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Gabrielle Gurley

Gabrielle Gurley is The American Prospect’s deputy editor. Her Twitter is @gurleygg, and her email is ggurley@prospect.org.

Recent Articles

The Justice Department Works for You, and Other Myths

At the annual NAACP convention, the contrast between the messaging from Rod Rosenstein, Jeff Sessions’s number two, and Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s first attorney general, was stark.

Gabrielle GurleyJul 28, 2017
AP Photo/Brian Witte
AP Photo/Brian Witte Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein speaks at the NAACP’s national convention in Baltimore. T hough few blacks believed that the much-vaunted post-racial America was anything more than media hyperbole, a black president nonetheless left the White House with a health-care legacy, a healthy approval rating, and a rock star patina that the hyper-partisanship of the nation’s capital failed to tarnish. His presidency may have contained few Rooseveltian moments but history will likely record that the country was stronger for his travails. The arc of the moral universe bent perhaps ever so imperceptibly toward justice during his tenure, but bend it did. Which is why, after the Obama interregnum, Donald Trump’s assault on civil rights has set many African Americans back on their heels. Nowhere was that sentiment more evident than at the NAACP’s annual convention in Baltimore this week, where two very different conceptions of what justice means for African Americans...

Speaker Ryan, Adrift in Massachusetts

Paul Ryan talks trickle-down taxation with workers in one of the poorest cities in the state.

Gabrielle GurleyJul 21, 2017
AP Photo/Stephan Savoia
AP Photo/Stephan Savoia House Speaker Paul Ryan addresses workers at a New Balance athletic shoe factory after he toured the factory floor in Lawrence, Massachusetts. trickle-downers_35.jpg H ouse Speaker Paul Ryan switched gears on Thursday to talk about something completely different: “Made in America Week” and federal tax code reform—two of the GOP’s current talking points as their lawmakers scurry to change the subject from their own Made in Washington health-care debacle. President Donald Trump launched “Made in America Week” at the White House, displaying such products as door hinges, crab pots, and brooms wholly manufactured stateside. Placing the event in the proper temporal context, The Guardian describe d the 50-state showcase as a “museum of American capitalism.” Meanwhile, the president posed gleefully with fire engines from Wisconsin and wore a Stetson cowboy hat from Texas. Truth is indeed stranger than fake news. Fresh off his sundry attempts to roll back health care,...

Charlie and the MBTA

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker’s privatization initiative at greater Boston’s transit authority has realized short-term savings—but the cure is still adequate public investment.

Gabrielle Gurley | July 19, 2017

Can Trump Succeed Where Reagan Failed?

Determined to stamp out sanctuary cities, Trump and congressional Republicans plod on, but the anti-apartheid battles of the 1980s demonstrate that such movements are easily cowed by presidents.

Gabrielle GurleyJun 30, 2017
(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
(AP Photo/Alex Brandon) People with family members who were killed by undocumented immigrants meet with Attorney General Jeff Sessions on June 29, 2017. O n Thursday, the House passed the No Sanctuary for Criminals Act , which proposes to withhold federal funding from localities that refuse to cooperate with Trump administration immigration measures aimed at criminal noncitizens and other undocumented people. The bill would also allow individuals and close family members of individuals who are victims of felonies committed by undocumented immigrants who have been released from local or state custody against the advice of federal authorities to file suit against states. The day before, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, the new president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, called on Congress to work on bipartisan immigration and criminal justice law reforms, adding that cities could use more federal assistance to fight terrorism and crime, and provide mental illness, substance abuse, and...

The False Promise of Trump’s Rural Infrastructure Investment

The president’s loyal fans cheer him on, but that’s because they haven’t been reading the scorecard.

Gabrielle GurleyJun 23, 2017
AP Photo/Susan Walsh
AP Photo/Susan Walsh A supporter listens as President Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “ We will rebuild rural America,” President Donald Trump told an adoring audience at the Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a few days ago. The president enjoys tantalizing the public with hints about his gonna-be-great-again infrastructure plans. But there is enough evidence to make clear that those “beautiful red” rural communities and the people that Trump professes to love are ones that are going to get shafted: Trump’s plans for rebuilding rural America may only further isolate those regions from the healthier sectors of the economy. “We have to make sure American farmers and their families, wherever they may be, wherever they may go, have the infrastructure projects that they need to compete and grow,” Trump proclaimed. But the details of the infrastructure plans that have trickled out of Washington so far only heighten anxieties about rural America’s...

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