Less than a month after the stunning collapse of the crypto exchange FTX, Congress held its first hearing on Thursday on what Washington should do amid the fallout. Senators called for swift legislative action to safeguard consumers but many disagreements still exist over the shape of those actions. Debates will likely continue for months on how, exactly, crypto should be regulated in the U.S.

The hearing was hosted by the Senate Agriculture Committee, and didn’t feature the person at the center of the FTX saga: CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who is expected to testify at a House hearing later this month. The only person invited to testify on Thursday was Rostin Behnam, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), an agency that regulates derivative markets and is among those lawmakers are considering tasking with reining in the freewheeling world of cryptocurrency. Behnam pressed the Senate to give his agency oversight of most crypto markets, calling for “comprehensive market regulation.”
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However, Behnam’s testimony was complicated by his close working relationship with Bankman-Fried over the last year. And the bill that Behnam and other senators advocated for on Thursday was the same one championed by Bankman-Fried himself, raising many eyebrows.

Here are the main takeaways from the hearing.

Senators are divided over the path to take on crypto

Many of the senators who spoke on Thursday emphasized the need for some sort of action following the FTX crash. “The risks of trading crypto have come into sharp focus in the past few weeks,” said Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat, who co-led the hearing with John Boozman, an Arkansas Republican. “The lack of clear consistent rules has allowed crypto to flourish despite the harmful conflicts of interest, an absence of responsible governance and risk management and a failure to safeguard customer assets.”

Many senators voiced support for the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, a bill sponsored by Stabenow and Boozman and aims to give the CTFC greater control over crypto. But another bill from Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, and Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican, the Responsible Financial Innovation Act, is competing for attention. And many other crypto bills are floating around in the House, all of them proposing different levels of involvement by the US government in a financial world that has quickly amassed hundreds of billions of dollars in value.

Many members of Congress are still struggling to understand exactly how cryptocurrency works. Some senators on Thursday, including Republican Senators John Thune of South Dakota and Roger Marshall of Kansas, raised the possibility of at least temporarily banning crypto in the US altogether, though it was unclear if they understood how such a ban would work. “Do you ever consider that there should just be a pause in this cryptocurrency digital world until we get our arms around it?” Marshall asked Behnam.

“I don’t have the luxury to sit back,” Behnam responded. “No matter what, whether it’s in the US or offshore, these markets are going to exist.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who is often a leading progressive voice on regulations, was not present at Thursday’s hearing, but will likely present formidable opposition to any bill that is remotely friendly to crypto: At a Senate Banking Committee hearing this week, she called FTX “not much more than a handful of magic beans.”

The CFTC wants control over crypto

At the moment, the CFTC is jockeying for regulatory control over crypto with the Security Exchange Commission (SEC) and other agencies. Thursday’s hearing gave Behnam a chance to make the case for his agency, which is much smaller than the SEC and often perceived as much more crypto-friendly.

Behnam refuted this idea on Thursday: “If individuals took a harder look at our record, they would understand we’re the farthest thing from a light-touch regulator,” Behnam said.

Behnam sought to distance himself from Bankman-Fried, who has served as the main face of crypto on the Hill. Bankman-Fried said on Wednesday at the New York Times’ DealBook summit that he spent “hundreds, probably thousands of hours” in Washington trying to secure meetings with regulators. Bankman-Fried, along with former FTX Digital Markets CEO Ryan Salame, also contributed tens of thousands of dollars to lawmakers on the Senate Agriculture Committee for their election campaigns this year.

Behnam admitted at the hearing to meeting with Bankman-Fried ten times over the last couple years in his office. But he said that the meetings were related to FTX’s “dogged” pursuit of a proposal that would let investors make sophisticated bets with borrowed money directly on FTX instead of through a broker. The proposal was highly controversial, with detractors arguing it could destabilize markets. “We did not have flexibility to put it on the side of the desk or disregard it…knowing the importance of the issue and the very strong feelings on both sides,” Behnam said.

Senator Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, also sought to distance Bankman-Fried from the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, which Bankman-Fried publicly supported. In October. Bankman-Fried tweeted in October that the bill would “provide customer protection on centralized crypto exchanges.”

“It’s been widely discussed in the media that the Stabenow-Boozman bill is an SBF bill,” Booker, who co-sponsored the bill, said. “Sam Bankman-Fried did give a lot of feedback, as did many others, from industry, academia, from the policy community, and beyond.”

Behnam said that the bill would have to be “strengthened” in the wake of the FTX crash, including with regard to conflicts of interest and the financial information cryptocurrency exchanges should be required to disclose.

Some are skeptical that Congress will do anything

While Behnam and some senators used the hearing to push hard for the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, the bill has received criticism from both crypto supporters and skeptics. Crypto supporters worry it will heavily restrict the sprawling crypto ecosystem known as decentralized finance (DeFi). Miller Whitehouse-Levine, policy director of The DeFi Education Fund, told TIME in a phone interview that “I don’t think this hearing is indicative of momentum behind the DCCPA. If anything, I think it has added much more to think about in the next few months.”

Crypto detractors, on the other hand, argue the bill lacks teeth in protecting customers from shady practices and that the CFTC might be the wrong agency to police it. Americans for Financial Reform released a letter in September arguing that the CFTC was too small and ill-equipped to regulate the crypto market.

Dennis Kelleher, the president of the advocacy group Better Markets, went a step further, arguing that the CFTC should be investigated over “how much access influence Sam Bankman-Fried bought” at the agency. He points to one strategy FTX took of hiring a slew of former CFTC officials, including Mark Wetjen, Ryne Miller, and Brian Mulherin.

After Thursday’s hearing, Kelleher expressed frustration that it had unfolded “as if the FTX blowup didn’t happen.”

“When something like this happens, typically you have an overreaction of elected officials of the need to crack down on the industry,” he says. “Instead, this hearing is to push a bill that was endorsed and pushed by FTX.”

The hearing was the first in a series of congressional meetings about FTX. The House Financial Services Committee will hold a hearing on its collapse on Dec. 13, and expects Bankman-Fried to testify there. As congress mulls whether to pass legislation, federal agencies including the CFTC, the SEC and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have reportedly launched investigations of FTX.

As he left his home of France for a high-profile meeting with his U.S. counterpart, President Emmanuel Macron carried with him a barrel of frustrations from European allies over some of Joe Biden’s signature policy accomplishments.

Those frustrations quickly bubbled up into public view once Macron reached Washington on Wednesday, as he stopped at the French embassy and delivered a speech in his native language and singled out two bills that Biden signed into law as “choices that will fragment the West, because they create such differences between the United States of America and Europe.”

Macron was talking about the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, two sprawling measures Congress passed over the summer that are poised to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into subsidies and tax incentives for electric car manufacturing and microchip makers in the U.S.
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Macron said he agreed with the broad goals of both bills—jump-starting sustainable energy technologies and making the world economy less dependent in China for chip manufacturing—but warned they come at a time when the strong U.S. dollar is adding to inflation in Europe, Russia’s stranglehold on gas is spiking energy prices, and Europe is facing a recession.

Macron’s demand that Biden rethink some of his administration’s proudest accomplishments is an early warning sign that a growing energy crisis in Europe could test the unity of European nations, as they bear the economic brunt of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war with Ukraine.

After a two-and-a-half hour one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office with Macron, Biden told reporters he makes “no apology for” the massive technology and green energy investments he signed into law. But he acknowledged there might be “glitches” in the $390 billion in climate change initiatives in the Inflation Reduction Act and said he would be looking at “tweaks” that could be made. “When I wrote the legislation, it was never intended to exclude those who are cooperating with us,” Biden said.

The annoyance Macron brought to the White House heats up a long-standing trouble spot in U.S.-European relations as European powers grapple with a raft of measures Biden has put in place to make the U.S. supply chain less reliant on overseas factories and add manufacturing jobs to the U.S. economy.

“What’s the French word for ‘annoyed’?” says Michael Allen, who served in President George W. Bush’s National Security Council and was a former staff director of the House Intelligence Committee, about the French response to the measures. He noted that making changes to such a carefully negotiated piece of legislation wouldn’t be easy for Biden, particularly once Republicans take control of the House in January. “Biden potentially opened Pandora’s box to a mad scramble to fix it sooner rather than later,” Allen says.

Former French ambassador to Washington Gérard Araud said on France’s LCI Television on Thursday morning that some of the Biden provisions drawing frustration in Europe were part of a protectionist trend in American politics that spanned the Trump and Biden administrations. “Presidents Trump and Biden have listened to their voters, and so they’re reinforcing their protectionism,” Araud said. “It’s a long-term protectionism that will not stop, it didn’t stop with Trump, or with Biden, and the Europeans must understand this.”

For his part, Macron has urged his fellow European countries to work to come up with their own economic incentives that could be done in coordination with the U.S. government. “We can’t ask the United States to resolve Europe’s problems,” Macron told reporters on Thursday. “We in Europe must move stronger and faster,” Macron said.

Hosting the French president for Biden’s first State Dinner is part of the repair work being done by the Biden Administration after it blindsided France last year by agreeing to work with Australia on building a nuclear-powered submarine fleet. The surprise announcement sank France’s own lucrative submarine deal with Australia and caused Paris to temporarily recall its ambassadors from Washington and Canberra.

The Biden administration’s decision to fete Macron in Washington is also an acknowledgement that Macron has emerged in the wake of political turnover across the continent as the strongest, most high-profile European leader.

Biden started off his meeting with Macron on Thursday with some flattery.

“Emmanuel is not just the leader of France, he’s one of the leaders of Europe. He’s been very outspoken, and he has been very, very commanding in Europe,” Biden said, sitting next to Macron in the Oval Office.

Macron could use the boost, as he faces harsh political headwinds at home and is eager to play up his influence on the world stage to his audience back in France. His party lost control of France’s parliamentary majority in April and discontent over rising energy costs and economic pain is sapping his popularity. As Macron arrived in Washington on Wednesday, a new poll showed his approval rating at 37%, down 6% since his reelection in April.

Read more: The Challenges Ahead for Emmanuel Macron

Earlier this year, Macron repeatedly spoke to Putin after the Russian autocrat started rolling tanks toward Kyiv in February, but failed to find diplomatic footing and risked fragmenting support for Ukraine before he begged off the effort.

Macron acknowledged on Thursday that the time and terms for peace talks must be determined by Ukraine. Biden said he was “prepared to speak” with Putin if he’s “looking for a way to end the war.” Biden said he had “no immediate plans” to talk to the Russian leader and any talks he had with Putin would be in close consultation with European allies.

The meeting of the two leaders at the White House on Thursday went more than an hour longer than planned. Biden presented Macron with a mirror made from wood that fell on the White House grounds and a record collection of American musicians. Among the gifts Macron gave Biden was a vinyl record of the 1966 French film, A Man and A Woman, the story of a couple who have lost their spouses falling in love, that Biden saw on an early date with First Lady Jill Biden. The visit was set to continue Thursday night with an elaborate state dinner featuring Maine lobster, American caviar, Napa Valley chardonnay, and a performance from New Orleans songwriter and singer Jon Batiste.

Amid the pleasantries and pageantry, Macron made clear that his most pressing disagreement between the two countries was rooted in trade. Macron called on Biden to “synchronize” U.S. economic policies to better align with Europe’s.

Toward the end of the press conference, a French-speaking reporter pressed Macron to show what evidence of improving trade relations he got from Biden, pointing to a line from the avant-garde artist Jean Cocteau, that there’s “no such thing as love, only proof of love.” Macron replied, “We are not here to ask for proof of love. We are here to agree on a strategy and we did.”

—WITH REPORTING BY VIVIENNE WALT/PARIS

Republican candidate for governor Kari Lake plans to sue Arizona’s largest county next week to overturn her election loss, sources familiar with the matter tell TIME, as the state’s election system is beset by turmoil more than three weeks after Election Day.

