Author: Debra Saunders

“The price of a college education should never be the risk of a sexual assault,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., told a Senate hearing Wednesday. Too many colleges don’t treat rape, she observed, as “the violent felony that it actually is.” Her solution is the bipartisan Campus Accountability and Safety Act, or CASA, which would require […]

When South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley signed a bill to boot the Confederate flag from State House grounds earlier this month, it was a beautiful moment — if decades late. State lawmakers finally acted out of revulsion from images of a confessed shooter posing with the Civil War relic before he shot to death nine […]

Voters in Colorado, Iowa and Virginia think Hillary Clinton is not honest or trustworthy. According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, a mere 34 percent of Colorado voters think she can be trusted; 62 percent do not. In Iowa, those numbers are 33 percent to 59; in Virginia, Clinton is underwater on trust, too, 39 percent […]

Last year, CNN’s “Death Row Stories” ran an episode about a California woman convicted of first-degree murder and then freed when a federal judge overturned the verdict because prosecutors had withheld evidence. I had a few issues with the episode, in part because Gloria Killian was not tried for capital murder and never spent a […]

July 1 was one of those evenings when you feel blessed to be in San Francisco, especially if you are strolling along Pier 14. But every reader knows what happened next: A bullet struck Kathryn Steinle, 32, as she walked arm in arm with her father. Neither knew what had happened; the shot killed a […]

The most recent time I had seen Jeb Bush speak in San Francisco was in January, when he addressed the National Automobile Dealers Association. It is hard to imagine a group more invested in the old-school economy. It was a friendly crowd. The former Florida governor seemed comfortable — and boring. I left feeling as […]

San Francisco is not likely to change its ill-conceived sanctuary-city policy because City Hall must bow to progressives who don’t believe in deporting undocumented immigrants with serious criminal records. Activists such as Angela Chan of the Asian Law Caucus believe that Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi was right to release Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez rather than turn him […]

President Barack Obama commuted the sentences of 46 federal drug offenders Monday. In his first term, Obama issued one meager commutation; he was arguably the stingiest modern president when it came to the exercise of his pardon authority. Now, White House spokesman Josh Earnest noted, the president has issued 89 commutations — more than the […]

Donald Trump is the GOP’s Voldemort, the Dark Lord and villain of the Harry Potter children’s book series. To thinking Republicans who don’t want to go through another circle of hell like the 2012 presidential primary, Trump is He Who Must Not Be Named. When a partisan mistakenly utters his name, media dementors — soulless […]

Democrats now will say anything to distance themselves from sanctuary city policies, even though they have supported these policies for years. In an exclusive CNN interview Tuesday, Hillary Rodham Clinton was asked about San Francisco’s refusal to hand over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement seven-time convicted felon and five-time deportee Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez. He stands […]

Did San Francisco’s sanctuary city ordinance contribute to the senseless shooting death of Kathryn Steinle, 32, as she was out for an evening stroll on Pier 14 last week? This is a national story, because the federal government released accused shooter Francisco Sanchez to a San Francisco jail in March and the jail released Sanchez […]

Downtown San Francisco feels like a large public toilet without enough janitors. More than once this year, I’ve seen men drop their pants in public places — including at Fifth and Market — to leave a smelly mess on the sidewalk. You can walk for blocks and never escape the stench of stale urine. At […]

San Francisco changed America. When then-Mayor Gavin Newsom opened City Hall to same-sex marriages during the 2004 Winter of Love, he had determined to “put a human face on discrimination.” The long line of couples eager to tie the knot appealed to the public’s romantic side. When two people are in love and want to […]

The GOP-majority Supreme Court saved President Barack Obama’s bacon Thursday with a political ruling that papered over his signature Affordable Care Act. Writing for the majority in the 6-3 King v. Burwell decision, Chief Justice John Roberts noted that the 900-page law was written behind closed doors with little debate or amendment and thus was […]

