Feature: Latest Reports from Real Clear Politics ‘Opinion Section’

Ex-Clinton Staffer Says No to Testifying to Congress
WASHINGTON (AP) — A lawyer for the former Hillary Clinton staffer who set up her private email server has told Congress that his client still will not appear before Senate committees investigating the matter. The Senate committees on the judiciary and homeland security had renewed their request to question Bryan Pagliano about the server after news broke that the FBI, which is also investigating the server, had offered him immunity. Committee leaders had told Pagliano that the immunity grant should relieve any concerns he had about being prosecuted if he testified before them and requested…

Indiana to the Fore; Pa. Senate Race Infighting; Energy Security; Earth Days Father
Good morning. It’s Friday, April 22, 2016. Google, as is its tradition, has an evocative search-page doodle commemorating Earth Day. Today’s offers a series of interactive tours, courtesy of Google Maps, of exotic sites ranging from Yosemite to the Great Barrier Reef. This is not a commercial message; I’m just in awe of what the folks at Google created. Then again, I’m a sucker for Earth Day, and still remember the first one, back in 1970. It was the brainchild of Wisconsin-born Sen. Gaylord Nelson, a progressive Republican-turned-Democrat. In a moment, borrowing from…

An Unnecessary Fight With the Little Sisters
Which of the following seems out of place: Visa, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Pepsi, the Little Sisters of the Poor. If you answered the Little Sisters of the Poor, you answered correctly! If you did so because the first four options are major corporations and the last choice is an order of nuns who care for destitute and dying elderly people, you were only partially correct. The Little Sisters are also the correct out-of-place selection because they are the only option not exempted from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. For years now, the Little Sisters have been reluctantly…

The Trump Bandwagon Is Rolling Toward a Cliff
With Donald Trump’s resounding New York primary win, the conventional wisdom is on the move again. It’s returning to the presumption that Trump will win enough delegates to secure the nomination on the first ballot or come so close he can’t be denied it without setting Cleveland on fire. There are opportunities ahead for John Kasich or Ted Cruz to outperform expectations and prompt the CW to pivot again. But for now we’re back to “Oh my God, Trump is actually going to be the Republican Party nominee for president.” To Trump’s chagrin, his return to…

A Manifesto to Mend Our Politics
WASHINGTON — It has become a truism to say that the American political system is suffering from dysfunction. But weirdly, even the insurgent candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, don’t talk much about how they would fix it. This is a populist insurgency without a clear manifesto. So it’s refreshing to hear Rep. John Sarbanes present a detailed action plan to repair what’s broken. This proposal isn’t a cure-all. It wouldn’t fix the immigration problem or fund Social Security or fight terrorism. But by changing the way we fund elections, this proposal could make it easier to elect…

Tubman Fits the Bill
WASHINGTON — Conservatives should be delighted that Harriet Tubman’s likeness will grace the $20 bill. She was a Republican, after all, and a pious Christian. And she routinely exercised her Second Amendment right to carry a gun, which she was ready to use against anyone who stood in her way — or any fugitive slave having second thoughts. On her long road to freedom, there was no turning back. Instead, we’ve had mostly silence from the right. Donald Trump did mouth off, of course, opining that slated-to-be-displaced Andrew Jackson “had a great history” and that substituting Tubman –…

The Cultural Factors at Play in Africas HIV Crisis
LUSAKA, Zambia — Mary, who is 24 but looks barely 18, has already experienced more than enough betrayal for any lifetime. Shyly but deliberately, she told of feeling sick at 16 and being diagnosed with HIV. After her mother — her only provider — was sent to prison, an aunt took Mary in, but forced her to sleep in an open-walled shed behind the house. Then she was raped by a boyfriend. “I went home crying and bleeding,” she recalled. Mary told no one, fearing she would be turned out on the street. “I kept quiet, by myself.” Four months later, she learned she was pregnant. For the sake…

New Yorks Home-State Winners Have November Problems
Home-state candidates notched up impressive victories in New York’s presidential primaries Tuesday. Donald Trump topped 50 percent for the first time — and handsomely, with 60 percent of Republican votes. And Hillary Clinton won 58 percent of Democratic votes in her adopted home state. Trump’s capture of 89 of New York’s 95 delegates gets him closer to, but does not guarantee him, the 1,237-delegate majority needed for the nomination. Clinton’s delegate edge in New York was smaller, 139-108, but Democrats’ rules allocating delegates proportionately give Bernie Sanders no chance to overcome…

Hands Off the Ladies Rooms
If it concerns sex in any way, you can be sure that our culture will fixate on it and manage to defy common sense with hyperventilating indignation. Same-sex marriage roiled the waters for decades, but now that the Supreme Court has big-footed that question, culture warriors are prowling for new realms of transgression to embrace. So, coming soon to a bathroom near you: transgenderism. I’m just back from a weekend at Harvard University where unisex bathrooms are the norm. On behalf of womankind, I say: To the Bathroom Barricades! Bathroom injustice has been a feature of the world for a very…

