George Will
George Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977. He is also a contributor to Fox News. His books include One Man’s America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation (2008), Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy (1992), Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball (1989), The New Season: A Spectator’s Guide to the 1988 Election (1987), and Statecraft as Soulcraft (1983). Will grew up in Champaign, Ill., attended Trinity College and Oxford University, and received a Ph.D. from Princeton.
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Omaha, Neb. — From Little League on up, players emulate major leaguers, so Major League Baseball’s pace-of-play problem is trickling down. Four innings into a recent College World Series game here, just seven hits and three runs had consumed 96 minutes. ... -
Repeal the Davis-Bacon Act
“You really ought to give Iowa a try. Provided you are contrary.” – “Iowa Stubborn,” from Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man ‘Contrary” does not quite capture Steve King’s astringency. The Iowa native and conservative congressman was born, appropriately, in ... -
Fixing America’s Endless Infrastructure Mess
Sensing that his Scottish enemies had blundered at the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, Oliver Cromwell said, “The Lord hath delivered them into our hands.” Philip K. Howard, were he the exulting type, could rejoice that some of his adversaries have ... -
The Immortal Pleading for Public Broadcasting
As changing technologies and preferences make government-funded broadcasting increasingly preposterous, such broadcasting actually becomes useful by illustrating two dismal facts. One is the immortality of entitlements that especially benefit those among society’s articulate upper reaches who feel entitled. The ... -
How to Restore American Self-Reliance
When in the Senate chamber, Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, sits by choice at the desk used by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. New York’s scholar-senator would have recognized that Sasse has published a book of political philosophy in ... -
Federal Power Spins Its Ever-Growing Web
A blind spider creeping through America’s judicial thicket might be heading to the Supreme Court, which will have to decide if the contentment or even the survival of the Bone Cave Harvestman spider species, which lives only in two ... -
Today’s Left Would Have Called Elvis’s Music ‘Cultural Appropriation’
In July 1954, a 19-year-old Memphis truck driver recorded at Sun Studio the song “That’s All Right.” When a local disc jockey promised to play it, the truck driver tuned his parents’ radio to the station and went to a ... -
Who Wants to Be a Billionaire (in 1916)?
Having bestowed the presidency on a candidate who described their country as a “hellhole” besieged by multitudes trying to get into it, Americans need an antidote for social hypochondria. Fortunately, one has arrived from Don Boudreaux, an economist at George ... -
Alas, the Mortgage-Interest Deduction Cannot Be Pried Away
Attempting comprehensive tax reform is like trying to tug many bones from the clamped jaws of many mastiffs. Every provision of the code — now approaching 4 million words — was put there to placate a clamorous faction, or to create a grateful ... -
The ‘Oh, Never Mind’ President
In his first annual message to Congress, John Quincy Adams, among the most experienced and intellectually formidable presidents, warned leaders against giving the impression that “we are palsied by the will of our constituents.” In this regard, if in no ... -
Do Safer Playgrounds ‘Advance Religion’?
When not furrowing their collective brows about crèches and displays of the Ten Commandments here and there, courts often are pondering tangential contacts between the government and religious schools. Courts have held that public money can constitutionally fund the ... -
Experience America at the Time of the Great War
“War is the health of the state. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.” – ... -
Baseball Numbers Aren’t Difficult — but This Quiz Might Be
Sportswriter: “You hit only two home runs all last year and already you’ve hit seven this year [1969]. What’s the difference?” Reds outfielder Alex Johnson: “Five.” See? Baseball numbers aren’t difficult. But be precise: As players say after ... -
An Oasis of liberty in the Arizona Sun
Phoenix — As a boy, Barry Goldwater Jr., son of the former senator and 1964 Republican presidential nominee, would step out of his father’s house and shoot at tin cans 50 yards away. Now 78, he says he could fire in ... -
Questions for Judge Gorsuch
This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee will question Neil Gorsuch about the judiciary’s role. Herewith some pertinent questions: – Lincoln’s greatness began with his recoil from the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which empowered residents of those territories to decide whether to ... -
Arizona State Leavens Academia with Intellectual Diversity
TEMPE, Ariz. — Encouraging developments are as welcome as they are rare in colleges and universities that cultivate diversity in everything but thought. Fortunately, state legislatures, alumni, and philanthropists are planting little academic platoons that will make campuses less intellectually monochrome. ... -
Slouching into Dystopia
Although America’s political system seems unable to stimulate robust, sustained economic growth, it at least is stimulating consumption of a small but important segment of literature. Dystopian novels are selling briskly — Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Sinclair Lewis’... -
‘Big Government’ Is Ever Growing, on the Sly
In 1960, when John Kennedy was elected president, America’s population was 180 million and it had approximately 1.8 million federal bureaucrats (not counting uniformed military personnel and postal workers). Fifty-seven years later, with seven new Cabinet agencies, and myriad new sub-Cabinet agencies (... -
An Adult Voice amid Pandemic Childishness
In his 72 years, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, who was raised in segregated Richmond, Virginia, acknowledges that he has seen much change, often for the better, including advances in ... -
Who Will Protect Americans from the Protectionists?
