Political Commentary

WASHINGTON — There was a time, with a Democrat in the White House and a red wave building ahead of midterm elections, when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce poured approximately $40 million exclusively into Republican campaigns. The year was 2014, and the granddaddy of corporate lobbying groups in the nation’s …

The Republican campaign of voter suppression — voter ID laws, closures of polling places, voter purges — is normally aimed at making it harder for people of color to vote, in the hopes of preserving Republicans’ white-minority rule for as long as possible. But another population has found itself in …

“I think what this has finally ended is the discussion about whether or not there’s climate change,”President Biden said in Florida Wednesday, standing amid the wreckage of Hurricane Ian in a striped shirt and his trademark aviator glasses. Nice thought, but Biden knows it’s not true. Millions of Americans think …

Decades of willfully moronic Republicans bringing snowballs onto the Senate floor to argue that climate change is a hoax. Decades of debate about carbon taxes and carbon offsets. Decades of rallies in D.C. and hoping that the next hurricane or drought or heat wave will wake up Americans to the …

“This is not a true story,” former Mandalorian actress Gina Carano says in her MAGA star turn as a Secret Service agent in My Son Hunter, the new film dramatizing — with plenty of liberties, to say the least — the life of President Biden’s most controversial son. It’s also, …

Two years after the January 6 insurrection, a plurality of Americans say the most important issue facing the country is the threat to democracy. That threat is not just rioters at the U.S. Capitol, a coup plot by an outgoing president, court rulings limiting voting rights, or politicians denying verified …

Law is supposed to be an objective discipline. We praise the “rule of law” as an immutable hallmark of the American legal system, and take solace in the ideal that justice should be dispensed fairly and evenly regardless of who is dispensing it. Our judges wear black robes because they …

There’s no such thing as a lone wolf — an appellation often given, in error, to terrorists who act alone, particularly those of the white supremacist variety. There are only those people who, fed a steady diet of violent propaganda and stochastic terror, take annihilatory rhetoric to its logical conclusion. …

Today, abortion is still legal everywhere in the country. However, it appears that won’t be true for long. Last night, Politico published an explosive leak of the draft opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Woman’s Health, the abortion case before the Supreme Court this term. This virtually unprecedented publication of a …

When I was a political reporter in Washington, I used to loathe the White House Correspondents Dinner. I hated how it portrayed Beltway journalism as a game. How it reduced the project of government accountability to performative antagonism practiced daily by reporters in White House press briefings — a performance …