Politics
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Editorial: Dems delight in blasting president over economy – if it's Trump
How do you know Joe Biden is out of the White House?
Because Democrats care about the economy.
Specifically, they care about hammering President Donald Trump about the economy, and his tariff rollout/rollback’s effect on it. They are tickled pink to point fingers across the aisle.
Politico cited interviews with more than a dozen Democratic ...Read more

Commentary: Hello, World! America doesn't have your back anymore
America has your back. That has been the message of U.S. foreign policy to the world’s vulnerable since the end of World War II.
That sense that America is behind you was a message for Europe against the threat of the Soviet Union and has been the implicit message for all threatened by authoritarian expansionism.
From the sophisticated in ...Read more

Mark Z. Barabak: The fight over Trump's legal bullying campaign makes for odd alliances
Lawfare makes for strange bedfellows.
As part of his tightening grip on power, and his assault on 200-plus years of checks and balances, President Donald Trump has bludgeoned some of the nation's leading law firms into shameful submission, extracting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free legal work for his pet causes.
More ...Read more

Commentary: Tackling climate change must be job no.1
Amid the historic and sweeping cuts to federal agencies and programs being carried out by the Trump administration, one truth has been overlooked: If we’re serious about cutting waste and protecting public funds, we must confront climate change head-on.
2024 was a disaster for the planet and its people. According to NASA, it was the warmest ...Read more

Editorial: DOGE finds more fraud -- where were the watchdogs?
Where there’s a will, there’s a way to commit fraud and waste money.
Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has unearthed far too much evidence of this in DC and beyond. His latest findings are eye-opening.
As the New York Post reported, DOGE claimed an initial review found that since 2020, 9,700 people whose birth ...Read more

Patricia Lopez: US citizens could be on a plane to El Salvador next
The White House made it clear during a visit from Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, that it plans to let Kilmar Abrego Garcia rot in the brutal prison to which — as the administration has admitted in court — he was deported by mistake.
The spectacle in the Oval Office on Monday was chilling. President Donald Trump warmly greeted ...Read more

Gustavo Arellano: Trump threatened Vietnam with a huge tariff. How's that going over in Little Saigon?
ABC Supermarket in the heart of Little Saigon is like a Donald Trump tariff rant come to fragrant, tasty life.
Sorghum liquors from China. Frozen seafood from Malaysia. Thai fish sauce. Japanese candies. A galaxy of products from Vietnam, of course.
All of these imports would be slammed by the massive tariffs that Trump threatened to impose on...Read more

Commentary: The FEC has opened the floodgates for big money to flood elections. Here's how we can fix it
Elections are getting bigger.
2024 was a blockbuster year in campaign spending, shattering the previous record — set just four years prior — as donors across the nation and the economic spectrum swooped in to pull control of every branch of government their way.
And they have a newly-powerful tool at their disposal: joint fundraising ...Read more

Commentary: Will Native tribes secure Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument?
On March 25, representatives of six Southwestern tribes announced the formation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Inter-Tribal Coalition. They are following the model of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, the moral force behind the 2016 establishment of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument.
This elevation of Indigenous ...Read more

Commentary: What I learned in the bleachers as a youth-baseball immigrant dad
I spent a recent Sunday in Norwalk, California, watching 12-year-olds play baseball on a field nestled between a juvenile prison and two sets of railway tracks. It was a hot, dry day. Any trace of a breeze carried the smell of diesel fumes from the industrial zone over the tracks. Still, there was no place I’d rather have been.
Friends of ...Read more

Editorial: The financial crisis of 2025? Better to be ready
If there’s one thing investors have learned in recent days, it’s that there’s no way to guess what America will do next. With its on-again, off-again tariffs, the US administration has demonstrated a rare and reckless willingness to shock markets.
Amid such radical uncertainty, a financial crisis isn’t out of the question. Policymakers ...Read more

Commentary: Trump administration exaggerates its powers in foreign policy
Despicable is the Trump administration’s refusal to ask Nayib Bukele, the authoritarian president of El Salvador, for the return of Armando Abrego Garcia, a man who was sent to a notoriously harsh prison there by a U.S. acknowledged “administrative error.”
Using such heinous deportations without legal due process eliminates the ...Read more

Patricia Murphy: Marjorie Taylor Greene heckled the president. Her own hecklers went to jail
On the one hand, you have to admire U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s willingness to do an in-person town hall meeting in the first place. With death threats now a part of her daily reality, she’d have a legitimate excuse to avoid public confrontations.
But Greene has consistently done town halls, and avoiding confrontation isn’t part of...Read more

Editorial: Moment of truth -- Judge Boasberg is right to seek contempt against Trump officials
President Donald Trump’s contemptuous view of the courts was bound to lead to bring the country to this: A federal judge writing, “The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders.”
D.C. Federal Judge James Boasberg, in a nearly-50-page opinion, explains why he’s reaching for a nuclear option: potentially ...Read more

Jackie Calmes: The case that proves the US, under Trump, no longer stands for rule of law
In a normal nation governed by the rule of law — not Donald Trump's America, that is — the government's mistaken deportation of a Maryland father to a Salvadoran gulag, in violation of a federal immigration judge's 2019 order, might have been easily resolved.
Lo! Just four days after the Supreme Court last Thursday unanimously ordered the ...Read more

Commentary: LA's 'mansion tax' needs a remodel. Here's how to fix it
In 2022, Los Angeles voters approved Measure ULA, a transfer tax on the sale of high-value properties inside the city limits. Nicknamed the mansion tax by its supporters, Measure ULA imposed a 4% tax on sales over $5 million and a 5.5% tax on sales over $10 million — one of the steepest such levies in the nation. Its revenue is earmarked for ...Read more

Andreas Kluth: The US has Greenland (and foreign policy) exactly upside down
If you’re sitting in Copenhagen or Nuuk and looking for bespoke lessons from the trade war that President Donald Trump just declared on the world, here are two.
First, what this American president signals, he also carries out. Second, it does not matter whether the object of his fixation is obviously self-defeating or nonsensical; he’ll ...Read more

Trudy Rubin: The 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's ride reminds us that ordinary citizens can defeat tyrants
ARLINGTON, Mass. — Driving through this old New England town, visiting relatives to celebrate Passover, I noticed every house on the street sported an American flag.
This was the route Paul Revere and William Dawes traversed by horseback exactly 250 years ago on their way to Lexington and Concord to warn local militias that British regulars ...Read more

Tom Philp: Harvard is defending academic freedom in California, too. Fight, Harvard!
I’ve never been much of a Harvard fan because I’ve never been able to get beyond the snob factor. But suddenly I find myself cheering for the Crimson. It is facing a takeover attempt by the Trump Administration that, if successful, could befall Sacramento State and other California institutions.
In the administration’s guise of opposing ...Read more

Editorial: Trump says he respects the Supreme Court. So return Abrego Garcia, Mr. President
By its own admission, the Trump administration erred in deporting Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old married father of three who was living in Maryland until March 15, when he was seized by federal authorities. Abrego Garcia is imprisoned now in El Salvador in a maximum security facility designated for members of that country’s ...Read more