At their post–Civil War apogee, 19th-century Republicans were the party of activist government, using protectionism to pick commercial winners and promising wondrous benefits from government’s deft interventions in economic life. Today, a Republican administration promises that wisely wielded ... -
The North Korean Red Line
.Santa Monica, Calif The Cold War was waged and won in many places, including this beach city, home to the RAND Corporation. Created in 1948 to think about research and development as it affects military planning and procurement, RAND pioneered strategic ... -
Where Justice Scalia Was Wrong
With an asperity born of exasperation, Justice Antonin Scalia once wrote, “If you want aspirations, you can read the Declaration of Independence,” but “there is no such philosophizing in our Constitution,” which is “a practical and pragmatic charter of government.” ... -
The Real Cost of Protectionism
When the president speaks of closed factories scattered like “tombstones” across America, has he noticed the shuttered stores in shopping centers, and entire malls reduced to rubble? He promises “protection” to prevent foreigners from “destroying” manufacturing jobs by exporting to ... -
A Most Dreadful Inaugural Address
Twenty minutes into his presidency, Donald Trump, who is always claiming to have made, or to be about to make, astonishing history, had done so. Living down to expectations, he had delivered the most dreadful inaugural address in history. Kellyanne ... -
The Patent and Trademark Office’s Assault on Free Speech
In 1929, Chief Justice William Howard Taft convinced Congress to finance construction of “a building of dignity and importance” for the Supreme Court. He could not have imagined what the court will ponder during oral arguments this Wednesday. The case concerns ... -
Obama’s Unforced Errors on Foreign Policy
When Barack Obama moves two miles from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to 2446 Belmont Road in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood, he will live half a mile from 2340 S Street, where Woodrow Wilson spent his three post-presidential years. Wilson’s embittering foreign policy failure ... -
Good Riddance, 2016
Viewing 2016 in retrospect — doing so is unpleasant, but less so than was living through it — the year resembles a china shop after a visit from an especially maladroit bull. Because a law says, “The state of California may not sell ... -
Does Anyone Besides Jeff Sessions Defend Today’s Civil-Forfeiture Practices?
“The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world. . . . The worst thing in the world varies from individual to individual.”— George Orwell, 1984 Philadelphia — For Christos and Markela Sourovelis, for whom the worst thing was losing their ... -
The Excellent Electoral College
Political mildness is scarce nowadays, so it has been pleasantly surprising that post-election denunciations of the Electoral College have been tepid. This, even though the winner of the presidential election lost the popular vote by perhaps 2.8 million votes, more than ... -
Nobel Laureate of 2016 Revisited
There has been ferment among the literati since Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Many say that however well Dylan does what he does, it is not literature. Dylan did not go to Stockholm Saturday to collect ... -
The Sensitivity Police Strike Again
The word “inappropriate” is increasingly used inappropriately. It is useful to describe departures from good manners or other social norms, such as wearing white after Labor Day or using the salad fork with the entree. But the adjective has become ... -
Fidel Castro and Dead Utopianism
With the end of Fidel Castro’s nasty life Friday night, we can hope, if not reasonably expect, to have seen the last of charismatic totalitarians worshiped by political pilgrims from open societies. Experience suggests there will always be tyranny ... -
Did Academia Help Elect Donald Trump?
