ArcaMax

Just days after Donald Trump tried to defang the abortion issue, it came roaring back in the form of an Arizona law, passed before women could vote, banning all abortions. Far from resolving the issue, the Supreme Court's decision to overrule Roe v. Wade has thrust abortion -- and the courts -- in the thick of what the White House termed the "...Read more

"I'm very pro-choice," Donald Trump said in 1999, when he first flirted with the idea of running for president. "Just very briefly, I'm pro-life," he announced at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2011. In 2016, campaigning for the support of anti-abortion leaders, he promised to appoint judges who would overrule Roe v. Wade -- ...Read more

When I wrote a few weeks ago about Donald Trump predicting a "bloodbath," my readers -- most of them in civil and respectful tones -- were quick to correct me. It was only the auto industry he was referring to, they said. They tried to defend him. They needn't have bothered. Trump has, since that time, adopted the idea of a "bloodbath" as a ...Read more

Back in 2020, the daughter of the judge presiding over Donald Trump's hush money trial in New York worked for a digital advertising firm that was involved in then Sen. Kamala Harris' presidential campaign. According to Trump, that made her a Trump hater and meant that her father should not be permitted to try the case. The judge, Juan Merchan,...Read more

Where does a lawyer draw the line between zealous advocacy of a client's cause and using his standing as a lawyer as a license to lie? A California State Bar judge ruled this week that former Chapman Law School Dean John Eastman crossed that line in his representation of Donald Trump's efforts to invalidate the 2020 election.

"It is true that...Read more

It might just be a coincidence that former Justice Stephen Breyer's new book had its official publication date on the same day the court heard argument on the biggest abortion case since Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overruled Roe v. Wade. In his important new book, "Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not ...Read more

Who was Sen. Chuck Schumer speaking to when he denounced Benjamin Netanyahu and urged Israel to hold new elections to replace him? And who was he speaking for?

Don't get me wrong. I'm no fan of Netanyahu's. Not one bit. When the history of Oct. 7 is finally written, Hamas will rightly be blamed for unspeakable evil. It was their doing and ...Read more

"Now, if I don't get elected," Donald Trump said at a rally last weekend in Ohio, "it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole -- that's going to be the least of it. It's going to be a bloodbath for the country."

Who talks like that?

The once and possibly future president of the United States. Warning of a bloodbath for the country.

His ...Read more

The essay was published by Guernica, which until this week I would have described as a highly regarded literary journal. (It can be found here: https://web.archive.org/web/20240305095742/https:/www.guernicamag.com/from-the-edges-of-a-broken-world/.) This week, they retracted the essay, saying they regretted publishing it. Why? Because it ...Read more

The man can't control himself.

In a nearly two-hour speech at a rally in Georgia this weekend, he told the audience: "I just posted a $91 million bond -- $91 million on a fake story, totally made-up story. Ninety-one million based on false accusations made about me by a woman that I knew nothing about, didn't know, never heard of. I know ...Read more

The Republicans should be mortified. In fact, by all accounts, they are. Rolling Stone featured an entire article quoting their reactions to Alabama Sen. Katie Britt's embarrassing response to the president's State of the Union speech. Describing the speech as "feeling more like a rejected audition tape for a supporting role on 'Grey's Anatomy...Read more

It's a question I've been writing about for more than 40 years, since I found myself in the back of a police car explaining what happened to me when a Black man held an ice pick to my throat and threatened to kill me. I was, I learned that night, a lucky victim, lucky to be alive and lucky that racism meant that mine was considered a "real ...Read more

The Supreme Court did not have to take up Trump's immunity case. When Jack Smith went to the court and asked them to fast-track the case -- avoiding the delay that an appeal to the D.C. Circuit would entail -- the court said no. The result was that the appeal, which took months to decide, put the trial on hold. If the court thought the case ...Read more

Asked last Sunday if he was ruling out a run for the presidency in 2024, California Gov. Gavin Newsom shot down the idea -- again.

"You gotta be kidding," he told Kristen Welker on Sunday's "Meet the Press." "I am here celebrating the extraordinary accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration, making the case that we need to make to ...Read more

The decision of the Alabama Supreme Court that frozen embryos are protected as children is being viewed as a major victory for the anti-abortion movement, which is ironic, to say the least, since its most immediate impact is to make the hellish trip to having children through in vitro fertilization even more difficult. So much for pro-life. So...Read more

Donald Trump has been outrageously silent about the brutal murder of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. No, correct that. Silence would have been outrageous. Comparing himself to the slain hero is beyond outrageous. Trump, and his supporters, have had the audacity to compare Trump's indictment by four grand juries to the imprisonment ...Read more

"Turn on the TV," my friend Annie said. No hello -- it has to be something bad. "The Super Bowl." At first I thought Las Vegas. But no, this must be Kansas City. A shooting. One woman dead. Twenty-two people shot. Eleven children. Here we go again. What could be more American? The schools were closed. A million people gathered to celebrate. ...Read more

If there was one lesson to be learned from Bush v. Gore, and its impact on the Supreme Court's credibility, it is that the court should not decide presidential elections. That job belongs to the people: in the case of Donald Trump, to voters and juries. What that means in practice is that the court needs to find a way to decide the two cases ...Read more

One of them confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi -- both are, after all, women, whose first initial begins with an "N." One of them confused the president of Mexico with the president of Egypt, while the other confused the leaders of Hungary and Turkey. What does it prove? Basically, nothing. Certainly nothing about who should be the next ...Read more

On Tuesday, as expected, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected in the strongest possible terms former President Donald Trump's claim that he is absolutely immune for crimes allegedly committed while he was in office. "For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become ...Read more