Author: Heather Cox Richardson

“The ‘trickle-down’ Theory: The principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps dropped by the rich, can best be served by giving the rich bigger meals.” – William Blum It was reported that as soon as a Democrat is back in the White House, Republicans intend to retrench and be careful about how the country spends money, although during Trump’s term, even before the pandemic, they spent huge sums without worrying about it. This is a pattern. Since President Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s, Republicans have insisted that tax cuts will pay for themselves by stimulating...

Twenty more House Republicans, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the House, signed onto the lawsuit filed by the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asking the Supreme Court first to take up the lawsuit, and then to throw out the presidential electors for Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Michigan on December 11. If it would do so, those state legislatures could appoint a new slate of electors for Trump, thereby tossing out President-Elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election and handing the White House back to Trump. And yet, on the evening of December 11,...

More than half of the Republicans in the House of Representatives signed onto Texas’s lawsuit on December 10 asking the Supreme Court to overturn the results of the 2020 election and install Trump, rather than the legitimately elected Joe Biden, into the White House Democrat Biden won the election by more than 7 million votes and by 306 to 232 electoral votes. Trump has lost 55 of the 56 court cases he has brought to change the election’s outcome, and all 50 states have certified their election results. This election is not close; attempts to overturn it reject the...

One of my children asked me once if people living through the Great Depression understood just how bad their era would look to historians. I answered that, on the whole, I thought not. People are focused on what’s in front of them: finding work, feeding their kids, trying to keep it together, making it through the day. It’s only when historians look back to gauge an era that they put the full picture together. So for those who cannot see it: we are in one of the most profound crises of American history. We are in the midst of...