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The Supreme Court’s rulings on marriage will not lessen the everyday – sometimes subtle, often not – ways that many LGBT people get treated as less than equals.

Five Supreme Court Justices just rolled back the most effective civil rights provision in our nation's history. What should we do now?

One option is to declare "mission accomplished" and forget about race in politics.

That, however, will not work. Although we have made amazing progress in the past fifty years, too many state and local politicians still maintain power by manipulating election rules.

Today, a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, upending a law that has been central to our nation’s commitment to eradicating the shameful legacy of racial discrimination in voting, especially in the deep South. The Court declared that the so-called “coverage formula” used to determine which states should be required to obtain preclearance for changes in voting laws was unconstitutional, but that Congress retains the authority to update the coverage formula.

Q. How would you summarize the decision in a single sentence?

A. The court effectively rolled back an important provision of the Voting Rights Act, ruling that the act’s formula requiring federal preapproval of election changes for some states but not others was outdated because it was based on data from the 1960s and ’70s.

Q. Did anything in in it — or in the justices’ votes — surprise you?

A. I was not surprised by the votes of the particular justices.

Five Supreme Court Justices just rolled back the most effective civil rights provision in our nation's history. What should we do now?

One option is to declare "mission accomplished" and forget about race in politics.

That, however, will not work. Although we have made amazing progress in the past fifty years, too many state and local politicians still maintain power by manipulating election rules.

The Supreme Court dealt the Voting Rights Act a serious body blow Tuesday, but it did leave Congress an out. The court said, “Congress—if it is to divide the States—must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions.”

The Supreme Court just declared that the Civil War is no longer relevant to the history and administration of racial justice in America.

In a sense, the court's decision in Shelby County v. Holder validated a generations-long effort -- first by Democrats and later by Ronald Reagan and the Bush family -- to throw off the moral weight that slavery and the Civil War had placed on the South. [...]

If it were up to you, how would you split up income between the top 10% and the other 90%? How should a country's wealth be distributed, and why? And, if more Americans truly understood the impacts and extent of income inequality, would they be moved to do anything about it? 

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously warned in 1996 that welfare reform was a huge gamble and that the result could be extraordinary human suffering. 

Those predictions came to seem extreme as the years passed. The boom of the late 1990s and then the credit fueled prosperity of the Bush years ensured a steady supply of low-wage jobs and, for a long time, it seemed that TANF was not the disaster many predicted.