On Tuesday, Democrats and Republicans will compete for the 42nd time in a nonpresidential-year contest -- a rivalry that goes back to 1854. That's the oldest such partisan competition in the world.
Do they live in two different worlds? White college graduate women favor Democrats over Republicans in House elections by a 62 to 35 percent margin. White non-college-graduate men favor Republicans over Democrats in House elections by a 58 to 38 percent margin.
"I have some thoughts on 'enthusiasm' and the election," tweeted Amy Walter, the Cook Political Report's ace analyst of House races. What I and, I suspect, others expected to follow was a discussion of how voters' enthusiasm, positive or negative, tends to determine who wins elections, especially in off-year elections, when turnout is more variable.
"You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about," Hillary Clinton told CNN last Tuesday. Her words cannot be taken literally, for you can be civil if you want to; they're a statement that she doesn't want to.
"I can't think of a more embarrassing scandal for the United States Senate since the McCarthy hearings," said Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn as then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the afternoon of Sept. 27, "and the question was asked, 'Have you no sense of decency?'"
Here's my question," tweets legal scholar Jeffrey A. Sachs, obviously in response to the controversy over Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. "what is the alternative reality where Roe was never decided, levels of partisan polarization are identical to our own, and the SCOTUS appointments process is markedly better?"
"I did not, and of course I looked for it, looked for it hard." That was Bob Woodward, promoting his book on the Trump White House, "Fear," replying to talk radio host and columnist Hugh Hewitt's question "Did you, Bob Woodward, hear anything in your research, in your interviews, that sounded like espionage or collusion?"
"It's the Lord of the Flies on LaSalle Street," wrote columnist John Kass in the Chicago Tribune. In case the references are unclear, whether because high schools haven't been assigning the William Golding novel in the last few decades or because out-of-towners unaccountably don't realize that Chicago's City Hall front is on LaSalle Street, the curmudgeonly Kass was writing about Mayor Rahm Emanuel's announcement that he won't run for a third term as mayor next February.
The highlight, at least for some television watchers, of the first day of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, came when the young woman seated directly behind the nominee rested her right hand on her opposite elbow and pressed her index fingertip against her thumb, forming a kind of circle or OK sign.
Warm remembrances of Sen. John McCain have been filling the political air since his death last weekend. They'll continue through his the memorial service in Phoenix, his funeral Saturday at Washington National Cathedral and his interment at the Naval Academy cemetery in Annapolis on Sunday.
When you lose a game, particularly a game you had good reason to expect you'd win, do you try to figure out how to play better? Or is your first reaction to demand changes in the rules?
Is President Trump fulfilling candidate Trump's promises?
We're heading into the home stretch in America's unusually lengthy (six months and nine days) primary election season. Some three-quarters of Americans have had a chance to vote for Democratic and Republican candidates for Congress, and state and local offices.
Why is it considered "liberal" to compel others to say or fund things they don't believe? That's a question raised by three Supreme Court decisions this year. And it's a puzzling development for those of us old enough to remember when liberals championed free speech -- even advocacy of sedition or sodomy -- and conservatives wanted government to restrain or limit it.
Sometimes a society's values change sharply with almost no one noticing, much less anticipating the consequences. In 1968, according to a Gallup survey, 70 percent of American adults said that a family of three or more children was "ideal" -- about the same number as Gallup surveys starting in 1938. That number helps explain the explosive baby boom after Americans were no longer constrained by depression and world war.
"It's time for enlightened America to hit reset on affirmative action once and for all," writes Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter in The American Interest. By affirmative action, of course, he means the racial quotas and preferences that most selective college and university admissions departments employ.
Theater, much like Japan's Kabuki -- that's all the Supreme Court confirmation process is. Donald Trump's presentations of his two nominees, Judge Neil Gorsuch last year and Judge Brett Kavanaugh on Monday, were uncharacteristically graceful -- a worthy theatrical innovation, in the view of even some Trump critics.
Will NAFTA survive? Last week, Mexico elected as president longtime NAFTA critic Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (always called "AMLO") by a wide margin. He promptly had a cordial telephone conversation with longtime NAFTA critic President Donald Trump, who remains U.S. president for the next 30 months and, if re-elected, for all of AMLO's six-year term.
It became official just after lunchtime on Wednesday, just after the Supreme Court announced its final decisions of the term and went into recess. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the 104th person to serve on the court, is retiring, effective just after his 82nd birthday next month, after 30 years of service.
"I would prefer not to." That was the invariable reply of the title character of Herman Melville's 1853 story "Bartleby, the Scrivener," when asked by his employer to perform a task.
