In 2008, a majority of the Supreme Court decided that executing a man who raped his eight-year-old stepdaughter so violently that she required emergency surgery violated the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. That’s the holding of Kennedy v. Louisiana, 554 U.S. 407. Four justices disagreed. Sixteen years later, multiple states have passed laws […]
When my husband Dave and I learned that two of our three daughters had a fatal genetic disease, we entered the kind of nightmare for which no parent can fully prepare. Both girls — Keira and Livvy — were diagnosed with metachromatic leukodystrophy, or MLD, a rare degenerative disorder that destroys the nervous system and […]
President Donald Trump has announced that he will withdraw the United States from the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement that he negotiated in 2018. The USMCA replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was negotiated by the Clinton administration in 1992. Criticisms of NAFTA included labor and environmental exploitation, claims of corrupt multinational corporations illegally profiting through […]
The teachers unions are scared and desperate these days. How else do you explain the spectacle of Randi Weingarten and Becky Pringle, presidents of the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, respectively, firing off an open letter to the nation’s Democratic governors? What has them so frightened? A new federal tax credit […]
The tragic toll in deaths, injuries, and destruction from Venezuela’s massive earthquakes is not fully known, but it certainly can only increase. The death count rises daily. Initial estimates put the destruction at $6.7 billion, affecting nearly 7 million people, including 2 million in Caracas, the capital city. As rescue efforts continue, and relief and reconstruction […]
As leaders gather for the high-stakes NATO Summit in Ankara this week, the trans-Atlantic alliance stands at a historic crossroads, confronted by two defining crises: the Russia-Ukraine War and the simmering confrontation between the U.S. and Iran. What critics previously decried as a widening chasm between Washington and Brussels is instead coalescing into a sharp, […]
In March 1982, about 6,000 people gathered in Detroit to launch what they hoped would become America’s democratic socialist movement. The average age in the room was somewhere north of 60. The founding chairman was Michael Harrington, a Catholic intellectual who had advised Martin Luther King Jr. and wrote The Other America: Poverty in the […]
More than 1,200 former Justice Department employees encouraged the Senate to reject Todd Blanche’s nomination as attorney general, writing in a Tuesday letter that he has been “demonizing career employees.” “In the coming weeks, many will rightly underscore the corruption and abuses that have defined the Justice Department under Todd Blanche’s leadership: the vindictive prosecutions...
A commercial tanker caught fire after being struck by a projectile while transiting the Strait of Hormuz, the British military said Monday. The vessel was hit off the coast of Limah in Oman while traveling southbound, according to the U.K. Maritime Trade Operations, which is part of the British Royal Navy. The projectile struck the...
The Supreme Court voted for the Republicans and Trump whenever it had a chance to do so and checked Trump where it had no plausible alternative but to do so.