The first time I heard about Juneteenth, I was in college. Shameful, I know.

Maybe it was the mostly white schools I attended, where lessons on Black history started with slave ships, skipped a few centuries and ended with the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Or maybe — and this seems most likely, based on an informal poll of ...Read more

Advocates of equal rights for same-sex couples feared the worst when the Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal of a Catholic agency that faced the loss of its city contract because it declined to work with gay and lesbian prospective foster parents. On Thursday, the justices ruled for the agency, but in a reassuringly narrow way that doesn’t...Read more

Just 21 members of the U.S. House of Representatives this week voted against honoring U.S. Capitol Police and other Jan. 6 Capitol defenders with a Congressional Gold Medal. These Hall-of-Shame candidates included none other than Maryland’s own king of crankiness, prince of piety and savant of sanctimony, Rep. Andy Harris. The six-term ...Read more

California has a long history of churning out films about zombies, most of which are made on shoestring budgets.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration is throwing its weight behind a zombie with a big price tag: California’s slow-moving “high speed” rail line.

On Thursday, June 10, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that the ...Read more

Each year, thousands of eighth grade students from across the nation take a class trip to Washington, D.C. The impact can be life-changing, especially as young people bond and chart different paths toward high school and adulthood.

While the D.C. trip is a rite of passage for many, student travel to Alabama can better tell a story of the United...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Let's be clear: The state budget the California Legislature just passed is a payroll protection program — for the Legislature.

But it's also much more. And it doesn't mean the budget should cynically be dismissed as a sham, the way it is in much of the media. It's very real with many significant elements — like them ...Read more

Let’s start our instant analysis of this week’s Biden-Putin summit not with the big-news headline, but the bottom line:

The instant analysis of this Geneva summit is there can be no instant analysis. Not yet. But much to the surprise of a puzzled pundit corps, history may well conclude that, while President Joe Biden and Russia’s ...Read more

So much for quaint notions of bipartisanship. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell this week bluntly admitted what should long have been obvious: He views partisan politics as a zero-sum game in which the only goal is to seize power from the opposing party by any means necessary. In an interview, McConnell acknowledged that, should Republicans...Read more

The first time the Supreme Court decided an Affordable Care Act case, back in 2012, the result was a historic case with a complicated opinion written by the chief justice. It’s still studied closely in law schools. This year, the court revisited the ACA — this time as farce.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court rejected a coordinated, partisan ...Read more

President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin have had their much anticipated summit meeting in Switzerland. Now the question is: Will it improve anything?

Will Putin cease meddling in other countries, including our own?

Will he cease persecuting dissidents and lovers of freedom in Russia?

Will it lead to better U.S.-Russian ...Read more

Before thousands descended on St. Petersburg for Russia’s annual economic forum this month, the local governor boasted to radio listeners that no one had held a similar-scale event since the pandemic struck. A few days later, President Vladimir Putin told the audience that his country was in a better virus position than most and would quickly ...Read more

June 17 marked the 50th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s 1971 speech beginning the war on drugs. By any objective accounting, the drawn-out conflict has been a colossal failure. It was begun under false pretenses, has cost billions, has destroyed livelihoods and lives — and perhaps most glaringly, has not made a dent in drug abuse, ...Read more

Rate the U.S.-Russia summit in Geneva as a success for President Joe Biden.

If you want to understand why, just look at what Vladimir Putin said back home the day after the summit ended.

“I want to say that the image of President Biden, [as] portrayed by our and even the American press, has nothing to do with reality,” Putin told alumni of...Read more

In a highly technical opinion, the Supreme Court held Thursday in Fulton v. Philadelphia that Catholic Social Services is exempt from municipal laws that would have required it to place foster children with gay couples. Yet despite this result, the case isn’t the win that religious liberty advocates wanted.

The ruling was unanimous, but ...Read more

In two major decisions, the Supreme Court expanded protections for religious liberty and narrowed the law of standing so that fewer federal lawsuits can be entertained. Six of the nine justices were appointed by Republican presidents, and a majority of those six agreed with each decision.

Conservative exultation is nonetheless subdued. One of ...Read more

In rejecting yet another in a seemingly endless series of Republican attacks on the Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court did more than just preserve a crucial protection for millions of Americans with preexisting health conditions that make them vulnerable to gouging or exclusion by insurers. It also preserved the notions that people have to ...Read more

The Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday to uphold the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act breaks no new legal ground, but it has enormous practical significance in that it means that 21 million people will keep their health insurance coverage.

In 2012, in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, the court in a 5-4 ...Read more

Progressive activists are exasperated by the failure of Justice Stephen G. Breyer to announce that he will retire at the end of the Supreme Court’s current term. They fear that, if Breyer doesn’t step down now, President Joe Biden might have difficulty replacing him later if the Republicans regain control of the Senate in the 2022 midterm ...Read more

The cost of caring for America’s nearly 6 million Alzheimer’s disease patients is already $600 billion a year, factoring in the cost of uncompensated caregiving. Now, the Food and Drug Administration has approved a drug treatment that may or may not work but is set to cost $56,000 a year for the average patient — a charge that in most ...Read more

"I've heard a lot of different things that haven't been taught in school like Juneteenth. I don't know why these things weren't taught .…" — Clayton Kershaw, June 2020

I hope he does now.

But if not, the greatest pitcher of his generation need only look at what's going on in his home state of Texas for answers.

Gov. Greg Abbott is ...Read more