Shortly after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that he had struck a deal with President Joe Biden to raise the debt ceiling, Republican leaders began circulating a fact sheet to their members listing the victories McCarthy had secured. The first bullet point captured what was supposedly the whole point of the negotiations for the GOP: The newly christened Fiscal Responsibility Act would cut spending.
Depending on whom you ask in politics, the sudden advances in artificial intelligence will either transform American democracy for the better or bring about its ruin. At the moment, the doomsayers are louder. Voice-impersonation technology and deep-fake videos are scaring campaign strategists, who fear that their deployment in the days before the 2024 election could decide the winner.
Does anyone want to be president?Typically, by the time a president delivers the State of the Union address at the start of his third year in office, as Joe Biden will on Tuesday, at least half a dozen rivals are already gunning for his job. When Donald Trump began his annual speech to Congress in 2019, four of the Democrats staring back at him inside the House chamber had already declared their presidential candidacies.Not so this year.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.House Republicans are readying their subpoenas.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory.
Take detransitioners seriously.
Having at long last put down a rebellion from within his party, Kevin McCarthy is now House speaker. He finally has the gavel he’s long coveted, but the job he secured after 14 consecutive drubbings is not the one he envisioned.Last night, he suffered one more indignity to get it, perhaps the most stunning in a week’s worth of humiliations.
Having at long last put down a rebellion from within his party, Kevin McCarthy is now House speaker. He finally has the gavel he’s long coveted, but the job he secured after 14 consecutive drubbings is not the one he envisioned.Last night, he suffered one more indignity to get it, perhaps the most stunning in a week’s worth of humiliations.
At this point in the unending search for a House speaker, Donald Trump’s candidacy is making as much progress as Kevin McCarthy’s.The former president (and half-hearted 2024 White House applicant) today secured his first vote as the House slogged through its seventh fruitless attempt to elect a leader.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Pour one out for Donald Trump’s lawyers: Their client has had a miserable week in court, and his legal woes are mounting.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
JAY, Maine—Services at the New Life Baptist Church had just wrapped up, and in the parking lot outside its tiny chapel, Paul LePage was standing behind me with his arm wrapped around my head. He held a cellphone inches from my face, as if he were filming an extreme close-up.
Earlier this summer, when the Supreme Court ended a 50-year federal right to abortion, Democrats had no choice but to place their faith in voters to rebel against the ruling. Until tonight, however, no one could definitively say whether Roe v. Wade outrage would carry over to the polls.Tonight in Kansas, Americans got their first hint of that response, and it was a resounding victory for abortion rights.
OLATHE, Kansas—It’s 102 degrees, and the rally to save abortion rights has drawn a crowd of exactly one.Cassie Woolworth, the head of a local Democratic women’s club, has commandeered as her base of operations a concrete barricade meant to deter would-be terrorists outside the Johnson County courthouse. She unfurls a banner that says Trust Women alongside an image of Rosie the Riveter and hangs it between a trash can and a street sign.
Americans aren’t the most attentive political observers. But thanks in part to Hollywood, they have a pretty clear vision of what they expect their president to do in an unfolding crisis, especially an attack on U.S. citizens at home or abroad. He (or she, in the movies at least) will march down to the Situation Room, confer with advisers, and at some point address the nation in a sober televised speech.
On March 6, 2021, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia delivered the decisive 50th Democratic vote to help pass President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. The stimulus package provided relief checks to most American families, expanded a child tax credit to combat poverty, and bolstered federal support to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
Donald Trump sent thousands of tweets during his four years as president. None may prove as consequential as the one he sent in the wee hours of December 19, 2020: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild,” the president wrote at 1:42 a.m. ET.At the time, Trump’s middle-of-the-night missive deepened a sense of growing alarm about a defeated president who appeared to be unmoored and was fomenting chaos during his final weeks in office.
The most damning piece of evidence presented at today’s Select Committee hearing on the January 6 insurrection wasn’t a sound bite from a star witness, nor was it another never-before-seen video of the assault on the Capitol.
Time is the enemy of gun-control legislation, any advocate will tell you. The outcry for stricter gun laws has always been loudest during moments of national horror, in the hours and days after a massacre, when the anger is raw and the anguish of grieving survivors and families fills the airwaves. That brief window for action quickly begins to close when the public’s attention inevitably drifts to other topics. The opposition mobilizes, and talks break down or simply peter out.
Tonight Congress began its second prosecution of former President Donald Trump for his role in the events of the January 6, 2021 insurrection. The first occurred barely a month after the Capitol siege, when the Senate held an abbreviated impeachment trial that resulted in his acquittal. Last year, the Democrats leading the prosecution chose not to call witnesses.
