Goodbye, legal right to abortion.

Goodbye, separation of church and state.

Goodbye, commonsense gun laws.

Goodbye, Miranda rights.

And that's just the beginning.

With a fundamentalist, conservative Supreme Court majority in charge, brace yourselves for the possibility of the end of so many civil rights we take for granted: privacy, ...Read more

Some of the most harrowing testimony in the congressional Jan. 6 hearings has come from Republican officials in battleground states who endured tremendous pressure from Donald Trump and his allies to help overturn the 2020 election.

And not the normal kind of pressure politicians apply to each other.

Many of Trump’s followers went far beyond...Read more

Did you hear the one about the Republican Senate candidate who suggested killing any Republican who isn’t deemed conservative enough? It’s a real knee-slapper. Especially with recent horrendous mass shootings, public officials getting death threats and the country watching a forensic review of how a former president’s violent rhetoric ...Read more

This July 4, try eating green when you celebrate the red, white and blue. Environmental scientists say that phasing out animal agriculture and eating vegan is “our best and most immediate chance to reverse the trajectory of climate change.” So, I’m asking you, my fellow Americans, to go vegan to give our country and our planet a fighting ...Read more

In my first journalism job, I wrote two obituaries and edited 17. They were about the classmates and teachers who died in the mass shooting at my school.

In my first journalism job, I hid from an active shooter inside the newspaper room's photo closet.

In my first journalism job, I returned to that room every single day to write about the ...Read more

The last few years have seen one distressing news story after another about the scourge of plastic waste: Single-use plastic packaging dumped in the ocean is killing sea animals who mistake it for food. Elephants in Sri Lanka are dying after ingesting plastic trash piled up in open-air landfills. Discarded bottles, bags and wrapping broken down ...Read more

Republicans and conservatives are fond of the shibboleth that "America is a republic, not a democracy." Boiled down to its essence, the phrase is a justification for awarding a strong voice in government to minority political views.

We are now at a stage where the minority is taking over. Worse, it's an extremist minority that has exploited ...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Elections have consequences. That's a cliché, but clichés are born of truths. And this is a truth: If a Democrat had been elected president in 2016, we wouldn't have a right-wing Supreme Court.

If Donald Trump hadn't beaten Hillary Clinton, gun control laws and national abortion rights would not have been quashed by the...Read more

If Joe Biden wants to run for re-election, he should say so clearly and soon — and then start acting like it. Alternatively, if the president is not sure he wants to run again, he should take that as a strong sign that he shouldn’t — and then make that announcement soon, too.

The point, you may have noticed, is that whatever he does, he ...Read more

By striking down Roe v. Wade which has for nearly five decades protected the right of women to terminate pregnancy, the U.S. Supreme Court has not only turned its back on legal precedent and many of their own personal pledges to uphold Roe as “settled law” made during U.S. Senate confirmation hearings, it has assured that the United States ...Read more

On a recent outing my wife and I took in a touring exhibit from the Smithsonian Institution titled “Righting a Wrong.” Within the modest confines of a single room at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul, the exhibit conveyed an epic tragedy: the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants as suspected traitors ...Read more

Nobody should ever have to justify why they want or need an abortion. But there are some circumstances, such as rape and incest, that make it even more unconscionable to deny pregnant people of their fundamental right to choose.

And now that the Supreme Court has chosen to overturn Roe v. Wade, undoing nearly 50 years of federal abortion rights...Read more

Brittany Fonteno never wanted to imagine the chaos of a post-Roe world.

One of desperate, angry women begging healthcare workers for an abortion — and then leaving clinics distraught with only vague ideas of where to turn next for help.

But after Texas passed what, at the time, seemed like a draconian ban on abortions after about six weeks ...Read more

There are virtually no precedents in American law in which a right — declared fundamental by the Supreme Court — was erased. While the court has overhauled constitutional protections before, the complete retraction of the right to abortion sets the nation on a course it has never seen.

From 1910 to 1937, the court recognized a right to ...Read more

When my son came out, I found myself quickly learning how to navigate a new world where he might not be given the same rights and opportunities I expected for him. I was lost in a storm of rhetoric and hate pushing back against my child’s future.

Then we found Joe Wilson, a filmmaker, and his husband Dean Hamer. Joe’s film, "Out in the ...Read more

The Supreme Court overturned 50 years of legal precedent and quickly cut off legal access to abortions for women in large parts of the country Friday. Many big corporations realized quickly that they had to respond to the sweeping decision.

In the days before the widely anticipated announcement, some of the nation’s largest employers reached ...Read more

In last week's issue of New York magazine, two photos of Sen. Dianne Feinstein are laid out side by side.

In the first, from 1971, she is smiling broadly, hair bobbed, wearing pearls — the first female president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. She's about 38 years old.

On the facing page is Feinstein today, half a century later, ...Read more

In the face of growing evidence that former President Donald Trump violated laws and the Constitution in his effort to stay in office after the 2020 election, should he be prosecuted?

This is the wrong question.

The right question is: Are we able to justify NOT prosecuting him?

The answer seems obvious: In a nation that aspires to operate ...Read more

The Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization is a double disaster. First and foremost, overturning Roe v. Wade will have a devastating impact on the lives of Americans, especially women of childbearing age. Second, it is certain to be disparaged — even derided — by legal scholars and to result in a plunge in ...Read more

As the leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations prepare to meet this week in Madrid, I’m reminded of a call I received shortly after I became supreme allied commander at the alliance in 2009. It was from Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and with the directness for which he was famous, he said: “Jim, I want you to ...Read more