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JD Vance

JD Vance Tells Republicans Who America’s Real Birthright Citizens Are

US President Donald Trump

Trump’s obsessions help bury GOP chances

Adult man holds a microphone while asking a question during a town hall meeting.

Consensus Without Power: How Sortition Could Break America's Legislative Gridlock

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The Questions We Should Be Asking About the Lindsay Clancy Case

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How Anti-Bribery Laws Apply to Trump’s Promise of $5,000 Payments if Republicans Keep Control of Congress

Jeb Bush Super PAC Hit With Record Fine

The Fulcrum
By The FulcrumMar 13, 2019
The Fulcrum
The Fulcrum staff.
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Right to Rise USA, the super PAC that supported Jeb Bush's 2016 presidential campaign, has been fined $390,000 by the Federal Election Commission for accepting $1.3 million from an international investment holding company owned by Chinese nationals that counted Jeb's brother Neil as a board member. (It is illegal for foreign nationals to be involved in making donations to American political campaign committees.) The FEC has also fined the company, American Pacific International Capital, $550,000.

The penalties have not been made public but were reported by Mother Jonesbased on FEC filings. The report claims the combined fines were the largest levied in a single case in the nine years since the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling opened the political fundraising floodgates – and also the biggest FEC fine in a case of foreign national participation.

"This illegal $1.3 million is a direct result of Citizens United," since before that 2010 ruling companies were restricted in what they could give to super PACs, said Brendan Fischer of the Campaign Legal Center, the nonpartisan watchdog that first made the FEC aware of the APIC contribution.


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Keep Politicians, Not Politics Out Of Sports: Let Athletes Speak

Keep Politicians, Not Politics Out Of Sports: Let Athletes Speak

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What's Good for the Blue Collar Worker is Good for America

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After the AfD’s historic wins in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, an analyst links climate migration to democratic decline and a possible fix.

Stefania Pelfini la Waziya/Getty Images

Climate, Migration and the Far Right: Democracies Need a Short-Term Plan

On September 6, the far-right German party Alternative for Germany (AfD) made a historic breakthrough. 100 years after Hitler’s official reorganization of the Nazi Party, a group that has openly strategized and worked with neo-Nazis won a plurality of the vote in the state of Saxony-Anhalt and is on the precipice of forming a government there. 14 days later, they won a plurality again in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. This is the AfD's strongest electoral result yet, and the closest a far-right party has come to a majority in postwar Germany.

In a country with numerous safeguards against right-wing co-option – from a 5% minimum threshold to enter the Bundestag to bans for undemocratic parties – this democratic victory of a far-right movement shook the country to its core. Whether AfD is able to make up the handful of seats it needs in coalition agreements to form governments in both states isn’t the point; AfD’s stock is on the rise, and at this rate, they will likely continue to win at both the state and federal level. Even if Chancellor Merz’s coalition government can start delivering for the increasingly underemployed and isolated German people, by all signs, far-right support will only continue to increase.

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The Rule of Law depends on action, not blind optimism. Explore how critical hope, civic engagement, and accountability can strengthen democracy.
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I used to believe that learning the law meant learning the architecture of protection.

I believed statutes existed because someone, somewhere, had anticipated injustice and decided certain lines should never be crossed. I believed due process meant power could not simply declare itself correct. I believed whistleblower protections, grievance procedures, public-records laws, administrative review and courts formed a structure designed to restrain institutional misconduct.

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The summer of 2026 once again saw wildfire smoke from the West Coast and Midwest blanketing East Coast skies. Smoke-filled summer skies now seem to be the norm across America, and wildfire season isn’t even close to over.

The public response is also becoming normal. When investigators determine that a person started a wildfire, online chatter usually centers on the idea that humans are the cause and that climate change could not have played a role. That argument confuses the ignition source with the complex conditions that contribute to wildfire. A spark may explain where a wildfire began. It cannot, on its own, explain why flames spread so far and devastate entire communities.

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Politicians Can’t Just ’Give the People What They Want’

For reasons that will baffle my many detractors, I am often asked for advice about being an opinion journalist. One of my standard responses is: You have to be willing to disappoint your biggest fans.

What I mean is that if you start to see your job as telling fans what they want to hear, you risk becoming an entertainer rather than a thinker, and eventually you become a caricature. I’ve seen it happen numerous times. Patrick Buchanan was a brilliant columnist and a serious person. But over the course of his career, he listened too much to the people who said, “Go Pat, go!” and too little to friends who said, “I think that’s taking it too far.”

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