What we learn from the history of the Second Amendment This is the text of a talk I gave to this group: Here is an [edited] transcription of the talk along with citations and a list of sources at the end. The title of this talk is  “What We Learn from the History of the […]

I understand why people are saying that Trump got off on a technicality. The idea is to emphasize that most of the Senators who voted to acquit Trump did so even though they thought he was guilty. To be precise, it was a made-up technicality. The “jurisdictional” problem the Republican Senators found was not one

I had a hard time answering this question⬇️ because it brought back an unpleasant memory: The time I tried to explain on Twitter that the voting machines in Georgia were secure. So before I answer this question, let me tell you a story. First, my credentials. I monitored polling places and machine vote tabulation in

Last night two things happened thirteen minutes apart. At 4:30 pm California time, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a decision in the Wisconsin dispute over whether late-arriving mail-in ballots should be counted. Kavanaugh’s concurrence raised some eyebrows. Exactly thirteen minutes later, Trump tweeted something so inaccurate that Twitter hid it from view

One of my followers on Twitter suggested that Trump supporters don’t understand that he poses a danger to democracy. I disagree. There may be a few Trump supporters who don’t understand the danger posed by a president who openly says that the way for him to stay in power is to “get rid of the

I finished reading Stuart Stevens’ book, It Was All A Lie. There’s so much to talk about with this book, I’ll have to do more than one blog post. This is Part I: The Making of the Modern GOP.  Spoiler: We already knew a lot of this. For example ⤵️ The power a small group

Information for this post is from Book 6 in my Making of America series, Thurgood Marshall. Marshall was born in Baltimore in 1908. His interest in law, and his awareness of racial injustice was awakened early (excerpts from my book)             Thurgood’s seat in one classroom was by a window giving him a view of the

Today is an important anniversary. 73 years ago, on April 23, 1951, in Farmville, VA, Barbara Johns led a walkout of her segregated high school to protest the unfair and deplorable conditions of her school. What?! You don’t know who Barbara Johns was? She led her walkout more than 4 years before Rosa Parks refused

The Zelensky-Trump phone call was released by the White House and is here. In his riveting testimony last February before the House Committee on Oversight, Cohen explained how Trump pulls people in and gets them to lie and cheat for him. Cohen quotations from here. Trump doesn’t order anyone to lie or commit crimes. He’s

Alternate title: California shows the way California used to be Republican. We gave the nation Nixon and Reagan. Republican candidates won CA in every presidential election between 1952 and 1988 except one: By 1990, CA demographics were changing, with growing Asian and Spanish-speaking communities. Then California’s “Latino and Asian populations boomed in the 1990s.” In

I returned from Texas where I served as a volunteer for Raices in the Karnes Detention Center. In response to the crises at the border, Raices put out a call for volunteer Spanish-speaking lawyers. My husband is a native Spanish speaker so we go as a team. This was our second volunteer trip to the

I was honored to be the guest speaker at yesterday’s Indivisible / Santa Barbara march. The video is here. Here is the text: We are here to make our voices heard. This is democracy at work. If you’re like me, perhaps, in the past, you took American democracy a little bit for granted. Some of

To read this page on the Harris School of Public Policy website, click here   Why are challenges to democracy so important to effectively address? Democracies can, and do, die.  “If it happens here,” says Prof. David Strauss, “it won’t happen all at once. A large, diverse society with democratic traditions and a strong civil

On Friday, January 4, I appeared on KVEC News/Talk 920 AM and 96.5 FM to talk about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Here is a transcript of a four of the questions and answers: Q: What was the most surprising thing you learned about Ruth Bader Ginsburg? What surprised me most will probably surprise a lot of