Tag: Commentary

Published in USA Today on August 13, 2018

It isn’t on Rolling Stone’s list of 2018’s biggest farewell tours, but it’s time. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and Assistant Minority Leader Jim Clyburn should announce that for the next three months, they are going to travel the country and campaign like heck, raise lots of money and make sure Democrats win a majority of House seats in November — and that after the election, all of them will step down from their positions to make room for a new generation of Democratic leaders.
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Published in USA Today on April 12, 2018

For the first 200 years of this nation’s history, only three House speakers resigned from office, all because they were accepting other political appointments.

But in just the past 20 years, an equal number of House speakers, all of them Republicans, have decided to depart under very different circumstances.
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Published in USA Today on March 31, 2017

Amid the postmortem over everything that went wrong with the Republican health reform effort, we shouldn’t overlook the role of the system that elects members of Congress. It not only contributed to the massive failure, it is also predictive of what we will see from the Republican Congress moving forward.
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Published in USA Today on February 8, 2017

We didn’t need more evidence that this country is in for a very rough couple of years, but we got some anyway with the squeaker Senate confirmation of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. DeVos, who married into the Amway fortune, has given $200 million to Republican candidates and causes over the years. She has long been a strong advocate for school choice, including vouchers and unregulated for-profit charter schools. She has demonstrated both unfamiliarity and hostility toward public education, even calling public schools a “dead end.”
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Published in USA Today on January 20, 2017

President Trump’s short inaugural address sounded the same themes he repeated throughout his divisive campaign. While it almost certainly resonated with his supporters, it is unlikely to have reassured many of the 65.8 million voters who did not cast a ballot for him. The overall tone of the speech seemed almost angry and grim — with Trump announcing that he is taking on Capitol Hill and all of the political leaders who have preceded him as well as much of the rest of the world.
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