Pennsylvania Republicans have rallied behind a celebrity former TV host and political neophyte, choosing a charismatic convert to conservatism over a rival who espoused a purer form of the party’s modern doctrine.The above sentence could have been written in 2016, when Donald Trump defeated Senator Ted Cruz in Pennsylvania’s presidential primary on his way to receiving the GOP nomination. But tonight it’s a description of Mehmet Oz, America’s favorite living-room M.D.
Pennsylvania Republicans have rallied behind a celebrity former TV host and political neophyte, choosing a charismatic convert to conservatism over a rival who espoused a purer form of the party’s modern doctrine.The above sentence could have been written in 2016, when Donald Trump defeated Senator Ted Cruz in Pennsylvania’s presidential primary on his way to receiving the GOP nomination. But tonight it’s a description of Mehmet Oz, America’s favorite living-room M.D.
Yesterday afternoon, President Joe Biden hosted a good old-fashioned bill-signing ceremony at the White House. Before an audience of several dozen in the State Dining Room, the president celebrated the long-awaited enactment of a postal-reform bill. After his brief remarks, a large, bipartisan group of lawmakers crowded around Biden as he put pen to paper on the legislation. They huddled in close, as politicians do, silently jostling for prime position in the photo.
On the afternoon of March 3, 2020, Governor Mike DeWine stepped to a lectern inside the Ohio statehouse to announce his most difficult pandemic decision. Ohio, the governor announced, would bar most spectators from the upcoming Arnold Classic, a bodybuilding and fitness festival hosted annually by Arnold Schwarzenegger that draws a quarter of a million people from 80 countries to Ohio’s capital city. “Everything in life is a risk,” DeWine said.
By the time Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey brought Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to tears yesterday, the Supreme Court nominee had been answering questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee for more than 20 hours over two days. She had, by nearly all accounts, handled herself fine, alternately deflecting or batting away Republican attempts to portray her as a soft-on-crime judge who coddled pedophiles and supported the indoctrination of America’s schoolchildren.
At some point during tonight’s State of the Union address, President Joe Biden will likely denounce Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, voice support for the Ukrainian people, and tout the significant sanctions that he and U.S. allies in NATO have placed on Russia in response. When he finishes that sentence, most if not all members of the bitterly divided Congress will erupt in applause.
Among American institutions, Congress is at once the most transparent and the most reviled. Its votes, hearings, and debates are broadcast live for anyone to see; inside the Capitol, reporters can walk up to just about any of its 535 members and ask why they voted a certain way, or whether the latest reported scandal is true. Unfortunately for lawmakers, all of this visibility has helped make Congress only slightly more popular among U.S. citizens than Vladimir Putin.
Justice Stephen Breyer hadn’t even made his retirement official last week when Democrats put out word that they wanted to confirm his replacement as fast as possible. According to one report, they wanted to match the record speed with which Republicans installed Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court following the 2020 death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The reason for the Democrats’ rush wasn’t immediately apparent.
On the eve of the January 6 insurrection, the twin special-election victories by Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff of Georgia gave Democrats the Senate majority they desperately wanted, and simultaneously burdened incoming President Joe Biden with something far more fickle: hope and expectations.
The Build Back Better Act is dead. Long live the Build Back Better Act?With a few short sentences on Fox News, Senator Joe Manchin today dashed the dreams of Democrats by coming out firmly against President Joe Biden’s signature legislative proposal. “I’ve tried everything humanly possible. I can’t get there,” Manchin said of the $1.75 trillion bill that the House passed last month.
BROOKLYN—Outside the Park Slope Food Coop in one of America’s bluest bulwarks, masked shoppers still wait outside in socially distant lines. The 48-year-old co-op is perhaps the nation’s most political—and progressive—grocery store, but on a recent Friday afternoon, its members were not particularly eager to discuss the man nearly all of them voted for last year: President Joe Biden.
The owners of million-dollar beach homes aren’t a particularly sympathetic political constituency. Conservatives deride them as (literal) coastal elites; progressives demand they fork over more in taxes. Both parties happily accept their campaign contributions, but few members of Congress shed tears for the plight of waterfront barons, and fewer still are willing to wage a public fight on their behalf.Robert Menendez, the senior senator from New Jersey, is one of those brave lawmakers.
When Bob Dole returned to the Senate in 1988 after the second of his three presidential defeats, he told the assembled crowd of staffers and supporters, “I am bloodied, but unbowed, as the poet said.” The famous quote from Invictus defined few American politicians of the 20th century as much as Dole, who died this morning at the age of 98.