"Democrats realize that, most likely, Trump's nominee will get confirmed, and they're looking for an angle to make the case to voters that this is yet another reason that GOP members of Congress should be voted out," says Law School Professor Josh Chafetz. "Who knows if it will work as campaign rhetoric, but it's not a crazy gambit.”

Bahasa Indonesia was adopted to make communication easier across the vast Indonesian archipelago, but its simplicity has only created new barriers. Malay, according to Emeritus Professor of International Studies Benedict Anderson, was "simple and flexible enough to be rapidly developed into a modern political language."

Op-ed from Amanda Rodewald, CALS professor and director of Conservation Science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. She says, “Transparency establishes trust and legitimacy and should underlie public decision-making processes. The proposed transparency rule does just the opposite by restricting the ideas and science available to the EPA.”

Though the reasoning for ICE’s establishment had to do with terrorism, the philosophy behind it also represented a change in the U.S. government’s view of immigrants, says María Cristina García, a professor of history at the College of Arts & Sciences.

The Constitution is actually pretty vague about the Senate's role in approving Supreme Court nominees. It just says the Senate will provide “Advice and Consent” to the president on these nominees, says Cornell Law School Professor Josh Chafetz.

This has even greater implications for countries with low trust in government, says Emin Gun Sirer, an associate professor of computer science in the College of Engineering. “If you look at a government system that is opaque, that’s closed behind doors, versus one where I can inspect what’s going on behind it, it’s an amazing leap forward.”

“This suggests that some rationality might be returning to the approaches on trade and investment restrictions,” says Dyson trade policy Professor Eswar Prasad. “But it doesn’t necessarily signal a pullback from [a] hard-line stance on China. It might help the Chinese believe they should stay engaged with less protectionist forces [in the administration] to prevent rising tensions, but that will be a tough sell” in Beijing.

Op-ed from Mary Jo Dudley, director of the Cornell Farmworker Program and senior extension associate, on the economic role that undocumented immigrants play in the United States.

“My biggest concern is that [the U.S.] would do a test bed, to demonstrate that it works. There’s no formal agreement, but there’s an unspoken consensus prohibiting weapons in space. The point of the test bed is to break that taboo,” says George N. Lewis, a physicist and a visiting scholar at Cornell University.

“As an immigrant myself, I’m an example of how immigration is so critical to advancing the U.S. biomedical research and clinical care,” says Augustine Choi, dean of Weill Cornell Medicine in New York and provost for medical affairs of Cornell University. “I would love for our trainees to have the same opportunities. I just hope we will have policies that will allow immigrants to really fulfill their potential. It’s good for them and it’s good for the United States.”

“It’s really exciting,” says Andrew Farnsworth, an ornithologist with Cornell University. “Having this approach and these findings as a baseline against which to compare a changing reality of habitat fragmentation and loss is really important.”

In parts of western Nepal, woman are banished to chhaupadi huts when they get their periods. “These practices are done in the name of protecting the purity of the community,” says Kathryn March, an anthropologist at the College of Arts & Sciences. “That’s why it’s so hard for individuals to change them.”