Slate Voice

Thousands of teachers and sympathetic demonstrators in Oklahoma gathered on Tuesday, for a second straight day, at Oklahoma’s state Capitol to demand higher teacher pay and increased education funding.

Congress will be in recess for the next week or so, and we’ve been given a few peeks recently about what Republicans will set about doing once they get back. According to Politico, one of the items on the agenda may be tax cuts. Yes. Really. Republicans are dreaming of passing another round of tax cuts this year—or at least making vulnerable Democrats squirm by voting against them.

We’re now several days into a roiling debate over whether liberals ought to be upset that the Atlantic hired a man who once argued that a quarter of American women should be executed. Predictably, both sides have progressed from that specific and tedious subject to a debate about liberal bias in media, broadly speaking, of which the backlash against Kevin Williamson’s hiring is supposedly proof.

Most Republican officials have steered clear of directly criticizing the teenage survivors of the Parkland shooting, but Rep. Steve King has never been one for such caution. One day after 18-year-old Emma González led a tearful, silent tribute to her slain classmates during a march in Washington, King’s campaign shared a conservative meme on its Facebook page mocking González.

On Saturday, 800,000 Americans gathered in Washington, D.C., to participate in what they expected to be a gun control rally. What they saw was a transformative moment in American politics. March for Our Lives was, of course, a demonstration for stronger gun safety laws, fortified by delightfully specific policy proposals and replete with far-too-clever homemade signs. But it was an awakening of sorts, an introduction to the next generation of political activism.

Based on what President Donald Trump hears on television about the Federal Election Commission, the nation’s cable news consumer-in-chief must be panicked. Day after day, TV talkers squawk about how the independent government agency is poised to pounce.

Jeffrey Goldberg knows that he hired a troll. But he thinks readers should give him a second chance. The Atlantic editor in chief issued a memo to the magazine’s staff this week, explaining his decision to hire conservative writer Kevin Williamson as a columnist for the magazine’s new ideas section. In addition to making the thought leader’s now-familiar case for ideological diversity, Goldberg wrote that he likes to “give people second chances and the opportunity to change.

Stormy Daniels appeared on 60 Minutes on Sunday night, delivering the program its largest audience—21 million viewers—since a post-election interview with Barack and Michelle Obama in November 2008.

On Jan. 24, it was announced that former White House adviser and Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon had accepted an invitation from business school professor Luigi Zingales to participate in a debate on campus. “I can hardly think of a more important issue for new citizens and business leaders of the world than the backlash against globalization and immigration that is taking place not just in America, but in all the Western World,” Zingales wrote in a statement.

Joe Biden’s allies say the former vice president hasn’t decided yet whether to run for president again in 2020. But we know the interest is there. “If, in a year from now, if we’re ready, and nobody has moved in that I think can do it, then I may very well do it,” said Biden on The View in December.

It’s taken them several crucial days longer than they had hoped, but Democratic and Republican leaders on Wednesday closed in on an agreement to fund the government through September at the higher spending levels they set last month. The omnibus spending bill, the last big “must-pass” bill of the year, is a vehicle for legislators to tack on all of their other legislative priorities that they couldn’t get through regular order. If they’re not included in this $1.

The United States has a creative excuse for slapping tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum.Without the tariffs, the Trump administration argues, American producers of these metals would continue to decline, jeopardizing our military. This rationale has a legal purpose: to exempt the tariffs from adjudication by the World Trade Organization, which defers to claims of national security. But the rationale is a fraud.

Dr. David Shulkin, the current secretary of veterans affairs and the only Democrat in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, has done fairly well running the VA. At a signing ceremony for veterans legislation in June, Trump said of Shulkin, “We’ll never have to use those words [‘You’re fired’] on our David.” Eight months later, that declaration may prove ironic.

A daily selection of Slate’s best writing, read out loud. Learn more about this members-only feature at slate.com/voice

Now that Conor Lamb has won a House seat in western Pennsylvania, the national press is already decamping for Illinois, where the next big midterm battle will be about reproductive rights. On Tuesday, Democratic primary voters in the Chicago suburbs will choose between Marie Newman, a progressive, pro-choice challenger, and Rep. Dan Lipinski, a Blue Dog, anti-abortion incumbent.

President Trump has agreed to meet North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Diplomats and U.S. allies are puzzled. They wonder why Trump, without securing concessions, would offer North Korea what it has pursued for decades: the first meeting between a North Korean leader and a sitting American president. The question answers itself. Trump wants to have the meeting because no previous president has done it. Trump talks tough, but he doesn’t focus on confronting America’s enemies.

Former congressman and CIA Director Mike Pompeo has a bio that sparkles even in Washington: top of his class at West Point, five years of Army service, Harvard Law, success in business, and now politics. In Donald Trump’s Washington, Pompeo has added perhaps the most important laurel of all: trusted lieutenant to the president.

On Tuesday, Vox released the results of a recent Civis Analytics survey of likely voters on the priorities they’d like to see Democrats take on should they retake Congress and the presidency in 2020. Predictably, the top concerns were largely a reflection of the conversations at the center of current discourse: 31 percent of likely voters want the next Democratic administration to focus on health care.

For the past two weeks, progressive activists and Jewish advocacy groups have been relitigating the character of Louis Farrakhan. The National of Islam minister gave his annual Saviours’ Day speech on Feb. 25, during which he made several characteristic remarks about the “Satanic Jew” responsible for Hollywood’s “filth and degenerate behavior” that is “turning men into women and women into men.

Watching Sam Nunberg’s spectacular public splashdown on Monday was awkward for virtually everyone, but it was particularly painful for anyone who suspected that deriving secret joy from witnessing a public mental health crisis is neither journalistically, nor morally defensible.By Tuesday night, it was boring old news, as all things seem to be these days, but the questions raised by the uneasy spectacle shouldn’t fade so quickly.