Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the former House Speaker who was ousted from the position by members of his own party, announced on Wednesday that he will resign from Congress at the end of the year. 

“I have decided to depart the House at the end of this year to serve America in new ways,” McCarthy wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. “I know my work is only getting started.” 

His announcement will leave the House GOP with an even slimmer majority—they already hold only an eight seat majority in the chamber—until a special election can be held to fill his vacated seat. Many in Washington expected McCarthy to leave Congress following a historic vote in October when a group of conservative hardliners successfully kicked him out of his leadership position for the first time in U.S. history, leaving the California Republican in an uncomfortable position within his conference. The move signaled a major shift in the dynamics of the House GOP and highlighted deep divisions within the party.

“I will continue to recruit our country’s best and brightest to run for elected office,” McCarthy wrote. “The Republican Party is expanding every day, and I am committed to lending my experience to support the next generation of leaders.”

McCarthy’s departure marks a significant turn from his earlier statements, where he had asserted his intention to remain in Congress. The former Speaker, who first entered Congress in 2007, swiftly ascended the leadership ladder, overcoming an unsuccessful bid for the gavel in 2015. Known for his prolific fundraising, McCarthy’s tumultuous journey culminated in his appointment as House minority leader and later as speaker after a contentious 15-round vote.

The catalyst for McCarthy’s ouster was the assertion by eight conservative hardliners—led by Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz—that he had violated their agreement made during the initial speaker race. They accused McCarthy of breaching the terms by supporting a clean stop-gap spending bill, prompting a motion to vacate. Democrats backed the motion, adding to the pressure on the embattled Republican leader.

Tensions between McCarthy and his critics have been palpable since the motion to vacate, with some members expressing dissatisfaction over his handling of the speaker’s race to replace him. The sympathy McCarthy initially garnered following his leadership ouster began to wane, further exacerbating the divisions within the GOP. He was succeeded as House Speaker by Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana. 

McCarthy has repeatedly targeted the eight Republicans who voted against him, leading to speculation that he may intervene in primaries and elections to unseat them. McCarthy’s resignation comes against the backdrop of a growing exodus among Republican lawmakers. Over the past months, almost a dozen House GOP members have declared their intentions to retire from office at the conclusion of their terms, including his longtime ally Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, whom McCarthy tapped to serve as speaker pro tempore after he lost his position.

Some retiring members pointed to a distaste for the political climate in Washington as a factor influencing their decisions. The sentiment echoes a broader trend in recent years, where lawmakers have increasingly cited frustration with the polarized and gridlocked nature of Capitol Hill as a significant motivator for stepping away from public office. McHenry on Tuesday said he’s “confident” in the House’s future, despite the upheaval after McCarthy’s removal.

McCarthy struck a similar tone in his announcement, declaring himself an “optimist.”

“No matter the odds, or personal cost, we did the right thing,” he wrote. “That may seem out of fashion in Washington these days, but delivering results for the American people is still celebrated across the country.”

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If House Republicans were forced to vote today on who should lead them, it’s widely accepted on Capitol Hill that Mike Johnson would find it tough to keep his unenviable job as House Speaker. Put simply: the honeymoon is over, the troublemakers who made his promotion possible are losing patience, and the GOP caucus remains as ungovernable as ever.

All of which adds up to this tough truth: a partial government shutdown could be triggered on Jan. 19, with a complete collapse looming on Feb. 2. And the people who made Johnson’s speakership possible are rooting for House Republicans to preside over a total meltdown of government. It might be the natural conclusion of a right-wing movement kindled in the first months after Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 and which reached a roar during a deadly riot in the last weeks of the Trump administration, and now finds itself with little to do but cheer on destruction in the Biden era.  

