By William Freivogel >> Sixty-one years ago, Percy Green began a hunger strike in front of the office of then-St. Louis Treasurer John H. “Jack” Dwyer to demand the city remove tax money from Jefferson Bank, which had no Black employees. Green, who had already been branded a “habitual troublemaker” by the St. Louis Globe-Democrat
By William H. Freivogel >> In 100 days of chaos, President Donald J. Trump has violated laws, ignored time-tested norms, damaged the world’s most respected system of higher education, undermined the world’s leading network of medical and health research facilities, surrendered America’s important instruments of “soft power,” endangered the health of tens of thousands of
By William H. Freivogel >> French publication Le Monde headlined this week that it was “The week the US shook Europe’s world.” Americans could justifiably say it’s the month that shook ours. There is no precedent for President Donald Trump’s massive restructuring of the government with a flurry of executive orders, pronouncements, firings and pardons
By William H. Freivogel >> While President Donald Trump unleashes a torrent of legally questionable exertions of power, Congress sits by compliantly, the U.S. Supreme Court remains unengaged and the Fourth Estate shrinks from its role as a watchdog of presidential abuse. Media executives even curry favor with the man they’re supposed to be watching.
By William H. Freivogel >> Linda Greenhouse, the Pulitzer-Prize winning Supreme Court reporter, said in St. Louis last week that Justice Samuel Alito elaborately reinterpreted a 1990s precedent to “provide to a veneer of legal analysis on what is at its core a religious tract” overturning Roe v. Wade. Greenhouse added that the “metastasized precedent”
