Blog - Page 2 of 18 - Robert Kuttner

Don’t Mess with LGBT Texans

The Texas legislature is considering a bill that would allow any person in a licensed occupation, such as plumbers, opticians, pharmacists, and even non-emergency doctors, to refuse service to someone who happened to be LGBT because it offended their religious sensibility. You know, God created Eve from Adam’s rib, marriage is between a man and a woman, and who is the government to mess with God’s will? You wonder why the racists didn’t come up with this ploy back [...]

By Robert Kuttner|2019-05-06T19:18:30-04:00May 6th, 2019|Kuttner on TAP|0 Comments

Trump and China: The Art of the Cave-In

Several leaked reports from people “close to the negotiations” suggest that Trump will soon announce a trade deal with the Chinese government pretty much on China’s terms. This will serve Trump’s goal of changing the subject for one news cycle. But it will not serve the American economy. All the indications are that China will make an ad hoc agreement to buy a lot of stuff, but not alter China’s mercantilist system, nor its systematic theft of U.S. intellectual [...]

By Robert Kuttner|2019-05-04T21:41:11-04:00May 4th, 2019|Kuttner on TAP|0 Comments

In Which the Superb Tom Edsall Gets One Big Thing Wrong About Unions

New York Times contributing columnist Tom Edsall is a national resource. In column after column, he provides encyclopedic research both scholarly and journalistic, extended interviews, astute insights, and hard questions for progressives on politically urgent topics. His most recent column, on the political consequences of the decline of unions, is no exception. As Edsall demonstrates, the Republican right’s strategic war on unions has been devastating to Democrats, since union members and union families, with their sense of solidarity and [...]

By Robert Kuttner|2019-05-01T22:00:43-04:00May 1st, 2019|Uncategorized|0 Comments

This Is What a Constitutional Crisis Looks Like

After the midterm elections of 2018, many of us comforted ourselves that democracy had held after all. Democrats took back the House, and there was no outright theft other than the structural theft of gerrymandering and voter suppression. But Democrats had won by a theft-proof margin. Elsewhere, adult minders at the White House, the Justice Department, and the Pentagon were containing Trump’s most lunatic impulses. The “deep state” so vilified by Steve Bannon was doing its job. Trump had [...]

By Robert Kuttner|2019-04-29T15:39:28-04:00April 29th, 2019|Kuttner on TAP|0 Comments

Trump’s Infrastructile Dysfunction

Donald Trump is cornered. In his increasingly desperate efforts to bully and bluff the House investigations of leads provided by the Mueller report, Trump oscillates between bluster and changing the subject. His latest gambit is infrastructure. The American people, he insists, don’t want to hear about obstruction of justice. They want to hear about infrastructure. Indeed they do. Democrats are proposing a multi-trillion dollar Green New Deal. So where has the president been? Nowhere. He had two years with [...]

By Robert Kuttner|2019-04-25T13:52:04-04:00April 25th, 2019|Kuttner on TAP|0 Comments

Warren Does it Again

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s twin proposal for substantial student debt relief plus tuition-free higher education is a huge winner—economically, politically, and even fiscally. It demonstrates once again why she is such a leader at connecting brave policy ideas to the lived condition of ordinary Americans. The idea of cancelling $50,000 of debt is smart. It puts the relief where it is most needed. And it pays the cost by a tax on the super-rich—those whose own kids have no trouble [...]

By Robert Kuttner|2019-04-23T00:31:11-04:00April 23rd, 2019|Kuttner on TAP|0 Comments

It Ain’t Over

Bill Barr gave it his best shot, clumsily playing the role more of Trump's defense attorney than attorney general. But Barr's grotesquely dishonest spinning of the Mueller Report has backfired, and the reverberations will only increase. Here is the key line from the special counsel’s report: The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the president’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system’s checks and balances and the principle that no person [...]

By Robert Kuttner|2019-04-20T15:11:45-04:00April 20th, 2019|Kuttner on TAP|0 Comments

Notre Dame: God must be very angry at Her children

I am neither a Catholic nor any sort of believer, but my first reaction to seeing Notre Dame in flames, oddly, was that God must be very disappointed in us, Her children. This is doubly weird, since the God I imagined was a vindictive Old Testament God, banishing Adam and Eve, turning Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, or drowning the Egyptians—but of course Notre Dame is supremely a New Testament creation. Why might God be angry? The [...]

By Robert Kuttner|2019-04-16T15:12:09-04:00April 16th, 2019|Kuttner on TAP|0 Comments

Can the Deep State Contain Trump?

For Trump’s first couple of years, we consoled ourselves by believing that Trump was a kind of Gulliver figure, an overgrown child restrained by the adults of the deep state. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly was a sort of serious person who resisted Trump’s worst impulses. The generals at the Department of Defense and the National Security Council were bulwarks against Trump’s nuttier impulses. The attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was the worst kind of racist but a [...]

By Robert Kuttner|2019-04-12T16:32:01-04:00April 12th, 2019|Kuttner on TAP|0 Comments

Trump’s Huddled Masses and the Politics of 2020

Here’s a hard question for progressive advocates of refugee rights. Did Trump just get perversely lucky? Until a few months ago, critics of Trump’s wall, his caravan obsession, and his claim of an invasion had a foolproof rejoinder. His story was a fantasy. Immigration from Mexico was notably down over the past several years. Now, however, border crossings from refugees are way up. And Trump’s story of what draws refugees from Central America is not entirely wrong. They’ve heard [...]

By Robert Kuttner|2019-04-10T20:36:08-04:00April 10th, 2019|Kuttner on TAP|0 Comments

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