Josh Hammer

Joshua Benjamin Hammer is the senior editor-at-large for Newsweek since 2020JOSH HAMMER, SENIOR EDITOR-AT-LARGE and a former editor for The Daily Wire.JOSH HAMMER He also has connections to right-wing organizations like The Edmund Burke Foundation and the Federalist Society.JOSH HAMMER He worked for the 2016 Presidential Campaign of Ted Cruz,Iowa caucus: Ted Cruz echoes Ronald Reagan in victory speech and he has a reported friendship with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.MAGA influencers flock to Florida, chasing political clout and connections
==Common good originalism==
Hammer is most well known for his political idea of "common good originalism," an attempt to find a compromise between the idea of "common good constitutional" put fourth by right-wing legal scholar Adrian Vermeule and the famous conservative idea of "originalism".Critics Call It Theocratic and Authoritarian. Young Conservatives Call It an Exciting New Legal Theory. In a paper for the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Hammer told his conservative readers that "common good originalism presents our best chance yet for a truly, substantively conservative jurisprudence that is faithful to our traditions, cognizant of where we have gone astray, and clear-eyed about our future."COMMON GOOD ORIGINALISM: OUR TRADITION AND OUR PATH FORWARD However, what it actually entails is something Hammer has barely explained, to the point where, when directly asked about it by Ian Ward for an article in Politico, he basically said it was little more than an attempt "to kind of salvage that label" as opposed to actually moving the debate forward.
To put it another way: it was rather obvious Hammer is starting at his conclusion and working backwards, something he rarely tries to hide. A 2021 article from Public Discourse makes this clear, as he primarily discusses how the conservative movement needs a new legal theory, and ends the article not by promoting its merits but by pointing out what it would oppose:
However, a legal theory does not have value based on what its outcomes are, it instead should be based on how solid its legal scholarship is.
Mind you, this is partly because of Hammer's disbelief in an "apolitical" or neutral Supreme Court, responding to a comment from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Hammer writes that she has already embraced the idea of a political court, and conservatives should stop trying to create an apolitical one and should instead embrace the political court while making sure their ideology is the political one in control:
Because of this, it is rather clear that Hammer is looking for a legal theory to back up his beliefs, but his justification is primarily that the other side is already engaging in this exact action and that it's the only way to get their goal.
==Everything I don't like is slavery==
What of Hammer's most common tactics is to compare everything, and we do mean everything, he doesn't like to slavery and those who oppose it to Abraham Lincoln. For example, in his aforementioned article on Common Good Originalism, Hammer calls Roe v. Wade "the twentieth century’s moral and jurisprudential successor to the Dred Scott case" with his citation being his own article from The Daily Wire. As Hammer explained in that article:
Even if one morally disagrees with abortion, using this as a reason for Roe being wrongly decided simply fails to hold water. What follows from this information is not that abortion, nor slavery, are unconstitutional, but that sometimes the constitution allows morally questionable or even abhorrent things. Remember, it took a constitutional amendment to end slavery,Thirteenth Amendment meaning slavery was at least understood to be constitutional enough to where a constitutional amendment was required to end it. However, Hammer has never attempted to advocate for an anti-abortion constitutional amendment, instead saying the tools to win are already there.
This is far from the only example. One 2020 article he published saw him talking about how Lincoln would have opposed same-sex marriageStanding A Standing Athwart History: Anti-Obergefell Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Supremacy's Long-Term Triumph and on another occasion he criticized Democrats who focused on democracy by saying, "Do modern Democrats agree with their partisan forebear, Stephen Douglas, in his famous 1858 debates with Abraham Lincoln? Douglas was the more avowedly 'pro-democracy' candidate, after all!"" find the Democrats’ incessant rhetoric about 'democracy' increasingly intolerable. Do modern Democrats agree with their partisan forebear, Stephen Douglas, in his famous 1858 debates with Abraham Lincoln? Douglas was the more avowedly 'pro-democracy” candidate, after all!' by @josh_hammer (8/22/2022) Twitter (archived from 28 Jan 2024 16:15:08 UTC).
==Giving voice to conspiracy theorists and extremists==
Hammer's tenure at Newsweek has been characterized by giving space to conspiracy theorists within the editorial page, including Jack Posobiec (the promoter of Pizzagate), Dinesh D'Souza (who made the 2020 election conspiracy film 2000 Mules), and election denialist John Eastman. Hammer has also endorsed anti-democracy extremists such as Viktor Orbán and the Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters.Newsweek Embraces the Anti-Democracy Hard Right by Michaeel Edison Hayden (November 04, 2022) Southern Poverty Law Center.
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