Slate Voice

The Weekly Standard shut down on Friday after 23 years of publication. In an unceremonious execution, MediaDC, the magazine’s owner, instructed staff to clear out their desks by the end of the day. According to co-founder John Podhoretz, MediaDC chose to kill the outlet so it could strip-mine its assets and subscriber list.

President Trump thinks he’ll win a fight with Democrats over paying for a wall on the Mexican border. “If we don’t get what we want … I will shut down the government,” Trump told Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker–designate Nancy Pelosi in a televised Oval Office meeting on Tuesday.

Americans may never rid ourselves of our collective need to narrate political conflict in military terms. Everything must be understood as a pitched battle between two clear opposing sides. This is not an especially illuminating way of looking at things—nor does it meaningfully narrate the messiness of the present. Still, for years now, media narratives have tended to flatten complicated dynamics into the simpler concept of battle.

The Supreme Court declined to hear two Planned Parenthood–related cases on Monday, leaving in place two lower court opinions that favor the health care organization. Those opinions held that states violate federal law when they cut Planned Parenthood affiliates out of state Medicaid programs, as many states have tried to do since 2015.

In 2012, North Carolina Republicans won a “trifecta” of legislative and executive power. They used their newfound power to aggressively gerrymander the electoral map and impose new restrictions on voting. In 2016, Democrats reversed those gains, narrowly toppling incumbent Gov. Pat McCrory—and the GOP Legislature responded by stripping the incoming executive of key powers and privileges.

On Tuesday, Wisconsin Republicans escalated their lame-duck power grab, confirming 82 appointees from outgoing Gov. Scott Walker after passing bills to lock in conservative policy and keep incoming Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers from exercising meaningful power over state government. The hypocrisy is striking. In 2010, then–Gov.-elect Scott Walker asked outgoing Democratic incumbent Jim Doyle not to “finalize any permanent civil service personnel” as he finished his term.

Just in time for the holidays, the New York Times has published a heartwarming tale of Twitter enemies who learned to be friends. In the piece, Bari Weiss, the Intellectual Dark Web–fetishizing Times opinion writer, and Vice politics writer Eve Peyser explain how they came to like each other’s IRL personas better than their Twitter ones.

It feels much longer than 14 years since President George W. Bush declared that the U.S. should have “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world … by force of arms when necessary” in his second inaugural address.

When the CIA catches dictators doing bad things, the dictators often pay lobbyists to lie about what’s been discovered. Now the dictators can save their money because President Donald Trump is doing their hatchet work against the CIA for free. Trump has dismissed the agency’s findings about Russian interferencein the 2016 election. He has brushed offU.S. intelligence showing that North Korea isbuilding new missiles.

Nancy Pelosi cleared the first hurdle to regaining her former position as speaker of the House on Wednesday, earning 203 yes votes and 32 noes from her fellow Democrats. To get the gig, she has to turn 15 of those no votes into yeses by January, when the floor vote takes place. It’s been frustrating to watch members of both parties do battle over who Pelosi is, what she’s done, and whether she deserves another term as speaker, because there seems to be little room for nuance.

Some presidential reputations are like great red wines: They get better with time. There is no modern president about whom this is more true than the one we lost Friday, George Herbert Walker Bush. Twenty-six years ago, when he ran for re-election, Bush received the lowest percentage of the vote of any incumbent since William Howard Taft in 1912. He had been rejected by the American people and felt it.

The special counsel’sdraft statement of offense for Jerome Corsiincludes much extraordinary information.

With most of the votes from the midterm election tallied, we now have a better sense of the scale of the Democratic victory. It is historic. Thus far, Democrats have earned more than 8.8 million more votes than Republicans, flipped 39 seats, and are poised to win a 40th as election officials continue counting ballots in California. In terms of their House margin, this makes 2018 the Democratic Party’s strongest midterm performance since Watergate.

Theprimary mandateof special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is to determine if there are “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.

I grew up in Bedford, New Hampshire, an extremely Republican town of about 23,000 people that hadn’t elected a Democrat to state office since before World War II. That is, until earlier this month, when my middle school guidance counselor won her very first political campaign. Sue Mullen, 62, bested six Republicans, five other Democrats, and one libertarian to become one of Bedford’s 6½ (it’s complicated) representatives in the state House.

Ed Stetzer is grappling with a moral crisis. Stetzer, the director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, is preaching the Gospel to his fellow Christians. And they’re not listening. “White evangelicals are highly motivated to support President Donald Trump around the issue of immigration,” Stetzer, a Trump critic, wrote in Vox on the morning of the midterms.

Incoming congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez visited Capitol Hill this week for an orientation program for newly elected representatives. Conservative commentators relished the opportunity to take a few shots at their new favorite political punching bag.

I can’t say I was surprised when Michael Avenatti was arrested on suspicion of felonydomestic violence on Wednesday. It’s not that he seems like someone who’d assault a romantic partner. For one thing, that’s not something you can accurately glean from a guy’s tweets and cable news appearances. For another, Avenatti strongly denies the allegations.

If you watched the first video clip in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram story on Monday without knowing a thing about her, you might think you’d stumbled across an extremely popular, refreshingly unpolished lifestyle blogger. “As promised, I’m going to give you the recipe for this Instagram Live black bean soup,” she said, her smartphone camera wobbling from a poorly lit pot of brown sludge to her own un-made-up face. “It is from Bon Appétit.

The midterm elections did not give Democrats a singular leader to rally behind, nor did it settle ideological divides in the party. But the results can tell us a lot about the mood among Democratic voters, and what they might be looking for in a 2020 presidential nominee. First, much hay has been made about the choice between progressives on one hand and moderates or “centrists” on the other.