If you ever wondered what a 21st century nullification crisis would look like, look no further than Missouri. One hundred and forty eight years after the end of the Civil War, the New York Times reports, "the Republican-controlled Missouri legislature is expected to enact a statute next month nullifying all federal gun laws in the […]

These are heady days for red state propagandists. After years of leading the nation in poverty, low incomes, poor working conditions, dismal educational performance, awful health care systems, shocking teen birth rates, sky-high divorce rates, bloody gun violence and just about every other measure of social dysfunction, Republican-dominated states finally have some good news to […]

For Republican Obamacare foes hoping for a repeat of 2009's Tea Party days of rage, August 2013 is instead rapidly turning into the summer of their discontent. With its hardliners demanding a government shutdown or a U.S. default over funding for the Affordable Care Act, the Tea Party's big business backers are experiencing buyer's remorse […]

From the very beginning, one massive irony has loomed over the Obamacare debate. The elephant in the room? Health care is worst where Republicans poll best. From access to care and insurance coverage to the health of their residents, red states generally produce the most dismal rankings. And while Democratic-led states are now embracing the […]

During his press conference on Friday, President Obama pondered why the GOP's "number one priority, the one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don't have health care." But in attributing the 40 Affordable Care Act repeal votes, the threats to shut down the government over […]

They say everything is bigger in Texas. That's certainly the case when it comes to the mega-failure that is the Lone Star State's 46th ranked health care system. Six million people or 24 percent of all Texans--and 30 percent of those ages 18 to 64--have no health insurance. Twenty-two Texas counties are among the nation's […]

The past week brought two big waves of Obamacare news. In the first, Maryland became just the latest state to announce that its new health care exchange will deliver lower than expected insurance premiums beginning in 2014. In the second, a slew of contenders for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination took the op-ed pages to […]

For most Americans now living, those long-ago events were as unthinkable as they were forgotten. In Little Rock, Arkansas (1957), Oxford, Mississippi (1962), and Tuscaloosa, Alabama (1963), Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy dispatched federal troops to enforce the law of the land in the face of local segregationist officials proclaiming "states' rights" as their rallying cry. […]

Back in 1991, Democrat Edwin Edwards defeated former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard turned Republican gubernatorial candidate David Duke for governor of Louisiana. Edwards famously joked that "the only similarity between me and Duke is that we're both wizards under the sheets." Two decades later, the sheets and hoods may be optional, but for many […]

Among the many disturbing arguments in John Roberts' Voting Rights Act (VRA) decision, the most pernicious may be his invention of the "equal sovereignty" doctrine. In his Shelby County majority opinion, the Chief Justice struck down the VRA's Section 4 formula for determining which jurisdictions must be subject to "preclearance" in part because the VRA […]