“The office of speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant.”
With those words, uttered in the well of the House on Tuesday afternoon, Kevin McCarthy’s reign as speaker came to an inglorious end. McCarthy is the first speaker in history to be removed by his own party; eight Republicans voted to dethrone him, along with all 208 Democrats who were present and voting.
The fall of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy today demonstrated again that the one sin that cannot be forgiven in the modern Republican Party is being seen as failing to fight the Democratic agenda by any means necessary.Of all the accusations that could be leveled against McCarthy, the notion that he was insufficiently committed to battling Democrats would not seem high on the list.
“It’s a pathway to chaos. It’s like a shutdown,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said after Kevin McCarthy was ousted as House speaker.
Lake is the favorite for the Republican nomination in what’s shaping up to be a three-way general election race.
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.In embracing the term Bidenomics, Joe Biden is clapping back at his critics. But he’s also attaching his legacy to a notoriously unwieldy part of American life.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Kevin McCarthy’s brief speakership meets its end.
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.
Thirty years ago today, the U.S. military was involved in a brief but brutal battle in Somalia. In a series of firefights over two bloody days, 18 members of America’s most elite Special Forces and hundreds of Somali militiamen were killed. This was the Battle of Mogadishu, which the journalist Mark Bowden (now an Atlantic contributing writer) famously reported for The Philadelphia Inquirer and later adapted as the book and the film Black Hawk Down.
The newly released Raza Database Project reveals the number of Brown and Black people killed by police in the United States may be more than double the amount that is widely reported. Statistician and demographer Jesus Garcia explains how the team merged data sets from independent research projects on police violence to more accurately determine the ethnicities of victims. These are “terrible numbers to look at,” says Garcia. “The results are stark and bare.
In New Mexico, a 23-year-old gunman wearing a red MAGA hat opened fire last week on Jacob Johns and other Indigenous activists opposing plans to reinstall a statue honoring the 16th century conquistador Juan de Oñate, New Mexico’s first colonial governor. Johns, the prominent climate activist, was airlifted from Española to an Albuquerque hospital and required emergency surgery.
Over 50 years since the United States forced them out in order to build a military base on the island of Diego Garcia, exiled residents of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean continue to pressure Britain and the U.S. to pay reparations and apologize for expelling residents. We speak with prominent Chagossian activist Olivier Bancoult, who is visiting the United States to meet with lawmakers and State Department officials. The U.S.
The discord threatens gridlock on bills affecting how doctors practice and how much they are paid.
The decision preserves the Biden administration’s power to begin haggling with drug companies over the prices of 10 medications.
At POLITICO’s Cancer Moonshot Mission Update, administration officials said Biden’s goal of cutting the death rate in half is achievable.
Democrats are loving the Biden economy. They’re less certain about his economic message.
The United Auto Workers announced a strike at three plants — one each at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis — overnight.
A super PAC affiliate is spending $13 million far ahead of the normal advertising timeline.
Cuba has released footage showing an individual throwing two Molotov cocktails inside the Cuban Embassy compound in Washington, D.C., last Sunday, condemning it as a terrorist attack. An investigation is underway, but no arrests have been made. Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío says the country is demanding a speedy investigation, adding that it is the latest in a series of attacks against Cuban diplomatic missions in recent years.
Rep. Henry Cuellar was unharmed and police later recovered his vehicle.
Rep. Mike Lawler called the Florida Republican “a singular destructive force” as Gaetz tries to oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
“There is nothing more that can be said,” the former White House chief of staff concluded. “God help us.
When North Carolina’s state Supreme Court struck down conservative-gerrymandered election maps saying that they were in conflict with the state’s constitution, the belief that something approximating majority rule could thrive. Unfortunately, that decision was put in jeopardy as soon as the state’s Supreme Court flipped to Republican control. After rehearing the case, the newly conservative court ruled that Republicans could draw even more extremely gerrymandered districts.
“Would President Biden ever try to get out of a meeting by pulling a fire alarm?” the Fox News correspondent asked the White House press secretary.
Donald Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump appears to be hoping to turn herself into the next Jason Aldean or Oliver Anthony, riding right-wing resentments to a viral hit. She’s recorded a cover of the Tom Petty classic “I Won’t Back Down,” and she’s very angry at Apple for not placing it prominently enough in search results.
The Florida Republican has initiated the process for an eventual no-confidence vote on the House speaker.
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.Republicans averted the self-inflicted wound of a government shutdown this weekend. The main casualty of the process was aid for Ukraine, but foreign aid was always a fig leaf—for both GOP dysfunction and the determination of a small group of Republicans to help Russia.
In the opening weeks of the war, Ukraine managed to stop Russia’s advances near the border of Kherson and Mykolaiv oblasts, preventing passage of Russian forces across the broad Southern Bug River. Many times during that period, Russia tried to move toward the city of Mykolaiv, or to circumvent that location and pass across the Bug where it narrows to the north, but Ukraine dug in hard against these efforts.
The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie isn’t afraid to speak her mind. Her most well-known novel, Americanah, explores race, love, and migration through the story of a young Nigerian woman who moves to the U.S.; in 2013, she gave a TEDx talk titled “We Should All Be Feminists,” which Beyoncé sampled on her song “Flawless,” bringing Adichie to instant international attention.
The Republican Party sh-tshow continues unabated this week. Let’s start with Donald Trump, who has been on quite the bender the past few days. It’s certainly clear that if the media gave Donald Trump the same level of “Is he too old?” scrutiny, there wouldn’t be much else for them to write about.