Lake, who lost by less than one percentage point to Democrat Katie Hobbs and has refused to concede, cannot file her lawsuit under Arizona law until state officials certify the election results. That process will take place on Dec. 5, when Arizona’s governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and chief justice will validate the election outcome based on official results submitted by the state’s 15 counties.
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In the meantime, Lake’s legal team has been collecting affidavits from voters who claim they were unable to vote on Election Day because of problems with tabulator machines in roughly 30% of Maricopa County’s vote centers, according to Lake campaign insiders.

The equipment problems led to long lines and voter confusion at some vote centers. Maricopa County officials have stressed that no voters were denied the right to vote. Anyone who experienced issues with the machines, they said, were able to deposit their ballot in a secure box to be tabulated later. “People were still able to vote,” said Bill Gates, the chairman of the county’s board of supervisors. “It was just a matter of maybe not voting in the way they wanted to.”

Lake trails Hobbs by a little more than 17,000 votes. Lake’s suit, sources say, is likely to claim that more than that many voters were disenfranchised by Maricopa’s tabulator snafus, which they argue had a disparate impact on Republicans who were more likely to vote in person on Election Day than Democrats, who in recent years have tended to vote early or by mail. It’s a trend that is due in large part to former President Donald Trump having demonized mail voting as rife with fraud, despite no evidence to suggest that.

Read more: Trump’s Attacks on Mail Voting Bolstered ‘Big Lie,’ Jan. 6 Panel Says

Lake, the former news anchor turned politician, intends to ask the Maricopa County Superior Court to nullify its election and hold it over again. Such a decision would be unprecedented in modern American elections. Some of Lake’s top advisers recognize that the chances of a judge ruling in their favor are slim. “Courts require proof,” a Lake insider tells TIME. “And it’s going to be hard to prove. You don’t know how many people actually drove to a polling location, looked at the long line, and left. You’ll never know who decided not to pull in. And that’s unfortunate for Kari. We can just argue common sense. But that’s not evidence in court. It’s going to be tough.”

On social media, Lake has said her lawsuit will include “at least one smoking gun” based on whistleblowers who have contacted her campaign. “I’m working with a team of patriotic, talented lawyers on a legal case to challenge the botched elections,” she said in one video. “We will file this case in accordance with Arizona state law, and you’ll want to stay tuned for this one. Trust me.”

Lake is being represented by the Phoenix-based conservative lawyer Tim La Sota, and sources say there are conversations ongoing with the Republican National Committee to potentially join in the lawsuit. Lake’s campaign had hired Harmeet Dhillon, an RNC committeewoman who helped with Trump’s efforts to contest the 2020 election, to run its election week operations.

Local officials in all of Arizona counties convened on Monday to approve their respective election results, but those typically mundane proceedings were far more dramatic than usual in some counties. The Republican-controlled Cochise County governing board voted two-to-one to delay a vote on certifying their results until Friday, a move that risks delaying the statewide certification and that quickly drew lawsuits from outside groups and Hobbs in her role as secretary of state. In Mohave County, the Republican chairman of the Board of Supervisors, Ron Gould, reluctantly certified the election results but only “under duress,” he said, proclaiming from the dais: “I have no choice but to vote ‘Aye’ or I will be arrested and charged with a felony.”

And in Maricopa County, which comprises more than 60% of the state’s voters, hundreds protested the Board of Supervisors’ certification meeting, with many testifying about their grievances over Election Day issues with tabulator machines and long lines. The board eventually voted unanimously to certify the election results.

Problems with the machine tabulators emerged early in the morning on Election Day at 60 of Maricopa’s 223 vote centers; by midday, county officials said they had diagnosed and remedied the problem.

Read more: Problems With Some Arizona Voting Machines Are Stoking Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories

One longtime Arizona politico acknowledged that the problems were disruptive, but insisted that they did not ultimately disenfranchise any Arizona voters. “Were there some inconveniences? Yeah, absolutely,” Barrett Marson, a veteran Arizona Republican operative, tells TIME. “Did Maricopa County make a mistake? Absolutely. But did they rectify it as soon as possible? Absolutely. Did people have to wait in long lines to vote? Yes, but they voted. That’s Kari Lake’s problem. People were still allowed to vote.”

During the public comment period on Monday at the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors meeting, Lake supporters one by one excoriated the county, in some cases citing unsubstantiated claims that technological hiccups were part of an intentional plot to steal the election. “This is a war between good and evil,” one man told the board, “and you all represent evil.”

Over and over again, those who spoke expressed that they had little faith that the election was fair, often repeating points made by Lake or other conservative media figures. One speaker who works for a right-wing streaming service suggested that Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, was compromised in his role because he founded a political action committee last year called Pro-Democracy Republicans of Arizona to combat GOP candidates who have say the last presidential election was stolen, despite multiple investigations finding no evidence of substantial fraud. Lake has often said that President Joe Biden is an “illegitimate” president who did not really beat Trump in 2020. Richer did not respond to a request for comment.

One woman who served as a poll observer testified that they weren’t trained to check out voters who had already checked in at a polling place. That became an issue for some voters who had tabulator machines reject their ballots and who wanted to go to another location to vote. Another said she heard from a fellow poll worker that one of the tabulators at her polling place wasn’t working the night before the election.

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s office cited the tabulator malfunctions and check-out issues prominently in a Nov. 19 letter to Maricopa County demanding answers on the Election Day mishaps. “These complaints go beyond pure speculation, but include first-hand witness accounts that raise concerns regarding Maricopa’s lawful compliance with Arizona election law,” the attorney general’s office wrote.

Maricopa County officials responded on Nov. 27, saying the county complied with federal and state election law, and that voters who went to a second polling place on Election Day without checking out of the previous polling place were able to cast a provisional ballot. Elections officials would then research to make sure that the voter did not vote twice before counting that ballot. The letter did not address the training of poll workers for check-out procedures.

Brnovich’s shadow looms large in the ongoing controversy over the 2022 Arizona election, as he is one of the state officials tasked with certifying the election next week. While the Republican attorney general certified and defended the integrity of the last Arizona election two years ago, he later cast doubt on its legitimacy when he ran for U.S. Senate this year. Brnovich has not made any public declaration whether he will certify this election. His office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Meanwhile, Hobbs, as secretary of state, has engaged in a legal battle to compel Cochise County to certify its election results as mandated by state law, after its Board of Supervisors refused to do so, citing concerns with voting machines, even though voters did not experience any issues in that jurisdiction. “The Secretary of State’s Office provided supporting documentation that confirmed Cochise County’s election equipment was properly certified,” a spokesperson for Hobbs tells TIME. “The Board of Supervisors had all of the information they needed to certify this election and failed to uphold their responsibility for Cochise voters.”

Since the Associated Press called the election for Hobbs on Nov. 14, Lake has vowed to fight the results of what she has called a “botched election” and has emphasized to her supporters that she will challenge the outcome, much like Trump did in 2020.

“This whole system is a joke,” she said on a conservative podcast on Tuesday. “Either our courts help us out right now, or I feel we lose this country.”

The conviction of the leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia on seditious conspiracy charges was hailed as a significant win for the Justice Department and a “victory for the rule of law.” But the verdict against Stewart Rhodes and his associate Kelly Meggs, who face up to 20 years in prison after being convicted on the extremely rare charge in connection with the Jan. 6 attack, is unlikely to dampen a growing anti-government movement that has long since moved on from Rhodes’ Oath Keepers organization, splintering into new extremist groups that are younger, more aggressive, and more online.
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“We shouldn’t conflate this tactical victory against the Oath Keepers as a final kind of silver bullet success against what is unfortunately a thriving anti-government, anti-authority movement in the United States today,” says Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. “The life or death of the Oath Keepers as an entity…doesn’t change the fact that they have a significant number of individuals who continue to support the ideals, the ethos, the conspiracies that made the Oath Keepers who they were.”

Prosecutors alleged that members of the Oath Keepers organized, equipped and trained ahead of Jan. 6, and coordinated their actions during the attack on the U.S. Capitol using hand signs, cell phones, and encrypted apps. Some members were caught on camera forcibly entering through the rotunda doors wearing tactical vests, radios and helmets.

Read More: Inside One Combat Vet’s Journey From Defending His Country to Storming the Capitol.

The jury found that Rhodes, a 57-year-old former Army paratrooper and Yale Law School graduate who founded the Oath Keepers in 2009, played a central role in the violent plot to block the transfer of power and keep Donald Trump in office. Rhodes encouraged members of the self-styled militia to consider themselves as “the last line of defense against tyranny,” and adopted slogans that cast the group’s mission as defending the nation against perceived enemies. Last fall, a leaked roster of 38,000 members revealed dozens of elected officials in its ranks, along with large numbers of police officers, sheriffs, and current and former military.

The testimonies of some of the Oath Keeper members on trial alongside show how effective these tactics could be. Jessica Watkins, a defendant who was found guilty of obstruction and other Jan. 6-related charges but not seditious conspiracy, is a transgender U.S. Army veteran who struggled after she was “forced out of the military after her sexual orientation was discovered,” according to court documents. She worked as a firefighter, an EMT and a bartender before co-founding the small Ohio State Regular Militia. The group soon became a “dues-paying subset” of the Oath Keepers, according to the FBI.

Watkins became obsessed with right-wing conspiracies, testifying that she watched Alex Jones’ InfoWars show “five or six hours every day,” feeding her fears of a United Nations invasion, forced vaccinations and the bombing of U.S. military bases by China. After hearing about the Oath Keepers on the program, she saw her involvement with the group as a way to “still serve in another way” after losing her military career, she said. Many members of the group are drawn by what they see as an existential struggle against a government “co opted by a cabal of elites actively trying to strip American citizens of their rights,” in the words of the indictment against one of the Oath Keepers involved on Jan. 6.

Read More: For the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, Jan. 6 Was Just the Start.

But even before the insurrection, the group had “lost a bit of steam” as younger, more Internet-savvy far-right organizations like the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo movement entered the broader right-wing ecosystem, says Lewis of GW’s Program on Extremism. Rhodes saw the attack on the Capitol as an opportunity to push the Oath Keepers into the spotlight, amplifying fears of impending conflict with the U.S. government. After Jan. 6, however, Rhodes’ reputation among Oath Keepers took a hit as he stayed in Texas while fellow members were being arrested and accusations of informants roiled the group. Some local militia groups split away from the Oath Keepers, becoming disillusioned with the lack of responsiveness from the national organization, but have continued to actively organize and hold recruitment sessions.

While analysts expect the Oath Keepers to wither in the absence of its leader, “these groups aren’t going away,” says Roudabeh Kishi, the director of research and innovation at the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), a nonprofit that tracks political violence and extremist groups. “If anything they have adapted to the post-January 6 landscape and they’re continuing to adapt and evolve.”

Far-right groups are increasingly mobilizing around anti-LGBTQ or white nationalist narratives, bringing in new groups of people, Kishi adds. “Some of these bigger names that people have become increasingly familiar with, like the Oath Keepers, are just scratching the surface of these groups,” she says. “The far right isn’t a monolith led by Stewart Rhodes. It’s very, very splintered.”

Read More: ‘A Perfect Storm.’ The Michigan Plot Lays Bare the Dangers of Ignoring the Far-Right Threat

Even with Rhodes and other leaders likely in prison and the Oath Keepers’ national organization diminished, the leaders of far-right groups are increasingly reliant not on local chapters or dues-paying member but rather the online forums and encrypted messaging apps where they recruit and organize. “The threat is the network,” says Lewis. “And those have not gone away since Jan. 6. If anything, they have become more prominent, more mainstreamed.”

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis isn’t exactly the avatar for LGBT rights in Washington. The conservative Republican drew boos this spring during a commencement address back home in Wyoming for criticizing those who support transgender identity. She tried in 2016 to give parents vouchers so their children could leave schools to dodge an Obama-era policy that allowed transgender students to use whatever bathroom matched their gender identity. She co-sponsored the State Marriage Defense Act of 2015, which would have allowed states to ignore the federal recognition of same-sex couples to wed. She voted in 2010 against the repeal of the Bill Clinton-era Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military. These examples, it must be noted, are not exhaustive.
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In other words, Lummis was well within the current Republican Party’s position on LGBT rights—and, until Tuesday, well outside of the public’s view for the last decade of such policy.

