If you want to see a political wave forming a year before an election, watch the retirements. They’re often a leading indicator for which direction a party is headed, and so far, 2018 is shaping up ominously for Republicans. On Wednesday, the GOP watched as its ninth House committee chairman, Representative Trey Gowdy of South…
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) is the latest House Republican to announce he is retiring. Gowdy said he wouldn’t seek reelection on Wednesday. [USA Today / Deirdre Shesgreen] Gowdy’s announcement sent shock waves throughout Washington; he’s the powerful House Oversight Committee chair who conducted investigations on Benghazi. The reason he’s leaving? He’s sick of politics. [Politico…
There are images that come to mind when we imagine a democracy’s end. Democracies fall in coups and revolutions, burn in fires and riots, collapse amid war and plague. When they die, they die screaming. Not anymore, argue Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their new book, How Democracies Die. In most modern cases, “democracies…
Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was criticized Saturday on social media for citing a Pennsylvania woman whose paycheck went up by $1.50 a week as a success of the recently passed GOP tax-reform bill. Ryan tweeted a link to an Associated Press report detailing how some workers have begun to see more take-home pay as the…
President Trump on Saturday shared part of a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which the publication’s editorial board tore into the FBI over allegations made in a controversial memo released this week Without directly linking to the article, Trump tweeted quotes calling the memo, which alleges abuse of government surveillance powers by the Justice Department,…
For weeks, allies of President Trump ratcheted up pressure to “release the memo.” The impact, according to supporters, would be monumental: It would shake the F.B.I. “to its core” (Representative Jeff Duncan of South Carolina) or it would reveal abuses “100 times bigger” than what incited the American Revolution (Sebastian Gorka, a former White House…
CNN spoke to border dwellers as part of a special report regarding the impact of Trump’s border wall between the USA and Mexico. Pat Bell of River Bend, Texas, is facing the prospect of her home ending up on the Mexican side of the border if Trump’s wall is built. As CNN reported, “Bell is…
U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ), Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, released the following statement on partisan attacks on the FBI and Department of Justice: In 2016, the Russian government engaged in an elaborate plot to interfere in an American election and undermine our democracy. Russia employed the same tactics it has used to…
At a vast tract of uninhabited desert in southern Nevada, hundreds of moonlike craters dimple the wasteland, remnants of Cold War nuclear explosions that melted the bedrock and fused the sand to ensure that America could take part in the unthinkable: global thermonuclear war. The crowds of scientists and generals are long gone–the U.S. hasn’t…
Imagine you’re a member of the U.S. Senate, constitutionally charged with vetting Donald Trump’s nominees to federal agencies and courts. (Don’t panic. It’s only pretend.) More specifically, imagine that you’re a Republican senator, under pressure from your base and your leadership to confirm as many nominees as possible as swiftly as possible. Maybe you love…