Author: Lance Garrison
The Republican Party, of course, is still very much the party of abortion bans. This week, Florida, the third most populous state, began prohibiting the procedure at six weeks. In an interview with Time magazine, Trump said he wouldn’t try to stop states from prosecuting women who have had abortions, and refused to say whether he would veto a national abortion ban. If he wins in November, conservatives have plans to use the Comstock Act, a federal law from the same era as the Arizona ban, to restrict abortion nationwide. Idaho is already in the Supreme Court fighting the federal…
Friday is World Press Freedom Day, and The Times is lending its pages to amplifying the cause of bringing home the hundreds of missing or jailed journalists across the globe.“The need for factual and reliable information has never been greater,” write The Times’s publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, and its executive editor, Joe Kahn, alongside the leaders of The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, in an open letter published Friday morning, “but threats to journalists around the world are more prevalent than ever.”Russia has wrongfully detained Evan Gershkovich, a former Times colleague now at The Wall Street Journal, for more…
Well, I basically agreed with President Biden’s remarks today about the campus protests. Which, come to think of it, is probably a bad sign for him.There was nothing particularly contentious or surprising about the mini-speech. It boiled down to: Peaceful protests, good. Chaos, intimidation and violence, bad.This is more or less the position several colleges have been spotlighting in recent weeks. It is, admittedly, a bit simplistic, inviting questions about when civil disobedience becomes unacceptably disruptive and at what point uncomfortable speech tips over into threatening. Still, it’s a decent foundation for schools trying to muddle through this mess.That said,…
These days, I think a lot about Donald Trump. When the monthly economic reports come out, I think: Will this help elect Donald Trump? And, I confess, I’ve started to ask myself the same question when I look at the current unrest on American college campuses over Israel and Gaza.Now, I should say that I assume that most of the protesters are operating with the best of intentions — to ease the suffering being endured by the Palestinian people.But protests have unexpected political consequences. In the 1960s, for example, millions of young people were moved to protest the war in…
The key question for the Biden administration and the Saudis today is this: What to do next? The good news is that they are 90 percent done with the mutual defense treaty that they have drawn up, both sides tell me. But they still need to tie down a few key points. These include the precise ways in which the U.S. will control the civilian nuclear energy program that Saudi Arabia will get under the deal; whether the mutual defense component will be explicit, like that between the U.S. and Japan, or less formal, like the understanding between the U.S.…
“Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Lately, I’ve been seeing people repeat Ronald Reagan’s famous question, many of them apparently believing that they’re making a slam-dunk case for returning Donald Trump to power.Yet if you take the question literally, the answer is almost ludicrously favorable to President Biden. After all, four years ago, thousands of Americans were dying each day of Covid-19.Soaring deaths aside, four years ago more than 20 million Americans were unemployed; Trump left office with the worst job record of any president since Herbert Hoover. Also, the country was in the grip of…
In Donald Trump’s felony trial on Thursday, I began thinking of what might be called the Sleazy Lawyer Effect. Does it hurt the credibility of a witness if he sounds too much like a lawyer on the stand?The defense attorney Emil Bove did a good job cross-examining Keith Davidson, the lawyer who represented both Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, in part by making him seem squirrelly.Davidson came across quite differently from the first big prosecution witness, David Pecker, who seemed to make a relatively good impression by mildly conceding almost everything Bove threw at him. By contrast, Davidson quibbled with…
On Sunday, I published a Sunday Opinion cover story on campus free speech, campus protests and civil disobedience. It’s long, and it includes my own experiences with three decades’ worth of campus controversy. Here’s the key paragraph:There is profound confusion on campus right now around the distinctions among free speech, civil disobedience and lawlessness. At the same time, some schools also seem confused about their fundamental academic mission. Does the university believe it should be neutral toward campus activism — protecting it as an exercise of the students’ constitutional rights and academic freedoms but not cooperating with student activists to…
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan liked to talk about the concept of “defining deviancy down.” Donald Trump has been a master of doing so — numbing the public to behavior that in a different era would have been considered not just deviant but criminal.On Tuesday, before the jury filed in, Justice Juan Merchan held Trump in contempt of court on nine counts. In his ruling, he fined him but added that he must consider “whether, in some instances, jail may be a necessary punishment.” On Thursday morning, the judge indicated he would probably again hold Trump in contempt on at least…
Richard Stever-ZeitlinHyattsville, Md.To the Editor:Relationships break down when people stop talking. Brown University seems to have found a solution to campus unrest by continuing talks with protesters. This is good news! I recommend that university leaders meet with students, close the doors to the room and come out when you’ve reached an agreement. Keep talking!Ronald YargerMorris Plains, N.J.To the Editor:Re “How Protesters Can Actually Help Palestinians,” by Nicholas Kristof (column, May 2):Recently I began to total up in my mind what the students have spent to be comfortable, appropriately dressed, fed and able to produce new protest signs every day.…