We don’t need a new crisis over presidential abuse of power to reveal how badly polarized and degraded our politics have become. Before Watergate, majorities of the American public trusted the federal government “to do what is right,” and as recently as the early 2000s, you could find at least four in ten Americans expressing that confidence. Over the last decade, that number has hovered at or below 20 percent.
Contrary to suggestions by some, most Trump supporters are not automatons or blind supporters. What bothers them, and should bother others, about the latest Ukraine hysterias is the familiar monotony of this latest scripted psychodrama.
Smoking guns are the stuff of spy movies. In real-life intelligence-gathering, they are exceptionally rare. That’s why the business of intelligence typically requires collecting and analyzing fragments of information—putting together secret nuggets with unclassified information—to try to make sense of complex reality.
A sad aspect of the Trump Ukraine controversy: the dearth of members of Congress looking for a middle-ground solution that spares America the ordeal of an impeachment process that may turn out to be a political cul-de-sac.
I don’t know if Hazlitt would ever have said that all the economics you need to know is in his book. But in Economics in Two Lessons, University of Queensland economist John Quiggin writes as if he thinks that was Hazlitt’s thinking. Because Quiggin sees it that way, he decides to give two lessons.
It has been commonly observed that polarization in America has increased greatly in recent years. It is hard to disagree, given the rancorous political discourse we witness on a daily basis between the two major political parties, not to mention among many friends and neighbors. However, it is useful to remind ourselves that the current polarization is not completely new or unprecedented in scale.
Long before President Trump raised alarm by halting hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid in an alleged effort to influence Ukraine, his administration had built up plenty of practice in using federal funds to punish a favorite target: California.
President Trump’s comments in a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July have prompted the House of Representatives to launch an impeachment inquiry.
Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis said amid the looming cloud of impeachment, the country will be able to survive because of how the Founding Fathers designed the Constitution.
By Tuesday afternoon it was official: The last freshman Democrat of the seven who flipped previously Republican House districts in California had joined his colleagues in supporting an impeachment inquiry into the president.
Medicare for All is the left’s newest branding strategy for socialized medicine in the United States. Promoted by several Democratic presidential candidates and introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, its backers say it would improve the cost and quality of health care in America.
With global population levels set to reach close to 10 billion people by 2050, the ecological impact of the food we eat has come under intense scrutiny. Scientists believe human food consumption is having a devastating effect on the environment due to a combination of greenhouse gas emissions, overuse of land and pollution from the increased use of fertilizers and pesticides.
Berkeley law professor John Yoo warns that impeaching Donald Trump over his alleged solicitation of re-election assistance from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy could undermine presidential powers to conduct foreign policy and protect national security. Given Yoo's expansive understanding of those powers, that prospect may count as an argument in favor of impeachment.
