Author: Heather Cox Richardson

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” These were the first lines in a pamphlet called The American Crisis that appeared in Philadelphia on December 19, 1776, at a time when the fortunes of the American patriots seemed at an all-time low. Just five months before, the members of the Second Continental Congress had adopted the Declaration of Independence, explaining to the world that...

The story broke on December 17 that members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol think they know who wrote one of the eye-popping texts to Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows. The text was the one sent the day after the election, before all the states had called the election, suggesting that Republicans should not wait for results in three states but should simply appoint their own electors. Then the whole mess would be thrown to the Supreme Court. Trump had frequently said that the Supreme Court, to...

Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson asked whether opponents of Texas’s S.B. 8, the so-called Heartbeat Bill, could bring a Federal case to block the law, which gets around normal challenges by putting private individuals, rather than the state itself, in charge of enforcing it. By a vote of 5 to 4, the court said they could sue, but it limited that ability so severely that the law itself will remain largely intact. The state law, which went into effect on September 1, prohibits abortion after six weeks of a pregnancy, before most women know they are pregnant. And yet,...

Senate Republicans will not issue any sort of a platform before next year’s midterm elections. At a meeting of donors and lawmakers in mid-November, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that the Republican Party’s 2024 nominee would be responsible for deciding on an agenda. The Republican senators in 2022 will simply attack the Democrats. Rather than advancing any sort of a positive program, Republican Senators will be focusing on culture wars. Those have devolved to a point that Republicans are denying the legitimacy of any Democratic victory because, by their definition, Democrats are destroying the country. As Marjorie...