created at least 452 new crimes, so that at that time the total number of Federal crimes exceeded 4,450.

Of course, times change and laws need to be updated. But many laws detract from, rather than contribute to, our quality of life and overall well-being. It is impossible for anyone to know all of the laws that affect them and it is, therefore, impossible to not break any laws. How many of the 4,450 crimes have you broken?

The role of Congress, unfortunately, is to create new laws, not to do away with old laws that don’t work. Members of Congress running for re-election want to be able to say that they sponsored and passed new laws – regardless of how harmful the laws may be.

In a typical year, Congress passes at least 125 new laws, but Congress has fortunately slowed the pace of late. In 2011, after Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives, Congress passed just 90 bills into law. As of last August, only 61 of the 3,914 bills that had been introduced in 2012 as of that date had been passed into law.

USA Today criticized the “do nothing” Congress for not passing enough new laws, as though Congress should be graded based on the number of laws it passes. I say it’s a step in the right direction.

Many graduates of Harvard's Law School are and have been...such as Barack Obama.

What exactly is 'conservative thought'?