Author: Heather Cox Richardson

Early in the morning of January 7, shortly after midnight, Republican Kevin McCarthy of California won enough votes to become speaker of the House of Representatives. Not since 1860, when it took 44 ballots to elect New Jersey’s William Pennington as a compromise candidate, has it taken 15 ballots to elect a speaker. The spectacle of a majority unable to muster the votes to elect a speaker, while the Democratic opposition stayed united behind House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), raised ridicule across the country. McCarthy tried to put a good spin on it but inadvertently undercut confidence in...

“If the Congress maintains these principles, the voters, putting patriotism ahead of pocketbooks, will give you their applause. In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way – everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want – which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its...

Just a year ago, we were focusing on Russian troops massing on the border with Ukraine, which the U.S. government and allies recognized as an attempt both to keep Ukraine from joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a longstanding military alliance resisting Russian expansion, and to test the unity of the democratic nations that made up NATO itself. Former president Donald Trump had weakened NATO and vowed to pull the U.S. out of it if he won a second term, demoralizing our allies, but Democratic president Joe Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, had worked hard...

Survivors of the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado, testified on December 14 before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Club Q is an LGBTQ club in the city of about 500,000 people. The shooter opened fire there on the night of November 19-20, during a dance party. He used an AR-15 style rifle, murdering five people and wounding 19 more. Six others were hurt in the chaos. Pointing to Republican anti-LGBTQ rhetoric that calls LGBTQ individuals “groomers” and abusers,” survivors of the mass shooting said that Republican rhetoric was “the direct cause” of the massacre....