As Mary Kay Heard tells it, “I was a nobody,” for much of her life.    That’s when you want to shake her by the shoulders and say it’s because of people like her and…

When Donald Trump and his allies set out to alter the results of the 2020 election, they targeted local election officials and legislators all over the country. Very often the people in these critical positions,…

Where are the hearings? It’s been eight weeks since Liz Cheney, the top Republican on the House select committee investigating the attack of on the U.S. Capitol of Jan. 6, 2021, promised “multiple weeks of…

Like many scholars of democracy, I have strongly supported both the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. Both are necessary (though not sufficient) to secure the most precious rights…

Alaska is a place both physically and psychically removed from the rest of America, which folks there refer to as “Outside.” Note the capital “O,” as it appears in newspapers, which reflects both standardization and…

On Thursday, the Kansas Senate passed a bill that will provide $1 billion or more in tax breaks for large-scale industries that plan to invest here. It’s our hope the House does the same. The…

In politics, there are many artificial divides: liberal and conservative, rural and urban, insiders and outsiders, past and future. When we are faced with problems of extreme gravity, though, we often stand united and work…

I retired this year after 23 years in the Kansas Statehouse advocating for schools. I thought I would work longer, but the Statehouse is a toxic environment. It is an unhealthy place to work for…

It was only three months ago that surgeons successfully attached a kidney from a genetically altered pig to a human recipient. Since then, new successes continue to pile on. In December, the kidney procedure was…

The New York Times reports that President Joe Biden: “Will retreat from the tangle of day-to-day negotiations with members of his own party that have made him seem powerless to advance key priorities, according to…