Author: Debra Saunders

When Bernie Sanders hits rival Hillary Clinton for taking humongous speaking fees from big banks — notably the $675,000 Goldman Sachs paid her for three speeches while she eyed the Oval Office — he struck Clinton’s Achilles heel. Both the former secretary of state and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have cashed in since […]

Two years ago, Thumbtack — a startup that connects consumers with local contractors — conducted a survey to see what they thought of proposals to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10, as per President Obama’s bid “to give America a raise.” The survey found that that a plurality of the small businesses […]

Jeb Bush must be watching the Democratic primary with unadulterated envy. The Democratic debates have been comparatively civil — and conveniently scheduled to reduce viewership and impact. Bush has to contend with Donald Trump — and Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida. The establishment Democrat, Hillary Clinton, has only one serious […]

God help me. I have come to appreciate why some Republican voters like Donald Trump. It’s because he embodies New York in all its ostentation and swagger. When punched, he punches back. He owns his anger. He looks as if he is having a blast. At Thursday night’s Fox Business Network GOP debate, Trump readily […]

There are two ways to talk up bipartisanship. You can give the notion lip service. You can lament its loss in modern politics. You can lay the blame of partisan rancor on the times and not at your own clay feet. You can say, “It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency — that […]

The verdict is in. On Friday, jurors found 56-year-old Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow guilty on all 162 charges against him, including murder, conspiracy to murder, racketeering, trafficking in stolen goods and 154 counts of money laundering. Though the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office may feel vindicated by the verdict, the guilty verdict also serves as […]

Republicans fulfilled a popular campaign pledge Wednesday when, by a 240-181 vote, the House passed a bill repealing the Affordable Care Act and defunding Planned Parenthood. The bill, already passed by the Senate, now goes to the desk of President Barack Obama, where it surely will be vetoed. Just when, I have to ask, did […]

Weeks before Ammon Bundy and his pals showed up at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to protest five-year federal prison sentences imposed on two Oregon ranchers, a friend alerted me to the ranchers’ story. Thanks to federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws, the government was sending Dwight and Steven Hammond, who had served earlier sentences, back […]

“They went to the toilet and they scraped the bowl,” defense attorney Tony Serra railed during his closing arguments for client Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, 56, who stands accused of murder and racketeering. Chow, you may recall, was caught up in a March 2014 federal sweep that netted 26 other defendants, including former California state […]

Time magazine made a solid news judgment in naming German Chancellor Angela Merkel its 2015 “Person of the Year.” The flood of refugees and immigrants from the Middle East and Africa into Europe, the greatest wave of migrants since World War II, is the world-changing event of the decade, and Merkel is the individual most […]

In 2013, Americans learned about a new epidemic — affluenza. As psychologist G. Dick Miller explained the phenomenon, children of wealthy parents are taught not the golden rule but “we have the gold, we make the rules.” The unsympathetic carrier of the affliction — Ethan Couch, Miller’s client, then 16 — pleaded guilty in 2013 […]

With apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan. (With Donald Trump performing as Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, with his little list of people who never will be missed.) As next year it must happen that some losers must emerge — I’ve got a little list. I’ve got a little list. Of Republican contenders most deserving of […]

Why does Donald Trump repeat talking points that he knows are untrue? During Tuesday night’s debate, The Donald asserted that before 9/11, terrorists put their “friends, family, girlfriends” into planes, and “they were sent back — for the most part to Saudi Arabia. They knew what was going on. They went home, and they wanted […]

During the most recent presidential election, non-candidate Donald Trump crowned himself king of the “birther” movement, with his constant questions about whether President Barack Obama was born in Kenya or the United States. Now (it pains me to say) Trump is the GOP front-runner, and his closest challenger in the polls is Sen. Ted Cruz […]

Any day now, Donald Trump may walk back his Monday call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” If so, he won’t change his mind because he regrets insulting Muslim Americans — no small number of whom, unlike Trump, […]

