Since his inauguration, Donald Trump has challenged America's belief that its history was an upward trajectory, correcting past mistakes and rising towards Abraham Lincoln's "more perfect union." Other countries had experienced grave democratic crises, but we thought we were the ...read more
Last month, the Supreme Court voted 6-2 to uphold a North Dakota court of appeals ruling requiring an ID with a physical address to vote - a P.O. box simply won't do anymore. This law effectively disenfranchises at least 5,000 members of the state's Native American community - ...read more
With a new activist right wing on the Court, the Trump regime is wasting no time abusing its power: To a far greater degree than its predecessors, the Trump administration has sought to bypass adverse lower-court rulings on some of its signature issues by seeking extraordinary ...read more
Congratulations. You made it. And in grand style. Only a little over half the country thinks you’re a lying alcoholic rageaholic rapist prick. The important thing is exactly half the Senate was willing to look the other way. The country that let O.J. walk for murder allowed you ...read more
In less than four weeks, America will go to the polls and vote. By every imaginable indicator, unless something massive happens in between now and then, Republicans are going to be annihilated by an electorate so pissed off that all the gerrymandering and voter suppression the ...read more
A few weeks ago, Real Time host Bill Maher invited Steve Bannon onto his show, after he was disinvited from the New Yorker Festival. The interview was criticized by the left, just as Bannon's recent appearance in The Economist's festival and his documentary with Errol Morris, ...read more
Picture this: It's 2020. Donald Trump and the entire leadership of the GOP have been caught on video eating a live baby while worshipping a golden statue of Vladimir Putin. Except for the 60 million Trump voters who applaud them for their healthy nutritional habits and choice of ...read more
As Bob Cesca routinely points out in his work here at the Banter, Donald Trump always makes things worse for Donald Trump. And this week, Trump's self destructive tendencies were on full display as he took time at a rally in Mississippi to mock Christine Blasey Ford's testimony ...read more
Ever since Brett Kavanaugh first stepped up to the microphone to publicly accept Donald Trump's offer to become the next associate justice of the Supreme Court, I've been screaming to anyone who'll listen about the obvious, observable fact that Kavanaugh is being puppeteered by ...read more
Let's just say for a moment that Brett Kavanaugh is innocent of the sexual assault charges leveled against him by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, Julie Swetnik, and Deborah Ramirez. We could for example, envision a scenario where all the women mistakenly identified Kavanaugh as ...read more
If Lindsey Graham is any indication, Senate Republicans are absolutely furious after Dr. Christine Ford gave her testimony on Thursday. Hoping to have a female lawyer discredit her like she was on trial, Dr. Ford instead gave a brutally honest and credible account of what ...read more
“I may not be as stong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.” ― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway's last and perhaps greatest story, The Old Man And The Sea keeps popping into my head as I watch Donald Trump and the congressional ...read more
Last night on Anderson Cooper 360, panelists Jeffrey Toobin and Kirsten Powers found themselves having to calm down Michael Caputo, whose defense of Brett Kavanaugh turned into a full-on temper tantrum when they called him out on his lies. Caputo, a Republican aide, has worked ...read more
There are only three areas of bipartisan consensus in America anymore: the sun is hot, water is wet, and Ted Cruz is a terrible person. Democrats have hated him since he was elected Senator in 2012, and Republicans haven't been much nicer - as Lindsey Graham said, "if you killed ...read more
The 2018 midterms are potentially America's last chance to hold Donald Trump and his corrupt administration to account. But now, they have also become a referendum on Brett Kavanaugh and the sham hearings Republicans have foisted upon us. There were many red flags against ...read more
Over the past few days, Republicans have tied themselves in knots to defend Brett Kavanaugh from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who accused him of attempting to rape her when they were in high school. The GOP has trotted out all kinds of excuses, from the letter signed by 65 of ...read more
Since Doctor Christine Blasey Ford went public with her allegations that Brett Kavanaugh attempted to rape her in high school, Senate Republicans have tried to frame the debate as "he said/she said," with only two people to be questioned. Their efforts to stonewall an FBI ...read more
