Barack Obama goes into the 2014 midterm elections with negatives so high that he is unwelcome by Democratic candidates in states where control of the Senate will be decided. In Alaska, Senator Mark Begich is promising to serve as a check on Obama’s policies in Washington. In Louisiana, North Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia and Kentucky, […]

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  The growing body of literature about the Roberts Court can be sorted into three categories. Some, like Jan Crawford’s Supreme Conflict and Jeffrey Toobin’s compulsively readable The Nine, combine analysis of the Court’s major decisions with journalistic scoops about its inner workings. Others, like Mark Tushnet’s In the Balance, assess its jurisprudence through the […]

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  They left that young man’s body lying in the street for more than four hours,” Anthony Bell said on a sweltering August afternoon on West Florissant Street in Ferguson. The crowd was beginning to build for the nightly protests on what passes for Main Street in Ferguson’s black community, a four-lane stretch of bottom-dollar […]

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  If you are very attentive, and live in one of those places where regular state and local political news coverage survives, you may catch snippets of information about state legislative races in your area. More likely, you will see paid advertising or receive direct-mail involving such contests. That’s a shame. Thanks to ideological polarization […]

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  And don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Last week, Detroit’s mayor and city council unanimously voted to fire the city’s emergency manager Kevyn Orr 18 months after Michigan’s Governor Rick Snyder appointed him to run the bankrupt city’s affairs. The Republican governor and Michigan’s Republican Legislature had already pushed the […]

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