Scot Lehigh

Boston

Op-ed columnist for the Boston Globe. Currently featured in my twitter header: @MarciaCrumley's painting "Daylight Fading."

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Articles

Readers, I’m taking a break to write another novel - The Boston Globe

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Scot Lehigh

Writing a column for The Boston Globe is both a privilege and a pleasure. It’s the realization of a dream that began as a high school and college kid, reading David Broder, William Safire, Mary McGrory, George Will (still!), and the duo of Jack Germond and Jules Witcover. And the Trump administration certainly offers a panoramic tableau for columnizing. One never need ask, hmm, what’s happening this week that might make for an interesting topic?
Trumpian chaos reigns — but there are reasons for optimism - The Boston Globe

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Scot Lehigh

Chaos is in the American saddle — and yet the past few days offer some hope that the horses of havocs can be kept from a full stampede. On Wednesday and Thursday, the financial markets forced another delay and then a revision in the president’s tariff schemes, even as the Supreme Court took a step to rein in a bit of his budgetary abuse. To be sure, the picture remains grim. No one can predict with any market-assuaging confidence what will happen on the trade-taxing front.
Trump’s behavior makes me embarrassed to be an American - The Boston Globe

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Scot Lehigh

It’s something I never imagined I’d feel, let alone say. But for the first time in my six-plus decades, it’s true. I’m embarrassed to be an American. That’s hit me hard. I’ve traveled a bit over the years, and almost everywhere I’ve gone, people have expressed affection and appreciation for our nation.
‘See you in court,’ she said - The Boston Globe

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Scot Lehigh |Carine Hajjar |Caitlin Shetterly

The recent dust-up between President Trump and Maine Governor Janet Mills has been described as a heated exchange, but it really wasn’t. It was a bullying comment by Trump followed by a laconic, kill-the-contretemps comeback by Mills. It revealed something about both. Trump is a bully — and Mills is neither intimidated nor impressed by browbeaters.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s cynical and hollow man - The Boston Globe

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Scot Lehigh

When Mitch McConnell took to the floor of the US Senate last week, on his 83d birthday, to announce that he won’t be running for reelection again, he talked about how unlikely it had once seemed that he would be elected to the Senate, where he would have the same desk that 19th-century statesman Henry Clay once used. That remote wooden link between the two Kentuckians is as close as McConnell will ever come to an association with greatness.
Don’t buy DOGE’s fraud-is-everywhere fantasy - The Boston Globe

2 months ago | bostonglobe.com | Scot Lehigh

That’s true. The United States can’t simply continue to accumulate debt at its current rate, which means the nation needs an honest discussion of revenues and spending. But that is not what we are getting with DOGE. President Trump and MAGA mini-me Elon Musk are portraying their exercise as a hugely successful effort to crack down on waste, fraud, and abuse. It’s not.
Europe is rightly angry at Vance’s myopic message - The Boston Globe

2 months ago | bostonglobe.com | Scot Lehigh

Vance blasted our European allies for their supposed offenses against free speech and the free range of ideas. He scolded that “there is no room for firewalls,” a reference to the political policy of Germany’s mainstream parties not to enter coalitions with extremist factions, a practice designed to isolate neo-Nazi organizations.
From slopes to mopes: Dodging a season of snow - The Boston Globe

2 months ago | bostonglobe.com | Scot Lehigh

Are you hearing the predictions of a midwinter full of storms, which will sock us with snow and require long family shoveling hours clearing the lovely but laborious white stuff? Why, readers, I can help here. You know how theater types wish actors good luck by saying “Break a leg!”? When it comes to snow shoveling and its, um, avoidance, I say, “Bruise a rib.” This is an epiphany I quite literally tumbled upon.
The courts step in where Congress fears to tread - The Boston Globe

2 months ago | bostonglobe.com | Scot Lehigh

It’s a revealing and risible revue in Washington’s corridors of cower. Our GOP-led Congress has abdicated any oversight role with regard to President Trump’s blitz of the bureaucracy, while the federal courts have stepped into the breach. That has occasioned grumping and harrumphing by those Republicans who apparently aren’t old enough to remember the many resorts to the courts the GOP engaged in during the Obama and Biden presidencies.
Warning: Fiscal scams and flimflams probably lie ahead - The Boston Globe

2 months ago | bostonglobe.com | Scot Lehigh

Today, let’s go placidly among the noise and haste and chaos and history-and-reality-suspending plans to reorder the Middle East according to presidential pipe dreams and ... Ahem. What I meant to say is, here’s a bit of good news.