Many undergraduates, their fawn-like eyes wide with astonishment, are wondering: Why didn’t the dean of students prevent the election from disrupting the serenity to which my school has taught me that I am entitled? Campuses create “safe spaces” where ... -
President-Elect Trump Should Avoid the Bellicosity of Candidate Trump
The Republican party resembles the man who told his psychiatrist, “I have an identity problem, and so do I.” The party’s leader is at best indifferent to, and often is hostile to, much of the party’s recent catechism: ... -
What to Watch for on Election Night
Tuesday evening, after Election Day’s tranquility, new clamors will erupt as analysts with agendas tickle portents and lessons from the torrent of election returns. Herewith some developments to watch. In the 17 elections since World War II, the winner has ... -
As New Hampshire goes, So Goes the Senate?
Manchester, N.H. — In 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt defeated Kansas’s Governor Alfred Landon in 46 of the 48 states, thereby creating the jest, “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.” Eight decades later, New England has gone from the Republicans’ last redoubt in ... -
Republican Senate Hopes May Rest with Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson
Milwaukee — In 49 states, when you order breakfast in a restaurant you might be asked if you would like pancakes or an omelet. In Wisconsin, you are asked if you would like pancakes with your omelet. Ron Johnson would, thank you. ... -
A Judicial Slap to a Careless Congress
Another small step was taken last week on the steep and winding ascent back to constitutional norms. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the nation’s second-most important court, did its judicial duty by reprimanding ... -
Vladimir Putin Is Bringing Back the 1930s
Vladimir Putin’s serial humiliations of America’s bewildered secretary of state regarding Syria indicate Putin’s determination to destabilize the world. Here is an even more ominous indication of events moving his way: On just one day last week, ... -
Enough with the Lovable-Losers Stuff
Lots o’ folks confuse bad management with destiny. — Kin Hubbard The good news, a commodity in short supply, is that Americans are about to get a respite from the inundating Niagara of candidates’ blather. The bad news is that the ... -
In the High Plains, a Republican Worth Voting For
Aurora, Colo. — Here on the High Plains, where the deer and the antelope once played, Denver’s suburbs roam toward the Rockies’ front range and the nature of today’s polyglot politics is written in the local congressman’s campaign ... -
Pat Toomey’s Chances
Glenolden, Pa. — From Erie in the west to Scranton in the east, Pennsylvania is flecked with casualties the stubborn economic sluggishness and relentless globalization have inflicted on industrial communities. But in this middle-class Philadelphia suburb, Tom Danzi knows that the ... -
Impeach the IRS Commissioner
Republican congressional leaders ardently want conservative members of the House to not force a vote on impeaching the IRS commissioner. The public does not care about John Koskinen’s many misdeeds. And impeachment will distract attention from issues that interest ... -
Baseball’s Storyteller, Our Friend
Irish poets learn your trade Sing whatever is well made. . . . – William Butler Yeats, “Under Ben Bulben” Los Angeles — For 67 years, the son of Vincent and Bridget Scully, immigrants who came to New York City from County Cavan, Ireland, has been ... -
Nevada’s Joe Heck Aims to Keep the Senate Republican
Las Vegas — Nevada, which calls itself the “Battle Born State,” actually was born prematurely because of Republicans’ anxiety. Now, 152 years later, it again is a subject of their anxiety. Entering 1864, Abraham Lincoln and his party were intensely, and reasonably, in ... -
Where Is the Evidence That Trump Would Defend the Constitution?
Like shipwrecked mariners clinging to a floating mast, many Republicans rationalize supporting Donald Trump because of “the Court.” This two-word incantation means: Because we care so much for the Constitution, it is supremely important to entrust to Trump the making ... -
How Entangled with Russia Is Trump?
To gauge the opportunism and hypocrisy that define Donald Trump’s Republican party, consider this: Imagine the scalding rhetoric that would have boiled from the likes of Newt Gingrich, that Metternich of many green rooms, if Hillary Clinton had offhandedly ... -
Trump Reshapes the Republican Party
Crucial political decisions often concern which bridges to cross and which to burn. Donald Trump’s dilemma is that he burns some bridges by the way he crosses others. His campaign depends on a low-probability event, and on his ability ... -
As the South China Sea Grows More Dangerous, Republicans Settle on an Unserious Nominee
Neither the unanimous decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, nor China’s rejection of it, was surprising. The timing of it was, however, as serendipitous as China’s rejection is ominous. Coming as Republican delegates convene ... -
If This Is an ‘Economic Recovery’ — What Will the Next Recession Look Like?
