The Capitol building looks like it always has, but it has a new architect

More than any other building, the U.S. Capitol stands as the symbol of the republic. The building itself is just one of many in an historical collection encompassing 18 million square feet of building space over 570 acres. Overseeing it all, the architect of the Capitol. The current architect has held the job for just about a year. Thomas Austin joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin. Interview transcript: Tom Temin: I don’t know where you begin to talk about what the Architect of the Capitol does these days, but let’s…

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We’re About to Find Out What Mass Deportation Really Looks Like

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. The Trump administration is working hard to convince the public that its mass-deportation campaign is fully under way. Over the past several weeks, federal agents have seized foreign students off the streets, raided worksites, and shipped detainees to a supermax prison in El Salvador using wartime powers adopted under the John Adams administration. The tactics have spread fear and created a showreel of social-media-ready highlights for the White House. But they have not…

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What Going ‘Wild on Health’ Looks Like

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the bear-fondling, gravel-voiced Camelot scion, is President-Elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, where presumably he will “go wild on health,” to quote Trump. His nomination has raised concerns among public-health experts because many of Kennedy’s views on health are, well, wild. To be sure, among Kennedy’s battier ideas are a few reasonable ones, such as reducing obesity and cracking down on direct-to-consumer drug commercials and conflicts of interest among researchers. But these are eclipsed by some troubling ones, such…

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Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini

To support The Atlantic’s journalism, please consider subscribing today. Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation of powers became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description…

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New Jack Smith Indictment Against Trump Much Like the Old One

In an attempt to salvage his prosecution against Donald Trump, special counsel Jack Smith secured a reindictment Tuesday against the 45th president on four felony charges in his Washington, D.C., election interference case.  The case revolves around Trump’s various challenges to the 2020 election outcome, most notably his effort to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory on Jan. 6, 2021. The Washington federal grand jury’s new 36-page indictment is similar to the previous indictment in the case. However, in early July, the U.S. Supreme Court determined Trump…

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Sandra Day O’Connor Shattered Glass Ceilings. And She Inspired Lawyers Like Me.

For me, and for generations of female lawyers like me, Sandra Day O’Connor inspired our entrance into the legal field. The service of O’Connor, the first female justice ever to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, made possible the subsequent appointment of the five female Supreme Court justices to serve after her. I mourn her passing not because of her jurisprudence. Rather, I mourn who she was as a trailblazer and what her service at the Court did for women in a field to which I had long aspired. O’Connor…

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