The new Texas anti-abortion law is unconstitutional as its purpose and effect is to hinder, if not to entirely prevent, the free exercise of a Texas woman’s right to an abortion under Roe vs. Wade. It is also unconstitutionally vague, arbitrary, overbroad, unreasonable and dangerous.

People who think they know what will happen in Afghanistan need to hold off on their predictions. That country’s future is far from clear.

My mother, Muriel Fischer Rothman, was a gorgeous, tough, elegant, sharp, classy, Bronx girl, with a dry and cutting sense of humor. She tolerated no fools. But she was always there for me.

Would we still regard America as the land of liberty and justice if the United States was to become a country where the person who lost the presidential election could be installed as our President anyway?

Yesterday brought me to deep anger and tears of profound sadness as I witnessed, along with all Americans and the entire world, America’s “Temple of Democracy” invaded and defiled by criminally-incited domestic terrorists.

I recently read an article in New Jersey Globe that said, incorrectly, that when the New Jersey Republican plan for Congressional Redistricting was enacted and presented as a fait accompli to the New Jersey Congressional Delegation in December 2011, that I considered running in their gerrymandered 5th Congressional District, but ultimately decided to run in my home 9th Congressional District, because I thought I would lose a race in the 5th. Not true.

Will self-learning computers, initially programmed by humans, continue to be governed by the judgments of our relatively slow-thinking homo sapiens species? According to Yuval Noah Harari, whose three non-fiction books have each spent months on the best-seller lists, humans have created ever-more powerful computers to examine, draw patterns from and create more effective approaches to human productivity, health, happiness, longevity and perhaps immortality.

We sure are an odd political couple: A Centrist/Liberal Democrat who is a former U.S. Congressman from Bergen County and a Conservative former Chairman of the Bergen County Republican Party. We join today to ask two questions that concern us as Americans and American Jews.

Not everyone missed it. But I did. It was the spring 2018 news story about how China has instituted a Social Credit Policy for its 1.4 billion people and the domestic and international companies that do business with China.

In an age when so many are rightfully suspicious that our elected officials don’t have a vision that addresses the realities of most Americans, it is time to focus on what most of us agree are the major needs in our country. Needs that the latest Republican tax law appears to ignore and make much worse.

Do words with accepted meanings still hold those meanings, even in the age of Donald Trump? The Cambridge, Oxford, Collins, Merriam-Webster, Wikipedia and virtually every standard dictionary describes the Holocaust in nearly identical language, as “the systematic murder of many people, especially Jews, by the Nazis during World War II.”

Our country is a work in progress. But that has always been the case with America. In the 1800s, abolitionist Wendell Phillips said there is no guarantee, absent the watchfulness, hard work and insistence of a thoughtful people, that our experiment in freedom and self-government will continue successfully.

As my 16 years in the U.S. Congress have now ended, completing a total of 25 years in elected office, I have been reflecting on how grateful I am for those years of public service. In 1982, as a 29-year-old lawyer, wanting very much to help lead my hometown of Englewood in its renaissance, I ran for and was elected twice as Mayor. Those years were truly a labor of love. Working with my neighbors, we were able to fix many things and help set Englewood on its path to renewal.