This is how the government shutdown was always going to end.
For the past 30 years, the party that has forced federal agencies to close their doors in a funding fight has never actually achieved the policy outcome it was demanding. Republicans did not successfully pressure then-President Barack Obama to defund his signature health-care law when they shut down the government in 2013.
President Donald Trump’s gerrymandering war has never looked riskier for his party.
Prodded by Trump, Republicans earlier this year launched an audacious plan to entrench their congressional majority by redrawing House-district maps to squeeze out Democrats—anywhere and everywhere they could. The gambit was an exercise in political power and, coming outside of the traditional decennial redistricting process, without precedent in modern history.
President Donald Trump’s theory of executive power does not lend much weight to the views of his predecessors—especially those who happen to be Democrats. But as the government shutdown enters its second month, Trump is showing an odd degree of respect for legal guidance first adopted under a president he has mocked: Jimmy Carter.
Government shutdowns are a relatively modern phenomenon.
With the government shutdown well into its second week, President Donald Trump’s strategy to break Senate Democrats has become clear: Maximize the pain of the closure to force them into retreat. His administration is firing civil servants en masse, threatening to withhold back pay from furloughed federal employees, and canceling billions of dollars in funding for states that voted for his opponent last year.
When news broke this week that Sherrod Brown would run next year to reclaim a Senate seat in Ohio, Democrats cheered the reports as a huge coup. Before losing a reelection bid last year, Brown had been the last Democrat to win statewide office in a state that has veered sharply to the right over the past decade. His entry instantly transforms the Ohio race from a distant dream to a plausible pickup opportunity for the party.
As New York Governor Kathy Hochul denounced the GOP’s aggressive attempt to gerrymander Democrats into political oblivion this week, she lamented her party’s built-in disadvantage. “I’m tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back,” she told reporters.
As political metaphors go, it’s not a bad one. Hochul omitted a key detail, however: Democrats provided the rope themselves. For more than a decade, they’ve tried to be the party of good government on redistricting.
For months, no Republican in either the House or the Senate spoke out more forcefully, or more consistently, against cutting Medicaid than Josh Hawley. As President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” was weaving its way through Congress, Hawley argued repeatedly that stripping health insurance from the poorest Americans would be “morally wrong and politically suicidal” for a party that, in the Trump era, has relied on millions of votes from people who receive government assistance.
The so-called moderate Republicans promised they would not slash Medicaid. Conservatives vowed not to explode the national debt. Party leaders insisted that they would not lump a jumble of unrelated policies into a single enormous piece of legislation and rush that bill through Congress before any reasonable person had time to read it.
But President Donald Trump wanted his “big, beautiful bill” enacted in time to sign it with a celebratory flourish on America’s birthday.
When Democrats reshaped the American health-insurance system in 2010, Republicans accused them of all manner of legislative foul play: Middle-of-the-night votes. Backroom deals. An enormous, partisan bill jammed through Congress before anyone could find out what was in it. “Have you read the bill? Hell no you haven’t!” an indignant then-House Minority Leader John Boehner thundered on the House floor.
The GOP’s claims were exaggerated.
Representative Tim Burchett is fond of saying no.
The fourth-term Tennessean was one of the eight renegade Republicans who helped oust Kevin McCarthy, and when Speaker Mike Johnson tries to rally the party around legislation, many times Burchett is one of the last holdouts. As Burchett left the Capitol on Monday, he complained to me: “It’s always the conservatives that have to compromise.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
President Donald Trump has been back in the White House for just more than 100 days, and he’s already thinking about a third term. For much of American history, the notion would have been laughable.
Speaker Mike Johnson flashed a grin as he chided reporters in the Capitol this morning: “I told you not to doubt us.” Moments earlier, the House had approved a budget proposal that could allow Republicans to pass the president’s “one big beautiful bill”—a boost for not only Donald Trump’s legislative agenda but also Johnson’s job security.
In fairness to the speaker’s doubters, they had good reason to question whether the budget would pass.
Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush’s second-term honeymoon was ending, and Social Security was to blame. Voters rebelled against his plan to partially privatize the popular retirement program and, the following year, stripped the GOP of its majorities in Congress. The events of 2005 cemented Social Security’s reputation as the “third rail of American politics.” For the next two decades, Republicans didn’t touch it.
Perhaps Elon Musk wasn’t paying attention.
Republican senators have confirmed a onetime Bernie Sanders supporter to lead the nation’s intelligence community and a member of America’s most famous Democratic family as its health secretary. This morning, however, they saved some of their sharpest questions for a Cabinet nominee who, until last month, served alongside them as a GOP member of Congress.
Representative Ro Khanna has known Elon Musk for more than a decade, so he thought he should raise some concerns about the billionaire’s assault on the federal government where he would be sure to see them. Posting on the platform Musk owns, the California Democrat said yesterday that Musk should be hauled before Congress to explain himself. “Musk’s attacks on our institutions are unconstitutional,” Khanna wrote.
It took Musk just 16 minutes to reply: “Don’t be a dick.
