SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- The lofty position held by California Republicans 25 years ago when Proposition 187 passed seems unimaginable today. It was a high-water mark for the party that wouldn't last long.

The California GOP has been sinking into oblivion ever since -- but not entirely because of the anti-illegal-immigration measure.

Proposition ...Read more

Democrats accomplished something very difficult Wednesday in these complicated media times: They staged a hearing that was TV-friendly without dumbing down or diminishing the seriousness of the impeachment process. In media and maybe political terms as well, that's a strong opening day to what will be at least two weeks of open hearings into the...Read more

The day's news brims with reports on the thrusts and parries of Wednesday's U.S. House hearing, a possible prelude to the first removal from office of a sitting U.S. president. Weeks, perhaps months of public drama and decision-making have commenced. Our mission here is to frame this great debate -- and to explain why whatever now happens across...Read more

The first day of public hearings in the House impeachment inquiry acquainted television viewers who haven't followed this complicated story with two realities.

One is that there is significant if not yet conclusive evidence that President Trump grossly abused the power of his office by leaning on Ukraine, a country dependent on U.S. military ...Read more

The best defense of President Donald Trump on the first day of the House's public impeachment hearings came from Rep. Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican. She cited "the two most important facts" for Americans trying to understand the inquiry into the president withholding military assistance to Ukraine unless it investigated former Vice ...Read more

House Democrats have finally figured out how to hold a hearing.

The first public congressional session of the impeachment inquiry aimed at President Donald Trump probably wasn't compelling television for most voters. Most people just aren't very interested in fine details. Nor did Democrats bring a lot of drama or theatrics.

And yet I suspect ...Read more

The Morgan children were in their pajamas, probably dreaming, when four men broke into their home before daylight, loaded them into the back of an open wagon and forcibly took them across Pennsylvania's southern border. The year was 1837.

The men were working with a slave catcher named Edward Prigg who had come for their mother, Margaret, ...Read more

When former Attorney General Jeff Sessions agreed to speak at Northwestern University, editors at the student-run Daily Northwestern newspaper recognized it as a big story. Sessions, invited by College Republicans, was unwelcome by many on the liberal-leaning campus, so the Daily assigned one reporter to cover Sessions' talk and another to cover...Read more

BEIJING -- Thirty years ago this week I was on my way to Prague to watch Czechoslovak communism end with the Velvet Revolution. The Berlin Wall had just fallen, the Soviet communist party was headed for collapse, and the Cold War would soon end.

Five months earlier, Chinese leaders had cracked down on student admirers of Western democracy in ...Read more

The people who sell the weapon of choice for mass killers are going to have to reveal exactly how they peddle their message that wielding a weapon designed for military combat makes sense for ordinary civilians.

That's good news for all of us. The mothers and fathers of the children slaughtered at Sandy Hook Elementary School, through their ...Read more

One person who is probably more interested in Nikki Haley's somewhat boring second memoir than most people is Mike Pence.

In U.S. history, Pence will go down as one of the most loyal if not obsequiously sycophantic vice presidents ever. Nancy Reagan's famously adoring gaze whenever she looked at her husband was almost a smirk compared with the ...Read more

When I crossed through Checkpoint Charlie from West Berlin to East Berlin nearly 30 years ago, the failures of former East Germany were immediately obvious. The grey unkempt landscape and dilapidated buildings looked as though that country hadn't been repaired since American and Soviet tanks faced off yards apart decades earlier in one of the ...Read more

Left without remedy, an injustice does not heal. It compounds. This is the fundamental principle behind a 2006 lawsuit filed by a coalition concerned for Maryland's four historically black colleges and universities: Morgan State University, Coppin State University, Bowie State University and the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore. It alleges ...Read more

Look, I love avocado toast. I post pics of the lavish dinners I eat on Instagram. I know the earth is getting hotter with each passing year -- climate change is real. And If I ever get to retire, I'm sure my pension will come in somewhere between little to none.

So, I get you, millennials.

But I also think the aforementioned group of young'uns...Read more

Maybe it's because I was the youngest or maybe it's because I was girl, but I've spent much of my life expecting to be chastised for asking stupid questions.

Some questions are stupid; make no mistake about it.

I was a 34-year-old stepmother, an adult with a full-time job, when -- while travelling from New York to New Jersey through the ...Read more

President Trump and his Republican defenders on the House Intelligence Committee want the public to see the testimony Wednesday from two diplomats -- William B. Taylor Jr., the top U.S. representative in Ukraine, and George Kent, deputy assistant secretary of State for Eastern Europe and the Caucasus -- as a rebellion of sorts by "deep state" ...Read more