TAP

There is an increasing chance that in a Democratic wave election, gerrymandering could backfire on the Republicans, and lead to a massive Democratic sweep, with a pickup of 75 seats or even more. (It takes only 24 for Dems to take back the House.) Here’s how that works. Let’s say you are the Republican architects […]

… is the destruction of government agencies by appointment. Time and again, the president has appointed and the Senate confirmed directors committed to the destruction of the agency they’re directing and the inversion of its values. Think Scott Pruitt at the EPA, or Betsy DeVos at Education, or Ben Carson at HUD—the list, as you […]

… about the importance of electing a Democrat in 2020. Some say, let’s just find a Democrat who can be elected. Others say that it matters what kind of Democrat. I’m emphatically with the second group. The road to Trumpism was paved by Democrats who really didn’t care about working-class Americans, who thought social issues […]

…and propel economic inequality to still greater heights, the newspapers are full of stories charting how increasingly, to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “the rich are different from you and me.” While the growing distance between the billionaires and the rest of us is challenging art directors to come up with charts that still will fit […]

… the chasm between his rhetoric and reality—which is a government of, by, and for billionaires? This is trickier than it seems. The tax bill, as we’ve all read, is a phony. It delivers most of the benefits to the rich, and screws middle-class homeowners in high-tax states. But it does deliver modest help to […]

Maybe Trump’s crowing about the tax bill is premature. He staged a truly disgusting display at the White House, promising the legislation as “a Christmas present for the American people,” but a Christmas tree bill for lobbyists is more like it. However the true Christmas present is that the bill seems to be in trouble […]

…in the Alabama exit polls that should petrify Republicans, a few fairly jump out. A good deal of attention has been paid, and rightly so, to the level of African American turnout, which, at between 28 and 29 percent of the overall electorate, actually exceeded black turnout in 2012, when President Obama was on the […]

The election of Doug Jones portends several hopeful things. First, it shows that under the right circumstances, 30 percent of white Alabamians will vote for a Democrat, even a pro-choice Democrat; and that black anger can be turned into black voter mobilization. We may have a biracial progressive coalition yet. Second, it deepens the schisms […]

Sometimes, when you’ve been in a fight for a long time, you pick up allies so unlikely that your initial response is, “What the hell are they doing here?” So it is, apparently, with the foes of fracking, who’ve long been lobbying state and local governments, and sometimes the feds as well, to put a […]