For years, one of my favorite things about serving in Congress was getting the opportunity to interact with my constituents. I loved chatting with them about our beloved state of Arizona and the policies I was fighting for. Even when we disagreed, we did so respectfully. We found common ground without vilifying each other.

My 5-year-old daughter was on a playdate last month when an investigator from the Florida Department of Children and Families sat at my kitchen table to question me about how I disciplined her, and then accompanied me to the playdate to check for nonexistent burn marks beneath her clothes. Someone had falsely reported that I abused my child. The report was quickly dismissed, but this was the low point in the short time I have been a Brevard County School Board member.

Stuart Woolf, a large almond and tomato producer, recently bulldozed 400 acres of almond orchards in central California – about 50,000 trees that under normal conditions would have produced $2.5 million of nuts every year for another decade. It’s a fraction of the 25,000 acres his family farms, but razing the land was a necessary triage – “Like cutting off your horribly infected hand to keep the rest of the body going,” he told me.

Dear Mike Pence:

As compromises go, this one hardly merited the name. Yet even small concessions by Congress’ self-avowed legislative Grim Reaper, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, get attention for their rarity, and send politicos and journalists scrambling for explanations.

You might think it was a crime, but last week, a grand jury did not.

Really. As a Republican election lawyer who has participated in more than 30 post-election recounts, contests and audits, I am extremely confident: They won’t find anything. The massive fraud that former president Donald Trump claims tarnished the 2020 election has been and will remain illusory – because it didn’t exist.

It’s been nearly a month since our country’s cruelest abortion ban went into effect. As of midnight on Sept. 1, most Texans seeking abortion care have been left powerless and afraid. Providing abortion care in Texas was difficult before, but now we are living in a dystopian nightmare. Let me share what it was like on the night of Aug. 31 at Whole Woman’s Health of Fort Worth.

On Sept. 22, at a global COVID-19 summit held in conjunction with the meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, President Joe Biden asked the world's leaders to "go big" on vaccine donations: He announced a goal of vaccinating 70% of the world's population by next September. The president was responding in part to growing discontent about global vaccine inequities: Some 79% of vaccinations have occurred in higher-income countries, compared with 0.5% in low-income countries. And Africa has vaccinated only 4% of its population.

“If you want to leave, take good care, hope you make a lot of nice friends out there.” – from “Wild World” by Cat Stevens

Walk around a supermarket in the U.S. or Europe and you will see some empty shelves once more. This isn’t due to people panic-buying toilet paper, as they did early on in the pandemic; rather it’s because supply chains are clogged at almost every stage between Asian factories and grocery stock rooms.

For all the nation’s problems – resurgent COVID-19, tragic weather extremes and the economic tolls of both – you’d think political leaders wouldn’t crash us into an easily avoidable crisis as well. Yet here we are, facing the catastrophic threat of defaulting on the federal debt.

Those pictures are traumatizing.

Raging wildfires have closed California’s national parks. The polar ice cap is melting at an alarming rate. And extreme weather is ravaging the world – especially its poorest people – as temperatures tick ever upward.

What do you do when a president is crazy?

It may be recalled that one of the chief GOP arguments against the Affordable Care Act in 2010 was that it would institute bureaucratic “death panels” to determine, in the words of former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, whether someone was “worthy of health care.”

Robert E. Lee has retreated from Richmond. Again.

On Sept. 10, 2001, I was teaching an introduction to Islam class at the University of Iowa, where I was, at the age of 28, the first full-time professor of Islamic studies in the history of the state. That day, I had about 15 students in my class. Two days later, an additional 272 students showed up.

In the early days of Joe Biden’s term, clever observers had a piece of advice for the new president and his party that was repeated often: Do popular things. It was a bit tongue-in-cheek for being so obvious, but that was the point. Rather than turn his political strategy into a Rube Goldberg machine with a hundred moving parts, he should simply pursue his most widely supported objectives. That, it was said, is the only way to win, especially to prevent one’s presidency being hamstrung by a midterm election loss that gives the opposition control of Congress.