“For Eric Chornoby, leisure time is a ‘luxury’ he can’t afford. He’s a union postal worker from Detroit who hasn’t gone on vacation in five years. ‘Everyone told me our generation was getting it good. I did what I was supposed to do. But no matter how hard I try, I cannot get ahead,’ Chornoby said at a rally in Washington, D.C., on February 7. Chornoby, along with other workers from the American Postal Workers Union’s (APWU) Young Members Committee, traveled to the U.S. Capitol to attend the first-ever march for young workers. Today, the federal minimum wage sits at $7.25 an hour, and it hasn’t been increased since 2009. Many states and cities have doubled their minimum wages, but workers want to see an increase at the federal level that’s adjusted for inflation. In recent decades, workers have become the most productive they have ever been in history as wages have stagnated and corporations reached record-breaking profits.” (02/23/26)
“For years, America’s homelessness debate has been dominated by cautionary tales. The sprawling tent encampments of Los Angeles and San Francisco have become shorthand for urban decline. Those and other cities, particularly on the West Coast, spent billions to combat the problem yet have still seen dramatic growth in homelessness. As troubling as the sheer numbers are, the problem is compounded by a lack of behavioral standards in these cities. Thousands of people are allowed to camp, openly use drugs, and panhandle aggressively. The result is not mere poverty but disorder — creating permanent skid rows in certain sections. But while these cities dominate headlines, others across the country are getting this issue right — showing that homelessness can be reduced, sometimes dramatically.” (02/23/26)
“From Vietnam to Iran and every U.S. war in between, the same propaganda narratives are deployed, no matter how discredited and debunked they are from all the prior times they were exposed as lies.” (02/23/26)
“This should not have to be explained, but the Constitutional intent of the Supreme Court was not to solve social / economic / military problems — that is the role of Congress. It’s role was not to properly execute and administer these laws — that is the role of the President’s and the Cabinet departments he overse[e]s. The Supreme Court has the important but narrow role to judge whether the law is being followed. … Unfortunately there is a growing populist theory that the Supreme Court’s job is not to strictly follow the law but to act as a sort of legislature of last resort, to impose new law when Congress is deadlocked on an issue or to override ‘Bad’ law, with ‘bad’ defined based on the speaker’s preferences.” (02/23/26)
“A common myth holds that the current court is a 6–3 conservative institution that protects Trump and the GOP — that it is ‘enabling’ him and giving him a ‘free pass’ or a “blank check.” But basic accounting shows that this isn’t true. Last term, for instance, only 10 decisions, or 15 percent of decided cases, were 6–3. … The Court’s six justices appointed by Republican presidents don’t vote in lockstep. Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — both Trump appointees — voted together in closely divided cases only half the time last term. In the term before that, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson were all more likely than Alito and Thomas to be in the majority. It’s hard to argue that Republicans control the Court when Jackson is winning more than Thomas.” (02/23/26)
“No American military officer has ever had to do what the constitutional crisis of 1866-1867 required of Ulysses S. Grant, then serving as the commanding general of the Army. President Andrew Johnson and Congress thrust him into adjudicating between their respective constitutional claims to civilian control of the military. This most fraught civil-military crisis did not occur in wartime; it was the result of both the president and Congress pulling the professional military into American domestic political disputes. Grant’s judgment wasn’t perfect; he was wrong before he was right. But he was right enough to provide a powerful precedent for our troubled times.” (02/23/26)
“At 12:01 this morning, the United States officially ended collection of its International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs, which were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court last Friday. By now, you’re probably aware that President Trump has replaced these tariffs with a 15 percent levy based on Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows for a tariff of that size for up to 150 days to deal with a balance-of-payments deficit. The administration has been planning this switch for months, once the Supreme Court’s position on IEEPA became clear at oral arguments. It is interpreting a trade deficit, which has essentially not changed at all despite nearly a year of tariffs, as fitting the balance-of-payments standard; some experts do not agree with that interpretation, meaning that litigation could ensue on these tariffs, too.” (02/24/26)
“An alarming current attempt to use spurious accusations of antisemitism to attack press freedoms wasn’t recently carried out by the Trump administration. It was at the hands of Manhattan’s liberal district attorney, Alvin Bragg.” (02/23/26)
“Trump’s latest tariff gambits manage to defy economic logic, statutory limits, and constitutional structure all at once, and that makes them unusually useful as case studies in how not to govern trade. His maneuvers under IEEPA to suspend the de minimis exemption, and under Section 122 of the Trade Act to float a blanket 10 percent tariff on the world, are not just bad policies; they are abuses of delegated power that strip away the very constraints a liberal trading order depends on. They weaponize emergency statutes and obscure balance‑of‑payments language to deliver short‑run political optics while shoving the real costs — economic, legal, and institutional — onto a temporally distant and politically voiceless set of future losers.” (02/23/26)
