The debt ceiling was not designed to be an important instrument of economic policy: Congress retained the power to set all spending and tax terms, as it does today. But Congress also must vote every now and then to raise the limit on Treasury’s authority to borrow. Failing to do so means the government can’t meet the obligations it has already approved.

The president, and Vice President Kamala Harris, came into office promising to reverse what they rightly called Trump’s “unrelenting assault on our values and our history as a nation of immigrants.” Attacking and rounding up asylum seekers — and dumping them back into a crisis-wracked country that the U.S. government has otherwise deemed unable to accept any influx of deportees — not only belies that promise. It will ensure the pattern of destructive, narrowly self-serving U.S. policies in Haiti will continue.

Replacing ignorant juries with informed ones could be an important criminal justice reform. As a general rule, then, we propose that judges should tell jurors the range of sentences, including the statutory maximum and any mandatory minimums, that a defendant would face upon conviction.

The United States’ first full-scale invasion of a nation state came more than a century ago, with the Mexican-American War fought from 1846 to 1848. The war resulted in vast territorial gains for the United States that included all or parts of California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma. Mexico lost 55 percent of its claimed territory.

Following one of my lectures in a packed university auditorium in Brescia, I was approached by a young, hijab-wearing Muslim woman. By her name, appearance, and accented English, I read her as Italian of Arab extraction, possibly the daughter of immigrants to Italy or an immigrant herself. Unlike the other students who queued to speak with me, she had a concise question: “Why is the United States waging war on Islam?”