Новости за 13.11.2020

An inescapable risk in writing about current events is that they have the tendency to swiftly overtake the last thing you wrote. On Thursday afternoon, I filed an article explaining why the Supreme Court will likely take a sharp right turn after President-elect Joe Biden’s victory last week but noted that it still had the option to take a less aggressive tack. “If the justices wanted it, the Supreme Court could act as a force for American social and political cohesion instead of a factor in its destabilization,” I wrote. Читать дальше...

Throughout this election cycle, pundits and Electoral College–watchers trained their gaze on Pennsylvania, singling it out as the state that would likely determine the winner of the presidency. And as the year wound on, it became just as clear that the path to winning the Keystone state ran through Philadelphia and its suburban counties. That all turned out to be true, and those who aimed for President Donald Trump’s ouster can thank the City of Brotherly Love for buying four years of breathing room. Читать дальше...

When (if?) Donald Trump leaves office, he will be deeply in debt and starved of the bully pulpit that has made him an inescapable focus of attention. Ever since he lost the presidential election, many have already begun to tune him out. Once he has left the White House, he will be just another guy tweeting all-caps conspiracy theories about voting machines.

After Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in September, liberals spent seven weeks before the presidential election discussing the merits of Supreme Court reform. Should Democrats respond to Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation—and the GOP’s four-year campaign to reshape the federal courts—by adding more seats to the nation’s highest court? Should they adopt extraordinary measures like jurisdiction stripping to limit the conservative justices’ influence? In some ways, it was one of the most prominent policy debates of the general election. Читать дальше...

According to two sources familiar with the situation, as well as written communications … the White House Presidential Personnel Office (PPO) is still in the process of vetting candidates for job openings in various parts of the federal government, positions that the White House intended to fill by early next year.

In 1981, in their first public appearance after their wedding, Prince Charles and Princess Diana visited Brecon, a small town in Wales with a population a little under 8,000. “It was very cold, but people didn’t seem to notice the cold because they were so excited about Diana coming,” Valerie Harris, a Brecon resident, would later recall. Townspeople lined both sides of the main street, waiting for the royal visitors to appear. Charles had decided they would each take one side of the street and switch off. Читать дальше...

In a recent interview with Eater, San Francisco restaurant owner Pim Techamuanvivit articulated the bind she currently finds herself in: The pandemic has cratered her business at the same time that it’s made her staff’s continued employment—their salaries, their health insurance—that much more urgent. It’s an impossible situation. “I don’t understand why it’s up to me as a small-business owner to search my conscience every month to decide whether or not to support my employees,” she said. “Where is the conscience of this government... Читать дальше...

Depending on one’s outlook, this week has felt either unsettlingly ominous or unbearably silly. It began with Attorney General Bill Barr stopping by Capitol Hill to chat with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Shortly afterward, McConnell announced that he didn’t consider Joe Biden the president-elect and urged Donald Trump to continue his legal challenges to the ongoing counting of the presidential election vote. Barr then delivered a memo authorizing federal prosecutors to “pursue substantial... Читать дальше...

In July, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled a poster to commemorate what New York had just suffered. It depicted a mountain in the shape of the state’s Covid-19 case count. “We went up the mountain, we curved the mountain, we came down the other side,” he said. What he didn’t mention is that the mountain was a pile of dead bodies, the tens of thousands of New Yorkers who might not have died had he and other leaders throughout the state acted earlier and more decisively.