Author: Heather Cox Richardson

The debt ceiling is not about future spending; future spending is debated when Congress takes up the budget. The debt ceiling is a curious holdover from the past, when Congress actually wanted to enable the government to be flexible in its borrowing rather than holding the financial reins too tightly. In the era of World War I, when the country needed to raise a lot of money fast, Congress stopped passing specific revenue measures and instead set a cap on how much money the government could borrow through all of the different instruments it used. Beginning in the 1980s,...

Justin J. Pearson, along with Representatives Justin Jones and Gloria Johnson, the Tennessee Three, joined supporters this morning at the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, before a scheduled special meeting of the Shelby County Board of Commissioners to decide whether to reappoint Pearson to the Tennessee legislature after it expelled him last week. Republicans expelled Pearson and Jones from that body after they and Johnson engaged in a protest for gun safety without being recognized by the chair. The Nashville Metropolitan Council reinstated Jones on April 10. Meeting at the Lorraine Motel conjured...

On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States Army at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Lee’s surrender did not end the war, there were still two major armies in the field, but everyone knew the surrender signaled that the American Civil War was coming to a close. Soldiers and sailors of the United States had defeated the armies and the navy of the Confederate States of America across the country and the seas, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and almost...

“It’s not easy. It’s not — this has never been easy. Democracy is hard work. The work of democracy is never finished. It’s never laid down and that’s it, all you have to do. It must be protected constantly. We have to continually renew our commitment, continually strengthen our institutions, root out corruption where we find it, seek to build consensus, and reject political violence, give hate and extremism no safe harbor … And as you can probably tell, strengthening democracy is a subject about which I am somewhat passionate. I believe this is a defining challenge of our...

The New York grand jury investigating Trump’s 2016 hush-money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels has voted to indict the former president. While we do not know the full range of charges, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office confirmed that they were forthcoming tonight when it released a statement saying, “This evening we contacted Mr. Trump’s attorney to coordinate his surrender to the Manhattan D.A.’s office for arraignment on a Supreme Court indictment, which remains under seal.” This is the first time in history a former United States president has been indicted, although it is worth remembering that...