That perceived hostility faded ever so slightly on Tuesday, when an animated Lummis took to the Senate floor to explain why she had voted against a procedural delay on Nov. 16 for a measure that would protect some rights for LGBT and interracial couples to wed, and why she would shortly vote for a repeal of the Clinton-era Defense of Marriage Act. It was quite a jarring break for a figure who had scored a consistent zero on her LGBT record in the House and an only slightly better grade for her time in the Senate, according to the Human Rights Campaign. (Her lone credit in the eyes of the largest LGBT rights group? A vote for Pete Buttigieg’s confirmation as Transportation Secretary.)

“My days since the first cloture vote on the Respect for Marriage Act as amended have involved a painful exercise in accepting admonishment and fairly brutal self-soul searching,” Lummis said. “Entirely avoidable, I might add, had I simply chosen to vote ‘no.’”

The bill’s advancement, perhaps one of the last moves in a Washington under unified Democratic control, is in response to worries that the Supreme Court could follow the logic it applied in this year’s Dobbs decision that ended the federal abortion rights extended through Roe v. Wade. If the court could strike down a half-century of accepted abortion precedent, nothing presumably could block it from doing the same with 2015’s Obergefell ruling affirming the right of gay couples to wed, or even 1967’s Loving case that protected interracial marriage.

In a way, Lummis may have offered her friends a way out of the problematic politics thrust on the GOP with Dobbs. Lummis is a longtime fixture of Wyoming’s Republican Party, dating to her first election to the statehouse in 1978. When Bob Dole and Mitt Romney needed a gut-check about their presidential bids in deep-red Wyoming, they called Lummis, who has shepherded governors to power since the 1990s. But she isn’t one known to regularly find herself at odds with her party. When fellow Wyoming lawmaker Rep. Liz Cheney ran afoul of much of the GOP for condemning then-President Donald Trump’s conduct ahead of the Jan. 6 riot and during its chaos, Lummis established a smart distance from Cheney in the months that followed. Lummis shrewdly declined to rush to Cheney’s defense, hoping in the immediate wake of the madness that no one would pay too much attention to her intra-party dynamics. Lummis voted against certifying the results that showed Trump lost Pennsylvania and adopted Trump’s rhetoric that “I feel like other forces like Antifa were advocating violence.”

So it’s impossible to see Lummis as anything approaching a squish when it comes to conservative orthodoxy. So intense is her adherence to the GOP posture, she delivered that commencement address which included disparaging remarks about transgender students on a campus that had recently confronted the suicide of a trans classmate. Even more jarring to LGBT groups, she made the comments on the University of Wyoming campus Laramie, Wyo., where Matthew Shepard studied before two men beat, tortured, and killed the 21-year-old gay student in 1998. (Lummis voted against hate-crime legislation named in Shepard’s memory that finally made its way into law in 2009 as an amendment to the defense budget.)

Still, if the audience on Tuesday could set aside Lummis’ history of voting against LGBT rights, the speech on its own carried poignancy. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat and the first openly bisexual woman elected to the Senate, greeted Lummis with a hearty hug after the vote.

And for those who were able to mute what they knew about Lummis’ record, she offered a glimmer of hope for activists. Here was a figure who had been a consistent skeptic of LGBT rights and didn’t much care that the few voices in her state advocating for equality were raised against her. Wyoming sent her to the Senate in 2000 with 73% of the vote; she ran ahead of Trump by three whole points.

Still, there she was on the Senate floor, every bit a uniter on this issue that has seen a seismic shift in public opinion in recent years. Pew Research Center polling finds 61% of Americans see same-sex marriage today as a net positive, a total reversal from back in 2004 when Republicans used the wedge issue to turn out Evangelical voters. Lummis’ comments reflected this reality, even if three-quarter of her Republican colleagues ultimately voted against it.

“These are turbulent times for our nation,” Lummis said. “Americans address each other in more crude and cruel terms than ever in my lifetime. It is jarring and unbecoming of us as human beings. It is highly intolerant and frequently the most so when expressed by those who advocate for tolerance. Many of us ask ourselves, ‘Our nation is so divided. When will this end? And how will it end?’”

Her comments also reflect an inconvenient fact, covered in this newsletter recently: as written, the Respect for Marriage Act on its own lacks several crucial teeth. For one, it doesn’t codify the marriage rights embedded in the Obergefell ruling. It only requires states to recognize same-sex marriages from other states. If the Supreme Court strikes down the federal right, this bill does nothing to prevent states from no longer issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, who would have to find a better jurisdiction to get hitched. The bill heading back to the House for a final vote still permits organizations to deny recognition to same-sex and interracial couples if it violates their religious beliefs. And the provision banning polyamorous marriages—with more than two people, for the unfamiliar—is as much a dog-whistle as it is extraneous. The final bill is not so much an endorsement of inclusive marriages but rather, in the words of the LGBT twitterati’s newest pal: tolerance.

That’s right. Lummis repeatedly framed her position as one of tolerating LGBT individuals’ rights, not necessarily a desire to protect them. It’s a minor distinction, but one that rang loudly in the ears of those of us who watch LGBT politics with any consistency. It’s one thing to wrap your arms around gay neighbors, and it’s quite another not to throw a brick through their window.

“For the sake of our nation today and its survival, we do well by taking this step, not embracing or validating each other’s devoutly held views, but by the simple act of tolerating them,” Lummis said in a statement whose intentions may not have meant to fly like a brick, but still did damage.

Still, Lummis got there, along with 11 other Republicans in the Senate. An earlier version of the bill cleared the House with the support of 47 Republicans. The Senate-amended version—with changes meant to make it more palatable for conservatives—is expected to get a House vote next week and President Joe Biden is expected to sign it. Lummis’ language may not be what the crew at the Human Rights Campaign would prefer, but she at least had words in affirmation for the goal, albeit one that isn’t perfect. And, in doing so, Lummis may have just shown a whole cohort of conservatives how they can slowly evolve on a subject that most of the country has already blown past.

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In a show of growing military ties, Russian and Chinese strategic bombers flew a joint patrol over the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday that ended when the warplanes landed in each other’s airfields for the first time.

During an eight-hour mission, Russian Tu-95 “Bear” bombers and Chinese H-6K bombers flew over the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea in a flight path that triggered South Korea and Japan to scramble fighter jets in response.

The Russian defense ministry later issued a statement saying that no foreign airspace was violated during the flight and the bombers acted in accordance with the provisions of international law. China’s Defense Ministry described the patrols as a “routine” annual exercise between the two nation’s militaries.

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The bomber patrol is the latest example of strengthened defense collaboration between the two countries in recent years and follows a series of large-scale joint military drills this year as the pair face increased tensions with the United States over Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s threats against Taiwan. A senior U.S. defense official told reporters Monday before the joint China-Russia bomber patrol took place that their shared military exercises are often “a means of signaling their closer alignment and sending a message to the U.S. and to other countries.”

But while Beijing and Moscow share aspirations to push the U.S. from its hegemonic role over world affairs, a formal alliance between the two nations will prove challenging to sustain.

Read More: U.S. Unveils Strategy for Nuclear Threats from China and Russia

Three weeks before Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a deepening strategic alignment with one another in the coming years. In a lengthy Feb. 4 joint statement, they declared a “new era” of partnership in which cooperation would have “no limits” on a range of issues, including trade and defense.

Yet months later, some boundaries have become apparent. Unlike other world powers, China chooses not to condemn Russia’s blood-soaked military actions in Ukraine and has blamed the U.S. and its NATO allies for provoking Moscow into launching an assault on its smaller neighbor, while denouncing efforts to punish Russia through crippling economic sanctions. But China has failed to come to Russia’s aid in the war as Moscow struggles with diminishing weapon stocks. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to funnel billions of dollars in aid to support Kyiv and has sent thousands of American troops into surrounding countries, principally in Poland, to deliver on-the-ground guidance to Ukrainian forces.

“China doesn’t provide Russia with any weapons for the Ukraine fight, despite Moscow’s pleas,” says Michael O’Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington. “We may make too much of the existing partnership and, as a result, so demonize them both that we push them together.”

In October, the Biden Administration unveiled a new defense strategy that puts the U.S. military on a Cold War-footing with both Russia and China, detailing a plan to confront two nuclear peer-adversaries for the first time in history with a multi-year build-up of modernized weaponry, enhanced foreign alliances, and a top-to bottom $1.2 trillion overhaul of the American nuclear arsenal. It characterizes China as a long-term “pacing challenge” with its growing power projection in the Pacific region, while deeming Russia to be an immediate “acute threat” amid its ongoing war with Ukraine.

Read More: Inside the $100 Billion Mission to Modernize America’s Aging Nuclear Missiles

China “still seems to see a lot of value in their partnership with Russia,” the senior defense official said. “Of course, it’s going to be an area of keen interest for us and other observers in Europe and elsewhere. We’ve seen (China) continue to support Russia diplomatically and to amplify a lot of their propaganda and disinformation. And so those are areas of particular concern.”

On Wednesday, the Pentagon released its “2022 China Military Power Report,” an annual assessment that found Beijing could have 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035, up from its current 400, if they continue to expand their stockpile at the present pace. While the American stockpile now stands around 4,000 warheads, the U.S. is limited to 1,550 deployable weapons under a bilateral treaty known as New START with Russia. The landmark treaty, which the Biden Administration extended for five years with Putin, remains in force until February 2026.

A future President may choose not to renew the agreement or negotiate a follow-on. In that case, there could be a push—particularly from Republicans—to double the U.S. nuclear arsenal to match both Russia’s and China’s stockpiles, opening the door for an unprecedented arms race. It remains to be seen how united those two nations will stay going forward, but the prospect is one that Americans are increasingly concerned about, according to Pew Research. Although China and Russia still don’t have a formal military alliance, the evolving military exercises and joint patrols serve as a key way the two nations can strengthen bilateral defense ties.

When Nancy Pelosi this month announced the end of her historic tenure as the first female Speaker of the House, she set the stage for another historic shift in American politics: for the first time in U.S. history, the top ranks of House leadership for one party won’t include any white men.

“It has been with great pride in my 35 years in the House I have seen this body grow more reflective of our great nation, our beautiful nation,” Pelosi said in her retirement speech on November 17. “We have brought more voices to the decision-making table.”
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House Democrats are set to vote on their new leaders on Wednesday. The predicted ascendancy of Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, and Pete Aguilar of California to House Democratic leader, whip, and caucus chair respectively will revamp the face of a body that has historically been controlled by old white men. And it will mark the first time ever for either party in either chamber of Congress to have no white men in any of the top leadership positions.

“The institution itself makes it difficult for non-white males to rise in leadership,” says Arturo Vargas, CEO of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. “People tend to hang out with people who are like themselves. And I think that has always been part of the barrier for Latinos, African Americans, and women to rise in leadership.”

The expected new Democratic leaders come from very different backgrounds, but all have years of leadership experience in Congress, and experts say their rise demonstrates how the women and people of color have finally had the time to build institutional power in the House. “It’s taken this long in history, a couple centuries plus, for there to be a critical mass of non-white males in the House of Representatives within a particular party, having risen in seniority, and having demonstrated that their leadership capabilities are as good or better as anybody else’s,” Vargas says.

Jeffries, who is expected to become the first Black leader of either political party, has served as caucus chair since 2019. Clark, who represents the suburbs of Boston, became assistant speaker last year. Aguilar, who is of Mexican descent, represents San Bernardino County and has already served as caucus vice chair, making him the highest-ranking Latino in Congress. They are joined by Jim Clyburn, the 82-year-old Black South Carolinian who is currently House majority whip and is expected to become assistant Democratic leader.

