Hostility to the First Amendment is a bipartisan endeavor. Too many elected officials take an oath to uphold the Constitution without having bothered to read the document.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments about the legality of President Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan. Given the normal schedule followed by the Supreme Court, we shouldn’t expect a final decision until at least June. But on Monday, CNN already was hard at work seeking to impugn the legitimacy of the ultimate decision. In an analysis describing the financial status and educational experiences of the nine justices, commentator Devan Cole paints a picture of privilege. These men and women receive a salary between $274,000 and $299,000 a year before other lucrative revenue streams. They all went to either Harvard or Yale University (except for Justice Amy Coney Barrett), and most received significant scholarships during their undergraduate and law school studies.

President Joe Biden likes to pass himself off as a deficit slayer, which is a bit like Monty Python’s Mr. Creosote claiming to be an avid dieter.

Two endangered entities — marine life and multilateralism — got a big weekend boost when the United Nations announced a significant new treaty to better protect ocean biodiversity.

“We Report, You Decide” was among Fox News’ marketing mantras when the then-upstart network was challenging CNN.

In backrooms and dark corners, airline lobbyists, particularly the Regional Airline Association, are scurrying all over Washington, still trying to undo all the hard work that has been done to make air travel the safest form of transportation in human history. They’re doing this for the usual reasons. They want to try to cheapen pilot training and levels of experience for their own financial gain and expedience. They’re trying to do what is easier and cheaper for them, not what is best for passengers or crews, or for their industry.

Is all politics truly local? If so, how do we account for many of the priorities on the list of the bills that my home state’s legislature hopes to pass this year?

Pete Buttigieg, something of a genius in academic matters, is despairingly short of that when it comes to practicality, failing miserably, for instance, as secretary of the Department of Transportation. It’s almost as if his job is to sit and do little, disappear from the office a lot, get mad, entertain himself with peculiar ideas and focus on becoming president someday. For 10 days after it happened, he didn’t say anything about the wham-bang train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, even though the crash was accompanied by a raging, prolonged fire, a huge, bulging, satanic-looking, black plume cloud and something else: the release of killer chemicals from train cars to keep the cars from exploding.

While watching television the other night, I almost fell off the couch, and not because of naked bodies or bloody murders. It was because there, on my 50-inch screen, was a TV commercial for Spam.

California and the other Colorado River Basin states are at odds over how to halt the precipitous decline of Lake Mead. The impasse reflects a century of failure to take a basic step left undone by the original Colorado River Compact.

How convenient that presidential hopeful Nikki Haley’s proposed mental-competency test for politicians would kick in at age 75 — just below the age of her only other announced Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, and a few years below incumbent Democrat Joe Biden. Since the Constitution already specifies age criteria for federal elective office (minimum of 25 years for the House, 30 years for the Senate and 35 years for the presidency, but with no upper limit for any of them), Haley’s idea presumably couldn’t go into effect without a constitutional amendment.

Like the rest of the sane universe, we couldn’t believe the gall of Puffin U.K. when word came out that the publishing house and the Roald Dahl Story Co., the entity that manages his work, had conspired to make hundreds of changes to the writers’ iconic books.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is supposed to work for the American people first and his party second.

Recently, my suicidal 15-year-old grandson ingested and smoked a cocktail of several drugs. His loving parents found him nonresponsive, with a heart rate near 200 beats per minute. The emergency responders and doctors saved his life. Sadly, it was not his first attempt.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — “My name is Jimmy Carter, and I’m running for president.” And he’d grin. Always that friendly, down-home grin.

For hour upon hour and multiple days before he gave his recent State of the Union speech, President Joe Biden repeated all 7,224 words over and over, thereby avoiding most of his usual verbal flubs. Also, for 40 years as a senator, a vice president and a president, he learned what can be important in political oratory: avoiding the truth.

To hear progressives tell it, attacks on free speech come almost exclusively from right-wing book burners eager to control the contents of public school libraries. In particular, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his assaults on woke pedagogy tickle their neck hairs.

Nikki Haley’s announcement that she was entering the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination should have evoked cheers among party leaders. Here was a non-white woman just over 50, the daughter of immigrants with a compelling, up-by-the-bootstraps life story, who had become the United States’ first female Asian American governor. Haley is articulate, personable, less extreme than many other potential candidates, and, in addition to serving as South Carolina’s chief executive, she also represented the United States in the United Nations.