Slate Voice

FULLERTON, California—In April of 2017, Phil Janowicz became the first Democrat to announce his candidacy against Republican Rep. Ed Royce in California’s 39th District, a seat that Royce had held, in one form or another, since 1993. For decades, no one had realistically thought Democrats could topple Royce, but Janowicz, a tenured chemistry professor, spent the rest of the year trying to build a Democratic base in the district, which contains much of northern Orange County.

Last week, a supermajority of Irish citizens voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the country’s constitution, which effectively banned almost all abortions. Though polls predicted victory for women’s rights activists, the outcome still came as a shock to those who were too cautious to hope that the overwhelmingly Catholic country would join the rest of Europe in decriminalizing the procedure.

In 2014, as the Democratic leader in the state House of Representatives, Stacey Abrams spearheaded the New Georgia Project, a plan to register hundreds of thousands of black, Latino and Asian Americans who live in the state but don’t vote in its elections. Abrams ultimately registered just 46,000 people, but she held fast to her theory of the case—that outreach and mobilization could turn Georgia blue, or at least make it a blue-tinged purple.

Before the 1950s, what you thought about health care, guns, or abortion had little to do with where your vote went. Then the modern two-party system came along—or was engineered. On a recent episode of The Gist, Mike Pesca spoke with Sam Rosenfeld, author of The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era, about the evolution of political parties in the U.S. Their conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, is reprinted below.

If the people who came to see Pussy Riot in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday night were expecting an electro-punk show, they were in for a little surprise first: a slideshow. As a scrambled, anonymized voice narrated over the club’s sound system, a numbered list of facts about global income inequality flickered on a projection screen, along with the knit balaclavas that the Russian art collective made famous.

President Trump has harsh words for the undocumented immigrants he’s deporting. “You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are,” Trump fumed in front of cameras last week. “These aren’t people.These are animals.” Trump later said he was talking about MS-13, a criminal gang, and aides repeated his message.

Both progressives and moderate Democrats are crowing over the results from Tuesday’s primaries. Stacey Abrams, a progressive endorsed by Bernie Sanders and the group Our Revolution, defeated former state Rep. Stacey Evans to become the first female black gubernatorial candidate for a major party in history. In Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District, Amy McGrath beat establishment candidate Jim Gray, the mayor of Lexington.

In some ways, last week was a banner week for limited acts of moral courage in the Trump era. In the Senate, Jeff Flakeannouncedlast Wednesday he would join Rand Paul and John McCain to oppose the nomination of Gina Haspel to lead the CIA, citing herties to a torture regime in which she participated and then worked to obscure. She was still confirmed on Thursday, when six Democrats voted on her behalf. Also on Wednesday, a host of Senate Republicans voted to save net neutrality.

A “dark money” organization tied to a major electric company pumped significant cash into an Ohio congressional race in what a losing candidate describes as an act of retribution over a failed financial deal.

The Trump administration is planning to instate a rule that will bar recipients of federal family-planning funding from educating women about abortion options, making referrals to doctors that provide abortions, or providing abortion care. Conservatives have cheered the move as a way for the federal government to partially “defund” Planned Parenthood without requiring an act of Congress. Reproductive-rights advocates are calling the policy a “domestic gag rule”—a U.S.

The Pennsylvania primary on Tuesday was a big night for women in a state whose 20-person congressional delegation currently includes only men. The state has been represented in Congress by just seven women in its history—three of which filled vacancies left when their husbands died—with at most two serving together at any one time.

Over the weekend, the New York Times published an op-ed titled “Liberals, You’re Not As Smart As You Think.” In it, University of Virginia political science professor Gerard Alexander accuses American liberals of arrogance and warns them against making broad negative generalizations about large swaths of the population. “Liberals often don’t realize how provocative or inflammatory they can be,” he writes.

When I asked Florida Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart last year if he would sign a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill to investigate Russian meddling in the election, he didn’t hesitate for a second. “I don’t sign discharge petitions,” he said. “I didn’t even sign an immigration discharge petition.

This past week, journalists in America were struggling to comprehend two major stories: The first was that Donald Trump announced (via tweet) on Wednesday that any news that paints him in a negative light is, by definition, “fake news.” He went on to threaten the press credentials of any journalist who doesn’t portray him in a flattering light.

Since Donald Trump’s election in November 2016, two narratives have shaped conventional wisdom about the Democratic Party. One is that the party is flirting with an ideological crisis, forcing establishment Democrats to decide whether their future lies with more progressive candidates who can turn out the base or more conservative Blue Dogs who might appeal to Trump voters. The other narrative anticipates a more unified path.

On Tuesday, a white graduate student at Yale called the police to report that one of her black classmates was napping in a dorm common area. The ensuing encounter between the police and the student, Lolade Siyonbola, who is getting a master’s degree in African studies, was captured in a video that has drawn national attention to the case.

Gina Haspel was on Capitol Hill on Wednesday facing questions from senators in her quest to become head of the CIA. On Wednesday’s Gist, Mike Pesca spoke with Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, about the hearings. They discussed how Haspel dodged several questions about her involvement in torture as a CIA officer and what that means for the agency going forward. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Did President Donald Trump know in October 2016 about a $130,000 payment to silence a story that threatened his election? Did he deliberately conceal that payment from the Federal Elections Commission? Has Trump now approved a legal strategy to acknowledge the payment in order to buy the silence of his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, in the Russia investigation? These were largely mysteries until Wednesday night, when former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who has joined Trump’s legal team, began a crusade to shield Trump from campaign finance charges. In interviews with...

According to the New York Times, special counsel Robert Mueller has four dozen questions he wants to ask President Donald Trump about the Russia investigation. At least 18 of them focus on James Comey, the man Trump fired as FBI director last year in a failed attempt to “lift the cloud” of the investigation. Many of the questions involve meetings between Trump and Comey.

Filtered or unfiltered? We’re not talking about coffee or cigarettes, but world leaders. Gautam Mukunda is a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. In his 2012 book, Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter, he argues that American presidents who enter the White House without first being brought up in the halls of power end up being either great or terrible. On Thursday’s Gist, Mike Pescatalked with Mukunda about the ultimate unfiltered president.