George Will stories, Page 3

WASHINGTON The Democrats’ presidential aspirants seem determined to prove that their party’s 2016 achievement — the election of the current president — was not a fluke that cannot be repeated. But the Republican Party, whose last remaining raison d’etre is to frustrate Democrats, seems to be thinking: We are determined...

WASHINGTON In 1964, although there was scant chance that Americans would choose to have a third president in 14 months, Lyndon Johnson took no chances. The economy was sizzling and in November Johnson would carry 44 states. Nevertheless, he wanted low interest rates, so he summoned to his Texas ranch...

WASHINGTON The president has received from one of his employees, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, a report that probably tells Ross’ employer what he wants to hear: that imports of cars — “The Audis are coming! The Audis are coming!” — threaten “national security.” This report is required by our lackadaisical...

WASHINGTON Appropriately, during the crescendo of this college basketball season, in which the most significant event was a shoe malfunction, a lawyer whose best-known client was a pornographic actress was indicted for threatening to shrink a shoe company’s market capitalization by making allegations about the company misbehaving in the meat...

PHILADELPHIA “Horseplay,” a term used to denote child rape, is, says Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, part of a sinister glossary of euphemisms by which the Catholic Church’s bureaucracy obfuscates in documents the church’s “pattern of abuse” and conspiracy of silence “that goes all the way to the Vatican.” “Benevolent...

WASHINGTON Tiptoeing along the edge of caricature, Sen. Elizabeth Warren says: Native Americans should be “at the table” with African-Americans for a “robust discussion” about making some Americans pay reparations to other Americans to atone for misdeeds by still other Americans. The enumeration of the misdeeds, and the assignment of...

ANNAPOLIS, Md. America’s most improbably popular governor, a Republican beginning his second term in perhaps the bluest state, resembles a beer keg with an attitude. Stocky and blunt, Larry Hogan, whose job approval is in the high 70s, has won twice in the state with the highest percentage of African- Americans...

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” — Karl Marx WASHINGTON Norman Thomas was not easily discouraged. Running for president in 1932, three years into the shattering, terrifying Depression, which seemed to many to be a systemic crisis of capitalism, Thomas, who had been the...

WASHINGTON In 1994, the Clinton administration decreed a bright shining future for education. Its Goals 2000 legislation proclaimed that by that year America’s high school graduation rate would be 90 percent and American students would lead the world in math and science achievements. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., was unimpressed:...

WASHINGTON Soon, in a federal court that few Americans know exists, there will come a ruling on a constitutional principle that today barely exists but that could, if the judicial branch will resuscitate it, begin to rectify the imbalance between the legislative and executive branches. It is the “nondelegation doctrine,”...

WASHINGTON His tractor is so noisy that, when driving it, the man who calls himself “just a farmer from Butler County” puts his cellphone under his cap, set on vibrate. Charles Grassley, 85, who has served in the Senate longer than all but 11 of the 1,983 other senators —...

WASHINGTON Surely the silliest aspirant for the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nomination is already known: “Beto,” aka Robert Francis, O’Rourke is a skateboarding man-child whose fascination with himself caused him to live-stream a recent dental appointment for — open-wide, please — teeth cleaning. His journal about his post-election recuperation-through-road-trip-to-nowhere-in-particular is so...

WASHINGTON Back in the day, small rural airports had textile windsocks, simple and empty things that indicated which way the wind was blowing. The ubiquitous Sen. Lindsey Graham has become a political windsock, and as such he — more than the sturdy, substantial elephant — is emblematic of his party...

WASHINGTON Half or a quarter of the way through this interesting experiment with an incessantly splenetic presidency, much of the nation has become accustomed to daily mortifications. Or has lost its capacity for embarrassment, which is even worse. If the country’s condition is calibrated simply by economic data — if,...

LONDON — The poet Rupert Brooke voiced the exhilaration of those Britons who welcomed the war in 1914 as a chance to escape monotonous normality, “as swimmers into cleanness leaping.” They got four years mired in Flanders’ mud. In a 2016 referendum, Britons voted, 52 percent to 48 percent, for...

BERLIN Armin-Paulus Hampel, a former journalist and commentator who now is a member of the Bundestag, is ebullient, affable, opinionated, voluble and excellent company at lunch. But, because his party is Alternative for Germany, one wonders whether he is representative of it, and whether he is as congenial politically as...

BERLIN In one of contemporary history’s intriguing caroms, European politics just now is a story of how one decision by a pastor’s dutiful daughter has made life miserable for a vicar’s dutiful daughter. Two of the world’s most important conservative parties are involved in an unintended tutorial on a cardinal...

WASHINGTON If Republicans have a lick of sense, they are alarmed by a recent sign of intelligent life in the other party. The sign is the election by Democrats in the House of Representatives of Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In November, she...