It's Time for the State to Toss Out Its Ethically Suspect Bullies.

King Salmon, Alaska

An albatross Republicans must haul around this year is that voters no longer clearly see them as the party best able to control government spending and taxes. GOP pork-barrel kings such as Sen. Ted...

In November, we will definitively rank our two presidential candidates, but whoever wins the election will eventually be subject to yet another ranking effort -- that of historians who, every decade or so, compare all the U.S. presidents from the Founding to the current day. Inevitably, Abraham Lincoln and George...

Living politicians building 'Monuments to Me.'

Charles Rangel, chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, is intent on raising $30 million for a new academic center in his New York district -- a center with his name on it. After securing an earmark and two other federal grants...

In ruling on the constitutionality of Indiana's voter ID law -- the toughest in the nation -- the Supreme Court had to deal with the claim that such laws demanded the strictest of scrutiny by courts, because they could disenfranchise voters. All nine Justices rejected that argument.

Even Justice Stephen...

Democrats have a habit of falling in love with candidates on the first date.

Barack Obama's comments last week - about how alienated working-class voters "cling to guns or religion" - are already famous. But the fact that his aides told the Washington Post that he is privately bewildered that...

Washington is "Home Alone" as the Senate refuses to confirm nominees.

During last month's Bear Stearns financial crisis, the Federal Reserve was in the awkward position of having two empty seats on its seven-member Board of Governors. Two new nominees, along with a holdover member, have been awaiting Senate confirmation...

A Latin Country Asks for Our Help. Can We Rise Above Politics to Give It?

Trade legislation debates are usually about dry-as-dust topics like reciprocity and dumping. But sometimes they really matter. Take the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, which the Bush administration will send to Congress...

William F. Buckley struggled with the pain and inconvenience of emphysema for years, but it was only when he broke a bone in his right hand -- the hand he wrote with -- earlier this month that the decline of a man who very much lived by words accelerated. He...

The trouble with the Iowa caucuses isn't that there's anything wrong with Iowans. It's the bizarre rules of the process. Caucuses are touted as authentic neighborhood meetings where voters gather in their precincts and make democracy come alive. In truth, they are anything but.

Caucuses occur only at a fixed...

A version of this article appears in the December 28 Wall Street Journal

"Charlie Wilson's War," the new film treatment of how a party-hearty Texas Congressman teamed up with other Cold Warriors to humiliate the Soviet Empire in Afghanistan and hasten its end, is a box-office success. After the recent...

There's lots of controversy over ABC's "The Path to 9/11." Former Clinton officials Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright believe the makers took severe liberties with the historical record in discussing their role in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. As someone who was forced to evacuate my office across the...

Yale returns from Spring Break today and debate is likely to start heating up over the school's admission of former Taliban official Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi as a student.

Yale refuses to defend its position, but others are talking. Afghan exiles are appalled that Mr. Rahmatuallah, one often acted as a...

A roadside bomb planted by Taliban terrorists killed four U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan on Sunday. In a separate incident suicide bombers tried to kill an Afghan official responsible for persuading former Taliban members to support the new government. The official survived but the blast killed the two bombers along with...

I fear something very wrong is going on at Ivy League colleges that should concern liberals, conservatives and moderates. Don't believe me? Listen to Alan Dershowitz, a noted Harvard liberal and frequent contributor to the Huffington Post and noted feminist Camille Paglia.

Last month, Harvard President Larry Summers,...

The politics of the Harriet Miers nomination are getting stranger as attention turns toward Ms. Miers's tenure as head of the Texas Lottery Commission. Two key players in last year's presidential campaign--Jerome Corsi, co-author of the Swift Boat Veterans book "Unfit for Command," and Ben Barnes, a former Texas lieutenant...

New Orleans will face special challenges in recovering from Hurricane Katrina. "All the past (major U.S.) disasters, they have hit suburban areas, not the central urban areas of major cities," says Mary Comerio, an expert on post-disaster reconstruction.

Indeed, the job facing New Orleans can best be compared to the...

Everyone agrees that New Orleans is a challenging city to police even on a good day, given a murder rate that is ten times the national average. But the city's notorious corruption and cronyism has never built a police force that inspired confidence. Sadly, as I report in a posting...

Nothing can repair the lost homes and shattered lives of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. But the task of rebuilding can be made easier. In a posting at OpinionJournal.com I suggest that President Bush follow the example of Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and his own father. All were presidents...

I know that liberals and conservatives often have different priorities on voting rights issues - a conflict of visions if you will to borrow Thomas Sowell's phrase.

Liberals tend to see anything that increases voter turnout is a positive for a democracy, giving short shrift to concerns about ballot security....

This weekend marks Statehood Day in Hawaii. It marks the day in 1959 when the island territory became the 50th state after a public referendum in which residents -- by a margin of 17 to 1 -- expressed a desire to join the U.S. There used to be parades, fireworks,...