Last year, a private foundation—headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, and flush with funds provided by a multimillionaire conservative activist—escalated its campaign against a progressive movement that has captured the nation’s attention and is now spreading to other Southern states. The Civitas Institute, one of a half dozen nonprofit advocacy organizations created and underwritten by […]

Read more

  The named plaintiffs in the consolidated redistricting suits argued before the North Carolina Supreme Court on January 7 are former legislator Margaret Dickson and the North Carolina NAACP. Defendants named are Republican Senator Robert Rucho and the State of North Carolina. The case could have been styled NAACP v. Art Pope. Absent Pope, the […]

Read more

  Let us pause now to pay our respects to Bunny Mellon. She died in mid-March on her Virginia horse-country estate. But no tears, please. Bunny — nobody called her by her given name Rachel — lived a long and rich life. Very long. Very rich. One hundred and three at her death, Bunny Mellon […]

Read more

  No matter how hard lawmakers try to close their eyes, click their heels, and hope for the best, they can’t make highway funding magically appear. But that doesn’t stop them fiddling and flailing as they burn through the Highway Trust Fund. The Highway Trust Fund was created in 1956 to provide the nation’s surface transportation system with a […]

Read more

  Those who want to see a people’s democracy, let them come here and see this,” Fidel Castro told the UN General Assembly in 1960, after his Marxist insurgency overthrew Fulgencio Batista’s government in Cuba. The United States had long made forcefully clear that it preferred dictatorial banana republics (Nicaragua), coffee republics (Guatemala), or, in […]

Read more