Project 2025, the conservative governing playbook produced by veterans of the first Trump administration, has an entire chapter on how to overhaul USAID. Its authors urged the next president to “scale back USAID’s global footprint,” “deradicalize” its programs, and throttle its funding.
Before the election, Donald Trump disavowed Project 2025 because it veered so far to the right. But now he’s making the plan look downright timid.
Presidents typically spend their final days in the White House taking care of odds and ends: issuing pardons, signing some last executive orders, thanking staff. Joe Biden is doing all of those things—and also trying to change the Constitution on his way out the door.
This morning, Biden declared on X that “the Equal Rights Amendment is now the law of the land.” Well, there you have it: The Constitution has a 28th amendment, and women’s rights have been enshrined across the country.
Or not.
Democrats spent more than $20 million last year to end then-Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s congressional career. Now, however, the Republican they worked so hard to defeat is their favorite nominee for President-Elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet.
Trump’s selection of Chavez-DeRemer for labor secretary came as a pleasant surprise to many Democrats and union leaders, who expected him to follow past Republican presidents and name a conservative hostile to organized labor.
The success of President-Elect Donald Trump’s legislative agenda will depend on whether Republicans can close ranks in Congress. They nearly failed on their very first vote.
Mike Johnson won reelection as House speaker by the narrowest of margins this afternoon, and only after two Republican holdouts changed their votes at the last minute. Johnson won on the first ballot with exactly the 218 votes he needed to secure the required majority.
Only one historic site bears the name of America’s 22nd and 24th president—and it’s no Monticello.
The Grover Cleveland Presidential Library and Museum occupies a one-story building in Caldwell, New Jersey, behind the house where its namesake spent the first few years of his life. The museum is the size of a small living room. A Dunkin’ sits across the street.
The site befits Cleveland’s legacy.
Power-hungry presidents of both parties have been concocting ways to get around Congress for all of American history. But as Donald Trump prepares to take office again, legal experts are worried he could make the legislative branch go away altogether—at least for a while.
Several of Trump’s early Cabinet nominees—including Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Donald Trump has won the public embrace of virtually every Republican currently in federal elected office. In private, however, at least one bastion of mild GOP resistance to Trump’s takeover remains: the Senate Republican conference.
GOP senators demonstrated that resistance today by electing as majority leader Senator John Thune of South Dakota and decisively rejecting the candidate whom Trump’s allies preferred for the job, Senator Rick Scott of Florida.
Updated at 4:23 p.m ET on November 13, 2024
Donald Trump will begin his second term as president the same way he began his first—with Republicans controlling both the House and Senate.
The GOP scored its 218th House-race victory—enough to clinch a majority of the chamber’s 435 seats—today when CNN and NBC News declared Republicans the winner of two close elections in Arizona.
Iowa Democrats had gotten their hopes up, and honestly, how could they not? On Saturday night, J. Ann Selzer—the most renowned pollster in Iowa, if not the entire country—released her final pre-election survey, finding that Kamala Harris was leading Donald Trump by three points in a state the former president had carried by eight in 2020.
Barack Obama was barely three minutes into his speech inside a Madison, Wisconsin, arena on Tuesday when he delivered his call to action—“I am asking you to vote”—a plea so eagerly anticipated by the thousands in attendance that they erupted in cheers before he could finish the line.
Kamala Harris’s campaign had dispatched its most valuable surrogate to Wisconsin’s heavily Democratic capital on the swing state’s first day of early voting, with just two weeks to go until the election.
In the realm of presidential politics, progressives have become accustomed to disappointment. Joe Biden wasn’t their first (or second) choice in 2020. Nor, for that matter, was Kamala Harris. And Democratic nominees typically pick moderates for their running mates. So when Harris announced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her choice for vice president this morning, progressives experienced an unusual feeling: elation.
President Joe Biden has spent the past three weeks desperately trying to convince Democrats that he’s still got what it takes to win reelection. He’s campaigned more vigorously than he has in years, holding rallies, sitting for televised interviews, conducting an hour-long press conference, and pleading his case directly to members of Congress in phone calls and Zoom meetings.
It’s not working.
Congressional Democrats aren’t ready to demand that President Joe Biden quit his bid for reelection after a debate performance that was almost universally panned. But for the first time, some of them are taking the possibility seriously.
“The debate was a serious setback,” Senator Peter Welch of Vermont told me by phone yesterday. “It’s up to President Biden and his campaign to demonstrate that they do, in fact, have the energy for another four years.
The easiest explanation for why Representative Jamaal Bowman lost his Democratic primary in New York today is that he alienated the Jewish voters in his district with his denunciations of Israel. That explanation is reasonable, as far as it goes. Indeed, the race was the most expensive House primary in history largely because a pro-Israel group inundated the district with TV ads attacking Bowman. But that’s not the whole story.
Earlier this month, federal prosecutors bestowed on Republicans what seemed like an election-year gift: charging a senior House Democrat in a competitive district with accepting $600,000 in bribes and acting as a foreign agent. For a party clinging to a threadbare majority in the House, the indictment offered an obvious opportunity for an America First attack.