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.
The millions of people who crowd into New York City’s busiest subway stations every day have recently encountered a sight reminiscent of a frightening, bygone era: National Guard troops with long guns patrolling platforms and checking bags.
After 9/11 and at moments of high alert in the years since, New York deployed soldiers in the subway to deter would-be terrorists and reassure the public that the transit system was safe from attack. The National Guard is now there for a different reason.
Near the end of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments about whether Colorado could exclude former President Donald Trump from its ballot as an insurrectionist, the attorney representing voters from the state offered a warning to the justices—one evoking the January 6 riot that had set the case in motion.
On September 22, when federal prosecutors accused Senator Robert Menendez of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, Representative Andy Kim, a fellow New Jersey Democrat, asked one of his neighbors what he thought of the charges. “That’s Jersey,” the man replied.The neighbor’s shrug spoke volumes about not only a state with a sordid history of political corruption but also a country that seemed to have grown inured to scandal.
Anyone watching the fourth Republican primary debate tonight would be forgiven for thinking Nikki Haley was the favorite to win the GOP presidential nomination next year.Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy sure were acting like it. Neither man had finished answering their first question before they began attacking the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador.
So long, George Santos, we hardly knew ye—and that was pretty much the problem.This morning, House members evicted one of their own for only the sixth time in history, terminating the congressional career of the Long Island Republican barely a year after he won election on a campaign of lies and alleged fraud. The vote to expel Santos was 311–114, easily clearing the two-thirds threshold needed to pass.
Mike Johnson now knows what Kevin McCarthy was dealing with.At the new speaker’s behest, House Republicans today relied on Democratic votes to avert a government shutdown by passing legislation that contains neither budget cuts nor conservative policy priorities. The bill was a near replica of the funding measure that McCarthy pushed through the House earlier this fall—a supposed surrender to Democrats that prompted hard-liners in his party to toss him from the speakership.
“We’ve become a party of losers,” the conservative businessman Vivek Ramaswamy declared during the opening minutes of tonight’s Republican primary debate in Florida. He bemoaned the GOP’s lackluster performance in Tuesday’s elections, and then he identified the Republican he held personally responsible for the party’s defeats.
Updated at 8:58 p.m. ET on November 7, 2023 The GOP controls nearly everything in Kentucky, a state that Donald Trump carried by 26 points in 2020. Republicans hold both U.S. Senate seats and five of Kentucky’s six House seats; they dominate both chambers of the state legislature.What Republicans don’t occupy—and won’t for the next four years—is Kentucky’s most powerful post.
The GOP controls nearly everything in Kentucky, a state that Donald Trump carried by 26 points in 2020. Republicans hold both U.S. Senate seats and five of Kentucky’s six House seats; they dominate both chambers of the state legislature.What Republicans don’t occupy is Kentucky’s most powerful post. The state’s governor is Andy Beshear, a Democrat elected in 2019 who is hoping to win a second term tomorrow.
Updated at 3:46 p.m. ET on October 17, 2023On Friday, immediately after nominating Representative Jim Jordan as their latest candidate for speaker, House Republicans took a second, secret-ballot vote. The question put to each lawmaker was simple: Would you support Jordan in a public vote on the House floor?The results were not encouraging for the pugnacious Ohioan. Nearly a quarter of the House Republican conference—55 members—said they would not back Jordan.
When Representative Steve Scalise emerged yesterday from the private party meeting where House Republicans narrowly nominated him to serve as the next speaker, he sounded anxious to get started. “We need to send a message to people throughout the world that the House is open and doing the people’s business,” Scalise told reporters.The Louisiana Republican wanted an immediate floor vote so that his members could formally elect him in a party-line tally.
Updated at 8:14 p.m. ET on October 3, 2023Kevin McCarthy began his 269th day as House speaker by recounting all the times he proved his doubters wrong. In January, after a series of humiliating defeats, the California Republican hung on to become speaker of the House. In the months since, he reminisced, he has narrowly averted the twin crises of a national-debt default and, this past weekend, a government shutdown.
Updated at 9:02 p.m. ET on September 30, 2023For weeks, Speaker Kevin McCarthy seemed to face an impossible choice as he haggled over spending bills with his party’s most hard-line members: He could keep the government open, or he could keep his job. At every turn, McCarthy’s behavior suggested that he favored the latter option.
Yesterday was not a good day for House Republicans or for their struggling leader, Speaker Kevin McCarthy. In the morning, McCarthy was forced to scrap a procedural vote on a GOP proposal to avert a government shutdown that will commence at the end of this month if Congress doesn’t act. In the afternoon, a handful of conservatives tanked McCarthy’s bid to advance legislation funding the Pentagon.
As Kevin McCarthy made his televised declaration earlier today that House Republicans were launching an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, the House speaker stood outside his office in the Capitol, a trio of American flags arrayed behind to lend an air of dignity to such a grave announcement. But McCarthy looked and sounded like a hostage, and for good reason.That the Republican majority would eventually try to impeach Biden was never really in doubt.
When Donald Trump appeared last week in a Washington, D.C., courtroom for his arraignment on federal election charges, the presiding judge gave the former president a few simple instructions for staying out of jail while he awaited trial.Trump could not talk to potential witnesses about the case except through lawyers, Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya told him, and he could not commit a crime on the local, state, or federal level. Both are standard directives to defendants.
Officially, abortion had nothing to do with the constitutional amendment that Ohio voters rejected today. The word appeared nowhere on the ballot, and no abortion laws will change as a result of the outcome.Practically and politically, however, the defeat of the ballot initiative known as Issue 1 was all about abortion, giving reproductive-rights advocates the latest in a series of victories in the year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
For the 150 or so people who filled a church hall in Toledo, Ohio, for a Thursday-night campaign rally last week, the chant of the evening featured a profanity usually discouraged in a house of God.“With all due respect, pastor, hell no!” shouted Betty Montgomery, a former Ohio attorney general. Montgomery is a Republican, which gave the largely Democratic audience even more reason to roar with approval.
For many judicial nominees, a Senate confirmation hearing is one of life’s most grueling experiences—an hours-long job interview led by lawmakers who are trying to get them to face-plant on national television.Not for Aileen Cannon. When the federal judge who will oversee former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial testified in 2020, the Senate Judiciary Committee didn’t go easy on her so much as they ignored her.
A decade’s worth of disappointment has conditioned Black Americans and Democrats to fear voting-rights rulings from the Supreme Court. In 2013, a 5–4 majority invalidated a core tenet of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Subsequent decisions have chipped away at the rest of the law, and in 2019, a majority of the justices declared that federal courts have no power to bar partisan gerrymandering.