Author: Heather Cox Richardson

“Euclid’s first common notion is this: things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. That’s a rule of mathematical reasoning. It’s true because it works. Has done and always will do. In his book, Euclid says this is ‘self-evident.’ You see, there it is, even in that 2,000-year-old book of mechanical law. It is a self-evident truth that things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.” – Daniel Day-Lewis in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012) And on July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring:...

By a 6 to 3 vote, the Supreme Court handed down Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee on July 1 saying that the state of Arizona did not violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) with laws that limited ballot delivery to voters, family members, or caregivers, or when it required election officials to throw out ballots that voters had cast in the wrong precincts by accident. The fact that voting restrictions affect racial or ethnic groups differently does not make them illegal, Justice Samuel Alito wrote. “The mere fact that there is some disparity in impact does not necessarily...

Trump’s Big Lie has a number of elements that echo the argument behind the organization of the Confederacy in 1861. Like the Confederates, the Big Lie inspired followers by calling for them not to destroy America, but to defend it. The insurrectionists of January 6, and those who continue to insist the election was stolen, do not think of themselves as domestic terrorists, but as patriots in the mold of Samuel Adams. “Today is 1776,” Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) tweeted on January 6. The Confederates, too, believed they were defending America. In February 1861, even before Republican President Abraham...

David Ignatius recently had a piece in the Washington Post that uncovered the attempt of the Trump administration to reorder the Middle East along an axis anchored by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudia Arabia (more popularly known as MBS), Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and Jared Kushner of the United States. To make the deal, the leaders involved apparently wanted to muscle Jordan out of its role as the custodian of Muslim and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem, a role carved out in the 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan that was hammered out under...