If anyone is having a rough start to the new year, I’m willing to bet it’s Rep.-elect George Santos. The openly gay MAGA Republican is swimming in controversy, and (somehow) it’s not about being just a Trump supporter, or a gay Republican, or even his defeat of an openly gay Democrat in New York’s 3rd District race, which includes parts of Long Island and Queens.
In an entirely unsuccessful effort to persuade Kevin McCarthy’s intra-party enemies to lay down arms, two of the biggest Republican super PACs announced a bizarre agreement on Wednesday evening.
The Republican Party is in disarray. It isn’t an ideological battle going on as the leadership old and new have been on the same page for some time about not having any policy ideas. The main difference between what is called the “Freedom Caucus” and yesteryear’s establishment Republican Party leadership is that the Freedom Caucus has forced all conservatives to give up the false pretense that they ever had any policy ideas to begin with.
Because you “don’t say gay” under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ education crackdown.
House committees, including those on the military and foreign affairs, can’t operate, which lawmakers and intelligence experts say could draw allies’ alarm.
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.Congressman Kevin McCarthy’s failure this week to win the vote to succeed Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House has only driven home the immense sway she held in the position.
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.
“Your petition does not provide any new data or evidence,” wrote FDA’s Patrizia Cavazzoni.
The state’s high court is the first to find a right to abortion in a constitution since the fall of Roe v. Wade.
After months and months of SARS-CoV-2 subvariant soup, one ingredient has emerged in the United States with a flavor pungent enough to overwhelm the rest: XBB.1.5, an Omicron offshoot that now accounts for an estimated 75 percent of cases in the Northeast. A crafty dodger of antibodies that is able to grip extra tightly onto the surface of our cells, XBB.1.5 is now officially the country’s fastest-spreading coronavirus subvariant.
The partnership of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb is beautifully anachronistic. As writer and editor, respectively, they have together produced 4,888 pages over the course of 50 years, including the multivolume, still unfinished saga that is Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. A lasting collaboration of this sort is impossible to imagine in today’s publishing world of constant churn.
The U.S House of Representatives still has no speaker after Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy failed to get the full backing of his party over the course of two days and six rounds of voting. A contingent of about 20 far-right lawmakers opposes McCarthy’s elevation to the top job, but no other candidate has emerged so far who can garner the 218 votes necessary to claim the speaker’s gavel.
Far-right Israeli politician Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Tuesday visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem is being roundly condemned across the Middle East. Ben-Gvir is a key part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s new far-right government, which includes ultranationalist and ultraorthodox parties that are calling openly for the annexation of the West Bank.
The opinion offers limited assurances for activists seeking to work around abortion bans.
Pregnant people would be able to fill prescriptions for the drug at pharmacies.
Sanders’ well-chronicled antagonism toward lobbyists has some concerned they’ll be unable to blunt criticism of their clients’ profits or corporate executive salaries.
While antiviral pills are plentiful and remain an option for some with weak immune systems, they won’t work for everyone — Pfizer’s Paxlovid interacts with many widely prescribed drugs.
Even with last month’s further easing of inflation, the Federal Reserve plans to keep raising interest rates.
Six years of Donald Trump’s tax returns were released by a House committee on Friday after a years-long legal battle by the former president to keep them sealed. Early revelations include the finding that Trump paid just $750 in federal income tax during his first year in office in 2017, and he paid no tax in 2020.
“Is this a game show?” the Fox News host asked after he interrupted Boebert.
The Trump-backed Republican recently filed two appeals after losing a lawsuit over her gubernatorial election loss.
The House is coming back in to resume voting for the speaker’s job. Or not. It’s not entirely clear right now if they are ready to keep voting or if Kevin McCarthy is done groveling to the maniacs. He gave in on one thing in the break they took this after: his Super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund has agreed to the Club for Growth’s demand that it stop getting involved in safe open-seat primaries.
UPDATE: Wednesday, Jan 4, 2023 · 7:51:24 PM +00:00
·
Mark Sumner
Nice, the first T-90S loss. The T-90S is the export version of the T-90A without Shtora-1 (the eyes), but with additional Kontakt-5 reactive armour. https://t.co/iiqMsZMlmZ pic.twitter.
As the House of Representatives reconvened today, excited and hopeful that a new round of balloting would get Rep. Kevin McCarthy his gavel. But it was not to be. Another round of voting closed without meeting the threshold required to elect a speaker. The only winners thus far are Democrats, who look like a formidable force together, and C-SPAN ratings.
After a never-ending string of humiliating votes for speaker that have failed to yield anything other than severe embarrassment for Kevin McCarthy, it’s worth asking what would happen if House Republicans never manage to settle on a leader. My answer: It would be good for the country.
Right now, we don’t actually need a House of Representatives—at least, not one under Republican control.
“What was expected to be a day of triumph for House Republicans coming into the majority turned into chaos,” says Wednesday’s AP explainer, and it’s not immediately clear whether the nation’s political press was genuinely caught off guard by the current Republican shitshow or are just pretending at it.
“In an abundance of caution, doctors have recommended that it be removed,” White House physician Kevin O’Connor said.
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.If you think the crisis of American democracy is over, the circus in the House should remind you that a significant portion of the Republican Party has no interest in governing, policy, or democracy itself. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
After losing his parents to COVID-19, the California Democrat has little patience for those who downplay it.
The veteran Democratic senator is now third in line to the presidency. “Well, today I’m second because Kevin McCarthy’s not speaker.