Category: Politics

Ahead of the midterm elections, the Trump administration has been building a federal counterterrorism apparatus designed to turn alleged criminal conduct during protests against election-related abuses of federal power into the basis for targeting organizations, organizers and financial networks alleged to have provided support to those protests. Trump and his senior officials have been explicit […]

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On April 29 of this year the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, overturning the creation of a Black Majority district in Louisiana, driving a stake into the heart of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and effectively dismantling the remaining few legal procedures that have protected the right of […]

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Donald Trump has explained what the United States is doing in Venezuela in unusually candid terms. Speaking in Las Vegas on August 5 about the January military operation that removed Nicolás Maduro, Trump said the United States was “taking a lot of oil from Venezuela” and had already been repaid for the war “many, many, […]

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For our series Conversations on the State of Democracy, I sat down with Robert Reich near the Berkeley campus where he has spent a portion of his career. Reich was the Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Cabinet, served in the Ford administration and was an economic advisor on Obama’s transition. He’s taught public policy […]

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The principle [of emergency power] lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need. —Justice Robert H. Jackson, dissenting in Korematsu v. United States (1944) The president will do it. The predicate is being laid perfectly” [referring to President Trump’s […]

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