Historical events occur twice, Karl Marx famously said, first as tragedy and then as farce. But when it comes to the rampant lawlessness of Republican presidential administrations, the record is a succession of national tragedies for the United States. And the damage to America's democratic institutions is no laughing matter. As President Trump, his attorney […]

When House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal of Massachusetts demanded the Internal Revenue Service turn over six years of Donald Trump's tax returns to his committee, he was doing so with the law fully on his side. As past Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, former Joint Committee on Taxation chief of staff Edward Kleinbard, […]

For Republicans, the gathering of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has become an annual ritual in their hyperbolic effort to peel away Jewish Americans who overwhelmingly give their votes to Democrats. But the GOP brought an extra sense of urgency to last week's 2019 AIPAC Policy Conference. Less than six months after Democrats […]

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Republican Donald Trump presented a unique conundrum for the public and pundits alike. Simply put, Trump lied at a rate never before seen in modern American politics. No candidate in the 21st century, from either party, even came close. Writing in The Atlantic that September, Salena Zito offered this warning […]

Never one to miss an opportunity to get his hate on, Donald Trump on Tuesday demanded Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) resign over her unfortunate "all about the Benjamins" comment. Calling her well-received apology "lame," Trump complained, "Anti-Semitism has no place in the United States Congress. I think she should either resign from Congress or she […]

Even a broken clock, the old saying goes, is right twice a day. So it was for Donald Trump during his 2019 State of the Union address on Tuesday night. During perhaps the most backward-looking presidential message in memory, the president thundered about a mythical national crisis of undocumented immigration putting America and Americans at […]

"Both sides do it" may well be the most dangerous and deceitful phrase in U.S. politics. The lazy analyst's substitute for actual journalism doesn't merely misdiagnose what plagues the American body politic, but fails to correctly identify the source of the disease. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in their 2012 book, It's […]

When Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King lamented that language like "White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization" had "become offensive," GOP leaders like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy appeared horrified. But if they were shocked--SHOCKED!--to find Steve King's racism going on in their Republican Party, they shouldn't have been. King, […]

As the New Year begins, imagine that this is how your 2018 ended: You work at a company where the CEO and the management team are notoriously corrupt. They began the year by taking on $150 million in new debt for the purpose of rewarding themselves and their shareholders with a massive stock buyback. But […]

As 2018 draws to a close, there is growing concern about what the next year will bring for the American economy. President Trump's twin self-inflicted wounds of an ongoing trade war with China and a needless government shutdown helped send stock markets into a December panic. The expanding global economy, too, shows signs of a […]