What Trump Supporters Think When He Mocks People With Disabilities

Last weekend, I stood among thousands of Donald Trump supporters in a windy airfield, watching them watch their candidate. I traveled to the former president’s event just outside Dayton, Ohio, because I couldn’t stop thinking about something that had happened one week earlier, at his rally in Georgia: Trump had broken into an imitation of President Joe Biden’s lifelong stutter, and the crowd had cackled. Mocking Biden is not the worst thing Trump has ever done. Biden is a grown man, and the most public of figures. He does not…

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Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action Ruling May Be Bigger Than You Think

One of the more interesting, but less reported, aspects of the Supreme Court’s decision in the landmark affirmative action case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard was its criticism of universities’ racial categories in admissions policies. That critique opens a new way to challenge racial discrimination in court. Lawyers and litigants who care about racial equality should take full advantage of it. The high court’s perspective on racial categories arose out of what is known among lawyers as “the diversity rationale,” which comes from a 1978 opinion by Justice Lewis…

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Does the military need a separate service for cyber? Some lawmakers think so; DoD isn’t sure

It’s been a little over three years since Congress created a dedicated military service to focus on space. Lawmakers are wondering whether it’s time to do the same thing for cyber. The Defense Department hasn’t yet taken a position on that question — officials say they’re still studying the topic of military cyber force design. But some members of Congress are getting impatient. Lawmakers have asked DoD for its recommendations on whether there ought to be a separate military services just for cyber forces more than once. In the 2020…

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Republicans Think They Can Win the COVID Funding Fight

If a new coronavirus variant surges in the United States this year—perhaps the one currently tearing through Europe—there’s a reasonable chance that the country will be unprepared to fight it. You can thank Congress for that. Last week, lawmakers passed a massive spending bill without any additional funding for COVID-19 relief, despite White House pleas for more. Democrats would like to fulfill the administration’s request. But Republicans have taken the position that Congress has already done enough. “We don’t need COVID funding,” GOP Representative Randy Feenstra of Iowa told me.…

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