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How Kamala Can Win (Without Mini-Primary Madness)
In the aftermath of President Joe Biden’s debate debacle, the Democratic Party has divided into roughly three camps. After many years of defending Biden and his approach to politics, often in the face of naysayers who said his belief in bipartisanship and norms was antiquated, I joined Team Pass-the-Torch in my most recent column.
You Think This Year’s Presidential Conventions Will Be Crazy? 1924’s Fights Over the Ku Klux Klan Were Wilder
After Joe Biden’s uncertain performance in last month’s debate, the upcoming Democratic convention in Chicago should stir interest in past contentious conventions –not so much the tear gas-soaked disaster of Chicago 1968, but the epic fiasco in New York one hundred years ago. Sorry, Chicago—when it comes...
Pay Attention to Trump’s Every Cruel and Crazy Syllable
In the wake of Joe Biden’s debate performance last month, it’s easy to lose sight of Donald Trump’s marked surge in extremism, vindictive cruelty, and contempt for democracy. The presumptive Republican nominee has also demonstrated a marked decline in mental acuity more alarming than Biden’s slowness during the debate.
What Joe Biden Could Learn from Nelson Mandela About Knowing When to Quit
Picture a career politician well into his seventies who runs for and wins his nation’s highest office. His election as president marks the end of a dark era in his country’s history, and it will surely warrant prominent mention in the first paragraph of his obituary. In his inaugural address, the elderly president promises a new beginning to his compatriots and vows to heal the deep divisions that plagued his beloved country.
I’ve Defended Biden for Years. Now, I’m Asking Him to Withdraw
I’ve been making the case for Joe Biden for a long time. In 2017, when many Democrats presumed a progressive form of populism was the antidote to then-President Donald Trump, I wrote for Politico that Biden could snag the party’s presidential nomination as “the voice of anti-populism.” Soon after he entered the presidential primary in the spring of 2019, I argued his early poll lead was not illusory, and his embrace of bipartisanship was not delusional. And I’ve credited Biden with following through on his campaign pledge to restore bipartisanship in Washington, which is how he racked up wins on infrastructure, Ukraine aid, the debt limit, semiconductor manufacturing, gun safety, and even postal service reform.
The Supreme Court’s Naked Power Grab
The Supreme Court has become the most dangerous branch. Once again, at the end of its term, the Supreme Court issued major decisions that will have significant ramifications for how government functions and for society at large. A common thread connects the rulings: the justices handed more power to themselves.
From Abigail Adams to Jill Biden, We’ve Been Arguing about First Ladies since 1787
Most people assume that first ladies have played a central role in politics since First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt served as her husband Franklin D. Roosevelt’s eyes and ears on the road across America. And, of course, Jill Biden plays an important role as a sounding board and advisor for her husband, never more so now when his renomination is questioned by so many Democrats. In reality, Americans have dissected the appearances, portfolios, and political influence of first ladies since 1797, when John Adams took the oath of office, and Abigail Adams became the first political first lady.
If Biden Quits the Race, He Should Resign the Presidency
A chorus of pundits is calling for Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race after his disturbing, if not frightening, debate performance last week. Some elected officials, such as Representative Lloyd Doggett, the Texas Democrat, have gotten there. But if Biden does choose to end his reelection bid, it might well be best for the Democratic Party and the country if he not only declined the nomination but resigned from the presidency.
This Horrible Supreme Court Term
On the last day of its term, the Supreme Court flew its flag upside down. It gave the man from Mar-a-Lago, the immunity of a monarch and held that bribing a public official is okay so long as the money changes hands after the official act. While they were at it, they kneecapped the administrative state.
The Polls Matter More Than Ever Now
We at the Washington Monthly have long counseled against panicking over early trial heat polls of the contest between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Just last month we showed how June polls are notoriously not predictive of the November outcome. But the first batch of polls sampled...
The Trump Immunity Decision is Even Worse Than You Think
Giving the back of the hand to John Adams’s contention that the Constitution established a “government of laws, and not of men,” the Supreme Court now holds that a president is all but immune from prosecution for any act that might fall within “the outer perimeter” of a president’s official duties. The purported originalists on the Court seemed only too happy to jettison the admonition of the founders, enunciated in a brief filed by the Brennan Center on behalf of eminent historians, that no one is above the law.
I Worked for and Support Joe Biden. We Need Radical Candor From His Team—and Those Who Want Him to Quit the Race
We saw what we saw. Should the Democratic Party try to replace Joe Biden as its nominee—and if so, with whom? The stakes were sky-high last week, and this week, the Supreme Court made them virtually existential: It granted Donald Trump immunity for any official acts he might take if returned to the White House. Literally, any alternative would be better than that: America has had presidents with severe physical and mental impairments, abominable judgment, or the morals of an alley-cat—but we’ve never had a president hell-bent on destroying the nation’s democracy. The Democrats have only one question: Who will most likely prevent a Trump victory? To answer that question, both the Biden-should-stay and the Biden-must-go camps must display some uncomfortable candor. I’ll start.
