The Supreme Court heard oral arguments today on the constitutionality of President Trump’s Commerce Department adding a question on citizenship status to the 2020 census, and it looked like the five Republican pooh-bahs (Justices Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh) are poised to give it a thumbs-up. What this means is that the census—for which […]
Blog_Post
Posted inTAP
Warren Does it Again
Senator Elizabeth Warren’s twin proposal for substantial student debt relief plus tuition-free higher education is a huge winner—economically, politically, and even fiscally. It demonstrates once again why she is such a leader at connecting brave policy ideas to the lived condition of ordinary Americans. The idea of cancelling $50,000 of debt is smart. It puts […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
Every American Pays for Rape
April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month and it is important to understand how the trauma of rape affects every taxpayer: Many sexual-assault survivors depend on federal, state, and local government programs to help heal, recover, and restart their lives. According to a 2017 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study, rape costs 25 million […]
Posted inTAP
It Ain’t Over
Bill Barr gave it his best shot, clumsily playing the role more of Trump’s defense attorney than attorney general. But Barr’s grotesquely dishonest spinning of the Mueller report has backfired and the reverberations will only increase. Here is the key line from the special counsel’s report: The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws […]
Posted inElection Night Blog
Notre Dame, the National Museum of Brazil, and Weighing Cultural Losses
The world watched in horror Monday as a massive fire tore through Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, destroying large portions of the seven-century-old landmark. News channels went into special-coverage mode, newspapers around the world published impressive photos, and millions of dollars in donations for reconstruction began pouring in. A tragedy of this scale clearly merited the […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
April 16, 2019
Notre Dame: God must be very angry at Her children. I am neither a Catholic nor any sort of believer, but my first reaction to seeing Notre Dame in flames, oddly, was that God must be very disappointed in us, Her children. This is doubly weird, since the God I imagined was a vindictive Old […]
Posted inTAP
Can the Deep State Contain Trump?
For Trump’s first couple of years, we consoled ourselves by believing that Trump was a kind of Gulliver figure, an overgrown child restrained by the adults of the deep state. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly was a sort of serious person who resisted Trump’s worst impulses. The generals at the Department of Defense […]
Posted inTAP
The Israeli Election and American Jews
One major by-product of this week’s Israeli election is that the already gaping rift between Israeli and American Jews is sure to gape even wider. The disappearance of the Israeli left and center-left, as evidenced by the dismal performance of their respective standard-bearers, Meretz and Labor, in Tuesday’s voting, has no counterpart whatever in the […]
Posted inCivil Rights in America
Human Rights Watch Details Ongoing U.S. Criminal Justice Abuses
Despite recent progress toward criminal justice reform, the United States continues to pursue policies that encourage mass incarceration and fail to rehabilitate offenders, according to a Human Rights Watch report presented to the United Nations Human Rights Committee earlier this year. The international watchdog organization also detailed a spectrum of overreach and misconduct in the […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
April 10, 2019
Trump’s Huddled Masses and the Politics of 2020. Here’s a hard question for progressive advocates of refugee rights. Did Trump just get perversely lucky? Until a few months ago, critics of Trump’s wall, his caravan obsession, and his claim of an invasion had a foolproof rejoinder. His story was a fantasy. Immigration from Mexico was […]
