Jan 24, 2023
One of the first moves House Republicans made upon assuming the chamber’s majority was to create, in a party-line vote of 221-211, the “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.” But rather than use that unwieldy moniker, GOP leaders appropriated the name of an iconic investigative...
Jan 12, 2023
As politics grew increasingly violent in the 1850s, Americans understood that unresolvable conflicts over the extension of slavery and the disproportionate political power of the slaveholders could lead to disunion and war. In the view of some historians, activism outside Congress, driven by radical abolitionists as...
Jan 10, 2023
The election of California Rep. Kevin McCarthy as House speaker after five days and 15 ballots exposed divisions within the Republican Party that may not portend well for the immediate future of his party, the chamber, or the country. With one exception (1923), no speakership election since the Civil War needed...
Dec 13, 2022
Since British prime minister Neville Chamberlain attempted to avoid war with Hitler in 1938 by agreeing to carve up Czechoslovakia, the word appeasement has been synonymous with moral weakness and wishful thinking. While the failure to appease the Nazi dictator offers important lessons, politicians -- and even some...
Dec 8, 2022
Since September thousands of ordinary Iranian citizens have risked their lives -- and hundreds have lost their lives -- protesting the ayatollahs' rule after the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini. The 22-year-old woman had been arrested by the clerical regimes' morality police for not wearing her hijab the way the...