Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” That’s the question Joseph N. Welch, special counsel to the U.S. Army, asked of Sen. Joe McCarthy in 1954. It helped destroy the Wisconsin lawmaker, and end his red-baiting, witch-hunting career. Now it’s time for all Americans, especially Republicans running for president, to say the […]

Congress recently forbade President Obama from bringing Guantanamo inmates to the United States, or even preparing a place in the U.S. to which the terrorist prisoners might someday be transferred. The specific action Congress took was to renew earlier bans on the president spending any appropriated funds for those purposes. Republicans and Democrats spoke in […]

Congress is departing shortly for the holidays, but there’s still lots to do, such as keeping the government running and, conversely, avoiding a shutdown. They also need to revamp the nation’s energy laws and undertake a host of actions that require cooperation and bipartisan support. But instead of proposing a positive budget, Republicans riddled it […]

From sea to shining sea, college students seem determined to make us argue about race to the exclusion of all else. So here’s something I learned in college: Virtually every ugly stereotype applied to African- Americans by white racists was applied to my Irish-Catholic ancestors as well. Their English oppressors caricatured Irish peasants as shiftless, […]