  There is something I forgot to mention in my Sunday column about California’s gun laws and their failure to stop the San Bernardino terrorist attack last week: I supported California’s 1989 assault weapon ban. The bill passed after a vicious elementary schoolyard shooting in Stockton left five children dead. The shooter had an AK-47. […]

There are two kinds of Americans. One sees a mass shooting — such as the recent killings in San Bernardino, California, and Colorado Springs, Colorado — and automatically thinks other people should not be able to buy or own guns or own some kinds of guns. The other learns of a mass shooting and takes […]

America’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealth Group Inc., is losing so much money on the Affordable Care Act exchange policies it sells in 34 states that CEO Stephen Hemsley apologized to investors in New York on Tuesday. “It was for us a bad decision,” Hemsley said, according to Bloomberg News. UnitedHealth stayed out of the Obamacare […]

In 1997, I went to a “needle exchange” in San Francisco to see firsthand how the “harm reduction program” prevented the spread of HIV among addicts. Exchange staff offered vitamins, treatment for sores and referrals to kick the habit; addicts handed over carefully bundled needles in a one-dirty-for-one-clean exchange. Users’ participation demonstrated that they had […]

A federal program, once launched, is impossible to kill. It doesn’t matter if the scheme wastes money. It doesn’t matter if the program doesn’t work. It doesn’t even matter if the program does the very opposite of what it is supposed to do. Every government program enters the world with an army of fairy godmothers […]

Earlier generations believe that male enlistment in the military had an equalizing effect; wars brought men from all classes together to fight for a common cause. Newspapers are the modern (much less dangerous) equivalent, in that they provide a common experience for people of all walks of life, as well as a common investment. My […]

Donald Trump is like a contagion who infects everyone around him. Once you’ve kissed, you can never wipe his saliva off your face. Consider the venerable (in its own view) NBC. This year, the network fired Trump, only to find it is Trump Lite. On June 16, when Trump was announcing his candidacy for the […]

President Barack Obama wants the United States to take in 10,000 Syrian refugees next year — but in the wake of last week’s Paris attacks and reports that one of the terrorists may have had a valid Syrian passport with a stamp from Greece, more than half the governors in this country, a mostly Republican […]

“Why can’t we take out these bastards?” CNN’s Jim Acosta bluntly asked President Obama at a Monday press conference at the Group of 20 summit in Turkey. “These bastards,” of course, are the Islamic State — at least for Acosta. As Obama called Friday’s attacks in Paris that left at least 129 dead a “sickening […]

Former San Francisco 49ers star Kermit Alexander is death penalty opponents’ worst nightmare. Foes of the death penalty argue that the criminal justice system is skewed against African-Americans and that prosecutors are less likely to seek the death penalty when victims are black. Alexander is an African-American who grew up in the projects of Los […]

Activists at the University of Missouri just won themselves a trophy Monday. After weeks of protests against the president of the University of Missouri System, Tim Wolfe — and, most importantly, after the Mizzou football team threatened to boycott games until Wolfe quit — the administrator caved. “It is my belief we stopped listening to […]

This story starts with a transgender high school student who was born male but identifies as female. As a public high school student, she wants the school to recognize her as a girl, to call her by her new legal name, to allow her to use the girls’ bathroom and to accept her in girls’ […]

Outsiders like to think of San Francisco as a hotbed of contentious activism. Locals have tended to regard City Hall as the arena where Democrats and progressive Democrats mix it up. With Tuesday’s election, you can say goodbye to any notion of anarchy. All bow to the victorious political machine. City Hall is all-Democrat all […]

Ohio Gov. John Kasich is the Republican in the 2016 presidential field whom Democrats I know like the most. He evokes his Christian faith to explain his support for government spending. At the CNBC debate, he declared, “I care about poor people” — in a way that made you wonder if he thought he was […]

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, had a standout moment early in Wednesday night’s Republican debate when he went after, not other Republicans, but the CNBC moderators, none of whom appeared to have “any intention of voting in a Republican primary.” CNBC’s Jim Cramer and Rick Santelli later asked questions a conservative would ask, but the event […]