St. Louis — America’s economy has now slouched into the eighth year of a recovery that demonstrates how much we have defined recovery down. The idea that essentially zero interest rates are, after seven and a half years, stimulating the ...
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Let Us Plunge toward Our Fast-Unfolding Future
In 1859, when Manhattan still had many farms, near the Battery on the island’s southern tip the Great American Tea Company was launched. It grew, and outgrew its name, becoming in 1870 the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, which in 1912 begat ... -
Hope in Sing Sing Prison
Ossining, N.Y. — Sparkling in the sunlight that inspired 19th-century romantic painters of the Hudson River School, Sing Sing prison’s razor wire, through which inmates can see the flowing river, is almost pretty. Almost. Rain or shine, however, a ... -
Engineering without a License
Beginning this week, Washington hopes that infrastructure, which is a product of civil engineering, will be much discussed. But if you find yourself in Oregon, keep your opinions to yourself, lest you get fined $500 for practicing engineering without a license. ... -
Buckley Captained Conservatism Before It Was Hijacked
In 1950, the year before William F. Buckley burst into the national conversation, the literary critic Lionel Trilling revealed why the nation was ripe for Buckley’s high-spirited romp through its political and cultural controversies. Liberalism, Trilling declared, was “not only ... -
A Portentous Election in the Peach State
Atlanta — By the time Georgia’s sixth district votes in the special congressional election on June 20, $40 million — perhaps more than $130 per ballot — will have been spent to pick one-435th of one-half of one of the three branches of one ... -
‘Baumol’s Disease’ Explains Flagging Productivity
Although William J. Baumol, who recently died at 95, was not widely known beyond the ranks of economists, all Americans are living with, and policymakers are struggling with, “Baumol’s disease.” It is one reason brisk economic growth is becoming more ... -
Trumpian Signaling on Sanctuary Cities
“But what good came of it at last?” Quoth little Peterkin. “Why that I cannot tell,” said he, “But ‘twas a famous victory.” – Robert Southey “The Battle of Blenheim” (1798) Southey, a pacifist, wrote his anti-war poem long after the 1704 battle ... -
Trump Does Not Know What It Is to Know
It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about Donald Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of ... -
Will France Elect a Gallic Barack Obama?
The French are too intellectually vain to borrow others’ political ideas, but too interested in style not to appreciate and appropriate that of others. So, on May 7 they might confer their presidency on a Gallic Barack Obama. In 2008, Obama, a ... -
The Battle against Sex Trafficking of Minors
Three months ago, State Trooper Jonathan Otto, 33, of the Arizona Department of Public Safety pulled over a car that had caught his attention by traveling 104 miles per hour long after midnight, just south of Kingman. He smelled marijuana in the ... -
What the Freedom Caucus Stands For
With a mellifluous name suggesting bucolic tranquility, Representative Mark Meadows, a North Carolina Republican, is an unlikely object of the caterwauling recently directed at him and the House Freedom Caucus he leads. The vituperation was occasioned by the HFC’s ... -
Our National Scourge of Misinformation
Impulse control is unfashionable as well as unpresidential, but perhaps you should resist the urge to trip people who stride briskly down the sidewalk fixated on their phone screens, absorbed in texting and feeling entitled to expect others to make ... -
End the Filibuster’s Power of Obstruction
The Senate’s coming confirmation of Neil Gorsuch will improve the Supreme Court, and Democrats’ incontinent opposition to him will inadvertently improve the Senate — if Republicans are provoked to thoroughly reform the filibuster. If eight Democrats will not join the 52 ... -
Whatever Replaces Obamacare Will Look a Lot Like Obamacare
‘Mend it, don’t end it” was Bill Clinton’s rhetorical straddle regarding affirmative action. Republican efforts to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) look increasingly like “mend it, don’t end it.” The problem is not that, ... -
What’s the ‘Public Purpose’ of the National Endowment for the Arts?
