As Texas Governor Greg Abbott doubles down on the Lone Star State’s refusal to follow federal immigration law and the ruling of the Supreme Court regarding the border with Mexico, it is worth recalling the words of the President of the United States: The power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by […]

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 […]

Fearing the prospect of large Democratic gains in Tuesday's midterm elections, Donald Trump has been serving a steaming buffet of hate with something to please everyone in his xenophobic base. Some 3,500 Central American migrants--most of them women and children--trudging through Mexico hundreds of miles from the U.S. have been transformed by the president into […]

Over the past couple of weeks, the Trump administration and its allies have been engaging in a lot of wishful thinking. Fresh off the strong second quarter economic growth number of 4.1 percent, Trump told a gathering of business leaders next quarter "could be in the fives." Not content to rest there, the President echoed […]

During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump gave full-throated support for resurrecting the Bush administration's regime of torture for terror detainees. But Trump's brand of state-sanctioned sadism promised to go much further. Trump warned he would seek reprisals against the kin of suspected terrorists, "because they may not care much about their lives, but […]

It was a tough week for supporters of Donald Trump's draconian policy of separating the families of undocumented immigrants at the border. (Those supporters are overwhelmingly Republican: a Quinnipiac University poll showed only 27 percent of all respondents--but 55 percent of GOP backers--endorse the practice.) It began when former CIA and NSA chief Gen. Michael […]

In recent years, "red state socialism" has become the hallmark of American federalism. That is, even as supposed GOP budget hawks loudly (and wrongly) decry "out of control" spending by Uncle Sam, less well-off Republican-controlled states generally benefit from a one-way flow of federal tax dollars made possible by wealthier blue states usually dominated by […]

To say that the slogan "America First" has a checkered past in the United States is an understatement of epic proportions. Launched in the spring of 1940 on the eve of Hitler's conquest of France, Belgium and Holland, the America First Committee was an isolationist crusade which grew to 800,000 members who sought the keep […]

As President Trump's thinly veiled Muslim ban caused heartbreak, outrage and chaos around the globe, his Twitter past started to resurface over the weekend. As he presciently asked on June 4, 2014, "Are you allowed to impeach a president for gross incompetence?" At least one high-profile attorney has resoundingly--and ironically--answered, "yes." Ironically, that is, because […]