“We’re having a, uh, a territorial dispute, hm? … You’ve taken offence at my presence and I can understand that. I mean, I wouldn’t want you people in my back yard either.” – Falling Down (1993) While the Trump-era violence…
Our summer 2020 print magazine was going to be a reopening issue. Not an end-of-the-world issue. But then right before press time, three months of shutdown (and counting, in too many different places) took on a different coloring. Increasingly during…
Washington Thanksgiving is going to be ugly this year. There’s a real chance the public won’t know who won the White House weeks after Election Day, and rather than feeling grateful, leaders in both parties are peddling grievances nonstop. Before…
How do you defend something when its original justification no longer exists? Arguments for the Electoral College suffer from this problem. That problem lurked beneath the Supreme Court’s decision Monday in Chiafalo v. Washington. By a 9-0 vote, the Court…
Writing in my dad for president started out as a barbed joke. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain seemed like acceptable candidates. Obama was a man of extreme politics and moderate temperament. McCain was a man with an extreme temper…
A solution to the deplorable situation in Washington may be found by recourse to a misunderstood national treasure: democracy. It is by now obvious even to tennis writers that something is rotten in our nation’s capital. Headlines evoke a “constitutional…
Everyone had that one annoying childhood friend who would spoil every game. When it was his turn to be “it,” for example, he’d gripe about it, make excuses, and complain that the rules were unfair. Of course, he was always…
The latest attempt by the Democrats to avoid the exigencies of the Electoral College is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). They have been selling this scheme as a conservative compromise between progressives who would abolish the “obsolete” institution…
In case you haven’t been listening, we’re supposed to be in the middle of a constitutional crisis. That’s what Nancy Pelosi and Jerry Nadler are telling us, and it’s all because Donald Trump and Bill Barr are refusing to submit…