Although the Brett Kavanaugh hearings will reopen on Monday, with Doctor Christine Blasey Ford testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the White House still refuses to ask the FBI to investigate her allegations of sexual assault and attempted rape, much to the ...read more
This weekend, Stanford Professor Christine Blasey Ford revealed that at 15, she was sexually assaulted by a then-17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh, who held her down and covered her mouth when she tried to scream. If there was ever a moment to end this farce of a hearing and yank his ...read more
With the focus on Steve Bannon being disinvited from The New Yorker, there has been a flurry of hand-wringers on both the left and right asking why we can't engage the other side in debate. The answer is because people like Bannon, are so steeped in their own self-righteousness ...read more
Chris Rock had a joke a back in the 90's about not bothering with gun control and making bullets cost $5000 each instead. Today, the Supreme Court gave the gun control movement the next best thing by affirming that while there is a second amendment right to own a gun, there's no ...read more
Shortly before his death, former President Gerald R. Ford declared, "I am prepared to allow history's judgment of my term in office to rest (if necessary, exclusively) on my nomination thirty years ago of Justice John Paul Stevens to the U.S. Supreme Court." Stevens, an Illinois ...read more
Dean Heller, the Republican senator from Nevada, is desperate. He's unpopular, his party is unpopular, and his president is even more unpopular. And he's running for reelection in a state that Trump lost in a year that Democrats are angrier than the Tea Party could possibly ...read more
UPDATE: Literally as I was posting this article, word came down that Justice Alito rejected the plea of the PA GOP to preserve their unconstitutional congressional map. Republicans are running out of legal options to forestall the loss of their precious map. Now we'll see if ...read more
There are exactly two ways to approach Gil v. Whitford, the gerrymandering case currently before the Supreme Court. One, you can look at the merits of the case and decide whether or not the extreme partisan gerrymandering Republicans have engaged in has, in fact, stripped people ...read more
At the same time newspapers are stepping up their game to hold Donald Trump accountable for his growing number of gaffes, scandals and outright crimes, they're putting in the extra effort to wipe the slate clean for the GOP. Recently, Republicans have taken to complaining that ...read more
As a flood of dark money swamps Washington in support of placing Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, the Democratic Party has a choice to make... To continue reading this article, please go here. A Banter Membership gets you access to the magazine and all our Members Only content. ...read more
With Trump's presidency on the brink of collapse (in just three weeks!), Republicans seem intent to strap themselves to the side of the Titanic and ride it all the way to the bottom of the ocean. Instead of investigating the now-screamingly obvious ties between Russia and a ...read more
With the announcement of a hard right nominee to fill the illegitimately open seat on the Supreme Court, Trump is handing the Democratic Party both an opportunity and a potential time bomb. Neil Gorsuch may not be quite as extreme as Antonin Scalia, but he's well to the right on ...read more
It's still a few days before Trump takes the oath of office and immediately violates it but we're already seeing the first signs of outrage over Democrats not playing ball. In a eye-popping display of short-term memory, The Washington Post's Abby Phillip had this to say about ...read more
So yesterday, Senate Majority Leader and molting turtle Mitch McConnell struck out hard against Chuck Schumer's promise to fight any Donald Trump Supreme Court pick that's out of the mainstream. Schumer's vow is shockingly benign when you consider that, given that this is Trump ...read more
In September, the Smithsonian opened the doors of the brand new National Museum Of African-American History and Culture. The museum, on the National Mall near the Washington Monument, features extensive exhibits on a variety of topics related to black Americans. But one ...read more
The blocking of Judge Merrick Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court was a calculated risk on the part of Republicans. He's an eminently centrist pick who raised no real objections among Republicans other than "He's not a radical right wing extremist." But the gamble seems to ...read more
