Has Biden crippled his Presidency with the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan? Probably not, but Biden has badly tarnished his brand. The President should have postponed the U.S. ‘s exit until December, evacuated all 200,000 of its Afghan allies, and then ended American air support for the Afghan forces.

The Supreme Court adopted a tortured rationale for upholding two Arizona laws that reduce minority voters’ ability to cast their ballots, in its Brnovich v. National Democratic Committee decision. Justice Kagan showed that the two laws had an unfair impact on Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans. The Court is basically giving a green light to Republican lawmakers in states like Georgia who are enacting voting restrictive laws. (We discussed the background for the decision in Part 1).

The Supreme Court has struck another blow against voting rights, by upholding two Arizona laws that make it harder for minority Americans to cast their ballots.  The Court’s ruling in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee is very bad news for the Department of Justice’s lawsuit challenging Georgia’s new laws restricting voters. So far this year, 14 states have enacted laws designed to suppress minority voters.  The practical result of the Brnovich decision is that lower Federal courts probably won’t be able to block such abuses of political power. 

Donald Trump falsely claimed that the 2020 election was “rigged” and “stolen”.  Sadly, there is a great risk that the 2022 and 2024 elections will be rigged and stolen…by Republicans. Democratic leaders in Congress do not seem to have an effective strategy to counter the Republicans’ drive to establish one-party rule in most states. So Democrats will have to fight this on the state level, by mounting massive voter registration drives.

President Joe Biden has mapped out a strategy to make the United States more competitive and block, or at least slow down, China’s drive to dominate the world economy. The $6 trillion price tag for Biden’s proposals is expensive, and he may not be able to get his program through Congress. But if he fails, make sure that your children start studying Chinese, because the U.S. could lose its role as the global leader. Meanwhile, Sen. Mitch McConnell continues to act as though he is China’s best friend, sabotaging any attempts to repair our physical infrastructure and the tattered social safety net for less affluent families. 

As Republicans move to expel Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) from her leadership post in the House, the warning lights are flashing red for American democracy. Republicans are punishing Cheney because she has committed the cardinal sin of contradicting Donald Trump and defending the 2020 election results as legitimate. In the Party’s upper echelons, this is now considered treason.

In this fraught moment, Liz Cheney is the enemy of the tyrant, so she is my friend, politically speaking. Democrats should support her and the small band of other brave Republicans in Congress who are resisting the Party’s slide into an authoritarian cult.

You may have heard, from Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Wall Street Journal, and other purveyors of alternative reality that there is nothing sinister, nothing wrong at all, about the new voting law that the Georgia legislature passed on March 25. The state is just making its practices more uniform and expanding voters’ access, they claim.

That is sheer, utter nonsense—a whitewash, if you will.

The Republicans in Georgia were shocked when Joe Biden won the state’s electoral votes and its voters elected two Democratic Senators. The Republicans are desperately trying to prevent more Democratic victories. So they are cheating, tilting the playing field, creating obstacles for Blacks and urban Democratic voters in Georgia.

President Joe Biden is making a big bet, with his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, and the future of American democracy could depend on whether he succeeds or fails.  Biden’s relief program will help millions of Americans; it is the right thing to do and it should boost the economy. But the key question is: can Biden draw many white working-class and lower middle-class voters back to the Democratic Party?  

Biden’s plan offers massive, concrete benefits, and it is targeted at less affluent Americans, including white working-class and lower middle-class voters. This is a course correction for the Democratic Party, which has neglected those groups for three decades and alienated many of them with its stances on cultural issues such as gun control, immigration and abortion.

In 2020, as the pandemic raged across America, election officials scrambled, looking for ways to make voting safer. They dramatically expanded the use of early voting, mail-in ballots and other measures. Turnout soared, and the country conducted a fair, secure and safe election. The new approaches worked so well that many states may adopt them permanently.

But many Republicans, cheered on by Donald Trump, want to make voting harder, based on his lies about election fraud and his attacks on mail-in ballots in particular. Unfortunately, Trump’s Big Lie has worked: about 70% of Republicans believe that the election was stolen.

Since November, Republican lawmakers have introduced over 160 proposals in 33 states to curtail voting rights, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Including bills that the Republicans have carried over from previous sessions, they are pursuing over 400 measures in 43 states. They would restrict mail-in ballots and early voting, or they would disenfranchise voters through other means, such as tighter I.D. requirements or voter purges.