It’s been two months since a klatch of House Republicans forced the ouster of then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy because, frankly, they didn’t like him. One voted against him because she didn’t think he had women’s rights in mind. Another kicked him to the curb because he thought McCarthy had mocked his faith. Others said they found him duplicitous and wobbly on conservative goals. After all, McCarthy had dared to strike a deal with Democrats earlier in the year to keep the lights on. In the end, those eight rabble-rousers booted McCarthy after just nine months with the gavel, turning themselves into a kind of veto-wielding super-minority in a chamber where the Republican margins are epicly narrow.

After 22 days of deliberations, 14 candidates, four nominees and three public floor votes, Johnson got the top gig in the House in October. The little-known-beyond-Louisiana conservative weathered a rough few weeks as the public—and many of his colleagues—discovered that he was far more aligned with the evangelical, hard-right flank of the GOP than they had realized. But, in those first few weeks, a lot of conservatives held their tongues as Johnson got his sea legs and started to show what kind of figure he would be as he clutched the gavel.

So what has Johnson got done so far? In the middle of an international crisis, he tried to leverage a request for aid to Israel to score cuts to the IRS budget that will likely never get a vote in the Senate let alone President Joe Biden’s signature into law. He released carefully selected footage from Jan. 6, and then said he was blurring the faces of rioters to protect them from prosecution. And he has fast-tracked impeaching the President despite thin evidence to date—but, hey, a formal vote calendared for next week to allow subpoenas is propped up behind a snazzy logo. All that’s missing is theme music.

Yet none of that has solved the problems that McCarthy found himself ill-equipped to solve. The structural deficiencies that fueled Johnson’s improbable rise to the lush Speaker’s office remain. It’s like Goldilocks doesn’t have just three bowls of porridge in front of her at the moment; she has an entire oatmeal factory that no one knew existed. 

And that’s why the Speaker of a Republican House may very well be the worst prize in D.C. If America’s Shakespeare, Stephen Sondheim, were still with us, he’d be writing Johnson as a modern Nellie Lovett from Sweeney Todd: a cannibalistic opportunist. There’s a problem with that analogy, though: Mrs. Lovett had buy-in from her co-conspirators in a way that the hopelessly divided House Republicans would never offer Johnson, just like they didn’t McCarthy.

Which begs the question: How are you finding the gavel, Mr. Speaker?

Along with avoiding a government shutdown, Republicans are returning to Washington this week with a pressing to-do list, including requests for billions in aid for Israel and Ukraine. And yet nothing seems to be moving any better now than it was in the McCarthy era.  And for those not rooting for a shutdown in the new year, the fact that there is so little ink on paper at this hour when it comes to a spending bill should worry even the most optimistic lawmaker. Johnson is sticking with the parameters negotiated between the Biden White House and Speaker McCarthy’s office, including topline spending of $1.59 trillion through next Oct. 1. While the far-right Freedom Caucus seems to have made peace with that, some holdout conservatives are still demanding that number be cut to $1.47 trillion. That delta is one of the reasons some GOP lawmakers are starting to sour on Johnson.

Not helping matters is Johnson’s decision last week to lock arms with George Santos before a two-thirds majority of the House chose to expel him from the chamber, a dicey vote that left swing-district Republicans in a lurch.

Meanwhile, Democrats are missing no opportunity to highlight the myriad ways that Johnson and like-minded Republicans are afield from both national sentiment—religion and abortion being central to this askew position—and party orthodoxy. And, golly, has it been good for fundraising even before Johnson seized the gavel: national Democrats have enjoyed the upper hand this cycle and show no sign of slowing down against a new Speaker who arrived on the job lacking a network of well-heeled donors conditioned to give.

