Articles written by the author
At a CNN town hall in Jackson, Mississippi, on Monday night, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts called for shutting down the Electoral College. “I believe we need a constitutional amendment that protects the right to vote for every American citizen and to make sure that vote gets counted,” she said.The Oklahoma City National Memorial consists of two stark structures connected by a reflecting pool, intended as monuments to the strength and resiliency of the city. It’s also a contemplative space, where visitors can reflect on and honor the 168 people who died in the April 1995 bombing, carried out by a white power terrorist with ties to a network of like-minded extremists.The chanting was disturbing and the anger was frightening, but what I noticed most about the president’s rally in Greenville, North Carolina, on Wednesday night was the pleasure of the crowd.The anti-Trump vote is the single largest coalition in American politics. That was true in 2016, despite Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the Electoral College. It was true in 2017, after Democrats won major victories in Virginia and Alabama. And it was true in 2018, when the anti-Trump coalition gave Democrats a majority in the House of Representatives.On Wednesday, when Attorney General William Barr testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Mueller report, he addressed lawmakers more as if he were a member of President Donald Trump’s legal team than as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Barr framed Trump’s actions as fully justifiable, even arguing that if the president feels an investigation is unfounded, he “does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course.”The demographic changes coming over the next few decades — the continuing rise of a more diverse electorate, with more liberal views than previous generations — won’t destroy the Republican Party or make it electorally insolvent. But it may make right-wing conservatism a rump ideology, backed primarily by a declining minority of older rural and exurban white voters. You can already see this taking shape. Among the youngest Republicans, 52 percent say the government should be “doing more” to s...Donald Trump may not have conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election, but the Mueller report still shows a president with criminal disregard for the rule of law and constitutional government. And arguably it suggests that Congress should address this in accordance with what the report reminds us is “our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”It’s still common to hear analysts speak of the “Trumpification” of the Republican Party — the extent to which it has adopted the attitude and ethos of the sitting president.At a forum in Iowa last weekend, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts gave what has become a standard answer for Democrats on the question of felon disenfranchisement.There’s no reason to mourn Kirstjen Nielsen’s departure from the Department of Homeland Security. She was an immigration hard-liner working aggressively to carry out President Donald Trump’s restrictionist agenda. She spearheaded efforts to crack down on migrants and asylum-seekers. She requested military assistance at the border. She limited the number of people who can legally present for asylum at ports of entry. And she vastly increased the number of immigrants in detention.On March 4, 1869, Ulysses S. Grant gave his first inaugural address — a short, plain-spoken statement of intent. Abraham Lincoln’s prized general, and a national hero in his own right, he promised to bring his singular determination to the presidency. “The responsibilities of the position I feel, but accept them without fear,” Grant said. “The office has come to me unsought; I commence its duties untrammeled. I bring to it a conscious desire and determination to fill it to the best of my abil...It’s still well under the radar, but the movement to circumvent the Electoral College gained ground this week. On Sunday, Jared Polis, governor of Colorado, said he would sign a bill to join the National Popular Vote interstate compact, whose members have pledged to give their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. The Maine Legislature, likewise, is mulling membership and will hold hearings to discuss the issue.Almost none of the Democratic senators running for president want to abolish the filibuster.Bernie Sanders’ most prominent message is economic, organized around a critique of capitalist inequality, an indictment of the ultrawealthy and a call for expansive new social programs. It helped propel him to a strong second in the 2016 Democratic primary campaign and has returned as the marquee message for his 2020 campaign, which he announced Tuesday with a promise to “complete the revolution.”Only a handful of Democrats in Congress (and just one Democrat-adjacent presidential contender) identify as “socialist,” but they appear to be the chief targets of President Donald Trump as he faces a confident Democratic opposition in the House of Representatives. “We are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” he said in his State of the Union address two weeks ago, declaring that “America will never be a socialist country.”On Saturday, after Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts formally announced her campaign to oust President Donald Trump from the White House, he took aim at her on Twitter.There’s something odd about the self-described moderates and centrists considering a run for president. If “moderation” or “centrism” means holding broadly popular positions otherwise marginalized by extremists in either party, then these prospective candidates don’t quite fit the bill.In 2017, former Gov. Steve Beshear of Kentucky gave the Democrats’ response to President DonaldTrump’s first address to Congress. The visuals were striking. Beshear, an older white man, was seated in a diner in Lexington, Kentucky, among an almost entirely white group of patrons. He was dressed casually. Several of the men in the background looked like they did factory work or another form of manual labor. You didn’t need to listen to anything Beshear said to get the obvious message: The Demo...Over the last month, we’ve learned just how much racism is too much to sustain a career in American politics.Howard Schultz, the former chief executive of Starbucks, cannot win the presidency as an independent candidate. But is there someone who could? Is there any chance a third-party candidate could contest the presidency and win?
