Politics

Oh yeah, that’s right: Democrats do have a primary after all. For an entire summer bleeding into fall, it sure didn’t feel like it. Republicans sucked up all the air, thanks to bigoted sound bites from their candidates and the Democratic National Committee’s own flawed assumption that it just needed six debates to get the…

The Republican presidential candidates, all 100 of them, have battled twice onstage, and those debates were everything you’d want them to be: tons of shade, side-eyeing and verbal elbowing in the race to become the party’s nominee. On Tuesday night, the Las Vegas stage is set for the CNN-hosted, first Democratic presidential debate, and, well,…

On Thursday morning, Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush told a group of voters at the State Historical Museum in Des Moines, Iowa, that he doesn’t support reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He said that the federal government no longer needs to watch over states’ voting practices “as though we’re living in 1960” because…

As the debate on criminal-justice reform continues to swing in the direction of sensible reforms, new legislation introduced in Congress Thursday continued the trend. Two big justice-reform bills offered in the House and Senate signaled that the “tough on crime” era of bad policy (which may have polled well for Election Day, but filled jails)…

American sports have always been a vast canvas upon which politicians can safely paint their personal theories of American life. Running for Congress and want to point out the abuses of management over labor? You can rail against the NFL’s decadeslong battle to hide the impact of concussions. Putting together a message of self-reliance and bootstrap…

The sudden resignation of House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) may have been a House of Cards-like script waiting in the lurch, but it was the last thing we saw coming the day after Pope Francis’ mic drop before Congress. Current House Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is favored to take over the speakership, even if…

Elizabeth Warren is not running for president. But based on the dazzling speech she recently delivered on racial and economic justice, she most definitely should. Sen. Warren (D-Mass.) furthered our national conversation about race with a bold speech linking racial equality, public policy, economic justice and American history. Warren’s #BlackLivesMatter speech Sunday at the Edward…

Why did Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) stun colleagues and announce that he would resign from Congress and the speakership? Was it because he focused on the wrong priorities, from his party’s perspective? No. Was it because he ignored the national debt or didn’t want to defund Planned Parenthood? No.   The real…

Jeb Bush’s recent comments in South Carolina about Democrats getting black people to vote for them by promising them “free stuff” during election season is a powerful reminder that a leading Republican presidential candidate is woefully ignorant about contemporary race relations and the history that’s shaped the racial-justice struggle. Ironically, the former governor of Florida’s…