… If Manchin acted and voted like a garden-variety Democratic senator, Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) could enact much of Biden’s agenda. But Manchin won’t permit that — and the reason turns on home-state politics. Unlike almost all other Senate Democrats, he’s trying to outrun a decades-long realignment in […] Read more »
What Manchin and Sinema can learn from the Lincoln Republicans on voting rights
By the standards Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have set for federal action on voting rights, the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution — two pillars of the post-Civil War effort to ensure equality for all Americans — would never have become law. Every Democrat in Congress […] Read more »
The Cruel Logic of the Republican Party, Before and After Trump
Donald Trump has claimed credit for any number of things he benefited from but did not create, and the Republican Party’s reigning ideology is one of them: a politics of cruelty and exclusion that strategically exploits vulnerable Americans by portraying them as an existential threat, against whom acts of barbarism […] Read more »
What today’s GOP demonstrates about the dangers of partisan conformity
Rep. Liz Cheney talks to reporters after House Republicans voted to remove her as conference chair on May 12, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Robert B. Talisse, Vanderbilt University Directly following the 2020 election, Republicans seemed to be through with Donald Trump. Party leaders stopped speaking to him […] Read more »
Republicans Are Setting Off a ‘Doom Loop’ for Democracy
The insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6 failed. Donald Trump is not the president. But at the state level, the Republican war on elections is posting startling wins. They are trying to do what Trump failed to do: neuter elections as a check on Republican power. A new report […] Read more »
Redistricting Holds Key to House Majority
It’s hard to remember a time when conventional wisdom about the outcome of the midterm elections was this hardened this early in the cycle. Even folks who don’t pay particularly close attention to House elections feel comfortable giving Republicans a significant advantage in winning control of the body next year. […] Read more »