US Politics

Five senior Republicans tell POLITICO the House has all but slipped away. With less than three weeks to go, the party is triaging, and the money is moving to the lifeboats.

The Supreme Court chooses most of the cases it decides. Here is how a petition becomes an argued case, from the 90-day deadline to the June opinion.

The Supreme Court opens its term with a climate case about state law, federal power and whether local governments can seek damages from oil companies.

A federal judge temporarily restored access for CNN, MS NOW and Politico. His narrow due-process ruling leaves a larger press-freedom fight unresolved.

Beloved children's books can survive honest scrutiny. Roald Dahl Day asks whether celebration can make room for the truth about their author.

Trump's Ireland visit puts official diplomacy, a major golf tournament, and the president's private brand on the same stage in Doonbeg.

On the 25th anniversary of September 11, Arcwize recognizes those killed, the survivors, families, first responders, recovery workers, and those still living with its consequences.

Inflation is still above the Fed’s comfort zone, while the labor market has shown fresh strength. Friday’s CPI release could reshape expectations for the September policy meeting.

The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s broad attack on birthright citizenship. A narrower order now tests how much of the same policy can return through exceptions and paperwork.

U.S. employers added 162,000 jobs in August as unemployment held at 4.1 percent, but hiring remained concentrated and the longer slowdown did not disappear.

The English-speaking left does not need to invent immigrant-worker organizing from scratch. It needs to recognize, join, and resource the networks already leading it.

Sangwoo Cho traces Ben Shapiro’s changing place in a conservative movement increasingly divided over Israel, media, and America First.

The Freedom 250 Grand Prix is being sold as national celebration, but racing through the capital also reveals who gets to define public space and patriotism.

As U.S. Open attention begins, Althea Gibson’s 1950 breakthrough is a reminder that exclusion can survive without an explicitly discriminatory rule.

Sangwoo Cho argues that the Epstein-files controversy was more than a communications failure: it exposed the cost of cultivating distrust that cannot be contained.

After the Supreme Court reaffirmed birthright citizenship, Sangwoo Cho examines what the renewed fight reveals about who America allows to belong.

Ninety-one years after the Social Security Act became law, its promise remains indispensable and financially vulnerable.

Payrolls fell by 23,000 in July as unemployment held at 4.1 percent, while sharp downward revisions and subdued participation revealed weaker momentum.

The decline of shared public life may be giving partisan identity more power to define how Americans see one another.

The 250-year anniversary of the Declaration’s signing reveals how America turned a messy political sequence into one clean national myth.

A 49–50 vote left the war in the president’s hands, and exposed how far Congress has retreated from its own constitutional power.

A close reading of Alabama’s prison crisis, and why a real solution must be measured by accountability, care, safety, and the lives inside the system.

After the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s emergency tariffs, the administration rebuilt them under a different law. The legal label changed; the constitutional fight did not.

The Genesis Mission could accelerate medicine, energy, and discovery. Its success will depend on privacy, transparency, independent validation, and who gets access.

Two decades after Jon Stewart confronted Crossfire, political commentary has moved online, but its incentives still reward performance, outrage, and partisan theater.

We’ve come far as a country, from role-playing Hollywood-level combat scenarios in Atropia to embedding artificial intelligence in virtual warfare simulations. The U.S. military leaves no stone unturned in preparing its soldiers for the uncertainties of war. But if “closing the loop” is what makes the system better, who remains outside to evaluate it? Shield AI’s recent acquisition of Aechelon Technology paints a picture of a future where, as Shield AI CEO Gary Steele remarked in a statement,...

On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that President Trump's firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause was lawful. In doing so, the Court overturned a 91-year-old precedent that had prevented presidents from removing members of independent agencies at will. The decision represents the most significant expansion of presidential power over the federal government in nearly a century. Independent agencies were designed by Congress to function as a check...

A Rare Moment of Agreement Democrats and Republicans rarely find common ground on social, economic, or political issues. However, one topic stands out: the need for a Congressional stock trading ban. Both parties overwhelmingly support this initiative. According to the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, an impressive 86% of registered voters favor prohibiting members of Congress from trading stocks. This statistic comes with a margin of...

The last two weeks in the United States have seen nationwide protests against ICE, Donald Trump, and the actions of the DOJ within the last year. In those two weeks, students took to the streets in droves, participating in school walkouts, chanting, and claiming intersections and/or sidewalks in massive crowds. Although some in more organized manners than others, students have provided the bulk and blade of anti-ICE attention & action as of late. Local partisan groups have the choice to...

The Democratic Party has a Hakeem Jeffries problem. Not because Jeffries has done anything wrong, but because his position at the center of a fracturing coalition has made him the symbol of a debate that the party can no longer manage with careful language and calls for unity. Jeffries, if Democrats retake the House, would be the first Black speaker in history. Some members of his own party's insurgent wing are running against his allies and chanting at their victory parties that he is next....

The United States turns 250 years old this week. The NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released July 1, 2026 asked Americans how they feel about that milestone. The results do not describe a nation in the mood for celebration. They describe a nation that is exhausted, divided, and deeply uncertain about whether the system it inherited is capable of delivering on what it promised. The poll is worth sitting with. Not because any single survey can capture the full complexity of what 330 million people...

We are raised to not think outside ourselves, to ignore the unhoused person asking for food, to avert our eyes at the sight of struggling families desperate for medical care. The United States and similar capitalist Western cultures have cultivated a mindset of “not owing anyone anything” and of watching out for yourself above all else. This seems to remain true in closer-knit groups like family and friends as well as in larger community bodies. We have created a culture where support and...

