TAP

It’s the only sanctuary state out there, the state where there are real restrictions on the extent to which cops can cooperate with ICE. It continues to push the envelope on climate change legislation, and, with New York, has mandated that its minimum wage rise to $15 an hour over the next few years. But […]

Clearly, White House Counsel Donald McGahn or his associates were the source of the explosive leak that Trump had directed McGahn to fire Mueller, and that McGahn blocked the move by threatening to resign. But why did McGann choose last week to leak the story of an episode that happened last June? The most obvious […]

For starters, he and his ultra-nationalist domestic policy adviser, Steve Miller, are continuing to play to Trump’s hard-core base. Second, Trump is trying to demonstrate that he’s the boss here. There are several problems, however. First, there is no such thing as a take-it-of-leave-it demand in politics. This may work as a ploy when you […]

The administration’s decision this week to place a 30 percent tariff on imports of solar panels has drawn a predictable backlash from a range of critics, including the companies that install solar panels and the disciples of corporate free trade. Among the latter are a number of congressional Republicans and right-wing think tanks, which have […]

Virtually all mainstream writers have imbibed the conventional wisdom that there is a simple divide between something called “free trade” and something disparaged as “protectionism.” Free trade, good; protectionism, bad. But how do you proceed when another country is clearly protecting its home markets and its exports—by subsidizing their manufacture and selling them below the […]

…another wildly divergent set of articles on what the super-rich have planned for the rest of us. Consider the contrasting takes in two news stories today, one in The New York Times, the other in The Washington Post. The contrast is clear even before you read the stories, since they’re expressed in the headlines. “Ahead […]

…on whether to defer consideration of DACA and keep the government open for three weeks. Democrats would be fools to take this deal. In three weeks, nothing will have changed, and Congress will go through this all over again. Public opinion supports extending DACA by margins upwards of 80 percent, depending on the poll. Even […]

I’m guessing that Trump will. Why? Because he and the Republicans, as the governing party, have more to lose if the government actually shuts down. And because Trump, in the end game, is pretty good at making a deal, and likes to brag that he can get things done. And because the Democrats realize they […]

…I was having an email exchange with the author of a piece I was editing on how Democrats can both turn out their base and reach out to voters outside their base in the 2018 midterms. We were going back and forth on three points in the piece—chiefly, on whether Latinos could be said to […]

Want to know why Democrats are failing to optimize their role as the true economic populists against the purely symbolic faux-populism of Donald Trump? Consider the bill to weaken the Dodd-Frank Act, now working its way through the Senate. The bill would exempt financial institutions as large as $250 billion in assets from many of […]