The historic new leadership team is gaining power at tumultuous moment for people of color in America. After the 2020 murder of George Floyd and ensuing Black Lives Matter demonstrations, Americans elected the most racially diverse Congress in history. But a backlash over discussions around structural racism has also flourished, as the way such issues are taught in schools and in books available at libraries have become political flash points.

Quentin James, the founder of the Collective PAC, which works to build Black political power, is excited about House Democratic leadership. But he’s also anticipating resistance. “I think it is indicative of what’s happening across the country,” he says. “[America] is in a moment of transition, where people who’ve been in power have to now share that power. And I think we see what that means for many of them: the rise of antisemitic behavior, the rise of white supremacy. We see, in my opinion, kids acting out, them not wanting to share their power or leadership.”

On the Republican side, white men still dominate House leadership. Conference Chair Elise Stefanik of New York is the only woman in a top spot. Jennifer Lawless, the Commonwealth Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, says that the contrast between the two leadership teams highlights a difference between the two parties’ priorities. “I don’t think the Republicans have ever had to pay a price for not fielding the same percentage of female candidates as the Democrats have, or for not electing the same percentage of people of color as the Democrats have,” she says. “I do think that, as far as the voters who have really turned out for Democratic candidates the last few cycles are concerned, this signals that their efforts paid off.”

Leadership has remained largely homogeneous in both parties in the Senate. Every Democratic leader in Senate history has been a white man. The same is nearly true for Republicans, with the exception of Charles Curtis, a member of the Kaw Nation who would become the nation’s Vice President under President Herbert Hoover after several years as Senate Majority Leader.

Since Republicans will soon control the House, it may be some time before the diverse new Democratic leadership team gets to exercise its power. Kenneth Lowande, an assistant professor of political science and public policy at the University of Michigan, has studied the impact of representation in Congress. If Democrats retake the House, Lowande expects that the new leadership team might prompt more votes on legislation that would benefit underrepresented communities and install more diverse members in positions on key committees.

Those changes could be years away, but with slow leadership turnover, Democrats’ vote on Wednesday is a crucial first step. “I’d say that really what this is,” Lowande says, “is the groundwork for something bigger.”

(WASHINGTON) — The Senate passed bipartisan legislation Tuesday to protect same-sex marriages, an extraordinary sign of shifting national politics on the issue and a measure of relief for the hundreds of thousands of same-sex couples who have married since the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision that legalized gay marriage nationwide.

The bill, which would ensure that same-sex and interracial marriages are enshrined in federal law, was approved 61-36 on Tuesday, including support from 12 Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the legislation was “a long time coming” and part of America’s “difficult but inexorable march towards greater equality.”
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Democrats are moving quickly, while the party still holds the majority in both chambers of Congress, to send the bill to the House and then—they hope—to President Joe Biden’s desk. The bill has gained steady momentum since the Supreme Court’s June decision that overturned the federal right to an abortion, a ruling that included a concurring opinion from Justice Clarence Thomas that suggested same-sex marriage could also come under threat. Bipartisan Senate negotiations got a kick-start this summer when 47 Republicans unexpectedly voted for a House bill and gave supporters new optimism.

The legislation would not force any state to allow same-sex couples to marry. But it would require states to recognize all marriages that were legal where they were performed, and protect current same-sex unions, if the court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision were to be overturned.

That’s a stunning bipartisan endorsement, and evidence of societal change, after years of bitter divisiveness on the issue.

The bill would also protect interracial marriages by requiring states to recognize legal marriages regardless of “sex, race, ethnicity or national origin.”

A new law protecting same-sex marriages would be a major victory for Democrats as they relinquish their two years of consolidated power in Washington, and a massive win for advocates who have been pushing for decades for federal legislation. It comes as the LGBTQ community has faced violent attacks, such as the shooting last weekend at a gay nightclub in Colorado that killed five people and injured at least 17.

“Our community really needs a win, we have been through a lot,” said Kelley Robinson, the incoming president of Human Rights Campaign, which advocates on LGBTQ issues. “As a queer person who is married, I feel a sense of relief right now. I know my family is safe.”

The vote was personal for many senators, too. Schumer said on Tuesday that he was wearing the tie he wore at his daughter’s wedding, “one of the happiest moments of my life.” He also recalled the “harrowing conversation” he had with his daughter and her wife in September 2020 when they heard that liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had passed away. “Could our right to marry be undone?” they asked at the time.

With conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett replacing Ginsburg, the court has now overturned Roe v. Wade and the federal right to an abortion, stoking fears about Obergefell and other rights protected by the court. But sentiment has shifted on same-sex marriage, with more than two-thirds of the public now in support.

Still, Schumer said it was notable that the Senate was even having the debate after years of Republican opposition. “A decade ago, it would have strained all of our imaginations to envision both sides talking about protecting the rights of same-sex married couples,” he said.

Passage came after the Senate rejected three Republican amendments to protect the rights of religious institutions and others to still oppose such marriages. Supporters of the legislation argued those amendments were unnecessary because the bill had already been amended to clarify that it does not affect rights of private individuals or businesses that are currently enshrined in law. The bill would also make clear that a marriage is between two people, an effort to ward off some far-right criticism that the legislation could endorse polygamy.

Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who has been lobbying his fellow GOP senators to support the legislation for months, pointed to the number of religious groups supporting the bill, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some of those groups were part of negotiations on the bipartisan amendment.

“They see this as a step forward for religious freedom,” Tillis says.

The nearly 17-million member, Utah-based faith said in a statement this month that church doctrine would continue to consider same-sex relationships to be against God’s commandments. Yet it said it would support rights for same-sex couples as long as they didn’t infringe upon religious groups’ right to believe as they choose.

Most Republicans still oppose the legislation, saying it is unnecessary and citing concerns about religious liberty. And some conservative groups stepped up opposition in recent weeks, lobbying Republican supporters to switch their votes.

“As I and others have argued for years, marriage is the exclusive, lifelong, conjugal union between one man and one woman, and any departure from that design hurts the indispensable goal of having every child raised in a stable home by the mom and dad who conceived him,” the Heritage Foundation’s Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy, wrote in a recent blog post arguing against the bill.

In an effort to win the 10 Republican votes necessary to overcome a filibuster in the 50-50 Senate, Democrats delayed consideration until after the midterm elections, hoping that would relieve political pressure on GOP senators who might be wavering.

Eventual support from 12 Republicans gave Democrats the votes they needed.

Along with Tillis, Maine Sen. Susan Collins and Ohio Sen. Rob Portman supported the bill early on and have lobbied their GOP colleagues to support it. Also voting for the legislation in two test votes ahead of passage were Republican Sens. Richard Burr of North Carolina, Todd Young of Indiana, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Mitt Romney of Utah, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Roy Blunt of Missouri, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming and Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska.

Lummis, one of the more conservative members of the Senate, spoke ahead of the final vote about her “fairly brutal self soul searching” before supporting the bill. She said that she accepts her church’s beliefs that a marriage is between a man and a woman, but noted that the country was founded on the separation of church and state.

“We do well by taking this step, not embracing or validating each other’s devoutly held views, but by the simple act of tolerating them,” Lummis said.

The growing GOP support for the issue is a sharp contrast from even a decade ago, when many Republicans vocally opposed same-sex marriages.

Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat who is the first openly gay senator and has been working on gay rights issues for almost four decades, said this month that the newfound openness from many Republicans on the subject reminds her “of the arc of the LBGTQ movement to begin with, in the early days when people weren’t out and people knew gay people by myths and stereotypes.”

Baldwin, the lead Senate negotiator on the legislation, said that as more individuals and families have become visible, hearts and minds have changed.

“And slowly laws have followed,” she said. “It is history.”

Associated Press writer Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON—Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes was convicted Tuesday of seditious conspiracy for a violent plot to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential win, handing the Justice Department a major victory in its massive prosecution of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

A Washington, D.C., jury found Rhodes guilty of sedition after three days of deliberations in the the nearly two-month-long trial that showcased the far-right extremist group’s efforts to keep Republican Donald Trump in the White House at all costs.

The rarely used, Civil War-era charge calls for up to 20 years behind bars.

Read More: For the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, Jan. 6 Was Just the Start
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Rhodes didn’t go inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, but was accused of leading a plot that began shortly after the 2020 election to wage an armed rebellion to stop the transfer of presidential power.

Through recordings and encrypted messages, jurors heard how Rhodes rallied his followers to fight to keep Trump in office, warned of a possible “bloody” civil war and expressed regret that the Oath Keepers didn’t bring rifles to the Capitol on Jan. 6.

In an extraordinary move, Rhodes and two other defendants took the stand in their defense, opening themselves up to intense questioning from prosecutors. Rhodes told jurors there was no plan to attack the Capitol and insisted that his followers who went inside the building went rogue.

On trial alongside Rhodes, of Granbury, Texas, were Kelly Meggs, leader of the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers; Kenneth Harrelson, another Florida Oath Keeper; Thomas Caldwell, a retired Navy intelligence officer from Virginia; and Jessica Watkins, who led an Ohio militia group.

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If you look at the top-line numbers in public polling, it would seem impossible to fathom anyone but Donald Trump emerging in 2024 as his Republican Party’s nominee. After all, a robust 95% of Republican voters in this month’s midterm elections held a favorable view of the ex-President, according to exit polls.

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Still, look a little deeper at the numbers—and their trendlines—and there emerges a potential vulnerability, especially after Trump’s meddling helped lead the GOP to yet another disappointing election. In the wake of this month’s midterms, 75% of Republicans told Quinnipiac pollsters that they still held a favorable view of Trump, steady with his job approval numbers as President and his favorability numbers after leaving office. But Republicans appear less certain when it comes to their choice for nominee for 2024. CNN’s tracking analysis shows GOP support for Trump as the nominee slid from 53% in the second half of 2021—his first year back out of power—to 44% support since Election Day just a few weeks ago.

Put another way: Republicans may be tiring of their Trump-Curious phase and may return to a more traditional footing that opts for, say, scions of the establishment over TV docs and Q-Anon celebs. And the former President’s recent sit-down with a white supremacist and an antisemitic, conspiracy-theory-touting rapper could lead his softening numbers to further crumble.

Trump remains the figure to defeat, for sure. His closest threat is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has slowly built a brand among Republicans and rose over the same period in CNN’s calculations as Trump’s slump. DeSantis has rocketed from 12% support for his nomination to a fulsome 32% since winning a second term. If history is any guide, DeSantis is about to draw the kind of scrutiny that often tanks political newcomers on the national stage.

Since Trump ostensibly took over the Republican Party in 2016, the GOP has lost its majority in the House, control of the Senate, and the White House. This year, Republicans missed a very real opportunity to reclaim the Senate; their House majority will be far narrower than expected and could prove impossible to wrangle into something approximating a governing coalition. Trump continues to hoover up small-dollar donations from the activist types while doing relatively little to help candidates beyond ego-inflating rallies where Trump is the star. Just maybe the party is realizing its bargain with Trumpism may not be a durable way to build victories.

Republican insiders have been reluctant to engage in any real criticism of Trump or to block his problematic candidates. The conventional wisdom is that Trump is a tractor-trailer-sized shipping container to any single challenger’s thimble of potential. Despite deep, deep misgivings about some of Trump’s Senate picks, Washington largely got out of the way and let them move from primaries to general-election ballots. The results were a five-point Republican loss in Pennsylvania and Arizona, plus a one-point squeaker of a defeat in Nevada—basically, the entire Senate map hinged on those races.

Given those results, Republicans are starting to get a bit more antsy about Trump’s future. Talking with voters at Republican events this year, DeSantis’ name repeatedly came up as a Trumpian contender without the baggage. They like Trump, for sure, but want to win, and DeSantis might be a safer bet. That comes through plain as day in Marist/ PBS polling: back in October of 2021, 50% of Republicans said Trump represented the best chance of winning in 2024; a post-Election Day poll from Marist/ PBS has Trump’s support with that same audience dropping to 35%.

