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In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.

Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.

Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.

Barrett again declined to preview how she would rule on potential cases during her confirmation hearing, as she did for the previous two days, seeking to portray herself as an independent judge without an agenda.

Lindsey Graham seemed to suggest that Barrett would vote to uphold the Affordable Care Act in an upcoming case because of a judicial principle known as severability, defending himself from political attacks in his tough reelection race against Democrat Jaime Harrison.

"From a conservative point of view, generally speaking, we want legislative bodies to make laws, not judges," Graham said later. "Would it be further true that if you can preserve a statue you try to, to the extent possible?"

If upheld, Planned Parenthood says the decision would leave 5.4 million Texan women of reproductive age with only 10 abortion providers in their state.

This decreased access would be especially detrimental to already marginalized groups and those with limited economic resources. Forty-two percent of the women who have abortions fall below the federal poverty line, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Denying women abortion access only increases the risk of falling into poverty, ThinkProgress reported in 2012.

providers disproportionately affects Latina women, according to Jessica González-Rojas, executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. "While this politically-motivated attack threatens all Texas women, it's particularly harmful for the 40% of Texas women who are Latina," González-Rojas said in an emailed statement. "Latinas are twice as likely to experience unintended pregnancies as non-Latina white women and are more likely to be of reproductive age.

Yiannopoulos  — a raving, crude white nationalist with zero interest in anything approaching conservative theory or history — is, in the eyes of the biggest conservative confab’s organizer, an ideal speaker (if not for the sex-with-children issue.) That in a nutshell is the problem of the right.

As political groupings and causes have gotten stale, the figures left running these groups are intellectually unserious or downright perverse

The old “three-legged stool of conservatism” has been moldy for years now.

I was one of the many who admired the orderly commitment and resolution of the women’s march on Washington the day after President Trump’s inauguration.

Yet my admiration is mixed with worry. As I step through the police lines, I bring a message with me: Your demonstrations are engineered to fail. They didn’t stop the Iraq war. They won’t stop Donald Trump.

With the rarest exceptions—and perhaps the January 21 demonstration will prove to be one—left-liberal demonstrations are exercises in catharsis, the release of emotions. Their operating principle is self-expression, not persuasion. They lack the means, and often the desire, to police their radical fringes, with the result that it’s the most obnoxious and even violent behavior that produces the most widely shared and memorable images of the event.

He has spent the last four years writing a book that he hopes will forever change the way we view the superrich’s role in our society. “Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong,” to be published in hardcover next month by Portfolio, aggressively argues that the enormous and growing income inequality in the United States is not a sign that the system is rigged. On the contrary, Conard writes, it is a sign that our economy is working. And if we had a little more of it, then everyone, particularly the 99 percent, would be better off.

most Americans don’t know how the economy really works — that the superrich spend only a small portion of their wealth on personal comforts; most of their money is invested in productive businesses that make life better for everyone. “Most citizens are consumers, not investors,” he told me during one of our long, occasionally contentious conversations. “They don’t recognize the benefits to consumers that come from investment.”

Dean Baker, a prominent progressive economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says that most economists believe society often benefits from investments by the wealthy. Baker estimates the ratio is 5 to 1, meaning that for every dollar an investor earns, the public receives the equivalent of $5 of value

The landmark Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade has protected a person’s right to a safe and legal abortion since 1973. But many people, especially low-income women and women of color, still face heightened barriers to access the medical procedure due to the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal health insurance programs like Medicaid from covering abortions, except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. 

The Hyde Amendment — named after former Illinois Rep. Henry Hyde, a vocally anti-abortion Republican — was passed in 1976 and has been renewed every year since. Congress has the opportunity to repeal the Hyde Amendment during the federal appropriations process each spring.

Research shows that 1 in 4 low-income women seeking an abortion are forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term when lawmakers restrict abortion coverage under Medicaid. Studies also show that a woman denied an abortion is more likely to fall into poverty than a woman who is able to get one.

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Tuesday signed into law one of the country's most restrictive abortion bans, a measure supporters hope will force the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit its 1973 decision sanctioning the procedure.

Under Senate Bill 6, abortion would only be allowed in cases where it's necessary to save the life or preserve the health of the fetus or mother. The law does not allow any exceptions in situations of rape or incest — a line that anti-abortion rights activists and lawmakers have supported in the past.

The measure's supporters expect the law to be challenged by abortion rights activists. It's future is uncertain, as similar attempts to restrict access to abortion services in Ohio, Georgia, and Alabama in the last two years have failed after federal courts struck down local laws.

President Biden's budget proposal fulfills a campaign promise to remove a longstanding ban on federal funding for most abortions known as the Hyde Amendment.

Abortion rights advocates have praised the move; a statement from Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson called the Hyde Amendment "racist, sexist, deeply unjust" and thanked Biden for working to remove it.

Biden reversed his longtime position on Hyde, joining other Democratic hopefuls in saying he would work to overturn it. "If I believe heath care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone's zip code," Biden said in June 2019.

