Commentary

Since the red sandstone “Castle” was completed in 1855, the Smithsonian has been a fixture on the National Mall. First envisioned by Pierre L’Enfant, the Mall has come to embody both the nation’s character and ideals. What started as a marshy lowland has become the most-visited place in the National Park System, inviting people from across the country and around the world to better understand American democracy, and to experience the history and culture of this richly diverse nation. The challenge ahead is to reimagine a Mall that tells the full American story.

I promise not to mention Donald Trump in this column. I’ll refer to him as “Florida man,” as the New York Post did the other day, after he claimed that he will again run for president. (I say “claimed” because it’s hard to believe anything Florida man says.) A point the pundits have missed in discussing Florida man’s waning influence: It really started a year ago, when he failed to get Republicans in Congress to kill the $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending bill.

People living in the Baltimore area can only marvel at this month’s opening of the Silver Line, the $3 billion, 11.5-mile extension of the Washington, D.C., Metrorail from Reston to Dulles International Airport and beyond to Ashburn. The project was four years delayed and substantially over budget, but the boost to already-affluent Loudon County is unmistakable.

Certain images from Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s nearly two decades of leading House Democrats stand out. There is Ms. Pelosi beaming as she called up to the dais all the children who had accompanied their parents to the House chamber, having them stand with her as she reclaimed the speaker’s gavel in 2019. There is Ms. Pelosi in the White House surrounded by male congressional leaders and top military officials as she stood up across the table and pointed her finger toward a stunned President Donald Trump. But the image that perhaps best sums up Ms. Pelosi is the footage of her on Jan. 6, 2021

My fifth time going through a fertility surgery was when it hit me that I might never have children. I was 39, and each cycle was the same: unsuccessful. My eggs — which I was told were both low quality and quantity — never even made it to the stage where they could be implanted back into me as the beginning of life. I’d wanted children for years, less as a concrete goal than as a theoretical desire, something that I thought would happen once I found a partner I loved and managed my career.

As the Bible tells the story, Moses delivers his people from bondage and to the “promised land,” but even with all his efforts, he is not allowed to enter. He must gaze upon it from a distance. This, I fear, is the story of Stacey Abrams. She built the huge voter registration and turnout machine that helped Joe Biden carry Georgia in 2020 and helped the state elect its first Jewish and Black senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, giving Democrats control of the Senate.

Allowing 35 million Americans to delay paying their federal student loans was a questionable policy when it began in March 2020 in the depth of the pandemic crisis. It’s a terrible idea now. The White House should not extend the student-loan moratorium, as The Post has reported it is considering doing when it expires at the end of the year. Such a move would be the eighth time the debt freeze has been prolonged.