As the Colorado Supreme Court wrote, January 6 meets the bar for insurrection “under any viable definition” of the term. The legal scholar Mark Graber, who has closely studied the Fourteenth Amendment’s history, argues that “insurrection” should be understood broadly—an act of organized resistance to government...
During his term in the White House, Donald Trump governed as a wartime president—with blue America, rather than any foreign country, as the adversary. He sought to use national authority to achieve factional ends—to impose the priorities of red America onto Democratic-leaning states and cities. The agenda Trump has laid out...
It’s become yet another subsidiary of Trump Inc....
“We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Donald Trump said this past November, in a campaign speech that was ostensibly honoring Veterans Day. “The real threat...
On the last Saturday before Donald Trump took office, in January 2017, I watched the controlled chaos of a hackathon unfold in a library at the University of Pennsylvania. Volunteer archivists, librarians, and computer scientists were trawling government websites, looking for data sets about climate change to duplicate for...
You knew it was coming....
“I didn’t come here,” Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina complained last week, “to have the president as a boss or a candidate as a boss. I came here to pass good, solid policy.” Tillis was referring to Republicans who were abandoning a deal on border security because they thought reaching a solution with President...
As GOP leaders get in line, the outlook for democracy looks grim—in Ukraine, and even in America....
What the people who now want us to ignore the Fourteenth Amendment are arguing is that certain aspects of the Constitution ought to be nullified merely by their unpopularity—not even necessarily among a majority of voters but among a subset of extra-special voters. This is not a standard applied to any other aspect of the...
Donald Trump, who is not the president, is using a minority of Republicans to block aid to Ukraine, to undermine the actual president’s foreign policy, and to weaken American power and credibility.
Have you heard about the president who received money from China and other foreign countries? No, not the current president. The former one....
Pressed in court, Trump’s lawyers made an argument that would destroy nearly all limitations on presidential power....
As soon as Apple announced its plans to inject generative AI into the iPhone, it was as good as official: The technology is now all but unavoidable. Large language models will soon lurk on most of the world’s smartphones, generating images and text in messaging and email apps. AI has already colonized web search, appearing in...
On January 17, House Speaker Mike Johnson led a candlelight vigil at the Capitol to mark the recent passing of the 100th day of hostage-holding by Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Members of Congress assembled shoulder to shoulder with families of hostages. The Republican speaker delivered a heartfelt speech. “We must stand together...
As the 2024 Republican presidential field began to stir three years ago, Fox News tried to make Ron DeSantis happen. From the week of the 2020 election through February 2021, the network invited DeSantis to appear 113 times, or almost once a day, according to the Tampa Bay Times. In an email uncovered by that newspaper, one Fox...
Strange as this might be to say of the only American president found legally liable for sexual abuse, the only leader of the free world accused of dangling a TV gig in front of a porn performer seemingly as an enticement for sex, the only commander in chief to publicly denigrate the sexual attractiveness of both Heidi Klum...
This past fall, in a small southern foundry, Robert E. Lee’s face was placed on a furnace that reached a temperature of more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. As the heat mounted, a haunting orange-red glow appeared across Lee’s severed visage, and the cracks that split his bronze cheeks began to look like streams of dark tears...
One of the stranger political crusades of the past few years has been the Republican war on so-called woke capital, which has led GOP politicians across the country to adopt a kind of anti-corporate, pro-regulatory rhetoric that one normally associates with the left wing of the Democratic Party. And among the GOP’s favorite...
Thanks to Donald Trump’s presidential term, the conservative legal movement has been able to realize some of its wildest dreams: overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, ending affirmative action in college admissions, and potentially making most state-level firearm restrictions presumptively unconstitutional. That...
Last Wednesday, over the course of three and a half hours of arguments, the conservative and liberal justices on the U.S. Supreme Court jousted over whether to overrule a 40-year-old case called Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council....
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/X41Pu
Until the very end of his presidency, Donald Trump’s cultivation of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and other violent far-right groups was usually implicit. He counted on their political support but stopped short of asking them to do anything....
