Tag Archives: political-commentary

Just over eight years ago, Donald Trump announced Mike Pence as his running mate. The choice was seen as an olive branch to the insiders of the Republican Party who appreciated Pence as a classical conservative with rock solid right-wing policy views. Pence also represented a salvo for white evangelicals …

Earlier this week, the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a European Union-funded research group, announced that last Sunday, July 21, 2024, the daily global average temperature hit 62.76 degrees.It was the hottest day scientists have measured since 1940 — which officially makes it the hottest day ever recorded on Earth by …

Kamala Harris has not given birth to children — and is therefore unfit to be president of the United States of America — appears to be the first line of attack the GOP has come up with since the presidential race was upended this weekend when President Joe Biden dropped …

George Washington could tell a lie, Taft didn’t get stuck in the bath, and Mary Lincoln never used Todd, her maiden name, after marriage. As a presidential historian, I love eviscerating falsehoods with an arsenal of contradictory evidence. I start by naming the false witness, identifying his motivations, methodically trace …

This article is published in partnership with The Lever, an investigative newsroom. If you like this story, sign up for The Lever’s free newsletter. In 2008, I published a book with a straightforward premise: the upcoming era of American politics would be defined by a competition between the left and …

Sandwiched in between an assassination attempt and a VP pick, District Judge Aileen Cannon issued one of the worst, most nakedly political judicial decisions in decades, dismissing the classified documents case against Donald Trump in a flat rejection of decades of precedent. Cannon’s decision is a sneak preview of what’s …

Sunshine Man galloped for 35 minutes before the gunshot. The iconic palomino stallion died on the same open lands he had roamed for years, but they looked unfamiliar to him in his last desperate moments. The dust from the helicopter kicking up behind him, the roar of the blades ceaselessly …

Donald Trump got away with it. That’s the result, anyway. Monday’s Supreme Court decision is a little more detailed: The court, by a 6-3 vote along partisan lines, granted the once-and-maybe-future president immunity from prosecution over most of his actions to overthrow the government in 2020 and 2021. But that’s …

We dodged a bullet with the Supreme Court this term. Literally. Last year, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that domestic abusers subject to qualifying protective orders must be allowed to purchase and carry firearms. You read that right. In U.S. v. Rahimi, the court ruled that the Constitution …

On Thursday, in their ruling halting the Biden administration’s plan to limit ozone pollution from drifting into other states, Supreme Court justices repeatedly, accidentally referenced “nitrous oxide” — a.k.a. laughing gas — rather than the chemical compounds actually at issue in the case. The opinion, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, …