As distilled from an email update from Michael Waldman, President and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court struck down what remains of the Voting Rights Act. Soon, it will rule on the president’s birthright citizenship executive order, one that, as Waldman writes, “could upend what it means to be an American.” That is not...

Britain’s King Charles III spoke to a chamber that, for a moment, set aside party labels—Democrat and Republican—and listened not as factions, but as participants in a relationship that has endured for more than two centuries. What stood out in Charles’s address was not grandeur, but restraint. Not proclamation, but purpose. And beneath it all, a quiet ethical framework worth...

How does a country move from argument to action? The shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is not an isolated event. It is part of a pattern, a deepening reflex in this country to divide the world into friend and enemy. We have been moving, steadily and dangerously, toward seeing one another not as fellow citizens, but as sides...

There are moments when events reveal more than they intend. What unfolded Saturday at the Washington Hilton was not simply an isolated act. It was what happens when something deeper begins to intersect—when grievance meets amplification, when suspicion hardens into certainty, and when language that once stopped short of harm no longer does. We often look for a single cause....

What is power accountable to when it no longer accepts limits? We have seen what happens when power turns inward—when it begins to believe it answers only to itself. There was a time when presidents understood that authority came with limits. Not just legal limits, but moral ones. They did not see disagreement—especially from moral voices—as something to be attacked...

What does leadership require when decisions send others into harm’s way, and uncertainty is shared not just by those in command, but by the nation itself? General Dwight D. Eisenhower once observed that “the supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity.” Not confidence. Not control. Integrity. And it is precisely that quality that is tested when clarity is hardest to...

Question: How low can Donald Trump go?Answer: Low enough to attack the head of the Catholic Church and, by extension, 1.4 billion Catholics. His latest descent comes in the form of an attack on Pope Leo XIV. Not over policy. Not over governance. But something far more telling: moral authority. In a post on his social media site, Truth Social,...

What will define us at 250 years—not our disagreements, but what we are willing to believe about one another, and about the truth itself? As we approach the 250th anniversary of our democratic republic, I find myself returning to a familiar concern, now sharpened by the widening divide in our country. Disagreement has always been part of the American story....

On Thursday, three days before Easter Sunday, Pope Leo XIV delivered a message that went straight to the point. “Leadership is not measured by authority, but by the willingness to kneel.” That’s humility. Not the kind we admire in passing. The kind that asks something of us. Today, when leadership is measured by loudness and control, Leo offered a different...

Since my dinner with Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison, I’ve been reading more about James Madison, who’s often called the father of the Constitution. What struck me is this: despite the distance of time, he isn’t speaking about us. He’s speaking to us. Madison did not fear a foreign army nearly as much as he feared us. That is not an...