Daybook

6/18/2021 Daybook

Movement

What looked speculative on Monday became conventional wisdom by Friday.

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6/14/2021 Daybook

Following the money

Nancy Pelosi sounds surprisingly upbeat about the potential for Joe Manchin to change his mind on voting rights legislation. Could her optimism have something to do with this?

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6/11/2021 Daybook

Who could have seen this coming?

You can’t negotiate with someone who already has what they want. 

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6/7/2021 Daybook

Parallel realities

Washington is experiencing a surreal moment, caught between conducting business as usual and a looming existential threat. 

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6/4/2021 Daybook

Tea leaf

The first special election of the Biden era was notable for what didn’t happen.

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6/1/2021 Daybook

Assumptions

Republicans will retake Congress next year . . . unless they don’t.

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5/28/2021 Daybook

Irreconcilable differences

One word captures the state of the Republican Party four months into the Biden presidency.

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5/24/2021 Daybook

The urgency paradox

Democrats know they have to move quickly and decisively to avoid losing the window to act on Biden’s ambitious agenda. There’s only one thing standing in their way. 

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5/21/2021 Daybook

The bipartisanship fallacy

We shouldn’t expect Republicans and Democrats to come together around anything if they can’t come together around this one thing. And they can’t. 

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5/17/2021 Daybook

Commission watch

Is it possible to investigate something that one side sees as an attempt to violently overthrow the government and the other side sees as a tourist event? The reality gap that divides the two parties will be put to the test this week as Congress nears a vote on one of the most important issues of our day.

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5/14/2021 Daybook

Words or actions?

In the wake of Liz Cheney’s ouster from congressional leadership, a group of high-profile former Republican officials said now is the time to free their party from Trump’s influence. Together, there is one thing they can do to make this happen. But will they?

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5/10/2021 Daybook

More purge politics

With Congress returning to Washington this week, the political world will be consumed by the power struggle in the Republican House caucus, where Liz Cheney is poised to be ousted from the number three leadership spot. As political dramas go, this one has zero suspense. The challenge to Cheney’s leadership has been brewing for months and everyone in Washington expects it to end with Cheney being replaced by upstate New York congresswoman and Trump opponent-turned-acolyte Elise Stefanik. What makes this gripping political theater is the fact that it is happening to a legacy figure in the conservative movement and what it says about the present and future state of the Republican Party.

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5/7/2021 Daybook

Group identity

In the coming weeks you will see a lot of stories about how the White House is open to bipartisan compromise with Republicans on the massive infrastructure legislation working its way through Congress and how West Virginia’s Joe Manchin is confident he can work in good faith across the aisle. But several events this week point to why these efforts rest somewhere between bad theater and wishful thinking. If we connect the dots across what’s happening this week in Arizona, on the Hill and in Florida, we see Republicans telegraphing that they are animated not by policy objectives or ideology but by nurturing and defending a shared identity built around a worldview unsupported by external reality. No longer a conventional political party, Republicans are turning into a faith group united by the false belief that massive fraud by voters of color illegitimately removed Donald Trump from power, a wrong that has to be righted at any cost.

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5/3/2021 Daybook

Mitt

There was an incident over the weekend in which Mitt Romney was booed at a state convention of Utah Republicans for having twice voted to convict Donald Trump at his impeachment trials (and – reality check – impeachment may seem like ancient history, but the most recent trial ended less than three months ago). If you’re looking for a measure of the health of the post-Trump Republican Party, you can stop here.

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4/29/2021 Daybook

Biden’s ordinary extraordinary speech

Joe Biden’s speech to a socially distanced joint session of Congress Wednesday night lacked some of the pomp and grandeur we normally associate with such events, but Biden made the largely empty room work to his advantage. Speaking softly enough to make viewers want to lean in to their screens, modulating his voice for emphasis, Biden delivered his remarks in the casual cadence of a friend or neighbor in what felt like a 21st century Fireside Chat.

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4/16/2021 Daybook

It’s been quiet . . . but . . .

The Biden administration launched with a flurry of activity, culminating in passage of the $1.9 trillion Covid relief package. For several weeks we had wave upon wave of executive orders and cabinet nominations, and while Biden intentionally toned things way down he remained a presence in the news. Then things seemed to get quiet.

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