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"We already are seeing 'border war' with individual states passing major legislation that differs considerably from that in other places," says Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, and William Gale, a Brookings senior fellow in economic studies,

When and if the issue turns to violent confrontations between local citizens and federal officers, or between contentious groups of citizens, the clash might well take place far closer to home

America has an extraordinary number of guns and private militias," they write. How many? They cite the National Shooting Sports Foundation's estimate of 434 million firearms in civilian possession in the U.S. right now. That would be 1.3 guns per person.

it turns out that the way the wealthy decide how to distribute cash is often even less fair than the way the state decides how to spend it.

More than half of the highly conspicuous donations of the ultra-rich were injected directly into the endowments of their already rich alma maters. Much of the rest was given to hushed museums in the form of very expensive donated art, or to other places that rich old people tend to congregate, like cultural arts centers and high-end hospitals. In other words, the funds the rich were giving went largely to institutions that tended to the needs and prerogatives of the rich and privileged.

The U.S. Education Department’s civil rights enforcement arm has launched an investigation into a North Texas school district whose superintendent was secretly recorded ordering librarians to remove LGBTQ-themed library books.

accused the district of violating a federal law that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender. The ACLU complaint was based largely on an investigation published in March by NBC News, ProPublica and the Tribune that revealed that Granbury’s superintendent, Jeremy Glenn, instructed librarians to remove books dealing with sexual orientation and people who are transgender.

An Education Department spokesperson confirmed the investigation and said it was related to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits schools from discriminating on the basis of sex, gender and sexual orientation.