A faddish phrase on the right is something called “the administrative state,” which refers to the federal workforce deputized by Congress to craft and enforce rules over the environment, banking, health care, product safety, mass communications, the power grid, etc. A recent profile of the Claremont Institute — which has the unenviable task of stitching together an intellectual fig leaf for Trumpism — noted that scholars there view our nation’s bureaucrats as a “fourth branch,” effectively overturning the Constitution.
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Progressive Voices
“We don’t have any teacher applicants for our vacancies,” said two superintendents from rural North Carolina public school districts. Think about that. If they do not find qualified replacements or come up with alternative solutions, students will arrive on the first day of school Aug. 29 in classrooms without teachers.
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What a lot of complaining I hear about gas prices. I’ve done some myself. I also see a lot of blaming, especially of President Joe Biden. “It’s all his fault.” Hmm, could Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have just a little bit to do with the latest surge in prices at our gasoline pumps? Oil is a dense fuel, moved around with relative ease across the globe.
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The views of the universe are gifts of perspective So much of our collective experience as a country these days involves division and strife, but this week we rediscovered our capacity for unity and awe, occasioned by a picture. Last Monday, NASA released the first image from the James Webb Space Telescope, a “deep field” photo that captures hundreds of galaxies, each containing roughly 100 million stars...
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And a case from North Carolina threatens to topple American democracy It’s pretty hard not to take it personally when the highest court in the land erases your humanity. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has rolled back a woman’s right to choose whether to have an abortion, the power of the state reaches right through us, deciding what happens inside our bodies. What we think and feel doesn’t matter. It doesn’t get more personal than that.
...As a family medicine physician in training, I have been closely following the news about Roe v. Wade. I am training to be an abortion provider because it is fundamental to how I comprehensively care for pregnant people and their families. Abortion is safe, normal, and essential. The recent reversal of Roe poses a direct threat to my training, and to the patients I serve here in North Carolina.
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The United States of America is no longer a free country. Women are no longer full citizens with equal rights. The theocracy also known as the U.S. Supreme Court has decided that our bodies don’t belong to us. Anyone who is or can become pregnant will be a ward of the state, captive of a misogynist minority.
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Whatever the National Rifle Association is paying for the votes in the U.S. Senate, it’s not enough. They’re getting one heck of a deal. And no organization should be more excited to support the measures that the Senate is contemplating than the NRA. It’s a bill that is all hype, no substance and won’t affect gun owners, gun safety or the NRA’s silent but co-equal partner, the gun manufacturers, in any meaningful way.
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Amazon and its lobbyists are claiming that passing Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s Big Tech bill would lead to the end of Prime, or at the very least, significantly impair the service. This is such an absurd, desperate lie. What the bill actually does is force Amazon to compete in ways that will benefit consumers and small businesses.
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Two years after his death, efforts to raise funds for a memorial center in Raleigh continue A neighbor remarked last week that the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas had quickly pushed the grocery store killings in Buffalo, New York off the front pages of most newspapers. He concluded that the mass shooting at a Tops Friendly Markets store in Buffalo, which resulted in 10 deaths, has already been forgotten...
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During a 2014 symposium marking the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision, a statement from one of the plaintiffs offered what today feels like prescient insight. Many of the Virginia plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit, feared integration and would have preferred separate and actually equal.
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Sexual violence survivor details some of the horrors that await if the Supreme Court ends abortion rights When I was raped in 2016, one of my attackers reached inside me and pulled out my NuvaRring, an internal birth control device, and asked me what it was. When I told him, he cast it aside where it was lost until police retrieved it a couple days later.
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As a researcher who measures the effects of contraception and abortion policy on people’s lives, I usually have to wait years for the data to roll in. But sometimes anticipating a policy’s effects before they happen can suggest ways to avoid its worst consequences. In my forthcoming peer-reviewed paper, currently available as a preprint, I found that if the U.S. ends all abortions nationwide
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