The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Moore v. Harper may well be one of the most consequential Constitutional cases affecting the future of American democracy. But its political meaning is as significant as its legal implications. Its wider context is the current court’s crisis of legitimacy, Donald Trump’s attempted coup to overthrow the result of […]

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On August 22nd of this year, the New York Times reported that a secretive Chicago industrialist named Barre Seid had transferred more than $1.6 billion into the control of Leonard Leo, to whom Donald Trump outsourced the packing of the U.S. Supreme Court. (For more on that court-packing, check out Jim Hightower’s piercing series on Leo.) That story by […]

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Some 4,000-year-old dogmas, like the Bible’s “eye for an eye,” never die. State-sponsored killings have morphed over millennia (from stonings, beheadings, burning at stakes, firing squads, gas chambers, lynchings, and electric chairs to lethal injections) but continue apace. In the United States, the federal government and the 27 states that still impose the death penalty […]

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John Durham—the United States attorney tasked by Attorney General William Barr to conduct a wide-ranging inquiry into the origins of the Justice Department’s and FBI’s Russia inquiries—contributed to a September 2019 statement released by Barr and the Justice Department intended to undermine efforts to impeach President Trump. Durham approved portions of the statement describing his […]

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In late September 2019, President Donald Trump called Attorney General William Barr, seeking a favor. Trump was at the time facing impeachment in the House of Representatives for pressuring the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to announce investigations that could be politically advantageous to the U.S. president. Trump pressed his attorney general to hold a […]

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