Christine Todd Whitman is the former Governor of New Jersey (1994-2001) and former Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (2001-2003). She currently serves on the board of Americans Elect. HPR: How do you think responsible environmental regulation can be reconciled with the kind of small-government pro-growth agenda that anyone in the Republican Party would want … Read more
Cory Monteith’s most lasting contribution was his courage. On the loss of any young Hollywood actor, it is tempting to say that we are losing a great talent. Yet as Woody Allen once phrased it, “Talent is luck. The important thing in life is courage.” What made Cory Monteith’s brief career spectacular was not his … Read more
This past Wednesday, House Republicans asserted that the landmark Senate-passed “Gang of Eight” immigration bill would be “dead on arrival.” They vowed to pursue their own legislation which would further militarize the southwestern border and be far less accommodating for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. The libertarian position … Read more
It’s frequently said of Millenials in general and Harvard students in particular: we like to do many things at once. This past Fourth of July, I settled for doing just two: traveling from London to Madrid and, whilst on the flight, catching up on foreign policy articles for my summer research job. It was a … Read more
It’s very hard to tell where the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge actually begins. A sign indicating the entrance is followed by over five miles of elevated road snaking through the partially-completed skyscrapers of downtown Qingdao, a burgeoning coastal city of eight million in China’s Northeast, before finally hitting a line of tollbooths at water’s edge. Though … Read more
With everyone expecting a bang, the Supreme Court delivered a whimper. The decision in Fisher v. Texas was anticlimactic and surprising; no one would have predicted that the lone dissenter to a decision that tacitly upheld affirmative action would be Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The justices’ ultimate decision, which remanded the case back to the … Read more
When actress and political novice Ashley Judd chose not to challenge Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell in the Kentucky Senate race, some political observers might have expected a more normal, predictable race run by professional politicians and veteran campaign strategists. This, however, has not been the case so far. On the Democratic side, Kentucky … Read more
With Hollingsworth v. Perry and United States v. Windsor decided, we can finally say it – we now have in America thirteen states with full marriage equality. After a rocky decade of various versions of “skim-milk,” low-fat, Silk, and empty-carton marriages extending a choose-your-own-adventure set of assorted rights to gays and lesbians across the country, … Read more
As a gay man, it seems greedy to say that I was disappointed by the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Windsor. After all, the partial revocation of the Defense of Marriage Act means that 150,000 same-sex couples now have access to thousands of federal benefits previously denied to them. Yet as much as … Read more
Four HPR writers explore the legal and political ramifications of the Supreme Court’s recent same-sex marriage decisions. From Justice Kennedy’s judicial activism and Justice Scalia’s originalism to the LGBT equality movement and party politics, these writers explore some of the most pressing questions the justices left us with on June 26. (Update: Humza Bokhari looks … Read more