"Over the past 230 years, presidents have followed Washington’s lead, making increased diversity and representation of religions, backgrounds, genders and races a central part of the cabinet story."
"A claim that an election was illegitimate is a claim to remaining in power. A coup is under way, and the number of participants is not shrinking but growing. Few leading Republicans have acknowledged that the race is over."
Reckoning with the Trump adminstration's actions and assigning moral or criminal sanction to any misdeeds will probably be compromised by the destruction or failure to maintain presidential records.
"I choose to believe he is ready to be transformed by the times, his peers, and the mandate given to him in defeating good ol’ white supremacy. I can accept Biden for the purpose of dealing with him for the moment."
A professor of law and legal history volunteered as a ballot counting observer in Pennsylvania and offers a reflection on the unspectacular nature of democracy in action.
A Harvard political theorist takes the Fox News host to task for allowing his conservative guest to make inflammatory and unfounded statements about her in-class speech, which led to her receiving death threats.
An earthquake in Guatemala, and subsequent demands for their labor, shook many medical professionals out of complacency and cooperation with the country's right-wing government at the height of the nation's civil war.
Kamala Harris's candidacy shows a new path for women in public life: being judged as an autonomous human being, rather than as a wife or mother. This will be a radical change if it sticks.
A historian of education argues that Black studies was not an invention of the 1960s; its flawed implementation reflected the long battles Black activists fought against hostile and indifferent school administrations for decades before.
The Organization of African Unity proposed its own refugee convention in 1969, reframing the issue as one of solidarity rather than crisis, and pointing the way to a more humane and positive model of thinking about the problems of displacement and statelessness.
The Republican Party has outsourced the work of policymaking to a handful of billionaire-funded think tanks, leading to an incoherent platform of plutocratic populism and a party structure that cannot debate and advance new ideas, says a top scholar of comparative politics.
A uniform procedure for publicizing the vote count can eliminate the chaos of haphazard vote counts and remove the opportunity for candidates to portray the normal process of counting votes as irregular or crooked.
Abolishing the Electoral College isn't a radical idea. It had bipartisan support in the 1960s as a reform consistent with the Supreme Court's rulings that established "one person, one vote" as the core principle of representation in a constitutional democracy.