Dems Wage Intra-Party War in Pa. Senate Race
Democrats are locked in a tight, negative battle to determine who will challenge Republican Sen. Pat Toomey in November, with national groups spending millions of dollars to boost a candidate who is trailing in the polls against an opponent who has spurned party leadership in showing an independent streak. That outside money – around $4 million from different groups – has provided a jolt to Katie McGinty, a former Clinton administration official and chief of staff to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf. In fact, Democratic leaders have gone all in on her candidacy, with President Obama and…

How Politics Obscures Environmental, Energy Gains
The third part of RealClearPolitics’ series on security issues in the 2016 campaign focuses on energy and the environment. Part 1 was a national overview, and Part 2 addressed the economy. Striding to the podium on Nov. 30 in Le Bourget, France, President Obama kicked off the U.N.-sponsored talks on climate change at a fraught historical moment. The terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 137 innocents and wounded many more had occurred only 17 days before. As a result, Obama spent the first part of his speech paying tribute to victims of the violence before transitioning to a different…

Indianas Pivotal Role in 2016 GOP Race
With support for candidates calcifying in many of the upcoming states on the Republican primary calendar, there are few true battlegrounds left that could swing the outcome of the race, either handing the GOP nomination to Donald Trump or stopping him in his tracks. Indiana, which votes May 3, is one of them. The Hoosier State has already become a hive of activity among the Republican presidential candidates. Trump held a rally in Indianapolis on Wednesday and met privately with Gov. Mike Pence. Sen. Ted Cruz swung through Indianapolis on Thursday, also meeting with Pence prior to appearing…

How Trump Turned Cruz Into the Establishment Candidate
Donald Trump’s landslide victory in the New York GOP primary was a game-changer. It ended his Wisconsin slump and set the stage for an across-the-board sweep next Tuesday in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island. Trump’s vote count exceeded his pre-primary polling average by nearly 10 percentage points. Perhaps most important, the win gave him 89 more delegates for the RNC July convention. So Trump is now the prohibitive favorite to win the GOP nomination — although there is still much dispute about this. But I believe, even if he comes up short of the 1,237…

How Democrats Win Debates by Corrupting English
Humans have been using euphemisms ever since Adam first “knew” Eve. In politics especially, obfuscating and twisting the meaning of words has been going on forever. But today’s debates aren’t only littered with rhetorical distortions; in some ways, many of Democrats’ most potent arguments are built on corrupt language. One word that’s really getting a workout this cycle is “loophole.” Basically, all of life is a giant loophole until Democrats come up with a way to regulate or tax it. In its economic usage, “loophole” — probably more of a dysphemism — creates the false impression that people…

Dishonoring General Jackson
In Samuel Eliot Morison’s “The Oxford History of the American People,” there is a single sentence about Harriet Tubman. “An illiterate field hand, (Tubman) not only escaped herself but returned repeatedly and guided more than 300 slaves to freedom.” Morison, however, devotes most of five chapters to the greatest soldier-statesman in American history, save Washington, that pivotal figure between the Founding Fathers and the Civil War — Andrew Jackson. Slashed by a British officer in the Revolution, and a POW at 14, the orphaned Jackson went west, rose to head up the Tennessee militia, crushed…

How the Republican Race Plays Out From Here
Obviously, Tuesday night was a good one for Donald Trump. He won over 60 percent of the vote in the New York primary, and carried all but four of the state’s 95 delegates. His main rival, Ted Cruz, finished third. But lost in the hoopla is that a big Trump win in New York was already baked into most projections. While few prognosticators had him at 60 percent of the vote, most had him winning 70 of the state’s delegates or more. So from a delegate perspective, not much has changed. Where do we go from here? It’s hard to say, but I do think there are some broad takeaways….

Scenarios for Trump; the Cruz Problem; Health Care Promises; Remembering Butch OHare
Good morning. It’s Thursday, April 21, 2016. On this date in 1942, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt looking on, a young Navy wife named Rita O’Hare draped America’s highest combat decoration around the neck of her husband. His name was Edward, though the president called him “Eddie” and he went by “Butch” to friends and family. To an adoring American public, he was Lt. Edward H. O’Hare. Two months earlier, his daring flying and expert marksmanship while piloting his Grumman fighter plane had destroyed or disabled five Japanese bombers,…

Time to "Go Galt" on the Public Schools
On Tuesday, a federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled that a local school district must teach their students that up is down, right is left, 2 + 2 = 5, and that Kim Kardashian and Miley Cyrus serve as perfect models of refinement, good taste and aesthetic restraint. Fine, fine, I’m paraphrasing. What the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit actually ruled was that, as The Washington Post reports, “a transgender high school student who was born as a female can sue his school board on discrimination grounds because it banned him from the boys’ bathroom.”…