It’s been obvious for some time that the U.S. Postal Service is ailing. And as the country tries to recover from the coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis it created, America’s middle class is ailing too.

With the change in presidential administrations, some are demanding that President Joe Biden fire the current commissioner, Andrew Saul, of the Social Security Administration (SSA), appointed by President Donald Trump. Under current law, Saul may stay in office through the end of his term (another four years), although a recent Supreme Court decision does put the law around independent agencies into constitutional question. Legal and political issues aside, what is, as a matter of good public policy, the correct governance and political structure for this massive, critical federal agency, with considerable decision-making authority and policy responsibility?

I downloaded my vaccine passport the other day.

Let’s see, he has already spent $1.9 trillion, plans to spend another $4.1 trillion and pretty soon we are talking about real money. On hearing President Joe Biden outline his monetary and other grandiose ambitions in a speech before a miniaturized, virus-wary Congress, Republican Sen. Mitt Romney thought his moolah mutters nothing less than foolish, saying in a New York Times quote, “Maybe if he were younger, I’d say his dad needs to take away his credit card.”

In his speech to Congress, President Joe Biden declared his ambitions for a country on its way back from the COVID-19 pandemic. “Now, after just 100 days, I can report to the nation: America is on the move again,” he said. “Turning peril into possibility. Crisis into opportunity. Setback into strength.”

Until a year ago, parents’ struggles to find quality, affordable child care were largely considered a personal problem. Just another thing to juggle when working while raising kids.

There are thousands of graves the world over for fallen Americans who died on the battlefield of war, graves that have no headstone denoting the identity of the remains therein.

During the pandemic, schools across the country turned themselves inside out, holding classes outdoors to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. And now that vaccination is driving down transmission rates, school administrators are eager to get students back in the classroom.

Now that more than half of Americans have received at least one COVID vaccine, this is a milestone we should all celebrate. The Biden administration is marking the moment with a partial rollback of masks. It’s the easing of these restrictions that may encourage more people to seek the vaccine.

Compassion isn’t the first word on the tip of anyone’s tongue when discussing U.S. immigration policy. But in tapping Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez to head U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, President Biden has wisely selected a veteran lawman who knows when to be tough and when to be humane.

Overregulation of housing — from restrictive zoning laws to onerous building codes — is implicated in a great many of America’s problems. A lot of people who have studied the issue, from varying political viewpoints, have reached that same understanding. If the negative effects are getting clearer, though, the path ahead isn’t.

The fatal shooting of a homeless, mentally ill Escondido man with nearly 200 arrests on his record last Wednesday raises many familiar questions, starting with, Why does America have a history of accepting that it is OK for a police officer to kill someone for aberrant behavior? Why are police officers expected to know how to deal with those who have mental health issues? And how can people with chronic mental health problems be more readily compelled to accept professional treatment?

What happens when you put three Democrats and three Republicans in a room? Nothing. They might shout and grandstand, but the odds are small that there’ll be substantive progress on important issues or, in the case of the Federal Election Commission, enforcement of the nation’s election laws. Congress might not be able to mend the bitter partisanship that rends the nation, but it at least could fix this important agency.

President Joe Biden’s proper labeling as genocide the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire more than a century ago fulfills a long-overdue historical duty that his White House predecessors have cowardly avoided.

On Monday, the Supreme Court grappled with a genuinely tough First Amendment issue: Should California be able to make charities that speak on matters of public concern disclose to the state the names of their big donors? The issue reveals something about the way that conservatives and liberals currently differ on free speech issues.

The 2008 crash tested financial globalization. In 2020, the chaos of the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic led many to question the world’s dependence on complex global supply chains. These last few months, however, as vaccination programs have taken off in some parts of the world and stalled in others, have raised even deeper doubts about globalization and the capitalist system. Unless governments act soon, capitalism itself could face a crisis of credibility.

The Biden administration should avoid the Trump-era mistake of reducing the entirety of the U.S.-Mexico relationship to the single issue of immigration. The administration has made Vice President Kamala Harris its point person at the southern border, and she has been engaging with Mexico and Central American nations to embrace a regional approach to migration, which is laudable. But starting with her May 7 meeting with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, announced over the weekend, the vice president should broaden the scope of her Mexico agenda to cover the complex array of economic, environmental, security, energy and rule-of-law issues that define U.S.-Mexico dealings.

In a development that gun control advocates have been fearing, the Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a case that could establish a Second Amendment right to carry a handgun in public, endangering laws in California and elsewhere that allow local and state governments to limit gun-carrying permits to people who establish a specific self-defense concern.

A president’s first 100 days are an arbitrary benchmark, a point of measurement journalists are fond of because it allows us to draw comparisons between the current officeholder and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the last chief executive whose first three months were truly momentous.

The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board has long been an advocate of government transparency. We have also defended individual privacy. With his Senate Bill 663, Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton, put these values at odds. His bill would let targets of recall campaigns find out who signed recall petitions and also let targets try to get signers to remove their signatures — a change from how election officials alone have access to petition signers’ names to validate their signatures now. Newman says the change would allow recall targets to respond to false or misleading allegations against them.