Those numbers line up with Trump’s general approval rating. Exit polls conducted two years ago found Trump enjoying a 46% approval rating among all voters. He still lost. That number stood at 39% a few weeks ago. It’s tough to make a comeback from such low ratings. (President Joe Biden knows this, too; his exit poll numbers earlier this month left him at a 41% favorability crouch, down 11 points from his 52% showing in 2020.)

We are more than a year away from any voters having to make real their verdicts on Trump. His would-be rivals are plotting and strategizing their roll-out plans, all while grumbling that they simply have no real way of knowing how Trump would counterpunch. Biden seems to have stemmed his own intra-party crisis based on his better-than-expected midterm showing (although Marist found 54% of Democrats would still prefer a different nominee for 2024).

For his part, Trump may finally be conceding his infallibility exists only at his private clubs. His advisers and party insiders successfully lobbied Trump to mostly steer clear of the Dec. 6 runoff in Georgia’s Senate race. Trump isn’t exactly seen as an asset for Georgia Republicans, who watched him turn the state blue for the first time since 1992 and is still the target of a criminal probe there into his 2020 pressure campaign to overturn the election results. If Trump is proving toxic in a place as reliably red as Georgia, it’s not surprising Republicans are starting to look to inoculate themselves from his drag. Trump may be following the advice of wise counsels for now, but it’s seldom been good money to bet on that lasting—especially if Trump believes his own salesmanship can redeem the brand before anyone notices the snags.

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The 2022 midterm elections delivered something unexpected: very little changed. On a night when the Democratic Party seemed fated for a shellacking, they held their Senate majority and lost far fewer House seats than many expected. Their experience was the opposite of 2020, when Democrats anticipated a more convincing victory and were ultimately disappointed, even with Joe Biden prevailing over Donald Trump.

Despite the different outcomes, both the 2020 and 2022 elections had common features—features that say a lot about contemporary American politics and why it is hard for either party to get the landslide or wave that it wants.
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Part of the reason is what we call the “calcification” of electoral politics in the U.S. Just as it does in the body, calcification creates rigidity: most voters stick with the party they tend to support because the two parties increasingly differ not only on public policy but on basic values. They offer contrasting visions of what America should be, and who can be American.

At the same time, the parties are increasingly close to parity in the national electorate as well as key districts and states. This means that even the small changes that occur in a calcified politics can shift control of government. With victory almost always within reach, the parties have less incentive to reinvent themselves, even after losing an election. This only produces more calcification, because voters have no reason to reconsider their partisan loyalties if the parties are not changing.

Calcification was evident in the remarkable similarity between the 2016 and 2020 election results. Although Biden did just enough better than Hillary Clinton to win, relatively few 2016 voters switched sides four years later. At the state and county levels, the 2020 results were only slightly different than in 2016, even with the sharp rise in turnout. Despite dramatic events in the election year—such as a pandemic and punishing recession—the two parties remained close to parity.

A question in 2022 was whether calcification would be as powerful. In midterm elections, at least some voters who supported the president’s party in the previous election may sit out the election altogether. A consequential fraction of voters may even shift their votes, usually to signal their dissatisfaction with the president. Both are reasons why unpopular presidents’ parties typically struggle only two years after the president’s victory.

Read More: How Democrats Defied History in 2022

A “red wave” seemed possible heading into election day. Based on Biden’s approval rating and the state of the economy, Democrats were forecast to lose 40 seats or more. Indeed, Biden’s 44% approval rating in the national exit polls was actually a point lower than both Obama’s and Trump’s ratings when their parties lost over 60 and 40 House seats, respectively, in the 2010 and 2018 midterms.

But in 2022, Democratic candidates excelled at winning over voters who were lukewarm about Biden or even disappointed with his performance. One way to see this is to examine voters who “somewhat disapprove” or “somewhat approve” of the president.

According to the national exit polls, 67% of people who somewhat disapproved of Obama in 2010 reported voting for the Republican candidate for the U.S. House. In 2018, 63% of people who somewhat disapproved of Trump reported voting for the Democratic House candidate. But in 2022, as The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein has noted, this fraction dropped to 45%. More voters who somewhat disapproved of Biden stuck with the Democrats anyway.

A similar difference was visible among people who somewhat approved of the president. In 2010 and 2018, most of these voters voted for the president’s party for Congress, but about 20-25% still defected to the other party. In 2022, almost none of the president’s lukewarm supporters defected: 91% of those who somewhat approved of Biden voted for the Democratic House candidate in the midterm.

Why did such a large share of voters who weren’t thrilled with Biden’s performance still support Democratic candidates? It was because longer-term partisan polarization combined with election-year dynamics made the election especially consequential to voters who otherwise could have been tempted to switch sides.

One of those election-year dynamics was the Supreme Court majority’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade. Even before this decision, Democrats prioritized opposition to abortion bans over dozens of other political issues. After the decision, the salience of the issue skyrocketed among Democratic voters.

This may have helped Democrats turn out to vote and vote Democratic. The political scientist Dan Cassino conducted a survey experiment that randomized the order in which respondents were asked their view of abortion and whether they were likely to vote in the midterm. He found that merely asking abortion first increased the likelihood that pro-choice respondents said they would vote. Although Democratic turnout likely lagged Republican turnout, the abortion issue may have kept that difference from being even larger.

Another factor that raised the stakes for Democrats was the presence of Trump-backed 2020 election deniers up and down the ballot. A variety of analyses showed that candidates closely aligned with Trump—himself a chronically unpopular and underperforming candidate—may have lost 5 points on average. In an era of partisan parity, even a few percentage points of vote share can be the difference between winning and losing a seat—and perhaps between a congressional majority or minority. This is a defining characteristic of our politics today: big events may have small political effects, but even small effects can have big consequences.

Thus, there is little reason for Democrats to assume that the 2022 elections portend success in 2024. They will have more Senate seats to defend. Inflation, although falling, is still high. Biden remains unpopular.

More fundamentally, calcification and partisan parity portend competitive and narrowly divided elections—not easy victories. Even though it feels good to win, neither party can have much confidence that their hold on power will last that long.

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Former Presidents don’t typically end up breaking bread with national pariahs. And certainly not by accident. Staff and security protocols regularly protect them from such encounters—both as a practical matter and as a political one. Even lowly mayors who make the trek to D.C. to meet with donors, wonks, and reporters vet every chair at every table to head off a potentially scandalous coffee meeting.

So how then did Donald Trump end up sitting down last Tuesday for a dinner of turkey, stuffing, and apple pie with the rapper formerly known as Kanye West and Nick Fuentes? How did a former President and newly declared candidate for a comeback come to share any space with an entertainment icon whose recent antisemitic comments prompted companies left and right to drop their lucrative endorsement deals with him, and a far-right activist who denies the veracity of the Holocaust and whom the Justice Department has called a white supremacist?
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Was this, as Trump insists, an accidental meeting of lightning rods for chaos, one a corporate pariah and the other a radical rallying point for the aggrieved whites? A masterclass in trolling? Something in the middle? A hint at just how unhinged the 2024 campaign, now underway in earnest, is going to become?

The answer to any one of those questions should leave most Americans a little queasy, regardless of their politics. Even Trump’s most ardent MAGA-ists should see the meeting as, at best, an unforced error that is a distraction from his early entry into the race. And even Trump’s harshest critics don’t have to stretch far to cast it as a dog whistle to the worst corners of the current political landscape, one that—in Fuentes’ telling—would prefer to see Trump a little less scripted and presidential and much more engaged in the culture war afoot. It truly is a choose-your-own-adventure approach to political observation, and one that doesn’t exactly bode well for the republic if these are the options.

And here is the most confusing part of this whole affair: did Trump really not know who Fuentes was? The ex-President isn’t exactly someone who burdened himself with details. In the White House, he kind of ricocheted between meetings, lurching forward with a policy announcement well before anyone had checked out its legality and then sprinting toward a different initiative before any aides’ tested its assumptions. Trump governed by gut and allowed his supplicants to ply him with flattery and feigned fealty. So it’s not entirely outside the realm of the possible that Trump found himself supping with Fuentes without knowing the celebrity activist’s identity.

It isn’t beyond the imagination to think Trump thought the 24-year-old Fuentes was a Ye adviser, or part of his posse, or even a new member of the Trump cohort. Whereas traditional pols like Bill Clinton and Mitt Romney make a point of knowing the faces and backgrounds of the people at their tables, Trump lumps most of his contacts into two piles: useful suckers and hired help. He has proven himself capable of treating both categories with rampant disrespect and disloyalty. So Fuentes could have been a sycophant of the moment or a hired gun who happened to have some knowledge of polling.

Trump maintained he was caught unawares by the visit: “This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about,” Trump said Friday. Trump said the dinner was “quick and uneventful” before the Ye entourage returned to the airport. Still, and it cannot be dismissed entirely out of hand, Trump knew his former aide Karen Giorno, who joined the meal, and didn’t do a quick pull-aside to ask her who their interloper was. In politics, sloppiness and indifference don’t have much daylight between them.

Still—and here’s where it tests the elasticity of imagination—Trump’s insistence that he had no idea who Fuentes was matters only if you believe that, had he known, he would have refused to take the meeting. And that seems up for debate. Trump hasn’t exactly been shy when it comes to leaning into some dark impulses, including antisemitism. What Fuentes represents is part of the alchemy of Trump’s modern Republican Party. The Trump team’s awkward and tortured stiff-arm of Fuentes suggests something was happening behind the scenes that complicated the initial spate of Trump-didn’t-dine-with-Fuentes hints before eventually accepting that it happened and suggesting an ambush of some sort. It is as if the Trump cadre of current advisers recognized the Fuentes forum was a step too far even for Trump; they had to build some sort of firewall between an unapologetic extremist and the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2024.

In the grand field of the next presidential campaign, l’affair Fuentes might not even be a blimp. But one of the most useful pieces of advice ever offered to me is this: only the paranoid survive. Ye on his own is a problematic figure, and Trump’s response even in the absence of Fuentes suggests he later came to understand the mistake. (His statement on the meeting via his social-media start-up is one of the history books: “So I help a seriously troubled man, who just happens to be black, Ye (Kanye West), who has been decimated in his business and virtually everything else, and who has always been good to me, by allowing his request for a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, alone, so that I can give him very much needed ‘advice.’”)

The 2024 primaries are still a long way off, and early voting some 20-plus months away. There will be weekly skirmishes like the Trump-Ye-Fuentes dinner to flare up and test the MAGA machine—and to give its gear-grinders a chance to trip it up. Still, the fact a former—and perhaps future—President could accidentally stumble into a meeting with a rapper who is now arguably the country’s most famous antisemite and a man deemed a white supremacist by the Justice Department shouldn’t be overlooked as a pointless feud. Sure, maybe this was actually an accident, perhaps it was a slip in the protocol operation. Or maybe it was a former President making clear how he views his party’s future. And maybe it also aligns perfectly with Trump’s disregard for norms and embrace of chaos; consequences are for other people. After all, it was at this same Mar-a-Lago that Trump shared classified information with his Japanese guests at an al fresco dinner, and drew a raft of professional and amateur spies, and kept classified documents in his basement and closets to the point of drawing a Justice Department probe. Tuesday’s dinner was merely another chapter of that Florida property’s legacy.

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A week after he officially launched his third bid for President, Donald Trump has surrounded himself with a tight group of seasoned campaigners and political operatives. Members of his inner circle say the former President’s 2024 team has an expertise and professionalism befitting Trump’s frontrunner status for the GOP nomination.

And they fear it’s only a matter of time before all that ends.

