Breaking News

Columns

Supreme Court throws out Trump’s tariffs, upholds Constitution

So much for the notion that the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 majority of justices appointed by Republican presidents, was going to be a rubber stamp for Donald Trump. That is a frequently voiced charge by partisan Democrats, and a fear of many ambivalent voters who find many of Trump’s policies agreeable but worry about his overreach. That’s one political meme refuted by the court’s Learning Resources v. Trump decision, announced after more than the expected delay for the drafting of concurring opinions. The court struck down Trump’s beloved tariffs, with only one ...

Government subsidies have killed the EV industry

Here’s a depressing-but all-too-predictable headline from The Wall Street Journal last week: “Detroit’s EV Pullback Is Costing $50 Billion.” Yikes. That’s a lot of money for the American auto industry to lose. Once again, we have confirmation of an iron law of economics: If you want to kill an industry, subsidize it. The best recent example of this rule is the green energy industry (solar and wind power), which has been heavily boosted with taxpayer dollars for almost 50 years now and is still an inconsequential form of overall energy supply. Dozens of promising firms ...

Consider the differences between Jack Hughes and Eileen Gu

The Winter Olympics had its thrills and spills — and a deep philosophical divide represented by two American, or American-born, athletes. Jack Hughes, the gold medal-winning American hockey player for the U.S. team, gave voice to a patriotic reflex in his heartfelt expressions of love of his country. Eileen Gu, the gold medal-winning American-born free-style skier competing for China, exemplified a cosmopolitan ideal that floats above mere nationhood. This difference — between the bloody-mouthed hockey player draped in his own country’s flag and the exceptionally ...

Consideration of how a party has been able to offend its voters

Gavin Newsom won’t be the Democrats’ 2028 presidential nominee unless he wins a significant share of the African American vote. So how’s he courting it? Promoting his new memoir to a largely Black audience in Atlanta, the California governor decided to forge a connection by boasting about his poor SAT scores and difficulty reading. “I’m like you,” he said. “You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy” and “you’ve never seen me read a speech. Because I cannot read a speech.” Newsom suffers from dyslexia, but he obviously wasn’t assuming he was addressing a room ...

Remembering work of Jesse Jackson

President Trump called Rev. Jesse Jackson “a force of nature” and so he was. Jackson, who died last Tuesday at 84, was the last great orator of the civil rights movement. He could bring an audience to cheers or to tears with the power of his personality. I once accompanied him to a Washington, D.C., public middle school. He admonished the young girls in the all-Black audience not to get pregnant and to the boys he said to respect the girls and refrain from sex until marriage. They seemed to hang on his every word. Afterward I said to him: “That should be your main message if you ...

Miracle on Ice remains the greatest sports story

Everyone who witnessed it remembers where they were. The victory of the gold-medal-winning U.S. men’s hockey team over the Soviets at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y., was the greatest American sporting event of the 20th century, featuring the greatest call of all time — broadcaster Al Michaels indelibly counting down the final seconds before exclaiming, “Do you believe in miracles? ... Yes!” On the occasion of this year’s Winter Olympics, Netflix has released a new documentary on the team, “Miracle: The Boys of ‘80.” It is a story that has been ...