Over the last decade, it’s become commonplace to describe President Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party as hostile — as if the one-time New York real estate mogul was the political version of a corporate raider. That’s a gross mischaracterization, one that has contributed to a misunderstanding of the source of Trump’s ...Read more

As a former Cook County state’s attorney and a former chief of staff in a district attorney’s office, we were alarmed to learn that President Donald Trump’s administration quietly deleted the first federal police misconduct database — a critical tool created to prevent federal law enforcement officers with histories of serious misconduct...Read more

Uncomfortable truth time: The biggest reason California’s electric rates are rising so fast is that utility companies are spending billions of dollars each year to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires.

Does that mean Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric should spend less money trimming trees, ...Read more

On March 8, Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born green card holder and Columbia University graduate student, was arrested at his New York apartment by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

The arrest was linked to Khalil’s involvement in pro-Palestinian student protests at Columbia University last spring. Now facing deportation, the Algerian ...Read more

A federal judge has held that Elon Musk and DOGE’s actions to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development likely violated the Constitution in “multiple ways.” U.S. District Court Judge Theodore D. Chuang also ordered the reversal of many of the steps Musk directed to be taken to close the agency.

The decision could mark the ...Read more

The conventional wisdom — really, it’s an Article of Faith for the Republican Party — is that the federal bureaucracy is a hopeless swamp of waste, fraud, and inefficiency staffed by lazy, incompetent idlers.

But is it?

It’s a question worth considering, since it’s the rationale that drives the chainsaw — or wood chipper — that ...Read more

I confess that I had no intention of reading "Careless People," the tell-all memoir from former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams. I figured I knew all I needed to know about the company's history and its leader, Mark Zuckerberg, from following it for the better part of a decade.

But then Zuckerberg, whose company changed its name to Meta ...Read more

We’ve all witnessed it. The Thanksgiving table and other family gatherings turned terribly wrong. “Don’t talk about politics.” Maybe our parents told us that.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost the ability to have discourse over political issues with our neighbors, and even our family. We’ve all felt the divide. It’s not just a ...Read more

Welcome to Florida. Where Sunshine needs lobbyists and lawyers, and the state motto could just as well be “nothing to see here.” Where elected officials shamelessly reject attempts to let the people who voted for them know what they are up to. Where government bureaucrats seem increasingly inclined to simply ignore the law, particularly in ...Read more

Mayor Michelle Wu launched her long-delayed re-election campaign kickoff in a State of the City speech that opponent Josh Kraft could not compete against, taking a strong swipe at President Donald Trump and Republican “bullies” for criticizing Boston’s sanctuary city status.

“This is our city. No one tells Boston how to take care of our...Read more

Truth matters. You wouldn’t know that from watching the president address Congress earlier this month. The assault on truth since January has been breathtaking.

The removal of data from government websites, the elevation of science deniers to positions in charge of scientific policy, and the advancement of health policy that flies in the ...Read more

“We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That's when we were a tariff country,” said President Donald Trump recently, and he’s not wrong. But tariffs aren’t the whole story. The genius of the Gilded Age was interstate regulatory and tax competition.

That economy boomed. From 1870 to 1913, America’s GDP grew at nearly 5 percent per ...Read more

With Trump’s return to the White House, we once again bear daily witness to a spectacle that could be described as entertaining, were it only a TV series. But Trump’s unprecedented assault on our democratic norms and institutions is not only very real but represents the gravest peril our democratic republic has confronted in the last 80 ...Read more

The California Legislature — particularly its Democrats — will face a political litmus test next week that will reveal how serious they are about respecting the will of voters who overwhelmingly passed Proposition 36 last November, the initiative that strengthened penalties for some theft and drug crimes.

There was no funding mechanism for ...Read more

The Department of Government Efficiency’s path of destruction through the federal government leaves little doubt that Elon Musk and his hand-selected staff have no idea what the federal agencies are intended to do for the citizens of the United States.

A leaked audio recording from the acting commissioner of Social Security Leland Dudek ...Read more

To grasp the aberration of U.S. foreign policy under President Donald Trump, consider an abbreviated history of America’s shifting attitudes toward just one country, Canada. And start with Ronald Reagan, who stood for the original and genuine version of “peace through strength.”

When signing a free-trade agreement with Canada in 1988, ...Read more

U.S. health agency leadership and policymakers seem intent on undermining trust in mRNA, the technology that saved millions of lives during the COVID pandemic and has shown promise in addressing a range of infectious diseases and even cancer.

One troubling sign of the trend came when, according to KFF reporting, National Institutes of Health ...Read more

Women’s History Month began as a way to honor women’s contributions throughout time. It was meant to commemorate their “firsts” and perhaps more importantly, to inspire future generations of ladies to achieve greatness.

Unfortunately, that second objective is in danger. If politicians and businesses continue to abandon diversity, equity...Read more

Congress is cowed; that's one supposedly coequal branch of government down. But federal courts are proving more resistant to Donald Trump's trampling of laws and the Constitution. Now, just two months in office, the president has all but crossed the red line — defying a judge's order — that for more than two centuries has separated the rule ...Read more

In feudal times, it was expected that vassals would kiss the ring of the lord of the manor to show loyalty and subservience to his power, to make it clear that they understood they belonged to him. I had thought those times were long gone, but apparently, they are with us again.

Across America, politicians, businesspeople and media tycoons are ...Read more