“The list right now is impressive, it’s serious,” says a former Trump White House official. “A key question mark for people is: Can Trump resist the impulse to reach out to sh-theads and trust the people he’s with that are solid?”
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History suggests those in pivotal posts in Trump’s 2024 campaign will change multiple times. Both of his previous campaigns, as well as his four years in the Oval Office, were marked by constant turnover of key lieutenants, with Trump often reverting to right-wing bomb throwers like Steve Bannon, who served as his 2016 campaign’s CEO and White House chief strategist, his trade advisor Peter Navarro, and Mark Meadows, who became his fourth White House chief of staff in 2020.

Some around Trump hope the current team can manage to convince him that the surest path to victory is to keep focused on proven winning messages, like the economy and criticizing Biden’s record, rather than fringe conspiracies that motivate a narrower group of Trump’s base. In the weeks between Trump losing the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, then-Attorney General Bill Barr, White House lawyers, and Trump’s campaign leadership all told him he’d lost, but he didn’t want to hear it. It was in those weeks that Trump turned to outside personalities like Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, a lawyer who was the architect of false legal theories that states controlled by Republicans could send slates of fake electors to Washington to overturn Biden’s win.

Trump has centered his campaign planning around his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., largely ditching the Washington-centric advisors who populated his failed 2020 reelection bid. He’s brought in a new mix of long-time Republican political operatives who are trying to position him for the long haul. Other candidates for the Republican nomination aren’t expected to announce until the middle of next year. The first primaries are likely more than a year away, in February 2024. In the meantime, Trump is focusing most of his verbal attacks on President Joe Biden, who has said he would make a final decision early next year about whether he would run for reelection.

“For millions of Americans, the past two years under Joe Biden have been a time of pain, hardship, anxiety and despair,” Trump said in the gilded ballroom of his Mar-a-Lago Club on Nov. 15 when he formally announced his 2024 campaign. “The decline of America is being forced upon us by Biden and the radical left lunatics running our government right into the ground. This decline is not a fate we must accept. When given choice, boldly, clearly and directly, the American people will overwhelmingly reject the left platform of national ruin,” he said.

Who’s on the team?

Trump is leaning heavily on Susie Wiles, the powerful Republican operative in Florida who helped run Ron DeSantis’s winning 2018 campaign for governor, was key to Trump taking Florida from Biden’s win column in 2020, and most recently has been the CEO of Trump’s Save America Leadership PAC.

Read more: How DeSantis Turned Florida Red

Wiles has a track record of helping Trump grow a massive base of support in Florida, and she “knows how to run campaigns,” says Trump’s former White House spokesman Hogan Gidley, who talks to Trump regularly. “She knows the ins and outs of grassroots-ground-game politics, and, as well as being the sweet woman that she is, she’s also tough as nails—that is a very good combination to have when helping someone run for President of the United States.”

Trump has also turned to Chris LaCivita, a long-time Republican strategist based in Virginia who was an organizer of Swift Vets and POWs for Truth, which famously worked to turn public sentiment against the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry by questioning his military service. During the 2020 campaign, LaCivita led Preserve America PAC, a large pro-Trump fundraising arm linked to casino magnate Sheldon Adelson who passed away in 2021.

People familiar with Trump’s campaign say he is continuing to get advice from a cadre of allies he has worked with for years, including his former White House political affairs director Brian Jack; Tony Fabrizio, his long-time pollster; Steven Cheung, his former White House assistant communications director and a former communications executive for Ultimate Fighting Championship; Liz Harrington, a former Republican National Committee spokeswoman; Republican fundraising guru Sergio Gor; and conservative digital ad strategist Gary Colby.

Another person who has been spending time at Mar-a-Lago recently is Boris Epshteyn, a brash communications consultant who has fanned Trump’s lies about the 2020 election being stolen. Notably, Rudy Giuliani was not in attendance at Trump’s announcement.

“Trump supporters or people wanting to give him another look should be encouraged by this list of people, and people who want to dismiss him or people who think it’s going to be a cakewalk should be worried,” says Joe Grogan, who was the director of Trump’s domestic policy council in 2019 and 2020.

What comes next?

Trump’s political rivals were jostling for position at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual leadership meeting in Las Vegas over the weekend. “Personality, celebrity just aren’t going to get it done,” Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has ambitions to run for president, said Friday night, according to the Associated Press. Also in attendance were DeSantis, Trump’s former vice president Mike Pence, and Nikki Haley, the former U.N. Ambassador and former South Carolina governor. Trump agreed to appear by video conference on Saturday.

In the meantime, investigations into Trump continue to move forward. On Friday, Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland named a special counsel to take over dual Department of Justice investigations into Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after leaving office and Trump’s role in attempts to overturn the 2020 election. In Manhattan, prosecutors wrapped up their presentation of evidence on Monday in a tax fraud case against Trump’s business empire. And the Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to let House Democrats review copies of Trump’s tax returns, after Trump spent years trying to block that access. Also on Tuesday, a Trump ally, Senator Lindsey Graham, testified before a Georgia grand jury looking into efforts by Trump to pressure state election officials to push the 2020 results in his favor.

Read more: The Major Ongoing Investigations Into Donald Trump

After all the build-up to his Nov. 15 campaign announcement, Trump appears to be allowing that momentum to fizzle. Aside from his video speech to the conference in Las Vegas, he has not announced any other appearances or rallies planned for the rest of the year. His political website, which a few weeks ago listed his schedule of rallies around the country to rally his base before the midterms, has yet to be revamped for 2024. The site now generates a pop-up window asking for emails and phone numbers to pad the mailing lists of his nascent campaign and the Trump Save America Joint Fundraising Committee. Now that Trump has formally announced, donations to the joint fundraising committee for the 2024 race are subject to contribution caps of $10,800 per individual.

The Trump campaign will start off “lean and mean” and then will develop into something “bigger, faster, stronger,” Gidley said. He and other advisers suggest Trump’s message to Republican primary voters will sharpen in the new year.

But whether that message will be the one his current team is pressing remains to be seen.

“If he’s just bitching about the past all the time, I think it won’t be compelling and frankly, he won’t win the nomination,” Grogan says. “I think he should be taken seriously and soberly. Let’s hear what he has to say. If he runs a grievance campaign, then fine, dismiss him.”

While Thanksgiving is usually traced back to a 1621 meal between pilgrims and Native Americans, its origins as a national holiday are much more recent.

On Oct. 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation declaring the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving. He saw the occasion as a peaceful interlude amid the Civil War.

The proclamation marked the culmination of a 36-year crusade to make Thanksgiving a national holiday led by Sarah Josepha Hale. As TIME previously reported, she envisioned a day filled with roast turkey, pumpkin pie, and sweet potatoes and launched a letter-writing campaign to members of Congress and governors. In a Sept. 28, 1863 letter to Lincoln, she pointed out that he could continue the tradition set by George Washington, who declared the first national Thanksgiving in 1789 on the last Thursday of November.
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It would be another 60 years until a President, Franklin Roosevelt, designated the fourth Thursday of November, specifically, as a federal holiday.

You can read the full text of Lincoln’s proclamation below:

The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and even soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and provoke their aggressions, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict; while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people. I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that, while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation, and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.

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If you just read the headlines last week, you’d think Rep. Kevin McCarthy has finally reached his long-chased goal of wielding the Speaker’s gavel, that the top Republican in the House would finally get the top gig and fall right behind the Vice President in the line of presidential succession. But there’s a slight hiccup here, one based on something as simple as math: the gig goes to the person with a majority of the votes, and McCarthy simply might not get them.
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You see, McCarthy is chasing 218 votes to claim the simple majority of voting House seats, assuming there are no vacancies, absences, or present votes when the next Speaker is chosen. But with Republicans winning a majority by just a handful of seats in the midterms, that gives him almost no wiggle room. In the internal Republican vote, McCarthy received just 188 votes, with 31 defecting to a protest candidacy of Rep. Andy Biggs, and another five writing in other names. McCarthy has said he won’t rely on Democratic votes to win the speakership, meaning he needs to win over the NeverKevins in his nominal alliance—and a number of them have pledged never to be swayed.

Put another way: McCarthy at the moment doesn’t yet have the votes and has roughly six weeks to land them, either through brute bullying, sweet talking, or pragmatic horse trading. Otherwise, balloting could continue with other candidates stepping in from the far-right, from the establishment wing, or what passes for the middle in the GOP these days.

Or—and this is the less-than-ideal scenario that almost no one in Washington really wants to see enacted—former President Donald Trump could raise his head from Mar-a-Lago and anoint someone as his pick, and then return to his latest White House bid with an ally marshaling the opposition from a place of power in D.C. Trump has proven an unreliable ally, and there is always tension between the ex-President’s political hands and his own desire to make headlines.

Typically, the selection of a House Speaker is something that is preordained, lacking messy drama. Only once since 1913 has a Speaker election taken multiple ballots. That one took nine rounds of balloting in 1923 to give Frederick Huntington Gillett of Massachusetts a third term as Speaker. But the party has seldom found so much disunity without an obvious salve to ease the sting.

McCarthy has taken great pains to stay in Trump’s good graces. Other than a brief detour toward criticism following the failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, McCarthy has worked overtime to position himself as a loyalist to Trump, and for good reason. As TIME’s Molly Ball reported way back in June from a bus tour of Georgia with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a handful of Trumpist firebrands could emerge with a strong upper hand over McCarthy, extracting concessions from him in exchange for loyalty. So far, it’s worked, with Greene as a Trump favorite settling into a role as one of McCarthy’s strongest allies—for now.

Still, McCarthy is already using the House’s internal rules to cede what he’s calculated as minor ground and to mitigate potential risks to his power. In the kitchen cabinet of his leadership team, McCarthy increased the number of region-specific representatives from 13 to 19, effectively diluting the Republican establishment’s hold on who gets committee assignments. The Republicans also agreed that sitting House members—with the exception of leadership—cannot serve on the top panel of House Republicans’ official campaign arm, a concession to lawmakers who have been openly critical of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s de facto position of running an incumbent-retention program above all other priorities. And McCarthy has also supported a decision by his caucus, weary of Covid-19 protocols, to adopt rules that would reopen the House to tours and push back on guidance about wearing masks.

Yet McCarthy also brushed aside a proposal that would allow spending bills to go forward without a majority backing from the GOP, meaning the Speaker can still partner with Democrats on some measures that may find opposition from the right flank of the GOP. The incoming majority, however, adopted a proposal that would block any effort to replace the sitting Speaker—presumably, McCarthy—without a majority backing from the GOP, meaning lone-wolf lawmakers couldn’t force the top official from the job on threats or innuendo. That latter proposal got shown into place by Rep. Mike Turner, McCarthy’s anointed top Republican on the Intel Committee.

And that’s not to say the rule-making wrangling is done. Lawmakers shelved about half of the 25 discussed proposals to the new House session, including a ban on earmarks that is at the top of the Freedom Caucus’ agenda. It may well survive, but lawmakers decided to revisit it after the Thanksgiving holiday. By then, McCarthy should have a better sense of what he can trade away in exchange for votes—and which members are holding out for their pet project only to double-cross him when it comes time to vote on Jan. 3.

That’s right: McCarthy is atop the GOP pile at the moment, but absent 218 supporters from his own backyard, he can’t get the gavels just yet. He could reverse course and claim the gig with Democratic votes, but it would cast him as weak right from the start and there’s not a whole lot of incentive—beyond schadenfreude for his eventual and expected ouster—for Democrats to go along. Republicans could also retreat ever so slightly, with the understanding that McCarthy is on a tight leash. But at least five Republicans have now openly opposed McCarthy, meaning he’s in about as tight a spot as he could find himself.

All of which is to say this: McCarthy has been here before, with the speakership in reach; this time, he’s got an even narrower path to victory than in 2015, when the job fell out of his grasp. Yet he’s certainly started this campaign far wiser and exceedingly ready to use the threat of his looming power to try to herd his team into at least something approximating unity. Ultimately, though, he needs to be able to move 218 abacus beads from the middle of their rows into the McCarthy camp—and he doesn’t have a ton of time or many chits left to trade away.

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WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for the imminent handover of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns to a congressional committee after a three-year legal fight.

