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SCOTUS on a roll

The U.S. Supreme Court is on a roll — crushing rights and smashing precedents as it goes. We understood this wave of potentially bad decisions was coming — the nation’s highest court usually saves its biggest, most controversial rulings for the end of its session. But one can only do so much to brace against a tsunami, especially with four more decisions yet to come. The biggest one, of course, was the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health that overruled Roe v. Wade on Friday. Also thrown into the mix last week were the rulings to force Maine’s K-12 ...

Fair pay, opportunity and respect

That’s all officers ask for Last Sunday, The Dominion Post detailed the myriad complaints from Morgantown police officers against the City of Morgantown. Chief among the grievances was a series of policy changes that will cut officers’ pay: significantly less paid overtime and use-it-or-lose-it paid time off. But the underlying issue is that Morgantown’s police don’t feel supported and respected by the city, and that has caused officers to leave the force in droves. The solution to stop the flood of resignations is simple: Give the Morgantown Police Department the ...

Welcome to Gilead

“We had choices then.” – June“Now you have respect. You have protection. You can fulfill your biological destinies in peace.” – Fred“Biological destiny?” – June“Children. What else is there to live for?” – Fred -- From the Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” Welcome to Gilead. On our first day in the new world order, women now have fewer rights than a corpse and the barrier that has kept the United States of America from becoming a theocracy has been badly damaged. It is worthwhile to note that nothing can legally be ...

The Supreme Court decimates separation of church and state

Remember when conservatives decried the pre-Trump Supreme Court as an “activist court” because it dared to — gasp! — uphold human rights? Those same conservatives are oddly quiet now that the U.S. actually does have an “activist” Supreme Court — one that has delighted in overturning decades, sometimes centuries, of precedent and in deliberately misreading the Constitution despite many of its most extreme justices calling themselves “originalists.” This week saw two radical rulings, with more sure to follow. In Carson v. Makin, the far-right court gleefully took a ...

Gas tax pause won’t help, but neither does blaming Biden

The gas price situation has become so dire that President Biden has now asked Congress to consider a three-month gas tax holiday. As we’ve said before, a gas tax holiday won’t provide much relief at the pumps. That said, if the federal government suspended its 18 cent tax and the state suspended its 35 cent tax at the same time, consumers would save more than 50 cents per gallon. And that would add up to noticeable savings quicker than a state or federal holiday alone. But a gas tax holiday still presents the same problems: A huge loss of tax revenue and no guarantee companies ...

The answer to gun violence isn’t to turn schools into prisons

In the last couple weeks, local schools have been testing their new weapons detectors, and area high schools plan to have them up and running for daily use come fall. Take a moment to digest that. Guns and extremist rhetoric have become easily accessible nationwide. Now, the scourge of school shootings that once seemed improbable — something that happened to other people in other places — has become very possible here. So possible that our schools are bracing for what now feels like an inevitability. How did we get here? To weapons detectors at school doors? To ...