Category: Politics

How Democrats Got Desperate

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The progressives blinked. For months, the feisty left flank of the House Democratic Caucus insisted it would not provide the votes to pass President Joe Biden’s $ 1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package until the Senate first approved the rest of the president’s economic agenda. At minimum, progressives said, all 50 Senate Democrats—and especially the chamber’s two most centrist members, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona—would have to at least commit to Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan. Twice the House liberals backed up their tough talk with…

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Where Biden Goes From Here

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As Air Force One flew home over the Atlantic on Election Night, the televisions scattered throughout the plane were showing a miserable scenario for Joe Biden’s party. No White House staffers ventured back to the press cabin, a fairly routine practice on long flights. The president’s aides appeared grim. A weary Biden returned to the White House close to 2 a.m. and ignored shouted questions from reporters about the early results. The next day, after addressing the nation about children’s eligibility for COVID-19 shots, the president was asked about former…

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Rural America’s False Sense of Security

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Every few months throughout the pandemic, Wesley Thompson, a communications consultant in Washington, D.C., has driven to Indiana with his wife and two kids to visit his parents. He wanted to escape COVID cabin fever and give his 4- and 2-year-old some room to run around, which they could do more easily in his parents’ small town. The trips have offered him a glimpse into how Americans who live between the coasts have been spending the pandemic. In the summer of 2020, some people around his parents’ hometown “would look…

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When Bipartisanship Risks Undermining Democracy

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Looking like a human grease fire, and burning nearly as hot, the right-wing provocateur Steve Bannon spat vitriol as he emerged from federal court on Monday afternoon. “This is the misdemeanor from hell for Merrick Garland and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden,” Bannon, a former adviser to former President Donald Trump, insisted after appearing for the first time on contempt-of-Congress charges for his refusal to testify before the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. About an hour later, during the signing ceremony for the long-delayed bipartisan infrastructure bill, President…

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The Pedestrian-Death Crisis Came to My Neighborhood

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Nina Larson was 24 years old, and she wanted to be an opera singer. On Saturday afternoon, she was crushed by a car on the street outside my apartment building in Washington, D.C. My neighbor heard the sound of the accident from her sixth-floor window, and the driver’s horrified screams. Nina was trapped for a while, according to police reports, before emergency workers were able to free her from the car’s underbelly. I witnessed only the aftermath—the detectives’ chalk analysis on the pavement, the flowers piling up outside the nearby…

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