The court, without comment, rejected Trump’s plea for an order that would have prevented the Treasury Department from giving six years of tax returns for Trump and some of his businesses to the Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee.

It was Trump’s second loss at the Supreme Court in as many months. In October, the court refused to step into the legal fight surrounding the FBI search of Trump’s Florida estate that turned up classified documents.
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In the dispute over his tax returns, the Treasury Department had refused to provide the records during Trump’s presidency. But the Biden administration said federal law is clear that the committee has the right to examine any taxpayer’s return, including the president’s.

Read More: What Donald Trump’s Twitter Reinstatement Means for TRUTH Social

Lower courts agreed that the committee has broad authority to obtain tax returns and rejected Trump’s claims that it was overstepping and only wanted the documents so they could be made public.

Chief Justice John Roberts imposed a temporary freeze on Nov. 1 to allow the court to weigh the legal issues raised by Trump’s lawyers and the counter arguments of the administration and the House of Representatives.

Just over three weeks later, the court lifted Roberts’ order with no noted dissents.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The House contended an order preventing the IRS from providing the tax returns would leave lawmakers “little or no time to complete their legislative work during this Congress, which is quickly approaching its end.”

Had Trump persuaded the nation’s highest court to intervene, he could have run out the clock on the committee, with Republicans ready to take control of the House in January. They almost certainly would have dropped the records request if the issue had not been resolved by then.

The House Ways and Means panel and its chairman, Democrat Richard Neal of Massachusetts, first requested Trump’s tax returns in 2019 as part of an investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s audit program and tax law compliance by the former president. A federal law says the Internal Revenue Service “shall furnish” the returns of any taxpayer to a handful of top lawmakers.

Read More: Trump’s 2024 Announcement Makes Clear He Has No Idea Why He Lost

The Justice Department under the Trump administration had defended a decision by then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to withhold the tax returns from Congress. Mnuchin argued that he could withhold the documents because he concluded they were being sought by Democrats for partisan reasons. A lawsuit ensued.

After President Joe Biden took office, the committee renewed the request, seeking Trump’s tax returns and additional information from 2015-2020. The White House took the position that the request was a valid one and that the Treasury Department had no choice but to comply. Trump then attempted to halt the handover in court.

Then-Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. obtained copies of Trump’s personal and business tax records as part of a criminal investigation. That case, too, went to the Supreme Court, which rejected Trump’s argument that he had broad immunity as president.

Gary Peters did not want this job. The Senator from Michigan had just won a bruising re-election battle in 2020 by less than a percentage point, in a crucial battleground state. It was why he wanted to focus exclusively on his work on Capitol Hill and take some time away from the trail. Yet that was also why his colleagues wanted him to chair the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee in a year when Democrats were expected to take a beating.

After some cajoling from the Democratic leadership, Peters, 63, accepted the offer last year to run the Democrats’ Senate campaign arm for the 2022 midterm cycle. There was too much at stake, the soft-spoken legislator tells TIME. “This election was so important.”
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Historically, the party in power usually takes a shellacking during a President’s first midterms. Bill Clinton lost 52 House seats and 8 Senate seats in 1994. Barack Obama lost 63 House seats and 6 Senate seats in 2010. Many pundits expected the Democrats to suffer a similar defeat in 2022. Instead, Democrats are maintaining their Senate majority—even flipping a seat in Pennsylvania with John Fetterman’s victory over Mehmet Oz—and losing the House by only a narrow margin.

To break down what went right for the Democrats, TIME recently caught up with Peters, who’s known in Washington as more of a work-horse than a show-horse, about how the Democrats prevailed this year, what their game-plan is for winning Georgia’s Dec. 6 run-off, and what enduring lessons he thinks this election holds for his party going into next one.

What do you attribute most to the Democrats’ success in keeping the Senate and flipping Pennsylvania?

I think the number one reason was the quality of our candidates. There was a clear contrast between Democratic incumbents and candidates running for the U.S. Senate and their Republican opponents. Democratic candidates were experienced people of character. Our incumbents had delivered for people in their state in a tangible way.

And they were running against Republicans who were very extreme on issues. They were out of touch when it came to a major issue for Americans, which was reproductive freedom. They did not believe that there should be exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother. Most of them were election deniers as well. That’s not something that the American people support. It was clear in this election that candidates matter.

What’s your game plan for winning the Georgia run-off?

The game plan for the runoff is a very robust ground game. At this point, voters in Georgia know the candidates. Raphael Warnock is a man of character, a man of experience, a man who has delivered for the people of Georgia, in tangible ways, versus a Republican candidate that even Republicans have called highly flawed. I think the choice is very clear for the people of Georgia. And now it’s our job to make sure people who support Raphael Warnock show up. We will be helping the Warnock campaign run the kind of robust ground campaign necessary to win an election dependent on voter turnout.

Read more: Warnock and Walker Close Out Georgia Race With Competing Visions of Faith

A lot of Republicans tried to out-Trump each other to win the primaries. Pundits suspected at the time that this might turn out to be an act of self-sabotage. Do you think that these candidates alienated a lot of moderates and independents in the general election by doing that?

The candidates worked very hard to get Donald Trump’s endorsement. That seemed to be the thing that they were most interested in getting in the primaries. And they worked very hard to win over Trump supporters. So we had Trump’s hand-picked candidates running in these races. That may work in a primary, but it clearly does not work in a general election.

National Democrats embarked on a risky strategy to boost far-right Republicans in the primaries who they thought would be easier to beat in the general election. It was a bit of a gamble, but it seems to have paid off. Can you tell me about that?

We didn’t do that at the DS. We did not do that. We were not involved in supporting and spending money supporting candidates in Republican primaries. I simply did not engage in that at all.

But do you think it worked out for your colleagues who did do that?

I’ll be frank with you. I don’t want to comment on that, because I’m not sure what exact races they did that for and what were the results. I just know from a Senate perspective, that was not a game that I wanted to play or the DSCC wanted to play. We were totally focused on making sure we were supporting our Democratic candidates.

My number one focus as the chair of the DSCC was to bring incumbents back. That was first and foremost on my mind. I knew that when our incumbents won re-election, that would give us 50 votes, and we would be able to retain the majority. Then we went on offense. We did not get involved in Democratic primaries either. We let the strongest candidate emerge from the Democratic primary.

So what was the DSCC’s main strategy for winning these races?

We were active during the primaries in terms of building our ground operation. And that was really the other key to a big part of our success. We had very robust ground game and ground operations. It was probably the first time in modern history at the DSCC—and this was a strategic decision that we made—that we put more money into the ground campaign than we did into our independent expenditures, which were television and other media.

It was based on the belief that these were all going to be very close races. And they’re in battleground states; by definition, those are very close races. And the best way to win those races is to have a strong ground operation. That was our strategy from the get-go. We made major investments in the field operation in those states. So then whoever won the primary would be able to have that field operation up and running and ready to go.

Did Democrats also have an advantage by encouraging their voters to cast ballots by mail—thereby increasing their own turnout—whereas Republicans put themselves at a disadvantage by discouraging their supporters from voting by mail?

Voting by mail should not favor one party versus the other because everybody has an equal opportunity to vote by mail. It’s certainly the most convenient way to vote and has broad appeal to people in general, unless they’re told not to vote by mail.

But from a ground campaign or from an organizing perspective, vote by mail is an incredibly powerful tool, because you can reach out to voters who support your candidate, encourage them to vote by mail, and then you’re able to see whether or not they return those ballots. And then, if they haven’t returned those ballots, you keep reminding them that Election Day is coming up, and ask them, “Please send in your ballot.” And if it’s getting too close to the election, “Drop it off at a dropbox provided by the clerk.” But it is a big part of a ground campaign.

What do you think are the biggest takeaways from this election that Democrats need to keep in mind going into the next one?

A major takeaway is to continue to deliver for the American people. It was important for us to show that we were making a difference in people’s lives. For example, look at the Inflation Reduction Act that was passed through Congress. We focused on a number of items, but one in particular that was incredibly important to people was to bring down the price of prescription drugs.

In that legislation, we allow Medicare to negotiate with big drug companies to bring down the price of prescription drugs. It was the right thing to do for the American people, and it also presented a clear contrast with Republicans. Not one Republican voted to bring down the price of prescription drugs for seniors. So when folks went to the polls, they could ask the question: Who was voting to help me and my family? And who was voting for big drug companies and pharmaceuticals? It was a clear contrast. We were able to deliver an important public policy initiative that helps families, and Republicans opposed it.

There were pundits leading up to the election who worried that President Biden’s emphasis on democracy protection wasn’t going to resonate with voters. But it seems like it did.

It was important. We had candidates who were extreme and out of touch with the electorate. The fact that they were election deniers, and were challenging the very foundation of our democracy was a powerful issue, particularly with our base voters. When you’re in a midterm, and you already know there’ll be a drop in turnout, it’s incredibly important to reach out to base voters and get them energized. And when folks realized that part of this election was standing up for the core foundation of democracy, that was a very motivating factor.

Abortion was a huge issue, too. And it was a powerful issue to get voters motivated to go to the polls. So you put those two together: Republicans not only want to undermine democracy, but they also want to take away a fundamental right for women to reproductive freedom. It painted a very clear contrast for voters.

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

A bullet doesn’t make a sound.

It makes the initial roar as it leaves the gun, sure. Its shock to the body is matched with a spiteful slap to the eardrum. The noise can expand if it echos, as is often the case when fired in a closed space, like a school hallway in Newtown, Conn., a basement Bible study in Charleston, S.C., or the foyer of a synagogue in Pittsburgh. The shell casing can make its own distinct sound, whether it bounces on the linoleum floor of a school classroom in Uvalde, Texas, or is muffled in the carpet 32 floors above the Las Vegas Strip. And the reverberations can last years, especially for survivors who just wanted to get through Valentine’s Day in Parkland, Fla., or to find their safe space in Orlando.
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And then there is the second-wave reverberation, a history lesson that tells us that any conversation about trying to quiet the ear-shattering explosion of each bullet is pointless, that ultimately nothing can be done about guns in a country that has more weapons than citizens.

So, as is the case far too often, the screech of yet more bullets established America’s latest soundtrack over the weekend as a gunman burst into a Colorado Springs gathering place for members of the LGBTQ community Saturday night, opening fire to kill five and injure at least 18 more. A suspect is being held on preliminary charges of murder and hate crimes, but those are subject to change as more is learned about him. Officials have been careful not to assign a motivation just yet to the attack on Club Q. But it stretches credulity to think the suspect in this case just happened to show up heavily armed and wearing body armor at one of the few places in the Springs where gay people—including teens on some evenings—felt comfortable.

It also demands an aggressive suspension of suspicion to think the current national environment toward LGBTQ rights had no bearing when a 22-year-old man allegedly walks into a gay bar and starts killing. This legislative season alone, lawmakers have introduced at least 344 anti-LGBTQ proposals, and 25 of them are now law, according to the Human Rights Campaign. The most common headlines around this onslaught of legislation has been to keep transgender youths from pursuing health care, playing sports on the teams of their choosing, or even identifying themselves in schools—very controversial efforts if you spend much time in the conservative corners of the internet when one can simultaneously lament Caitlyn Jenner’s persecution and obsess over a University of Pennsylvania swimmer in the same burst of online outrage. Nothing, especially targeted executions, happen in a vacuum.

Flags in Colorado are flying at half their height and vigils are popping up around the typically conservative city of Colorado Springs. The pain’s manifestation is sincere, but the follow-up probably will be a faint echo of it. Mass shootings often summon rage about why policymakers didn’t anticipate this, gnashing about how to stop the next slaying, recriminations about the power of gunmakers and retailers and sportsman groups that have been co-opted for political machinations. But one thing remains louder than all of that chatter, and that’s the many sounds of bullets.

