The GOP Is Just Obnoxious

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.      Let’s say you’re a politician in a close race and your opponent suffers a stroke. What do you do?If you are Mehmet Oz running as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania,...

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Waiting for a Deus Ex Machina End to the Trump Era

Press them hard enough, and most Republican officials—even the ones with MAGA hats in their closets and Mar-a-Lago selfies in their Twitter avatar—will privately admit that Donald Trump has become a problem. He’s presided over three abysmal election cycles since he took office, he is more unstable than ever, and yet he returned to the campaign trail...

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The Logic Behind Biden’s Refusal to Negotiate the Debt Ceiling

President Joe Biden has already made the most important domestic-policy decision he’ll likely face this year. Biden and his top advisers have repeatedly indicated that they will reject demands from the new GOP majority in the House of Representatives to link increasing the debt ceiling with cutting federal spending. Instead, Biden is insisting that...

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How Moderate Republicans Became an Endangered Species

Early this summer, the federal government will, in all likelihood, exhaust the “extraordinary measures” it is now employing to keep paying the nation’s bills. As the country careens toward that fiscal abyss, Congress will face a now-familiar stalemate: Republicans will refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless Democrats agree to cut spending. Democrats...

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Abortion Pills Will Be the Next Battle in the 2024 Election

The next front is rapidly emerging in the struggle between supporters and opponents of legal abortion, and that escalating conflict is increasing the chances that the issue will shape the 2024 election as it did last November’s midterm contest.President Joe Biden triggered the new confrontation with a flurry of recent moves to expand access to the drugs...

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The Republicans Who Want George Santos Out

The Republican Party has had no better friend than Nassau County in the past few years.Of America’s largest counties, few have turned more sharply toward the GOP than New York City’s neighbor to the east. This collection of Long Island suburbs swept Democrats out of local office in 2021, and last fall, Nassau County voted resoundingly Republican in...

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What Winning Did to the Anti-abortion Movement

In a normal year, the March for Life would begin somewhere along the National Mall. The cavalcade of anti-abortion activists in Washington, D.C., would wind around museums and past monuments, concluding at the foot of the Supreme Court, a physical representation of the movement’s objective: to overturn Roe v. Wade. The march happens in January of each...

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American Religion Is Not Dead Yet

Take a drive down Main Street of just about any major city in the country, and—with the housing market ground to a halt—you might pass more churches for sale than homes. This phenomenon isn’t likely to change anytime soon; according to the author of a 2021 report on the future of religion in America, 30 percent of congregations are not likely to survive...

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Speaker in Name Only

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. McCarthy...

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Nothing Is Working for Kevin McCarthy

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. The semi-serious effort to elevate Trump, put forward...

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