Author: Lance Garrison
For the past two months, a small group of senators from both parties has been negotiating a deal to address the crisis at our southern border. The lawmakers are united in their desire to stop unauthorized migrants from entering the United States — an ambitious objective that has eluded past administrations.But the policies under discussion are likely to drive more unauthorized migration to the border and make President Biden’s immigration challenges even worse.In December border officials processed some 300,000 migrants — the most recorded in a single month. Over the past decade, Republican leaders in Congress have failed to come…
Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted a written online conversation with Mike Murphy, a co-director of the Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California, a former Republican strategist for John McCain and others and a host of the podcast “Hacks on Tap” and Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster and a moderator of the Times Opinion focus group series, to discuss their expectations for the Iowa caucus. They also banter about the road ahead for the G.O.P. primary and what the general election might look like after the primary.Frank Bruni: Mike, Kristen, happy Iowa caucuses.…
Red-state legislatures are the incubator and the proving ground of many varieties of right-wing nutjobbery that go on to affect national policy, but most people give no thought to what happens in their chambers. Even here in the South — where, to all appearances, our legislatures gather mainly to subvert democracy and rend the social safety net — few people seemed to be paying attention last week when the Tennessee General Assembly convened in Nashville for the new legislative session.But a bipartisan coalition of gun-safety advocates, some of them people who a year ago could not have imagined spending their…
Bret Stephens: Gail, we are conversing on the eve of the Iowa caucuses — not yet knowing who came in second, but not in much doubt about who’ll come in first. I’m trying to remember the last time the Republican winner went on to win the nomination: Ted Cruz in 2016? Rick Santorum in 2012? Mike Huckabee in 2008?Losers all. Assuming Donald Trump wins, that might even be a good omen.Gail Collins: And remember, Trump won Iowa in 2020, when he was an incumbent president looking for a second term; that didn’t turn out all that well for him, either.Bret:…
Voters may agree with the former president’s plans for further tax cuts, restrictions on abortions or strict limits on immigration. That’s politics, and the divisions among Americans over these issues will persist regardless of the outcome of this election. But electing Mr. Trump to four more years in the White House is a unique danger. Because what remains, what still binds Americans together as a nation, is the commitment to a process, a constitutional system for making decisions and moving forward even when Americans do not agree about the destination. That system guarantees the freedoms Americans enjoy, the foundation of…
After her failure to identify slavery as the cause of the Civil War generated a wave of criticism last month, Nikki Haley assured her potential constituents that she had Black friends, and that she understood the war’s origins. Growing up in South Carolina, she said, “literally in second and third grade, you learn about slavery.” Conveniently producing Black friends is, alas, unsurprising, but claiming she learned that the Civil War was a battle over slavery in second and third grade is.Gov. Haley attended a segregation academy, a type of private school established in the years after the Supreme Court’s 1954…
There are few national conversations more frustrating than the fight over D.E.I. Short for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the term — like the related progressive concepts of wokeness and critical race theory — used to have an agreed-upon meaning but has now been essentially redefined on the populist right. In that world, D.E.I. has become yet another catchall boogeyman, a stand-in not just for actual policies or practices designed to increase diversity, but also a scapegoat for unrelated crises.For example, after a door plug blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 jet this month, X’s Elon Musk, among others, launched…
Ah, the Iowa caucuses. So much drama. So much antici … pation. So much money and energy spent on an antidemocratic process in a state with a pretty dismal track record of picking presidential nominees.And yet! Just because the system is flawed doesn’t mean the stakes aren’t real — and brutal. The outcome of Monday night’s Republican vote will be pounced on by the political world and instantly shredded, devoured and digested like a rump roast tossed into a gator pond. It might not change anything. But it also might turbocharge or deflate this or that candidacy as the whole…
Cheryl Sharp, a 47-year-old sales associate who was among the many Iowans turned away from a filled-to-capacity Trump rally last month, sounded pretty confident she knew why Donald Trump was so appealing to many voters. For her and many others, she said, his most important quality was strength: He had the fortitude to keep the country safe, avoid new wars and ensure the economy hummed along.“You want someone strong, globally, so that it creates mutual respect with other countries, and maybe a little bit of fear,” she told me. “Yes, it’s true, not everyone likes him. It’s good not to…
If the federal government suspected that the various civil rights organizations were working together, they now had the evidence. In 1962 the N.A.A.C.P., the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality formally united, forming a new umbrella organization: the Council of Federated Organizations. Evers signed the compact on behalf of the N.A.A.C.P.Despite the national N.A.A.C.P.’s admonitions, Evers continued to correspond with King and seek to work with him, using King’s Montgomery strategy to build a successful boycott movement in Jackson, Miss. From the winter of 1962 through the spring of 1963, the Jackson movement persuaded Black shoppers…