Aside from the court-ordered dribbling out of Hillary Clinton's classified-material-filled emails, the big presidential campaign news of the summer has been the boom for Donald Trump in the race for the Republican nomination. Trump has risen from 3 percent in the polls (when he announced on June 16) to where he now stands at 26 percent -- 14 percent ahead of any other candidate.
In my last column, I looked at the possibility of two impossible things -- impossible things in the sense used by Alice and the Red Queen -- happening in the already turbulent 2016 presidential cycle. Here I'll look at another: the possibility that the partisan division lines that have endured with little change for two decades might suddenly shift and change.
One can't believe impossible things, Alice objected.
Reporters and voters have so far gotten few glimpses of Hillary Clinton speaking candidly. One of the few examples available is in the videotape and transcript of her meeting with Black Lives Matter protesters in New Hampshire last week.
Donald Trump's six-page platform on immigration may not be, as Ann Coulter wrote, "the greatest political document since the Magna Carta." But given the issue's role in elevating the candidate to leading Republican polls, it merits serious attention.
In 1935 George Dangerfield published "The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914," a vivid account of how Britain's center-left Liberal Party, dominant for a century, collapsed amid conflicts it could not resolve.
August is traditionally a vacation month, and East Coast elites, following European tradition, are thick on the ground in the Hamptons, Martha's Vineyard (the Obamas' choice) and Nantucket.
Thursday was the biggest night of the political year so far, for what happened on the stage at Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena and for what happened offstage as well.
The stage was the scene of the first two Republican presidential debates, hosted by Fox News, which together lasted some 200 minutes between 5 and 11 p.m. EDT. What happened there did not go unnoticed. According to overnight Nielsen ratings, the two-hour prime-time debate got a rating as high as the national basketball finals -- almost triple the highest rating of a Republican debate in the 2012 cycle and more than half that of the first Obama-Romney debate that fall. It was apparently the most watched primary debate in history.
Why did Fox News decide to schedule two Republican presidential debates rather than one? Simple arithmetic: 90 minutes divided by 17 candidates equals 5 minutes and 29 seconds apiece. That's scarcely enough time for the oral equivalent of a few tweets.
Faute de mieux. That means "for want of something better" in Secretary of State John Kerry's second language. It's also the best case made by its journalistic defenders for approval of the nuclear weapons deal Kerry negotiated with Iran. Or to be more exact, for rallying 34 votes in the Senate or 146 votes in the House to uphold a presidential veto of a congressional vote to disapprove.
As the presidential campaign heats up, and we head into the first debate among the 16 declared Republican candidates, there is an asymmetry between the two political parties.
Republican voters have been seething with discontent toward their party's officeholders and have not become enchanted with any one of 15 more or less conventional politicians who are running. Democratic voters support their officeholders with lockstep loyalty and seem untroubled by the serious flaws of their party's clear frontrunner.
Forty-seven years ago, the musical "Hair" opened on Broadway. Elderly mavens -- the core theater audience then, unlike the throngs of tourists flocking to cheap movie adaptations today -- were instructed that America was entering an "Age of Aquarius." The old moral rules were extinct: we were entering a new era of freedom, experimentation and self-expression.
America's two major political parties have a difficult task: amassing a 51 percent coalition in a nation that has always been -- not just now, but from the beginning -- regionally, religiously, racially and ethnically diverse.
Disparate impact. It's a legal doctrine that may be coming soon to your suburb (if you're part of the national majority living in suburbs).
Like it or not, Hillary Clinton is the single individual most likely to be elected the next president. So it's worthwhile looking closely at and behind her words when she deigns to speak on public policy, as she did in her July 14 speech on economics.
My sole focus is to run as a Republican, Donald Trump told my Washington Examiner colleague Byron York last week, "because of the fact that I believe that this is the best way we can defeat the Democrats." He went on, "Having a two-party race gives us a much better chance of beating Hillary and bringing our country back than having a third-party candidate."
It says something about Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign that it was big news that she submitted herself to an interview with a cable news journalist. It also says something that the journalist selected for this honor, Brianna Keilar of CNN, was recently a guest at the wedding of the director of grassroots engagement for the Clinton campaign. Makes sense to hedge your risk.
"Words mean what they say," I wrote in my Washington Examiner column one week ago. But, as I added, not necessarily to a majority of justices of the Supreme Court. The targets of my column were the majority opinions in King v. Burwell and Texas Department of Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project.
In King v. Burwell, Chief Justice Roberts interpreted the words "established by the state" in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) as meaning "established by the state or the federal government," even though the law itself defines "state" as the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
The Fourth of July is a time to remember Americans who have contributed much to their country, and this Fourth weekend is a good time to remember two such Americans who died in recent weeks -- and whom I'd had the good fortune to know and joust with intellectually since the 1970s -- Allen Weinstein and Ben Wattenberg.
For most people, words mean what they say. But not necessarily for a majority of Supreme Court justices in two important decisions handed down Thursday.
In the most prominent, King v. Burwell, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a 6-3 majority, ruled that the words "established by the state" mean "established by the state or the federal government."
