Opinion

The Republican Taliban doesn’t want my wife, Louise Hartmann, to vote. And they may well put that desire into law this year.

Republicans have always been wary of women voting or even engaging in politics, while Democrats are welcoming of women.

In 1828, gold was found in the Appalacian Mountains of Georgia on land that belonged to the Cherokee Nation. As word of the gold spread, miners and settlers pushed into the area. The State of Georgia wanted to regulate, permit and benefit from the commerce, but the land belonged to the Cherokee under treaty with the federal government. As the state and miners continued to encroach, the Cherokee Nation refused to cede more land and sought an injunction that eventually reached the Supreme Court.

In 1832, Chief Justice John Marshall infuriated sitting president Andrew Jackson by declaring that the State of Georgia had no right to encroach on Cherokee lands, because the land belonged to the Cherokee under the terms of a federal treaty. Ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling, a furious President Jackson famously responded: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

Within less than a month in office, the Trump administration exceeded its Art. II powers diminished the role of Congress and challenged the authority of the judiciary. Waving away his campaign pledge to lower the cost of groceries, Trump focused instead on maximal cruelty and political retribution dispersed with a wrecking ball.

Article I of the Constitution gives Congress, not the President, the power to establish federal agencies and to appropriate money to run them. But instead of examining expenditures and functionalities with an eye toward cutting costs, Trump and ketamine-crusted Elon Musk are blowing up entire government institutions, some of which have been in existence since the Revolutionary War.

So, JD Vance is now saying that he and Trump don’t have to obey federal judges, tweeting, “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” This is how autocrats run things; it’s an extraordinarily dangerous moment.

It was Tuesday, July 17, 1787 and the men writing the Constitution had convened in Philadelphia to debate the separation of powers between the Congress, the presidency, and the courts. They drew their inspiration for that day from French philosopher Charles de Montesquieu, whose 1748 book The Spirit of the Laws had taken the New World and the Framers of the Constitution by storm.

The 2024 election that might end up finishing off the United States of America for good was fueled at its ugly core by racism, and dangerous, centuries-old white grievance.

And if you are allowing yourself to be gaslighted by our mainstream media and too many Democratic politicians into thinking it wasn't, well, you are sliding toward being a major part of the problem. Worse, you are playing right into a career racist’s little hands, as he tries to beat us into a full surrender on this important issue.

A new poll from CBS News finds that most Americans agree with Trump’s policies of gutting protections for women and Black people while arresting and deporting Brown people here without documentation. Roughly two-thirds of respondents called him “tough,” “energetic,” “focused” and “effective.”

They think they are free.

When Kamala Harris said “we’re not going back,” she was doing more than repeating a campaign slogan. She was tapping into a belief, widely shared among liberals and Democrats, that progress can’t be stopped.

This was a powerful and persuasive statement at the time. After the US Supreme Court struck down Roe, there seemed to be a righteous backlash against not only the court but against the former president who had stacked it enough to void the national right to an abortion.

I think Rachel Maddow has good intentions, but those intentions are wrapped up in her employer’s need for advertisers and attention.

MSNBC is interested in ginning up fears of a future in which there is no liberal democracy left, but in the process of ginning up those fears, it papers over the fact that liberal democracy has already been lost.

On this day in 1936, Nazi Germany's Reichstag (one-party parliament) passed a law giving the Gestapo absolute authority to hunt down and kill anybody they saw as a threat.

The Gestapo’s heinous actions which lead to the Holocaust were completely above any legal review. Remember that when I bang home a sharpened point in a minute.

Something terrifying lived under my bed when I was a little boy.

There wasn't a single night I can remember when I didn’t navigate the final moments of the dreaded bedtime hour with a running start, and a leap into the warm safety of the covers atop my bed.

The Justice Department has asked a judge to stop or amend another judge’s order, issued Saturday, that blocks Elon Musk from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment systems. The DOJ’s move came after Donald Trump’s allies openly questioned the constitutional authority of independent judges.

“Officials ranging from billionaire Elon Musk to Vice President JD Vance have not only criticized a federal judge’s decision early Saturday that blocks Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing Treasury Department records, but have also attacked the legitimacy of judicial oversight, a fundamental pillar of American democracy, which is based on the separation of powers,” the Associated Press reported.

— Why every American should care about CBS settling ‘dangerous’ Trump lawsuit, even MAGA. CBS’s parent company, Paramount, wants to merge with Skydance, another media giant, but they need the approval of Trump’s FCC to make it happen. CBS, meanwhile, is being sued by Trump personally for $10 billion for violating “news distortion rules.” The suit is a blatant attempt to intimidate a network into favorable coverage — something straight out of Viktor Orbán’s playbook (or Putin in his early days) — but CBS is, according to insiders quoted in the media, seriously considering making some sort of a settlement, handing millions to Trump to make the suit go away. This follows ABC doing the same thing after George Stephanopolis said that Trump had been found liable for “rape” — a description of Trump’s attack on E. Jean Carroll that the judge in the case said was appropriate — but, again, the network paid him off with $15 million to make the threats go away.

In an extraordinary and risky show of defiance, CNN anchor Jake Tapper took to the airwaves to explain that CBS’s considering a payoff is an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do. He said that to “settle the suit would be a white flag of surrender… the network of [veteran broadcaster] Edward R. Murrow… saying, we will not speak truth to power. We will acquiesce to power at the expense of truth.” He wrapped up his rant, saying, “You live long enough and you see how eroded standards that politicians think work for their side always end up being wielded against them. And at that point, it doesn’t even matter who started it. It just matters that corporations are leaning on news divisions to supplicate themselves to whomever is in power because of their bottom line and the implied threat from the government.”