Slate Voice

When I attended the Women’s March convention in October 2017, I expected to witness little more than a three-day pep rally. Women with the financial capacity to take time off work, travel to Detroit, and abide the business-casual dress code would spend a weekend listening to rousing speeches and celebrity-stocked panels.

In the last week, we’ve learned several new things about past and ongoing contacts between President Donald Trump, his aides, and Russia. These revelations cast doubt on the president’s denials of collusion. Trump and his surrogates dismiss these stories, but their answers raise further questions. Those questions can and should be investigated. Here are the new developments.

In all the noise surrounding Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, much of the attention centered on her has been hostile or leering, racist or white-knighty or paparazzish—and predictably focused on her looks. While the left certainly isn’t exempt, the response from the right has been notable not just for its frenzied ubiquity, but for the gendered stink of the efforts to undermine her.

In a monologue that aired on Tucker Carlson’s nightly Fox News show on Jan. 2, the right-wing pundit did something out of character: He leveled a radical critique of policies supported by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. A prominent host criticizing the right on its favorite network would be surprising enough. But the nature of Carlson’s commentary was shocking.

The dynamics of workplace sexual harassment are often easy to understand. Typically, the harasser is in a position of power, making it difficult for his or her victims to resist or to report sexual advances without risking their careers.

Taken at face value, rhetoric from the White House and the Department of Homeland Security would lead Americans to believe that the United States is facing a terrorism crisis at our southern border. The picture being painted is one in which thousands of terrorists have been stopped from crossing the border to infiltrate the homeland. If that were true, that would indeed be a crisis. In reality, no such crisis exists.

As we enter the 20th day of federal workers being unable to go to their jobs, contractors being unable to get paid, and those reliant on federal services being unable to access them, all because the president is unyielding in his demand that a physical barrier be constructed on the southern border, it is worth considering: Isn’t there a better way? Of course there is. Various options exist for eliminating government shutdowns permanently, some of which have been kicked around for years.

As the shutdown stretches on, the Trump administration is beginning to realize theseverity of its consequencesfor millions of Americans and is desperately searching for a way out. While President Donald Trump did notdeclare a national emergencyduring his speech on Tuesday night and subsequently direct the military to build a border wall, the plan remains on the table.

Last month, special counsel Robert Mueller revealed something disturbing about former FBI Director James Comey. Here’s what Mueller disclosed: In January 2017, when Comey sent FBI agents to interview then–national security adviser Michael Flynn, Comey bypassed his own boss, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates. The story sounds innocuous, and it doesn’t serve either party’s narrative, so nobody made a fuss about it. But it’s important.

There’s an extraordinary scene in the new Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic, On the Basis of Sex,in which crusading civil rights attorney Ginsburg takes her rebellious teenage daughter Jane to a rundown street somewhere in Manhattan sometime in the ’70s to meet with civil rights attorney Dorothy Kenyon, played Kathy Bates–ishly by Kathy Bates.

To: Congressional Republicans From: The White House Re: Talking points on the shutdown Over the past two weeks, we’ve noticed that many of you are having trouble articulating where our party stands in the present impasse. You seem confused about whether we support or oppose the shutdown, what we’re waiting for, and what we’re trying to accomplish. We encourage you, as always, to follow the president’s lead. Here are the points he has emphasized since Dec.

House Democratic leaders made public on Tuesday night one of the first big pieces of legislation they would vote on: the rules governing the 116th Congress. The package makes substantial changes to the rules under which House Republicans had governed for the past eight years.

It’s officially 2019, which means it’s time to talk about 2020—or more specifically, who could win the Democratic nomination and the right to take on Donald Trump in the general election. Several dozen Democrats have already emerged as potential challengers, with Elizabeth Warren getting a head start on everyone else by announcing her candidacy on New Year’s Eve.

Since she lost her bid for a third term as a U.S. senator from Missouri, Claire McCaskill has been trashing the left to anyone who’ll listen. She’s insulted Democrats who wanted her to be a more vocal critic of the president, Senate colleagues who questioned her opposition to banking regulations, and progressives who try to push their more moderate representatives to the left.

If it surprised you when Sen.

Before Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the relationship between white racial views and partisanship wasn’t as clear-cut as one might think. Yes, Republicans won the large majority of white voters who believed black disadvantage could be attributed to a lack of hard work or effort—a key measure in the “racial resentment scale”—but a substantial minority of white voters was part of the Democratic coalition as well.

In 2009, House Republicans went hat-in-hand to the American people begging for a another chance. After squandering their majority status in the George W. Bush years and getting creamed at the polls in 2006 and 2008, they promised voters that they would do better next time. Specifically, they pledged that they wouldn’t send deficits soaring again. GOP Reps.

Twenty years ago, a sharply divided House of Representatives voted to impeach President Clinton, against the wishes of a majority of the American people. Now that President Trump has been publicly implicated in serious criminal conduct, the question of whether the president will be impeached and removed from office is once again front and center.

President Donald Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, claim that the men around the president have betrayed him. First these “rats” turned on Trump. Then they lied about him. Then they did the dirtiest thing of all: They produced evidence.

Nancy Pelosi has at last put down the rebellion against her and will now have the votes she needs to return to the speakership after eight years in the House minority. She did it, though, by negotiating on the one issue that she had refused to even consider when the rebellion began.