I spend a lot of time in the days after such mass killings reconstructing the details of these evenings and considering the prospects of legislative relief. Often, I will send notes and texts to lawmakers, furtively asking what Washington will be doing in response, and, in a performative way, everyone pretends that this time will be different. The optimism for restrictions grows dimmer every time, the time frame for such talk grows narrower. Every passing hour makes any meaningful adaptation less urgent; that half-life used to be measured in weeks, not commercial breaks. All the while, it’s impossible not to imagine what it must have been like—the sound of each bullet ripping through the rooms, the bodies, the lingering echo of the crime scenes.

It is as deafening as it is depressing.

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With his announcement that in 2024 he would make another run at the White House, former President Donald Trump made clear his belief that the conditions that once brought him victory still hold true.

Despite a midterm election season that didn’t produce the tidal wave of Republican victories widely predicted, it would be easy to believe that one factor that the political conventional wisdom held as the driving reason people voted for Trump in 2016 and again in 2020 may remain: “economic anxiety.” Today, with high but possibly slowing inflation, many Americans are definitely anxious about their personal economies.
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But economic anxiety has also proved to be a problematic explanation for the Trump phenomenon. While concern about current and future security is real for some Trump supporters, it can also be a term of artful avoidance, particularly of the racial resentment that research has shown to be a definitive element of voter psychology. The term also lets white voters with ample wealth who voted for Trump push responsibility for what’s happened since onto lower-income white Americans. (Trump won nearly 65% of the white working class in the 2016 general election, but also won about 38% of votes cast by white people with college degrees.)

Read more: Frustrated Women and Hopeful Men: The Gender Gap in Americans’ Moods

Duchess Harris, a professor of American Studies at Macalester College, an expert on 20th-century African American political history and civil rights, thinks a different idea better explains one of the major forces shaping American politics in 2016 and right now. Harris told me before the midterms and in a subsequent conversation a few hours before Trump’s Tuesday announcement that this other idea explains everything from the razor-thin margins in midterm elections to the deep reservoir of confidence Trump maintains about his own prospects in 2024.

That idea is “linked-fate” voting, developed by Evelyn M. Simien, a professor of Political Science and American studies at the University of Connecticut. As Harris explains in the following Q&A, edited for clarity and length, it could be a useful way to understand where American politics might go next.

TIME: Even before the 2016 election, you were talking about why a significant number of white women could be expected to join white men in supporting Donald Trump.

HARRIS: This shouldn’t really have been a surprise. if your fate is linked to white men, if you believe that what you have flows from supporting them, you’re gonna vote with your husband or your dad or your brother. That’s true for most white women, for most women. You’re gonna vote with your community. You’re gonna vote with your church.

What is “linked-fate voting” and why do people need to understand it?

The concept of linked fate is voting for the greater good. Sounds simple, right? [Research shows that] the majority of Black people and the majority of all women do that. But it gets more complicated because of the way that race and gender work in our country. So what it really tends to mean is that women vote in ways that are beneficial for their group. Men vote in ways that are beneficial for themselves.

Oh, that’s deeply interesting.

The data shows that Black men were heading towards the GOP before Obama. And one of the things the GOP was doing, of course, was saying, ‘Democrats have neglected you and taken you for granted’—and ‘We have Colin Powell.’ That’s a very simple, condensed way of putting it, but that’s essentially the argument that was being made. And it was working. Republicans were making gains [election] cycle after cycle, especially with Black and Latino men. Once you get Obama, that brings it all to a halting stop. And then Black men are like, I’m gonna vote for the Black man—which also is still individualism, right? Once Obama’s turn is over, they just went back to what they’ve already been doing, which is voting on what they think is their individual best interest.

Let me put this another way. A lot of Black women didn’t like Hillary. But Hillary got the biggest voting bloc from Black women—94% of black women voted for Hillary. Fifty-two percent of white women voted for Trump [47% in the final verified voter data only available weeks after the election]. What you can say about white women is that they participate in linked fate as well, because their fathers, husbands, brothers, sons might have benefited from Trump. They had reason to think that.

The data is there. That is why Trump won. White women were like, ‘This is good for my husband.’ Men of all races don’t do that. They don’t say, ‘This is what’s best for my wife. This is what’s best for my daughter.’ You can take this back to the 18th century, when Abigail Adams writes [to her husband John Adams [a future president and member of the Continental Congress] in 1776 and says “remember the ladies.”

She asked her husband to keep women in mind while he shaped the new country’s political system, but white woman would not get the vote for another 144 years. You think that same dynamic continues to shape our politics?

Yeah. You got it. And, and in their own way, Black women and white women are also behaving alike too. It’s just that that sense of linked fate to the men in their lives produces very different [election] results. It isn’t just that it feels different. They have, since Black women got the vote in 1965, created different results.

Read more: How the Voting Rights Act Changed the World

If I try to say that, sometimes people are like, you’re just one of those angry Black feminists. And I’m like, listen, you know, look at white women. Look how they voted in 2016 and 2020. Look at what their President did. How’s that working for you? That, in large part, is how we got the Dobbs decision.

This is just like simple psychology. It’s just like the way we’re wired as human beings.

Prior to Obama, if I understood you correctly, there was some visible movement of Black men towards the GOP. How would you describe the primary reasons that was happening prior to 2008?

The Black men who moved to the GOP were clear about the fact that they were pro-life, didn’t support gay marriage. They were coming out of Christian traditions that didn’t uphold what the Democrats were upholding, and they felt like the Democrats took them for granted and just assumed that they would vote for them. And when you scratch the surface, a lot of Black men when you add on top of the social conservatism, were and are fiscally conservative.

By 2020, Trump had boosted his numbers with Black, Latino and Asian voters in small but not at all negligible ways. Given what you have described, what does this tell us about the runoff in Georgia, where there are two Black men, Republican Herschel Walker and Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock, trying to become a U.S. Senator?

I won’t hazard a guess about the outcome but whatever it is, expect somebody to win by just a few votes and expect that same pattern to show up in how Black men vote.

People keep acting like these are sneak attacks. The patterns in the data tell you loud and clear what’s up. Right? People [are] outwardly saying, ‘We like Herschel Walker, we don’t care whose abortion he [allegedly] paid for. We like you better than the guy who’s actually a reverend, even though I’m an evangelical.’ There wasn’t a red wave in the midterms but nobody won by much. We saw a lot of neck-and-neck, like 49% to 51% splits.

So then what is going on here? Why do you think linked-fate voting isn’t a bigger part of the political conversation?

Because people don’t want to acknowledge that we are a nation divided, because we have been socialized to think that we’re not. And I’m like, just because they taught you that elementary school doesn’t mean it’s true.

Island nations are under threat from rising seas. Drought threatens wide swathes of Africa. And flooding will inundate countries across the globe.

For years, the developing countries most vulnerable to climate change warned of these threats and demanded that their wealthier counterparts help pay to address these climate-induced losses. Wealthy countries, who have caused the problem with decades of burning fossil fuels unchecked, instead insisted that they would help vulnerable countries expand clean energy and fund efforts to adapt to extreme weather. Paying to address so-called loss and damage, it seemed, represented a bridge too far.
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This week, the dam finally broke. At COP27, the United Nations climate conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, that concluded early Sunday morning, delegates from countries around the world agreed to create a fund to funnel money from the Global North to the Global South to help pay for the mounting costs of climate-related damages. Nations also accelerated a program to provide technical assistance to vulnerable countries. And they called for a reworking of institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to address climate-linked loss and damage.

All told, the result represents a groundbreaking shift in how the world understands climate policy. Yes, climate policy is partly about solar panels and wind turbines, elevating streets and building sea walls. But now it is officially, for the first time at this global scale, also about paying for the inevitable losses.

“This is the start of a new paradigm that truly accounts for the burdens of climate change,” said Lia Nicholson, a negotiator representing the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) at the conference’s closing session. “Establishing this fund signals to the world that loss and damage will no longer solely be borne by those governments and people least responsible; today is a step towards climate justice.”

This step forward brings the world into a new era of climate policy where paying to compensate for the worsening effects of climate change receives top billing in international climate discussions—and questions of how to pay for it enters the conversation in capitals of developed countries around the world. COP27 concludes a hard fought battle—but it also marks a beginning; and decisions made over the next few years will define what this new paradigm looks like.

The push for policies to address loss and damage dates back to the very beginning of U.N. discussions on climate change. In 1991, then the chair of AOSIS, the island nation of Vanuatu proposed a scheme to pay small island states when their land became unlivable as a result of sea level rise. From the beginning, those conversations were sidelined and kicked down the road by big developed countries whose negotiators feared that recognizing loss and damage would open up rich countries to unlimited liability. In major climate conferences over the coming decades, vulnerable countries repeatedly raised the topic with paltry results.

But ignoring a problem will not make it go away. Climate-linked damages have accelerated in recent years and many delegates gathered in Egypt agreed that the devastation of recent months made the loss and damage conversation impossible to sidestep. “We listened to the cause of anguish and despair resonating from one end of Pakistan to the other—a country with literally more than a third of its area flooded, a resounding alarm of the future that awaits us,” said Sameh Shoukry, the Egyptian Foreign Minister who served as COP27 president, as the talks came to a close.

And so over the past two weeks negotiators haggled over the details of what such a fund might entail. Crucial questions involved who might receive funding and who should contribute. Developed countries remained adamant that the fund should be open to a range of finance sources—including from countries like China that have become big emitters, even though they weren’t 30 years ago when the U.N. climate process was established. At the same time, developed nations sought to prevent finance from going to countries like Saudi Arabia, which are technically developing countries but have access to far greater means than many of their more vulnerable counterparts. Both of these questions remain to be determined in the coming years. Delegates also debated how contributing countries might finance these programs. A suggestion from the European Union that taxes be levied on fossil fuels, air travel, and shipping to pay for loss and damage raised eyebrows across negotiation teams.

“The establishment of a funding mechanism is the story of COP27, and a huge milestone,” says Cassie Flynn, head of climate policy at the United Nations Development Program. But “this is just the beginning of the journey on funding for loss and damage, and negotiators are going to have to face some questions very quickly around brass tacks: who provides into this fund, who can receive into this fund?”

No matter what happens, no one expects the new fund to provide sufficient finance to actually address the scale of the loss and damage challenge, and so a range of other solutions have been presented. Over the course of the conference, delegates discussed an insurance scheme organized by Germany to help cover certain losses, and the creation of a program known as the Santiago Network that will provide technical assistance to vulnerable countries. A proposal from Barbados to alleviate the debt of cash-strapped developing countries as they struggle with climate challenges gained support from countries across the globe, rich and poor, large and small. The topic will rank high on the agenda in the months ahead of the IMF and World Bank’s spring meetings.

“Loss and damage is a complex issue that impacts our immediate, medium, and long term,” Shauna Aminath, the minister of environment, climate change, and technology in the Maldives told other delegates on the morning of Nov. 20. “We need a mosaic of solutions.”

It may not be clear at first glance, but, between the lines, the COP27 deal also contained a win of sorts for big developed countries like the U.S. Those wealthy nations successfully fought back any attempt to be held formally liable; contributions to the loss and damage fund will be voluntary. After the decision had been finalized, a U.S. State Department official noted that “there is no liability or compensation in the agreement.” In the coming years, it’s safe to assume that lawyers from the U.S. will fight tooth and nail to ensure the fund stays that way.

But the conversation will inevitably evolve. On Friday, Vanuatu announced that 86 countries now support its plan to request the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the U.N.’s judicial body, to issue an advisory opinion on countries’ obligations to address climate change. Vanuatu plans to bring the issue to the U.N. General Assembly in December, and, if passed, the ICJ will take up the issue to offer an opinion that includes what rich countries owe for their historic emissions. It’s an opinion that could influence a range of court rulings around the globe.

“It will impact everything,” says Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s climate minister. “If you were sitting opposite someone, and you’re both equally aware that there are these legally defined obligations, perhaps there is now a shadow of a stick.”

It’s clear the conversation is only just beginning.