1 week Ago By DAN LEE
Last weekend was a wonderful weekend! Saturday afternoon was the Augustana College Choir home concert, where they performed the pieces they performed while on tour during spring break (all of which were memorized). Saturday evening was the Augustana Symphonic Band home concert, which featured the pieces they performed while they were on their spring break tour. Both concerts were superb! Sunday morning, my wife and I joined by our oldest grandson and attended the 9 a.
m. services at the church of which we are members. While we are in church, our grandson attends the Sunday School at our church, which he loves.
As those who attend church with some degree of regularity know, there are two basic types of hymns – hymns that the pastor believes are good for building character, and hymns that are good to sing. All the hymns at the 9 a.m.
service at our church last Sunday were in the latter category. They included two of my favorite hymns – “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” and “Beneath the Cross of Jesus.” (I like to think that hymns that are good to sing also build character.
) After church the three of us had breakfast together at one of our favorite breakfast places. That’s the nice thing about a 9 a.m.
church service – you can have a nice leisurely breakfast after church, instead of having to rush through breakfast before going to church. After breakfast, we went our separate ways. My wife and grandson went to our daughter’s place while I checked out some of the backwater places where there are frequently migrating waterfowl.
I saw a lot of Canada geese, several blue-winged teal, a couple of mallards and one white pelican. There will probably be additional white pelicans arriving in the next few days. In fact, they might already be here by the time that this piece goes to press.
I also spent some time in the ravine behind our house enjoying the daffodils that are now bursting into bloom. We planted several different varieties of daffodils in our ravine several years ago. Daffodils are good flowers to use for naturalizing because (a) you don’t need to do anything to take care of them – you just plant them and leave them to their own devices, and (b) unlike tulips, deer (of which we have many) do not eat daffodils.
By noon we had already packed a lot into the day. There was, however, more to come. We have season tickets to the Sunday afternoon performances of the Quad City Symphony Orchestra, which is one of the treasures of the Quad-Cities.
The Masterworks Concerts always begin with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” As a Navy veteran who served during the height of the Cold War, I always choke up a bit when I stand at attention and hear our national anthem. The theme of the April concert was “Rhapsody in Blue.
” As the title might suggest, it featured George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” The piano soloist for the piece was Lorraine Min, a Canadian-born pianist with an international reputation. She was amazing! Her mastery of the dynamics of the piece were unsurpassed.
She received multiple standing ovations. And so there was a lot packed into the weekend as I took a bit of a break from grading exams and paper proposals. The Quad-Cities are a wonderful place to live! Living here is an incredible privilege! A POSTSCRIPT TO LAST WEEK’S COLUMN.
After last week’s column went to press, a bipartisan group of Senators and a bipartisan group of members of the House of Representatives began working on measures that would place limits on the power of the president to unilaterally issue tariffs. Since the authority to enact tariffs constitutionally resides with Congress, whether this would involve rescinding some or all the delegation of the authority to impose tariffs to the president or would address the issue in some other way remains to be seen. Whether this could be done without enacting a bill that the president could veto is also an unresolved question.
Another late-breaking development is that the New Civil Liberties Alliance (a conservative nonprofit group founded in 2017 by Columbia Law School Professor Philip Hamburger which defines its mission as battling “violations by the administrative state”) has filed a lawsuit alleging that the Trump tariffs exceed the authority delegated to the president in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which was enacted on Oct. 28, 1977. President Trump claimed that this act gave him the authority to enact the far-reaching tariffs that he recently announced.
What the courts say on this matter remains to be seen. Dan Lee Dan Lee, a regular columnist, is the Marian Taft Cannon Professor in the Humanities at Augustana College; [email protected] .
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