[Ramesh Ponnuru] Trump Supreme Court contingency plan

Every White House in the modern era has sought to be prepared in case a vacancy arises on the Supreme Court. President Donald Trump’s legal advisers don’t know much more than anyone else about the likelihood of a vacancy this year, but they are making contingency plans. Those plans center on the possibility that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at 85 the oldest justice, will leave the court.At the moment, there appear to be seven leading contenders, who can be loosely grouped into a first and second tier ba

Feb. 6, 2019

[Carl P. Leubsdorf] Some early questions to ask about 2020

Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro. Sen. Kamala Harris. Every day, it seems, another candidate enters the Democratic race. Every week, there’s a new poll, most showing former Vice President Joe Biden as the party’s early presidential leader.The highly respected Cook Political Report even put out its first estimate of the 2020 Electoral College map, showing the Democrats with 232, the Republicans with 220 and the remaining 86 as

Jan. 31, 2019

[Leonid Bershidsky] Want less graft? Allow more freedom.

Transparency International, the Berlin-based global authority on graft, accompanied its Corruption Perceptions Index for 2018 with a warning that corruption gains where authoritarian and populist leaders erode democratic institutions. A comparison of Transparency’s data with studies by Freedom House, which scores countries on the state of democracy and liberty, reveals a more complex story but leads to the same conclusion.Putting the two organizations’ country scores side by side shows that the

Jan. 31, 2019

[Elizabeth Drew] Nancy Pelosi’s Great Wall of Resistance

Whoever explained to then-President-elect Donald Trump what it meant to be president -- if anyone did -- neglected to tell him that on occasion a president loses a policy fight. That person also forgot to explain to the US president-in-waiting that making a big promise he might be unable to keep required him to figure out how to prevent his most ardent followers from turning against him when he failed to fulfill it.Sloppy job preparation, together with Trump’s distorted personality, led to the n

Jan. 31, 2019

[Therese Raphael Theresa may postpones her moment of Brexit reckoning

If Britain‘s Parliament were the final arbiter of Brexit, Tuesday night’s vote would have been historic. It would have been a crowning achievement for Prime Minister Theresa May: Leavers and Remainers, Conservatives and Labour Party members debated for six hours and voted seven times before a majority finally said what they want to happen.It wasn‘t any of that. The European Union has already said “no” -- in more languages and ways than is reasonable to count -- to the one demand the majority vot

Jan. 31, 2019

[Joe Nocera] Howard Schultz’s presidential campaign is naive

Ten years ago, I wrote a column about Howard Schultz that was, well, not very nice. Schultz had earlier stepped aside as the chief executive of Starbucks Corp., but with the company in a deep slump, he decided to retake control, and reinstalled himself as CEO. My column, written as a snarky open letter, suggested that his comeback would fail.Schultz responded in an unusual way: The next time he was in New York, he invited me to breakfast. He made no effort to tell me why my column was wrong. Ins

Jan. 30, 2019

[Cathy Young] Is masculinity toxic or under assault?

Is there a war on men and maleness in America?Last week, a new Gillette razor company ad inspired by the #MeToo campaign was quickly denounced for supposedly slandering men as boorish and abusive.And earlier this month, the American Psychological Association was attacked for its new guidelines on male mental health, which critics said were biased against masculinity.Both controversies, which are still raging, have pitted “woke” progressives against defenders of traditional manhood. But each side

Jan. 30, 2019

[Alex Webb] What Microsoft can teach Facebook about playing nice

As another European Commission megafine on Alphabet nears, it prompts the question: can the Google parent ever free itself from the specter of penalties from the region’s regulators? The same goes for Amazon and Facebook, each of which is facing scrutiny for how it handles data. They could do a lot worse than looking to a fellow West Coast tech giant for a playbook.It wasn’t all that long ago that Microsoft was the European Commission’s nemesis. For most of the first decade of the millennium, th

Jan. 30, 2019

[Kishore Mahbubani] Trump, Macron and the poverty of liberalism

No Western liberal would disagree that US President Donald Trump’s election was a disaster for American society, while that of President Emmanuel Macron was a triumph for French society. In fact, the opposite may well be true, as heretical as that sounds.The first question to ask is why people are engaged in violent street protests in Paris, but not in Washington. I have personally experienced these Paris protests, and the smell of tear gas on the Champs-Elysees reminded me of the ethnic riots I

Jan. 29, 2019

[Ramesh Thakur] Arrested diplomacy

On Nov. 19, Carlos Ghosn, the board chair and former CEO of Nissan, was arrested at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport on suspicion of underreporting income and misusing corporate funds for personal purposes; he remains in custody. Less than two weeks later, Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei and daughter of its founder, was arrested in transit at Vancouver’s airport on charges by the United States that Huawei had violated US sanctions against Iran; out on bail, she now awaits an extraditio

Jan. 29, 2019

[Tyler Cowen] One shutdown lesson is that Americans need to save more

Now that the government shutdown is over, perhaps it is appropriate to consider a delicate question: Is it still OK to tell people they need to save more money?It’s an issue that came to the fore during the last five weeks, when hundreds of thousands of federal government workers, and many contractors, didn’t get paid, leaving many of them illiquid. I sympathize with the frustrated, laid-off workers -- my wife was one of them -- and consider the government shutdown to have been flat-out stupid.

Jan. 29, 2019

[John M. Crisp] Just what do we mean by ‘wall’?

Several news sources used the accurate but uncharitable term “cave” to describe US President Donald Trump’s capitulation Friday to the Democrats’ position on the wall and the government shutdown.It was a clear victory for the Democrats, but House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer were prudently restrained in their celebration. The victory is only a three-week reprieve. There’s no reason to believe that Trump has learned this episode’s most important lesson: A governme

Jan. 28, 2019