Author: Reporter

In 2020, North Carolina seemed the model of an evenly-divided swing state. Then-President Donald Trump barely won, beating Democrat Joe Biden by just over a percentage point. Meanwhile, the state’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, won reelection by a relatively comfortable 5 points. Even last year, as Republicans won two seats on the state Supreme Court, North Carolina’s congressional delegation split evenly between Democrats and the GOP. But it is the Republican Party that is making the decisions in the state, thanks to recent seat gains in the legislature and aggressive stances from GOP lawmakers. It has passed voting changes...

The new proposal to spend $614 million on American Family Field in exchange for the Brewers agreeing to stay in Milwaukee through 2050 is not the deal it’s being sold as. It’s difficult to see this as anything other than the latest attempt by a sports team to extort massive amounts of cash to prop up an already-bloated bottom line. The stadium cost about $290 million when it was built two decades ago. What Legislators are now talking about is equivalent to more than the original construction cost, even accounting for inflation. Let’s break this down. The proposal gives...

Barack Obama, mindful of the urgent power of a president’s words, liked to say he was guarded with his language because anything he said could send troops marching or markets tumbling. His successor, Donald Trump, showed no such restraint. Now Trump is facing dozens of criminal charges in four separate indictments, two ofthem anchored in the Republican’s lie that he did not lose the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden. And Trump’s propensity for falsehoods and his right to utter them are at the core of his legal defense. Though the U.S. presidency is vested with many overt...

Overturning Roe v. Wade and eliminating affirmative action in higher education had been leading goals of the conservative legal movement for decades. In a span of 370 days, a Supreme Court reshaped by three justices nominated by President Donald Trump made both a reality. Last June, the court ended nationwide protections for abortion rights. This past week, the court’s conservative majority decided that race-conscious admissions programs at the oldest private and public colleges in the country, Harvard and the University of North Carolina, were unlawful. Precedents that had stood since the 1970s were overturned, explicitly in the case of...