I am not impressed by Secretary of State John Kerry’s failed but energetic attempt to broker a deal between Israelis and Palestinians. It’s not that I don’t think his heart is in the right place. I know from conversations with him when he was in the Senate that he totally gets what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict […]

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Apologists for the decision made by the Unfab Five of the Supreme Court to fish-gut the Voting Rights Act are claiming it only affects a few states and has limited impact. That’s wrong. A trend has been very clear since 2000. Court rulings are shifting our nation away from the limited progress that expanded voting […]

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On the surface, the U.S. Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act and the national non-discussion on poverty have little in common. The former is about whether the racially discriminatory history of certain parts of the country merits their being placed under special scrutiny when it comes to how they shape their 21st-century ballot […]

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In summer 2011, a year after bp capped its disastrous Macondo oil well in the Gulf of Mexico and the national media had moved on, the Government Accountability Project (GAP) received a letter as unexpected as it was urgent. Michael Robichaux, a Louisiana physician treating individuals made sick by the disaster, explained: “This has been […]

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There are some things that fail to register in transcripts of oral arguments at the Supreme Court. Such as contempt. When I sat in on the Abigail Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin arguments last October, I was impressed with Justice Antonin Scalia’s contempt for the attorneys defending the university’s modest affirmative-action program. Reading […]

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