From Tucker Carlson to Trump, damage to America is mounting

USA TODAY

Happy Friday! Here's what we have today:

From Tucker Carlson to Trump, damage to America is mounting

By Tim Swarens

Like a middle-age guy who likes cookies too much and exercises too little (stop looking at me), many Americans take the health of our civic body for granted. Yet, that body has suffered one bruising blow after another in recent years.

The brutish election of 2016. The still-angry politics of the pandemic. The murder of George Floyd and its aftermath. The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, encouraged by a president who refused to accept a clear electoral loss. And this week, the sneak attack leak of a Supreme Court draft opinion about the most emotionally charged of issues, one that has divided Americans for decades.

Tucker Carlson on March 2, 2017, in New York.

Ashley Judd: How to honor my mom's legacy this Mother's Day

By Ashley Judd

This Sunday is abruptly, shockingly, my first Mother’s Day without my mama. She died just hours before her peers at the Country Music Hall of Fame could demonstrate to her how much they esteem her. She died just days before my sister and I could show her again how much we love and honor her.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I was supposed to visit her on Sunday, to give her a box of old-fashioned candy, our family tradition. We were supposed to have sweet delight in each others’ easy presence. Instead, I am unmoored. But my heart is not empty. It is replete with gratitude for what she left behind. Her nurture and tenderness, her music and memory.

This Supreme Court doesn't deserve to rule on Roe

By Richard Wolf

Supreme Court justices are fond of claiming that their decisions are not influenced by politics.

Conservatives, in particular, insist that only the Constitution (originalism) and laws (textualism) truly matter. Justices across the ideological spectrum also pay heed to precedent, usually when it suits their cause.

But if politics doesn’t belong in the debate about Roe v. Wade, the court should have the humility to recognize that it is, perhaps more than any of its predecessors, the Court That Politics Built. The very existence of today’s conservative majority is due to blatant power politics.

From Tucker Carlson to Trump, damage to America is mounting