Pennsylvania

F or all the talk about how Donald Trump’s endorsed candidates would fare in the Republican primaries this year, the results in this week’s races made clear: Whatever happens to Trump’s personal influence, Trumpism is consolidating its dominance of the GOP. The former president’s scorecard on Tuesday was mixed. Candidates he endorsed won the GOP nominations for governor in Pennsylvania and Senate in North Carolina, while his preferred choice for Idaho governor failed to topple the incumbent and his late intervention could not save troubled young Representative Madison Cawthorn in North Carolina. The Pennsylvania Republican Senate primary remains too close to call between the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, Trump’s candidate, and David McCormick, whom Trump has criticized. Yet more revealing than what happened to the candidates Trump endorsed was how many candidates endorsed him . As in Republican primaries earlier this year, no top-tier contenders in any of Tuesday’s races ran on … [Read more...] about What the Primaries Reveal About the Future of Trumpism

Republican Gov. Bill Lee on Friday signed off on legislation banning transgender athletes from participating in female college sports. Last year, no other state enacted more laws targeting transgender people than Tennessee , as GOP lawmakers consistently dismissed concerns that they discriminate against an already at-risk population. Those measures included banning transgender athletes from playing girls public high or middle school sports. This year, lawmakers returned to the Nashville-based Statehouse looking to expand that ban to colleges and universities. The proposal easily cleared the Republican-controlled Statehouse, where GOP members also approved a separate bill that will add harsh penalties against public K-12 schools that allow transgender athletes to participate in girls’ sports. Republicans this year also pushed to let teachers and school districts use the pronoun that a transgender student does not prefer, but that effort eventually got spiked during … [Read more...] about Tennessee governor signs collegiate transgender athlete ban

Most of us are familiar with the ongoing debate surrounding whether to keep or cut the ACT and SAT in undergraduate admissions. Now, a similar dispute may surface surrounding what to do with the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). While serving as student body president of UCLA at the start of the pandemic, I joined forces with my fellow presidents from Yale, Stanford and USC in calling for an end to the ACT and SAT as a component of undergraduate admissions. Now, as a law student and graduate student president at the University of Pennsylvania, I write with an eerie sense of déjà vu as the American Bar Association (ABA) seriously considers ending the LSAT testing requirement as a component for admission. For many students currently enrolled in law school, we knew this news was possibly only a matter of time, as the LSAT is afflicted with many of the same inadequacies as its undergraduate test counterparts. The ABA primarily references the LSAT's questionable reliability in … [Read more...] about Why the Law School Admission Test needs to go | Opinion