Joe Biden is only the second Catholic president of the United States. He's also a supporter of abortion rights — a position at odds with official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

Jamie Manson, president of Catholics for Choice, said she hopes for what she describes as a "better dialogue" between church leaders and some rank-and-file Catholics who disagree with aspects of the church's teachings.

Polling suggests a majority of American Catholics support abortion rights in most or all cases and oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide.

As the electoral odds facing President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden have continued to diverge in national and state polls, there’s at least one area where the divergence has been particularly striking: By early October, one national poll had Biden leading Trump by over 20 points among registered female voters; Trump and Biden were tied among likely male voters

Nationally, women in the U.S. have had the vote for 100 years. For the last 40 of those years, they have voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in greater numbers than men have.

It took 60 years for women to vote in the same proportion as men. In 1980, for the first time since the passage of the 19th Amendment, women voted at the same rate as men. That was also the first time they voted noticeably differently from men.

The death of the iconic Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has shocked the political world, altered the contours of the upcoming election and induced an overwhelming dread among liberals who fear some basic rights could now be in jeopardy.

it remains unclear whether the Senate will hold a vote before Election Day. If it did, it would represent a colossal act of hypocrisy since many of the same senators refused to even give Barack Obama’s last nominee, Merrick Garland, a hearing, arguing that it was inappropriate to fill a seat on the court in an election year.

But Republicans have the power to force a vote, and barring defections, they could exercise it.

Republicans hold a narrow majority in the Senate, meaning they can only afford to lose a few votes in their push to confirm a replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has touched off a partisan brawl in the Senate to confirm President Trump’s nominee to replace her, a vote that Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, has vowed to hold.

With Democrats all but certain to unite in opposition to Mr. Trump’s nominee

the chance to fill a Supreme Court vacancy seemed like a political lifeline, a chance to mobilize supporters and talk about something, anything, other than the coronavirus that has killed 200,000 Americans.

he has propelled himself, his Republican allies and the country into a breakneck race to confirm a successor to Justice Ginsburg before the Nov. 3 election, bulldozing past the precedent his own party set four years ago in a gamble that the political payoff will outweigh any political cost.

If they act before the election, they may lock in a conservative majority on the court for the years. But if they hold off they may give voters on the right greater incentive to turn out to keep the Senate Republican, ensure Mr. Trump’s re-election and make it more likely that his pick is eventually seated.

Justices do not set an agenda, Judge Barrett said, they respond to the cases that come before them. The description of the process was accurate, but also largely irrelevant in today’s legal world, where interest groups seek out and advance cases to come to the Supreme Court for the express purpose of getting justices to rule on policies to match their political beliefs.

“Judges cannot just wake up one day and say, ‘I have an agenda — I like guns, I hate guns, I like abortion, I hate abortion,’ and walk in like a royal queen and impose their will on the world,” Judge Barrett said.

Senate Republicans voted to confirm President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett on Monday, a major victory for the President and his party just days before November 3, that could push the high court in a more conservative direction for generations to come.

The vote was 52-48. Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who is in a tough reelection fight, was the only GOP senator to cross party lines and vote with Democrats against the nomination after having expressed concerns that it's too close to Election Day to consider a nominee.

The stakes in the Supreme Court battle are immense and come at a pivotal time in American politics in the run up to an election in which control of Congress and the White House are on the line.

Much of the public anxiety about Amy Coney Barrett — judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Notre Dame law professor and Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court — has focused on the question of abortion, and whether as a believer in originalism and a practicing Catholic she would be likely to vote to reverse Roe v. Wade.

Although we don’t usually think of it this way, the decisions of the Supreme Court have the power to affect the quality of the air we breathe, the pay we receive and the conditions under which we work, by determining what kinds of business and industry regulations are constitutional.

With a 6-3 conservative court, the country is at risk of having the few remaining tools that permit some limits on the power of business — like labor unions and environmental legislation — weakened still further.

The justices, who will hear arguments on Monday in two cases challenging the state’s near-total ban, required the parties to file their briefs with extraordinary speed.

The court will hear arguments on Monday in two different challenges, one brought by abortion providers in the state and the other by the Justice Department. The court’s scheduling order required the two sides to file their opening briefs simultaneously, with responses due on Friday.

Both challengers said the law, which bars most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, is at odds with Roe v. Wade, which prohibits states from banning abortions before fetal viability, or around 23 weeks. They added that the law, known as Senate Bill 8, was cynically drafted to avoid review by federal courts.

Our highest court is facing a legitimacy crisis and is in desperate need of reform. And yet, due to the deadlock that seems to be Congress these days, I too often hear the rebuke to US supreme court reform, “None of these reforms will happen, so what is the point of talking about them?”

We need only look to the number of justices who have felt the need recently to speak up on behalf of the court, in an attempt to justify its egregious abuse of judicial norms and processes, to know the justices are listening.

Most recently, Justice Samuel Alito gave a speech at the University of Notre Dame that can only be described as an attempted takedown of the press.