From defying Congress to rewarding loyalists and ignoring constitutional limits, America is confronting a dangerous new era where the rule of law no longer restrains those in power… Back when I was a kid in Lansing, Michigan, my father used to tell me that the difference between America and the places his Army buddies had fought through in Europe and Asia wasn’t the size of our buildings or the strength of our army. It was, he said, that here a cop couldn’t kick in your door without a judge first deciding there was a good reason, a president couldn’t help himself to the treasury, and he can’t take a king’s gift or send soldiers overseas to kill people without the people’s representatives saying yes. Even the cop shows we watched on TV had police regularly being turned away from people’s doors for lack of a warrant. Dad believed that with the uncomplicated faith of a man who’d watched what happened when those rules disappeared in other countries, and he passed that faith on to me as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, which, for an American of his generation, it was. I’ve been thinking about my Eisenhower Republican father a lot lately, because the thing he assumed could never happen in America is now happening here, openly, daily, and with a kind of swagger that suggests the people doing it don’t believe there will ever be a price to pay.

By the time George W. Bush became president in January 2001 neoliberalism had defeated even the Perot faction of American thought: politicians who opposed it, like Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown on the left and Mike Lee and Ron Paul on the right, were dismissed as cranks and outliers trying to stand in the way of progress. Bush continued the process, with his largest success being the privatization, with the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, of a large chunk of the nation’s premiere government-funded healthcare program, Medicare. The new “Medicare Advantage” programs, entirely run by private entities, cost the federal government on average 11% more than Medicare and were given the freedom to deny services to their customers the way health insurance companies have been scamming their customers for generations.

Republicans spent years manufacturing outrage over Hunter Biden while Trump openly turned the presidency into a billionaire’s cash machine… Back in 2019, Donald Trump pointed at Hunter Biden’s brief “cup of coffee” with a Chinese banker during a 2013 ride on Air Force Two and turned it into the single biggest line of attack he ran against Joe Biden for the next five years. The grift! The corruption! The selling-out of America! Oh, the humanity!!!

How Heritage and Project 2025 are weaponizing government to strip away women's rights, votes, and freedom… Last weekend was Mother’s Day, so it’s an excellent time to examine what the most powerful conservative think tank in America is planning right now for the women in your life. The same outfit that wrote Project 2025 and watched the Trump administration follow their playbook virtually to the letter, has been busy assembling a 90-page tract called “Saving America by Saving the Family.” It maps out a future in which American women are stripped of their right to vote without their husbands’ paperwork, denied access to contraception and abortion, pushed back into the home, and reduced to what Heritage’s new American Citizenship chair Scott Yenor calls the “heroic feminine” of motherhood and wifeliness. It’s quite a Mother’s Day card from the people who claim to revere motherhood the most.