When SB 128, which would legalize physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients, passed the California Senate, supporters hailed the measure’s success as a sign of its inevitability. And what Democrat in this heavily left-leaning Legislature wants to be on — say it slowly — The Wrong Side of History? It turns out reports of the […]

It is fitting, if late, that South Carolina’s political leaders seem ready to evict the Confederate flag from the grounds of their state Capitol in response to the vile shooting that left nine African-Americans dead in Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church last week. In a Monday news conference while flanked by Democrats and fellow Republicans, Gov. […]

Everyone has a story: The time an unlicensed driver rear-ended me. The time an unlicensed driver ran a red light and killed a co-worker’s dog as her husband was walking the dog in a crosswalk. It seems as if there are so many unlicensed drivers in California that authorities are not capable of deterring the […]

Pope Francis is releasing an encyclical Thursday on climate change — a draft of which was leaked to the Italian magazine l’Espresso on Monday. The New York Times reports that the encyclical is “eagerly awaited, especially by scientists and environmentalists” — because the pope agrees with most of them. On the right, it’s not all […]

“You’d have to be made of stone not to feel for these students,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said as he announced an Obama administration decision to forgive as many as 350,000 loans taken out by students of the now-defunct Corinthian Colleges. “Some of these schools have brought the ethics of payday lending into higher education.” […]

“There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally,” President Barack Obama proclaimed in a 2009 speech to Congress. It was a memorable event, in part because Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., shouted, “You […]

Hillary Clinton has a new crusade. The Democrats’ only name female candidate for president sees “a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to the other.” In a speech at Texas Southern University, Clinton also charged, “Republicans are systematically and deliberately trying […]

The revenge of the status quo is brutish. “If you attack the establishment long enough and hard enough, they will make you a member of it,” humorist Art Buchwald once observed. Those words never seemed truer than at the “Uber Turns Five” celebration at its San Francisco digs Wednesday. In the disruption economy, five years […]

In Progressive World, there are at least four stages of legally becoming an adult. On Tuesday, the California Senate voted to raise the age when young people can buy cigarettes, from 18 to 21. The Hawaii Legislature has passed similar legislation. A companion California bill would mandate that e-cigarettes fall under the same restrictions as […]

Do I trust the federal government? Hell no. President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice is happy to spend years investigating a foreign soccer organization for corruption and former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert for allegedly paying off a blackmailer — but not the alleged blackmailer — yet ignores big concerns. The feds have done next […]

Julius Caesar lay dead. The senators who took his life stood dumbstruck, faced with the foul deed they had done, and then fled in a panic. Mark Antony stared at the corpse in horror and then raged, “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.” He picked up Caesar’s heavily tattooed lifeless body and […]

“We have police. They arrest girls or women for having bad hijab or not being covered enough. But it’s not that we live with the police in our head. You know?” Those famous last words were pronounced by Washington Post reporter Yeganeh Salehi, 39, in 2014 as the dual Iranian-American citizen, who was raised in […]

The Senate Appropriations Committee did something last week the Senate has never done; it passed a marijuana reform measure. It was the narrowest of proposals, an amendment co-authored by Sens. Steve Daines, R-Mont., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., to a military spending bill that would prohibit the Department of Veterans Affairs from using federal money to […]

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., isn’t worried that, absent a Senate vote, key provisions of the Patriot Act are slated to sunset May 31. The GOP presidential hopeful told “Meet the Press” Sunday that a federal appeals court found the data-gathering authorized under the Patriot Act’s Section 215 is unconstitutional, “so really, it ought to stop.” […]

Dianne Feinstein of California arguably used to be the CIA’s best friend on the Democratic side of the Senate. I think it’s fair to say that San Francisco voters were not enthusiastic about her pro-intelligence posture during the George W. Bush presidency. One thing DiFi has going for her, though, is that it’s hard even […]

The Sacramento Bee and the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday that Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif., would announce Thursday she would be running for retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer’s seat. At last, it seemed as if California Attorney General Kamala Harris, the only name Democrat in the race, might face some competition. Then Sanchez claimed that the […]