Although the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2016 cost of $148 million was less than one-hundredth of one percent of the federal budget, attempting to abolish the NEA is a fight worth having, never mind the certain futility of the fight. Let’... -
Eugenics Was a Progressive Cause
The progressive mob that disrupted Charles Murray’s appearance last week at Middlebury College was protesting a 1994 book read by few if any of the protesters. Some of them denounced “eugenics,” thereby demonstrating an interesting ignorance: Eugenics — controlled breeding to ... -
Trump’s Budget Chief Tackles a Rubik’s Cube of a Federal Budget
The dyspeptic Henry Adams was not nice but not wrong when he described what now is named the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB), adjacent to the White House, as an “architectural infant asylum.” The granite pile, which once housed the ... -
America’s Predictable Pension Crisis
Some American disasters come as bolts from the blue — the stock-market crash of October 1929, Pearl Harbor, the designated hitter, 9/11. Others are predictable because they arise from arithmetic that is neither hidden nor arcane. Now comes the tsunami of pension problems ... -
Congress, Not Trump, Should Raise Tariffs
In theory, if only occasionally in fact, Congress plays a role when a president wants to initiate military hostilities. Republican senator Mike Lee of Utah thinks Congress should also have a say when a president wants to initiate a trade ... -
Trump Sides with the Sheriffs on Their Racket
The technique has been called (by this columnist) “immunity through profusion.” By keeping the molten lava of falsehoods flowing, the volcano that is Donald Trump can inundate the public and overwhelm his auditors’ capacity to produce a comparable flow of ... -
A Modest Proposal to Solve Inequality
Tight labor markets shrink income inequality by causing employers to bid up the price of scarce labor, so policymakers fretting about income inequality could give an epidemic disease a try. This might be a bit extreme, but if increased equality ... -
An Excess of Intellectual Emptiness
In 2013, a college student assigned to research a deadly substance sought help via Twitter: “I can’t find the chemical and physical properties of sarin gas someone please help me.” An expert at a security consulting firm tried to be ... -
Cooperstown Must Decide Whether It’s a Museum or a Shrine
Many Americans are more thoughtful when choosing appliances than when choosing presidents, but the baseball writers whose ballots decide who is “enshrined” — more about that verb anon — in Cooperstown’s Hall of Fame are mostly conscientious voters struggling to unravel ... -
The Waterbeetle of American Politics
He flabbergasts the Human Race By gliding on the water’s face With ease, celerity and grace; But if he ever stopped to think Of how he did it, he would sink. – Hilaire Belloc, on the waterbeetle Leaving aside the ... -
Academia May Now Be Beyond Satire
The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is a window on the sometimes weird world of academia, recently revisited a hilarious intellectual hoax from 20 years ago. Reading the recollections of the perpetrator and of some who swallowed his gibberish is sobering. ... -
How Obama Transformed America
Any summation of Barack Obama’s impact on domestic policy and politics should begin with this: In 2008, he assured supporters, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Soon he will be ... -
Protectionism’s Enduring Costs
It is axiomatic that if someone is sufficiently eager to disbelieve something, there is no Everest of evidence too large to be ignored. This explains today’s revival of protectionism, which is a plan to make America great again by ... -
General Mattis’s Challenge
“To change anything in the Navy is like punching a feather bed. You punch it with your right and you punch it with your left until you are finally exhausted, and then you find the damn bed just as it ... -
Starbucks and Our Pursuit of Snobbery
Indiana’s Thomas R. Marshall, who was America’s vice president 100 years ago, voiced — he plucked it from a Hoosier humorist — one of the few long-remembered utterances to issue from that office: “What this country needs is a good five-cent ... -
Trump Says Goodbye to Free-Market Economics
So, this is the new conservatism’s recipe for restored greatness: Political coercion shall supplant economic calculation in shaping decisions by companies in what is called, with diminishing accuracy, the private sector. This will be done partly as conservatism’s ... -
Boondoggles: The Transaction Costs of Democracy
History has a sly sense of humor. It caused an epiphany regarding infrastructure projects — roads, harbors, airports, etc. — to occur on a bridge over Boston’s Charles River, hard by Harvard Yard, where rarely is heard a discouraging word about ... -
Be Thankful You Have Something to Grumble At
“Oh, don’t the days seem lank and long When all goes right and nothing goes wrong, And isn’t your life extremely flat With nothing whatever to grumble at!” – Gilbert and Sullivan At this shank end of a shabby ... -
Put the REINS Act and a Keystone Pipeline Bill on President Trump’s Desk
