It's not enough for individual believers to worship God as they see fit -- a right which I and most Americans are happy to acknowledge and protect. According to Scalia, the government must place its thumb on the scale and promote and advance religion over non-religion.

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The killing of Sheikh Al-Nimr should serve as a prime moment for the U.S. to reconsider its alliance with the Saudi regime, a regime that not only denies human rights to its own people but exports death and destruction abroad.

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Everyone else's chances for victory almost require Trump's support in the polls to suffer serious damage. If nobody else manages to break into the front rank, then Trump is the best-positioned candidate to win the nomination -- hands down.

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Patent and copyright protection are not laws of nature, they come from the government. And in recent years we have been making them stronger and longer. As a result, these forms of protection apply to a much wider range of products, which means the products of technology cost us much more money.

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Trump appears to have relented to requests for his favorite passages in the Bible by sharing, "Proverbs, the chapter 'never bend to envy.'" But the trouble is that it's not entirely clear that Trump's favorite Bible verse is actually in the Bible.

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It may seem passing strange for a civil libertarian, a general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union, to be celebrating the birthday of the dreaded FBI director. But for me, Hoover, who would celebrate his 120th birthday on January 1, was a godsend.

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Notice the irony of Trump benefitting from the politics of resentment. Billionaires like Trump make off with too much of the nation's income and wealth, at the expense of ordinary working stiffs. And then Trump puts on his politician's hat and cashes in on the resentment. And here's where it gets really tricky. Some of the ultra-P.C. stuff is silly and makes it easier for the right to lampoon liberals. The broader challenge here is that many of the causes that Trump and company put down as P.C. are legitimate and overdue. How long will it take before cops who brutalize black citizens are brought to justice? Do we really want to evict 12 million law abiding immigrants, many of whom were brought here as kids? But when the local working class is getting clobbered economically, it's easier to play off the races against each other.

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As President Obama prepares to deliver his final State of the Union address on January 12, it's difficult to remember how incredibly bad the economy was when he took office seven years ago and how important financial reform is to getting the economy working again for all Americans.

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As we continue to push for police and criminal justice reform in this new year, let us not forget that places like Cleveland and West Palm Beach face March primaries where voters can express their outrage at the polls. We must take the frustration that we express in the streets through peaceful protests to the voting ballot box, for that is how we can hold accountable those that are supposed to serve us.

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With the Paris framework in place, momentum for bottom-up, decentralized market-based policies will only increase -- and at the core of such systems are transparency and integrity.

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The Republican campaign has deteriorated into a schoolhouse brawl. This is not a campaign of new and exciting ideas; rather, it is a misguided crusade that offers voters little hope for those tired of politics as usual.

Why is it that when it comes to the social world, not all speech is deemed equally worthy of protecting? That is a question that has been dogging me of late, as I listen to commentator after commentator caution student protestors about the importance of respecting freedom of speech and the trap of political correctness.

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The ESSA doesn't settle anything. It doesn't solve anything. Every argument and battle that supporters of public schools (and the teachers and students who work and learn in public schools) have been fighting will still be fought -- the difference is that now those arguments will be held in state capitols instead of Washington D.C.

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Militias are the ancestors of the modern National Guard, not of self-proclaimed "patriots" who show utter contempt for any form of authority beyond themselves. The extremists playing solider in the woods of Oregon are at best criminals and at worst domestic terrorists, and they need to be identified as such.

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I'll be unequivocal -- when protesters in Ferguson challenged government authority and abuse, you labeled them thugs. Guess what, it's 2016, you bunch of goddamn yokels -- you don't get to smash government property and point guns at law enforcement just because you're white.

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When Americans think about nuclear weapons, they comfort themselves with the thought that the vast, nuclear destruction of human life has not taken place since 1945 -- at least not yet. But, in reality, nuclear weapon-related destruction has taken place, with shocking levels of U.S. casualties.

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Rubio can't seem to make up his mind on immigration reform or apparently obey traffic laws and balance his checkbook. But I was most amazed at his recent declaration of war against college education while campaigning in New Hampshire for the upcoming Republican Party Presidential primary.