The electoral college is one of the oldest and most distinctive features of American democracy. Outlined in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, it began as a compromise between giving the public a direct voice in choosing the president and preserving congressional power. Here is how the system worked originally, and how it changed with the 12th Amendment in 1804 and the 23rd Amendment in 1961. How the System Works Allocation: Each state receives a number of electors equal to its two...

Months ago, the Department of Justice quietly removed a 2024 study from the National Institute of Justice's public site. The study examined the political affiliations of domestic terrorism perpetrators and found that 84.4 percent of ideologically motivated incidents of political violence between 1990 and 2020, 227 out of 269 events, were carried out by far-right actors. The data suggested that the far right, a key base of support for President Donald Trump and the broader MAGA movement, had...

Mullets, red hats, and American flag apparel have become shorthand for the American South in the popular imagination. Southern culture is too often portrayed as synonymous with cruelty and bigotry. Popular media tends to depict the region as impoverished and uneducated, classist stereotypes that go largely unchallenged because the South is also framed as cruel and therefore undeserving of the compassion typically extended to struggling communities. Southern Roots That image obscures a more...

Legacy admissions have become one of the most quietly debated features of American higher education. The conversation tends to flare up around Supreme Court decisions and admissions scandals, then fade. But the policy is still very much alive, and the students it displaces are real. The Where Legacy admissions exist in all states except California, Illinois, Maryland, Colorado, and Virginia. California and Maryland have enacted statewide bans covering both public and private universities,...

In June 2026, the same companies that just a few years ago were racing to add rainbows to their logos and drive floats through pride parades have gone quiet. No profile picture changes. No statements. No floats. The silence is not neutral. Corporate Pride People inside queer communities saw this coming. For years, the criticism of corporate pride sponsorship was consistent: the attraction to queer aesthetics felt transactional, a cash grab by companies that did little to materially support...

The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press. That sentence has been interpreted by courts for over two hundred years. What is happening right now is not a repeal of that sentence. It is a quiet, systematic redefinition of what it protects, who it protects, and when its protections apply. Text from the First Amendment highlighting fundamental freedoms, including religion, speech, press, assembly, and petitioning the government for redress. In...

The Trump administration cut 1.1 billion dollars in federal funding from public broadcasting this year. NPR stations across the country are contracting or closing. PBS faces a similar reckoning. Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and several other public-interest broadcasters have had their funding slashed or eliminated entirely. The justification offered by administration officials is that the government should not be in the business of funding media. That argument has a...

In October 2025, the Pentagon introduced new press guidelines. The guidelines required journalists seeking access to sign a 21-page policy restricting their contact with military and civilian staff, warning that reporting on information not officially approved could lead to consequences regardless of how the information was obtained or whether it was classified. Almost the entire mainstream press corps refused. The Associated Press, Reuters, NPR, The New York Times, and every major network...

On January 1, 2026, Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor of New York City. He is the first Muslim to hold that office. He is the first Asian American to hold that office. He is also a democratic socialist who represents a district in Queens and who ran on a platform that most political analysts, as recently as three years ago, would have described as unelectable in a major American city. The significance of this moment does not reduce to identity, though identity matters. The first Muslim,...

Livestreams depict young men sitting in fancy cars and standing in bustling clubs, smiling awkwardly while steroids course through their bodies. If you turned the lights on, you would see red marks on their cheeks and jaws from hammers, the stubble barely starting to fill out their young faces. "Looksmaxxing" has entered the public zeitgeist as the newest form of self-improvement. Young men take extreme measures to increase their attractiveness, often pursuing dangerous practices with little...

The week of May 11 through May 17, 2026, produced a set of civil rights developments that, taken individually, each warranted serious coverage. Taken together, they describe something more alarming: a coordinated, sustained effort to weaken the federal government's role in protecting racial equality. Voting rights took a hit. DOJ enforcement activity against civil rights violations slowed. Immigration policing expanded in ways that civil rights organizations and international human rights...

In March 2026, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case of Priscilla Villarreal, a citizen journalist in Laredo, Texas, who was arrested in 2017 for asking a police officer a question. That is not a metaphor. She was arrested for asking a question. Villarreal, who operates under the name La Gordiloca, published news stories about a border agent's suicide and a car crash after contacting law enforcement sources for information. Texas prosecutors charged her under a state statute that...

On May 19, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order directing banks to screen customers for immigration status. If you are undocumented, the federal government now wants your bank to know it. The order instructs financial regulators to identify signs that customers without legal status are opening accounts or obtaining loans. The Treasury Department is tasked with issuing risk guidance to financial institutions. An earlier draft of the order would have required banks to collect...

A protester in Kansas City marches with students from Crossroads Preparatory Academy in 2022. On Thursday, City Council repealed a ban on so-called conversion therapy, a scientifically discredited practice that seeks to “convert” LGBTQ+ minors to a heterosexual lifestyle. On March 31, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that Colorado's ban on conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ minors violated the First Amendment. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was...

The United States is now ranked 64th in the world for press freedom. Not 64th in GDP. Not 64th in military spending. 64th in its ability to protect the people whose job is to tell the truth about power. Reporters Without Borders released its 2026 World Press Freedom Index last month, and the findings are damning. For a country that has long held up its First Amendment as the gold standard of democratic values, slipping to 64th out of 180 nations should be a national crisis. Instead, it barely...

Public media is not just background noise. It is the news infrastructure that serves places no one else will.

Gas is $4.55 a gallon. The Pentagon has spent $25 billion in nine weeks. And the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world's oil moves, is still closed.

The Trump administration opened a civil rights investigation into a private women's college for admitting trans women. Legal experts are baffled. The implications go far beyond one campus.