Seventeen days before President Donald Trump, his spoken oath of office still lingering in the wintry air, lifts his left hand from Scripture (a leather-bound edition of The Art of the Deal), the Republican-controlled Congress will begin working. Fittingly, on ... -
A Disruptive yet Ruinous Triumph for the GOP
At dawn Tuesday in West Quoddy Head, Maine, America’s easternmost point, it was certain that by midnight in Cape Wrangell, Alaska, America’s westernmost fringe, there would be a loser who deserved to lose and a winner who did ... -
A Fitting Final Chapter to the Sleaze Sweepstakes
As the presidential campaigns sink to the challenge of demonstrating that there is no such thing as rock bottom, remember this: When the Clintons decamped from Washington in January 2001, they took some White House furnishings that were public property. They ... -
The Republican Party Needs to Revert to Nominating Republicans
When told that the New England transcendentalist Margaret Fuller had grandly declared “I accept the universe,” the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle dryly remarked: “She’d better.” Much ink and indignation has been spilled concerning whether Donald (“I am much more ... -
The Diversity Colleges Need
A specter is haunting academia, the specter of specters — ghosts, goblins, and “cultural appropriation” through insensitive Halloween costumes. Institutions of higher education are engaged in the low comedy of avoiding the agonies of Yale. Last October, the university was rocked ... -
Trump’s Vile Candidacy Is Chemotherapy for the GOP
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” — “Me and Bobby McGee” What did Donald Trump have left to lose Sunday night? His dignity? Please. His campaign’s theme? His Cleveland convention was a mini-Nuremberg rally for Republicans ... -
Why Are Millions of Men Choosing Not to Work?
The “quiet catastrophe” is particularly dismaying because it is so quiet, without social turmoil or even debate. It is this: After 88 consecutive months of the economic expansion that began in June 2009, a smaller percentage of American males in the prime ... -
Donald Trump’s Rise Reflects America’s Decay
Looking on the bright side, perhaps this election can teach conservatives to look on the dark side. They need a talent for pessimism, recognizing the signs that whatever remains of American exceptionalism does not immunize this nation from decay, to ... -
Deepen Charleston’s Port, and the Big Ships Will Come
Charleston, S.C. — Technology has put powerful computers in billions of pockets, but an invention much more mundane than the smartphone — the shipping container: a rectangular steel box — also has changed the world. Because of it, two of today’s ... -
Putin’s Post-Factual Politics
“In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. . . . Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building. . . . For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes.” — George Orwell, 1984 Documents inconvenient to the regime went into the ... -
In a ‘Change’ Year, Rob Portman Deserves Reelection
Terrace Park, Ohio — Senator Rob Portman probably will win a second term, despite the fact that he deserves to. The swarm of young people who gathered on a Saturday morning in this Cincinnati suburb to feast on doughnuts and his ... -
Congress Should Reassert Its Power Over the Purse
Because truth-in-labeling laws are among the laws from which Washington feels exempt, the titles of congressional legislation often take liberties with the facts (e.g., the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act). The Stop Settlement Slush Funds Act, however, precisely ... -
In Illinois, the Blue-State Model Rolls toward Bankruptcy
Chicago — Seated in his office here, wearing neither a necktie nor a frown, Republican governor Bruce Rauner is remarkably relaxed for someone at the epicenter of a crisis now in its second year and with no end in sight. But, ... -
Is There a Method to Trump’s Madness?
In the 1870s, when Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall controlled New York City, and in the 1950s and 1960s, when Chicago’s Democratic machine was especially rampant, there was a phenomenon that can be called immunity through profusion: Fresh scandals ... -
The Path Ahead for Clinton
Philadelphia — En route to fight one of his many duels, French politician Georges Clemenceau bought a one-way train ticket. Was he pessimistic? “Not at all. I always use my opponent’s return ticket for the trip back.” Some Hillary Clinton ... -
If Texas Goes Blue, Republicans Are Finished
Political conventions are echo chambers designed to generate feelings of invincibility, sending forth the party faithful with a spring in their steps and hope in their hearts. Who would want to be a wet blanket at such moveable feasts? Steve ... -
The Travesty of Teacher Tenure
The mills of justice grind slowly, but life plunges on, leaving lives blighted when justice, by being delayed, is irremediably denied. Fortunately, California’s supreme court might soon decide to hear — four years after litigation began — the 21st century’s ... -
Social Science Says Our Education System Is Failing: Will Liberals Listen?
The report was so “seismic” — Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s word — that Lyndon Johnson’s administration released it on the Fourth of July weekend, 1966, hoping it would not be noticed. But the Coleman report did disturb various dogmatic slumbers and vested ...