In 1972, I worked in a hard-bitten, racially divided Southeast Texas town 25 miles east of Houston. The racial divide in Crosby, Texas, was U.S. Highway 90. If you were black, you lived south of the highway in Barrett Station. White Crosby lived north of the highway. Highway 90 was also an economic dividing line, […]

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In “A Brodner Minute,” illustrator-animator Steve Brodner‘s series of satirical videos for The Washington Spectator, Brodner twits everyone in his path. No one is safe—from Rudy Giuliani to Mitt Romney, Arizona governor Jan Brewer to fatcat donors, Grover Norquist to Newt Gingrich. Below, Spectator interns Annie Jones and Renae Lesser ask the artist a few questions about his work. AJ: You studied fine […]

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In their book It’s Even Worse than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein explore the causes of permanent conflict in Congress. While their book explores the history of partisan conflict in the modern Congress, they place much of the burden […]

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Reviewed: Land of Promise: An Economic History of The United States, by Michael Lind (Harper, 592 pp., $29.99). America is fickle. Or at least our economic history is. According to Michael Lind, author of Land of Promise, we can’t make up our minds about the role of the federal government in the economy, and the result […]

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The minimum wage was ushered into existence by a Republican Supreme Court Justice switching sides on 
a constitutional test before the Court, much as the Affordable Care Act has been. Justice Owen Roberts was 
a solid vote on Republican Supreme Court that in 1932–34 had dismantled most of FDR’s New Deal legislation. In response, Roosevelt […]

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