The Supreme Court Comes for the Homeless
I suspect the lawyers for the City of Boise, Idaho, sensed trouble back in 2018 when they read the first paragraph of Judge Marsha Berzon’s opinion in a lawsuit against the city by six homeless plaintiffs. It begins with a quote from Anatole France, the French novelist: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” Justice Neil Gorsuch, in an opinion issued Friday on behalf of the conservative supermajority of justices, took a little more time to get to the point: the Supreme Court, in its majesty, is walking away from those, rich or poor, who sleep under bridges.
On Guns, the Supreme Court Can’t Shoot Straight
The Supreme Court’s Second Amendment case law consists of serial sea changes; and its latest entry showcases the limits of an interpretive method tied to recovering the determinate meaning of words written in the past, as the justices battled over the meaning of their ruling just two years prior. First, in 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller,the Court declared for the first time that that 217-year-old constitutional provision protects an individual right to have guns for self-defense unconnected from any militia purposes. Two years later, in City of Chicago v. McDonald, it applied that ruling to state and local governments, where the vast majority of firearm regulation has occurred throughout this nation’s history. And two years ago, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Court announced a radical new history and tradition test for reviewing Second Amendment claims. Last week, the Court in United States v. Rahimi applied its new past-bound test to the modern problem of armed domestic violence. In that ruling, the Court sowed substantial uncertainty yet again–and undermined the originalist premise on which its Second Amendment precedents stand: that judges can reliably recover and apply the single fixed meaning of a contested legal text.
We Watched Joe Biden Struggle
Beware of getting what you wish for. The president’s aides asked that a candidate’s microphone be muted when not answering a question. They took the concession happily, forgetting that the debate Joe Biden “won” in 2020 was the one Donald Trump lost because he was unhinged and impulsive—shouting at his opponents, overtalking the moderators, running amok like a kindergartner overdue for his juice box.
A Wasted Opportunity for Biden (But Still Time for Redemption)
Ronald Reagan was known for his masterful rhetoric. Yet in his first debate as an incumbent in 1984, he delivered a subpar performance—short on sparkling narrative, overstuffed with statistics, meandering at the close—igniting panic over his age, which was then 77. Here we go again. Joe Biden’s struggles...
At the Supreme Court, Here Come the Bribes—and a Biden Victory on Disinformation
The Supreme Court has given Donald Trump de facto immunity. No matter the ruling on presidential immunity, Trump cannot be tried before the election. On Wednesday, it came down with two decisions, one on white-collar crime, Snyder v. United States, to which they turned a Nelsonian blind eye to a gratuity that was a bribe, the other Murthy v. Missouri, on curbing disinformation, which the majority likes, but which didn’t present a justiciable controversy. Snyder, involving the difference between a bribe and a gratuity, was a case where Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas should have recused themselves since they are public officials accepting extravagant gifts from persons having litigation interests before the court. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh, speaking for the majority, reflected in the understatement of the year: “gratuities [like bribes] can sometimes also raise ethical and appropriate concerns. “James Snyder, the former mayor of Portage, Indiana, population 37,926, awarded two contracts to a trash hauling company that purchased five trash trucks for about a million dollars. The following year, the company paid Snyder a purported “consulting fee” represented by a check to his order for $13,000, a sum above and beyond any gift limit set by any local government in the state. The jury convicted, and Snyder was sentenced to a year and nine months in prison.
Why Are Political Parties So Much Weaker Than They Once Were?
In 2016 and 2020, the runner-up for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders, was not a Democrat. In 2024, despite the president’s weakness in the polls, no viable Democratic alternative emerged. In 2016, the Republican Party nominated a man who had flitted between party registrations, flirted with running on a Reform Party ticket, and had a libertine history and liberal positions on entitlements and trade unimaginable for a GOP nominee as recently as 2012. In 2020, the GOP didn’t bother to write a party platform, and this year, the party of Abraham Lincoln will nominate a candidate who led an insurrection against the federal government.
Jamie Raskin’s Battleplan for Liberals in the War Over the Constitution
In May, Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, lead manager in the second impeachment of Donald Trump in 2021, a member of the January 6 Select Committee, and a prolific constitutional law scholar participated in an interview with Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick. The Democrat’s pointed questioning and coiled energy in Congress and on television have made him, arguably, his party’s pointman on legal issues, and his conversation with Lithwick, a veteran legal journalist, merits wide circulation and focused attention from liberals, especially the Maryland congressman’s fellow politicians. Raskin’s remarks—summarized here and streamed here—drew a roadmap for liberals in the war over the Constitution. They should listen to the 61-year-old, who understands that the game is no longer about individual legal issues like abortion or regulation. It is about combatting a movement whose leader has “chosen to set [himself] at war against the Constitution itself.” Raskin counsels that demonizing “originalism,” the banner held high by conservative jurists, is not the best tactic for liberals, however apoplectic they feel in the face of a scandal-prone, super-majority of rightist justices given to incinerating rights and trashing laws.
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