Opinion

On the afternoon of May 27, 1901, the clerk of the Alabama Constitutional Convention read out a letter to the delegates written by educator Booker T. Washington and signed by 23 other state black leaders. A couple of the delegates had objected to hearing it, as it was already past adjournment time, but Thomas W. Coleman, a Princeton-educated lawyer from …

President Bill Clinton went to Oklahoma City after a terrorist bombed the federal office building there in 1995. President George W. Bush lifted a bullhorn at the ruins of the World Trade Center on September 14, 2001. President Barack Obama sang “Amazing Grace” in Charleston, South Carolina, at a funeral there for a victim of the 2015 shooting spree in …

When John Adams wrote into Massachusetts’ Constitution a commitment to a “government of laws and not of men,” he probably assumed that the rule of law meant the rule of laws, no matter how many laws there might be. He could not have imagined the modern proliferation and complexity of laws, or how subversive this is of the rule of …

I have been recommending a defensive stance in equities since at least February, and truth be told, that hasn’t worked out so well. The S&P 500 Index has returned 4.3 percent since then, including reinvested dividends. I’m not ready to throw in the towel. What compels me to keep at it is the behavior of stocks at the close of …

President Donald Trump’s threat to exercise a US “military option” in Venezuela was irresponsible not because it was unrealistic, although it was, or because it reinforced that nation’s tottering autocracy, although it did. The lasting damage of Trump’s words may be to the US relationship with Latin America. For the first time in more than a decade, some of the …

In a sense, President Donald Trump threaded a rhetorical needle last week explaining why he will prolong the war in Afghanistan that he had opposed as a candidate. America will no longer fight for girls’ schools and democracy. Instead, it will fight to destroy terrorists. “We will not dictate to the Afghan people how to live, or how to govern …

Most academic models of international trade are pretty simplistic. Some of these models are surprisingly effective for making certain types of predictions—for example, economists are very good at predicting how much different countries will trade with each other. But they’re not so good at predicting what kind of things the countries will specialize in, which country will have a trade …

Democrats are in terrible shape. Republicans control all three branches of government in Washington, 34 of 50 governorships, and 68 of the 99 state legislatures. As they plot a comeback, Democrats have one obvious asset: the reckless presidency of Donald Trump. That’s not enough to close such a huge gap. And the battles that have started to rage inside the …

There is much to dislike in President Trump’s trade agenda, but he is correct on one subject: China’s relentless quest to extort American “intellectual property”—technologies, business methods, patents. Trump took a swipe last week at China’s policies by ordering his top trade officials to investigate. Whether he can alter China’s behavior is unclear, but he is right to try, even …

President Donald Trump’s decision last week to disband the Manufacturing Council and Strategy & Policy Forum not only puts his agenda to revitalize the nation’s infrastructure in jeopardy, it also weakens the precarious support commodities such as copper, steel and crude oil have relied upon. Although not stellar, global commodity prices had shown decent support ever since it became clear …