There’s Another Way to Extend the Child Tax Credit

The expanded child tax credit expired at the end of last year, leaving families reeling just as the program began to make a dent in child poverty. The American Rescue Plan, passed last March, had provided parents with a larger credit that was for the first time disbursed on a monthly basis, as opposed to once a year as a tax refund, and accessible to...

5h

We’re All Crazy in Someone Else’s Eyes

I glanced at the invitation nervously, not wanting to decline, but reluctant to go indoors with unvaccinated people. “Everyone invited has been vaccinated,” I read with relief but also sadness: that meant the hostess had excluded two of our closest friends. Some vaccine-refusers think the rest of us have acquiesced to government tyranny with these decisions....

5h

The Rich Tapestry of Brian Cox

In his memoir, Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, Brian Cox recounts making The Boxer, a somewhat treacle-bound 1997 Troubles film set in Northern Ireland. As he has done throughout his entire film career, he played a significant supporting character—a local IRA patriarch whose daughter (Emily Watson) pursues a dangerous romance with boxer Barry McGuigan,...

5h

Whatever’s Ailing This Administration, It’s Probably Not Ron Klain

As President Biden and his White House team round the one-year anniversary of their time in office, there’s been a persistent question floating around Washington political circles: What to make of chief of staff Ron Klain’s time in the job?There has been a spate of deeply reported stories from major news outlets assessing the performance of Klain, a...

5h

Meet the Trio Who May Have Figured Out How to Save American Democracy

Since the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his allies have produced no evidence that Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate despite their dozens of failed lawsuits, shrill propaganda, and bad-faith postelection reviews. But Trump’s party has shown no reluctance to revise the rules of voting to advantage Republicans before 2022’s midterms and 2024’s presidential...

5h

Make History and Keep Your Word, Mr. President: Nominate a Black Woman

In one of the most divided Senates we can remember, President Joe Biden will make his first Supreme Court nomination to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer. He has promised to make history, appointing the first Black woman to the highest court in the land. Black women make up only 3 percent of the federal bench, and Biden has already made real strides...

20h

Stephen Breyer’s Retirement Is Cause for Relief—and a Chance for Progress

Justice Stephen Breyer, the practical and erudite leader of the Supreme Court’s liberal wing, will reportedly retire from the high court at the end of the current term in June. His departure gives President Joe Biden his first and likely only chance to choose a justice, buoying the political fortunes of an administration that has been buffeted by the...

21h

Russia and the United States

To me, the saddest and most disturbing feature of this recent preoccupation of so many of our people with the problem of Communist penetration within our country is that it tends to rivet our attention upon ourselves, to seize us up in a sort of cramp of introspection, and to interfere in the most unhappy way with the attention which we ought...

1d

How Houses of Worship Became Hotbeds of Graft

No one wants to talk about the business of religion. But it’s time we do. On January 4, the Poway, California Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein was sentenced to fourteen months in prison, for having received at least $6.2 million in fake contributions to his synagogue and affiliated charities and secretly refunding up to 90 percent of the donations to the “donors.”*...

1d

Fixing the Electoral Count Act Is Suddenly the Most Popular Policy Idea in Washington

The pitfalls of being the nominal majority party in an evenly divided Senate were reinforced last week, when Democrats failed to enact two voting rights measures without Republican support and then were unable to muster the votes to change the rules to allow the legislation to pass with a simple majority. Although all 50 Democrats supported the Freedom...

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