It was barely six months ago that congressional Democrats voted to boost IRS funding by $80 billion over the next decade under the guise of beefing up tax enforcement and wringing more money out of billionaires and millionaires. Wage-earners of less means were assured they had little to worry about from an army of new agents.

Celia Cruz will be the first Afro-Latina American woman on American currency, the U.S. Mint reports. The Latina singer, originally from Cuba, was one of the most popular entertainers in the world. Her career spanned six decades and included more than 80 albums, many of which achieved gold or platinum status. She will appear on the quarter as a part of the American Women Quarters Project’s class of 2024.

In 1957, during the frosty years of the Cold War, Ike and Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker established the North American Air Defense Command in anticipation of defending the continent from Soviet long-range bombers — Sputnik was still a few months away — and NORAD went on alert.

American companies this month pledged to invest nearly $1 billion to expand manufacturing operations and other investments in Central America as a way of boosting economies, creating an estimated 1 million jobs and reducing the incentive for people to migrate northward. The pledges, on top of previous ones worked out by the Biden administration, now exceed $4 billion and are exactly the kind of action needed to address the immigration problem at its source.

The House’s new GOP majority is ignoring a key principle I learned during my five years working for Republicans on the House Oversight Committee: Manage expectations. Its “make accusations first, get the facts never” approach to oversight is doomed to over-promise, under-deliver and fall flat with the vast majority of voters.

President Joe Biden, his approval ratings underwater for most of the past two years, made his case for a second term on Tuesday.

President Joe Biden focused mostly on domestic issues in his State of the Union address Tuesday, but when he did turn to foreign policy he had strong words of support for Ukraine. He assured Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., who was in the audience, that “America is united in our support for your country. We will stand with you as long as it takes.”

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s quick endorsement of Rep. Adam B. Schiff’s Senate candidacy was huge — far more significant than an ordinary endorsement.

President Joe Biden’s third State of the Union address was the perfect reflection of his presidency: undisciplined and detached from reality.

Despite the dedicated efforts of a task force set up to facilitate reunifications, about a thousand migrant children separated from their parents, most under the now-infamous 2018 zero tolerance policy, remain separated. Even if all are eventually reunited, the scars left will be indelible.

California is digging out from the damage left behind by nine atmospheric rivers that passed in the last few weeks. The storms they created affected almost every region of the state with extreme flooding, massive mountain snowfall, mud slides, landslides and 20 deaths.

If a foreign enemy wanted to destroy the United States without anyone noticing, it might try to find a way to weaponize the rights we cherish and use them against us. That way, every action we take to defend our liberty would actually be a blow against it. But who needs enemies when we have the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals?

Today’s word is “adjunctification.”

You would think that after what happened in Memphis, legislators would be tripping over themselves to get to the House floor to pass a new law that promises real police reform.

Remember COVID? A mutated version of the virus that not long ago dominated our lives is still killing more than 500 Americans per day on average — adding to a 1.1 million grim national total. Here in New York City, 13 people are dying on average each day, nothing to sneeze at for those who care about preventing suffering.

A few days ago, The New York Times published a very interesting column by my colleague Ezra Klein about America’s peculiar lack of progress in the art of building things. Drawing on a recent paper by Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson, he noted that, at least according to official statistics, we’ve gone a half-century without any rise whatsoever, and maybe even a decline, in construction productivity — basically, the number of person-hours it takes to build a house or other structure of a given size.