‘How JD Vance could become the most powerful VP in American history’
Jeff Mayhugh at The Hill
J.D. Vance “might be the most powerful vice president in American history,” says Jeff Mayhugh. Vance “could use his intellectual prowess, congressional and venture capitalist relationships, and competitive roots to expand the power of the vice presidency.” If “Trump recognizes Vance’s growing influence and reacts unpredictably, Vance’s position as vice president would make him the only person in Trump’s inner circle who cannot be fired.” Vance has the “potential to wield that power in ways never seen before.”
‘What Scotland can teach America about democracy’
Joe Mathews at the San Francisco Chronicle
Earth’s “2.3 billion children now represent a rising global superpower,” says Joe Mathews, and “children are demanding more of the democratic rights that they are now denied.” In Scotland, all children “have been able to register to vote at age 14 and cast ballots at 16.” When “looking at the world in Edinburgh, children’s power feels like a rising tide. Who, but a fool or an adult, would dare stand in our kids’ way?”
‘Abortion has always been more than health care’
Christen Hammock Jones at Time
Abortion “is health care in the broad sense of the term,” says Christen Hammock Jones. But “many feminists working towards abortion rights in the 1960s and ’70s would have viewed this framing with suspicion.” Many “thought medicine itself was a lost cause because of the hierarchy that placed ‘expert’ doctors above patients.” Like “feminists in the 1960s and ’70s, those calling for the return of Roe should widen their vision of abortion rights beyond the clinic.”
‘Baseball has much larger problems than the farcical “golden at-bat”‘
David Lengel at The Guardian
A baseball rule change “would allow a team to send their preferred player to the plate, at any time, even if it wasn’t his turn to hit, once a game,” but this “transforms the game into a different code,” says David Lengel. Baseball needs “real solutions to the crisis of endless arm injuries,” but “instead we get the golden at-bat, the equivalent of being bored at 2 a.m. on the Fourth of July and stuffing M-80s inside cinder blocks.”