I Could Be Wrong.

  We Don’t Need a Ballroom. We Need a President Who Represents the Nation. When the First Lady publicly demanded that Jimmy Kimmel, the late-night television host, be fired, it was more than a moment of frustration. It was a view into the governing style that demands loyalty and treats disagreements as betrayals. We see a governing style that demands loyalty even when the demand violates the Constitution.   Kimmel’s real offence wasn’t misconduct. It was honesty. In the political environment that we have now, honesty is being punished more harshly than wrongdoing. The Kimmel episode is not some isolated flare-up. It is a long-running pattern in which threats, personal attacks, and false accusations of treason are used as tools of public manipulation and political discipline. The First Lady’s demand fits neatly into a broader climate shaped by years of rhetoric that cast critics as enemies and opponents as traitors. This climate has not made America Safer. It has made America...

  Violence Has a Side – America Needs to Stop Pretending It Doesn’t Saturday night's alleged assassination attempt shocked the country. Any act of political violence is unacceptable, no matter who the target is. But at times like these, we need to speak honestly about political violence in America. One shocking event doesn’t erase the pattern we’ve been living with for years. And it doesn’t change the fact that violence in this country has been rising in one direction far more than the other. I want to think that most Americans, conservative, liberal, and independent, want the same basic things: safety, stability, and a country where ballots, not bullets, settle disagreements. We will never get there if we keep lying to ourselves about where the political violence is actually coming from. It is not “both sides.” It has never been “both sides.” Pretending otherwise is part of why the problem keeps getting worse. You don’t need a think tank or be a rocket scientist to see it. Jus...

  How We Got Into This Mess: When Leaders Push Past the Constitution and the Supreme Court Stops Holding the Line A lot of people talk about the Constitution, but how many people actually understand what it says or why the Founders wrote it the way they did? The Founders had one big goal: to make sure no one person or group could grab too much power. Remember, the Founders had lived under a King and didn’t like it. They wanted the exact opposite for the United States of America. They built a system with guardrails - limits - to protect everyone's rights and not just the rights of those holding power. These guardrails only work when two things happen: 1. Leaders respect the limits 2. The Supreme Court enforces the limits. Over the last several years, both of those things have broken down. That is how we ended up in the mess we’re in today. You have to ask yourself, “What did the Founders actually want?” I think the Founders cared about a few simple ideas: No one is above the law...

  For more than 250 years, the presidency and the country have rested on a simple foundation, the oath. They are just 35 words spoken by every president with a hand on the Bible, promising to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The oath is supposed to be the anchor that keeps the office tied to the rule of law, no matter the pressure, no matter the politics. But the system was never designed for a president who uses lawsuits as a regular political and personal tool by filing cases against media companies, state officials, private citizens, and even federal agencies within the Executive Branch.   My memory goes all the way back to the Eisenhower Administration, and I have never seen anything like it. Legal analysis and historians note that no previous president has sued his own government while simultaneously asserting broad immunity from the laws that bind everyone else. That combination alone pushes the presidency into territory the framers ...

  America Says It Protects Children. The Reality Tells a Different Story. America loves to say it cares about children. “Family values”, “protecting the innocent,” and “defending life” are the battle cries of many of the elections. But after the election, you have to look at how this country actually treats living, breathing children. Not the unborn, not the symbolic idea of a child, but real kids in real situations. That is when the truth becomes unavoidable. Children in America are not a priority; they are just something to use to get elected and then put out of mind when the election is over. Children are actually the people who survive some of the worst kinds of abuse and are treated as if they barely exist.   You can see the contradiction everywhere. The fetus is talked about like it is sacred, but once it becomes a child, the urgency disappears. The family the politician claims is so important is left to figure everything out alone. Survivors of child sexual assault ...

  The disaster that many of us knew would happen is here.   But to be honest with you, to say “I told you so” would just make it worse. There are times in a nation’s life when the truth stops being something people argue about and becomes something people can feel and see. We are in one of those moments now. The consequences of recent decisions, in the courts, in the economy, and in foreign policies aren’t theories anymore. They are showing up in our grocery bill, and strained foreign alliances, in the stress families carry, and the way that the world looks at the United States.   As tempting as it is for people to say “I told you so”, that phrase would only make the situation worse. Not because the warnings were wrong, but because it would  appear to be gloating. That may shut down the very people who most need to look at what's happening. The Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling is a good place to start, because it didn’t just change the legal standard; i...

  Like most Americans, I don’t wake up thinking about the Constitution. Most of us are thinking about groceries, rent, our kids, their jobs, just the day-to-day things that we have to do to survive. But there should be one thing that nearly everyone agrees on: if you swear an oath to the Constitution, you should keep it. No excuses. No party loopholes. No hiding behind talking points. An oath is supposed to mean something. When members of Congress stop honoring it, the consequences don’t stay in Washington. They land on all of us. Over the last several years, a large block of lawmakers has repeatedly failed to carry out the basic duties the Constitution assigns to Congress. This isn’t about party or ideology. It is about whether the people we elected are doing the job the founder gave them, as prescribed by the Constitution. The truth is simple: when Congress stops doing its job, America pays the price.  Congress has a job, and it just isn’t doing it. The Constitution gives Co...

  There’s a simple way to judge a country: look at whose lives it protects, and whose lives it’s willing to forget. For years now, we’ve heard the phrase “All Lives Matter.” It sounds fair. It sounds equal. It sounds like common sense. But a country doesn’t reveal its values through slogans. It reveals them through actions, through the lives it defends, the lives it ignores, and the lives it quietly pushes out of sight. And lately, America has been doing a whole lot of looking away. When Black Americans said they were being killed during traffic stops and routine encounters, the response from many leaders wasn’t concern; it was irritation. Instead of saying, “Let’s fix the problem so fewer people die,” we heard “Blue Lives Matter,” “Stop resisting,” and “BLM is a terrorist group.” A man died in a chokehold on camera. We all saw, from the beginning to the end. It was like a modern-day lynching. Millions marched peacefully. The answer from those in power was “law and order,” and “...

  It is Easter again. I walked away from the church years ago, in fact, a long time ago. Why? I just couldn't understand what the Bible said, and what society was becoming, and how they interacted with each other. I saw the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer, and I could no longer reconcile how this fit the teachings of the Gospel. The moment that reminded me why I walked away wasn’t a sermon or a scandal. It was watching a politician, a man who openly admits he doesn’t read the Bible much, argue with the Pope about Jesus as if he were the expert in the room. One man has spent his entire life studying Scripture. The other can’t even quote Scripture. Yet millions of Christians lined up behind the politician anyway. In fact, they have even compared him to Jesus. That was the moment I realized I hadn’t walked away from Jesus. I was walking away from what had been done to him, not by his crucifixion 2000 years ago, but by how we crucify him almost daily today. Whe...