Sometimes, taking a step back from the day to day horror of Republican politics let's you put together a couple of disparate puzzle pieces. Case in point: What does the GOP gain from backing a losing and extraordinarily toxic presidential campaign? And how does this tie into the ...read more
With the presidential election just a week away and polls showing their nominee, Donald Trump losing bigly, GOP senators are walking back their promise to let the next president pick a new Supreme Court Justice. Shortly after Justice Antonin Scalia died early this year, ...read more
Now that he's done polishing Donald Trump's knob, Ted Cruz is reminding America why it hates him so much. On today's agenda: Letting us know the spurious reasoning behind the Republican plan to keep the Supreme Court crippled: LOVELAND, Colo. — Speaking to reporters after a ...read more
Back before Antonin Scalia (Satan Rot His Soul), died last year, a lot of anti-Hillary liberals insisted that the Supreme Court didn't matter; that ideological purity was far more important. After he died and Republicans took the unprecedented step of blocking any new Court ...read more
In a column titled The Clinton Agenda, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman lays out the case for why Hillary needs to not just win, but win big and what happens if does. First, the most obvious part: A landslide win gives us the Senate. That, in turn, gives us the Supreme ...read more
On Monday morning, President Obama was served a blow by the Supreme Court when it rejected the administration's request to rehear a case about his immigration executive orders. The policy in question would have granted millions of immigrants relief from deportation and allowed ...read more
Alexander Hamilton once wrote that of the government’s three branches, the Supreme Court was to be the “least dangerous.” The judiciary, he explained, would have “no influence over either the sword or the purse,” and therefore a limited capacity to “annoy or injure” the rest of ...read more
When President Obama named Merrick Garland as his nominee to replace influential racist Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, it's likely the last thing he concerned himself with was whether his choice would appeal to identity politics-obsessed millennial Tumblr-users. Not only ...read more
Everybody knows that Hillary Clinton has been beating up on Bernie Sanders but good over gun control, and Bernie has stubbornly continued to insist that we need a law, not a judge or jury, to decide if gun manufacturers are liable for the damage their products cause. However, an ...read more
With President Obama's Supreme Court Justice pick of Merrick Garland, we can assume that given his deliberative tendencies, he took many factors into account in reaching his decision. Today’s toxic political climate forced him to become far more tactical than he’d like to have ...read more
Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell informed President Obama of his intention to leave the Supreme Court vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia until there is a new president in 2017. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has given Democrats a clear message that as long as ...read more
It has always been my personal policy to do my best to refrain from speaking ill of the dead, even on a substantive basis, for at least a day or two following an untimely death, and if possible, to find something nice to say. In Justice Scalia's case, I recounted my lone meeting ...read more
In August of 2015, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) mandated that power plants in America reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by 32 percent from 2005 levels over the next 15 years (till 2030). It also ruled that 28 percent of the power states sell to their citizens ...read more
It's difficult to emphasize enough how utterly off the rails the Republican crazy train has careened. As insane as the GOP was, say, two or three years ago, who would've guessed that in 2015, the Republican frontrunner for the presidency would be a TV reality show host named ...read more
Uh, oh. The Huffington Post and The New York Times reported this week that the Supreme Court will rehear the case, Fisher v. University of Texas, regarding affirmative action and the use of race as part of the decision making process in securing minority enrollment. The ...read more
On last night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart laid into Justice Antonin Scalia for his pissy dissent over the Supreme Court's gay marriage ruling. “I think we found Scalia’s tell,” said Stewart. “The crankiness of Scalia’s insults runs inverse to his intellectual consistency.” ...read more
The rabidly anti-gay Westboro Bapist Church appears to have gone into complete meltdown mode after the Supreme Court gay marriage ruling passed this morning. In a series of increasingly deranged tweets, the Church is warning America that the end is nigh and the country is well ...read more