Privately, lawmakers are grousing that Johnson is embracing his “four-corner” role—that is representing all House Republicans in the closed-door conversations with House Democrats’ top hand and the two parties’ leaders from the Senate. Which, if we are being honest, is what he should be doing. Yes, party leaders in both chambers and in both shades of jersey should be playing to win. At the same time, they need to be working to make sure their members aren’t getting dinged as party hacks. But what is a leader’s job when his members want to be branded as hacks? To his credit, Johnson isn’t playing along thus far. Still, with every moment of sober responsibility, he’s endangering the vocal minority of his slim majority who want to be seen as arsonists. Privately, the fringe adults in his caucus are appreciative of the level-headed approach. But there’s a reason that appreciation is being expressed privately. The burn-it-down caucus is much more upfront about their intentions. 

There’s a reason none of the last three Republican Speakers ended their tenures on their own terms. House Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan took the hint and exited early; McCarthy failed to read the room and was forcibly removed. Johnson isn’t quite at that point but he may have already lost his chance to show he can lead his caucus with anything approaching unity. And, once again, House Republicans seem to be readying the moment when they will incinerate one of their own over disagreements that are not easily distilled to easy-to-understand conversations in the districts that will decide the balance of power come early 2025. The fight is entirely one of Washington’s making, and only the insiders understand why Republicans can’t stifle internal dissent at a moment when Americans are looking at D.C. with disbelief that this is really how the country is being run.

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When a prominent political figure debuts a new book, it often leads to speculation about a subsequent run for office. In Liz Cheney’s case, she’s made that possibility explicit.

As the former GOP congresswoman promotes her new memoir, “Oath and Honor,” she has made it no secret that she is mulling a presidential bid as a third-party candidate to prevent Donald Trump from returning to the White House. “I think that the situation that we’re in is so grave, and the politics of the moment require independents and Republicans and Democrats coming together in a way that can help form a new coalition, so that may well be a third-party option,” Cheney told USA TODAY on Monday, the day before her memoir arrived on bookshelves.

One of the most vocal critics of Trump within the Republican party, Cheney was one of just 10 Republicans to back the former President’s second impeachment in 2021 and became one of two Republicans on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol—a deadly day for which she blamed Trump. Being an outspoken critic of the 45th President made her an outcast in her own party and led her to lose her primary in Wyoming last year.

But in her new memoir, Cheney makes a case for her potential presidential run, reflecting on her political journey as a conservative and crafting an argument for why the direction of her party is at odds with the health of democracy. She argues that Trump’s influence has led the Republican party astray, describing it as caught in the “cult of personality” as Trump holds a significant lead in the Republican primary in another run for the Oval Office.

“Every American should understand what his enablers in Congress and in the leadership of the Republican Party were willing to do to help Trump seize power in the months after he lost the 2020 presidential election—and what they continue to do to this day,” she wrote. “So strong is the lure of power that men and women who had once seemed reasonable and responsible were suddenly willing to violate their oath to the Constitution out of political expediency and loyalty to Donald Trump.”

Drawing on text messages and personal conversations with other Republicans, Cheney’s memoir provides a rare and damning look inside the Republican party in the days before and after Jan. 6, when Trump and his allies sought to remain in office after losing the 2020 election. She argues that Trump poses a threat to American democracy and could turn the nation into a dictatorship if reelected. “This is more important than partisan politics,” she writes in the epilogue. “Every one of us — Republican, Democrat, Independent — must work and vote together to ensure that Donald Trump and those who have appeased, enabled, and collaborated with him are defeated. This is the cause of our time.”

Cheney also argues the GOP is lacking other credible leaders. In the memoir, Cheney reserves particular condemnation for former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his successor, House Speaker Mike Johnson, accusing them of compromising principles in their pursuit of Trump’s favor. She reveals for the first time that McCarthy told her just two days after the 2020 election that he had talked to Trump and that the President had admitted defeat, a revelation that contradicted McCarthy’s subsequent public statements. “He knows it’s over,” McCarthy said of Trump, according to Cheney. “He needs to go through all the stages of grief.” Later that day, McCarthy went on Fox News and said that Trump won the election, and three weeks later paid a visit to Trump at his Florida property. “McCarthy knew that what he was saying was not true,” she wrote.

Trump responded to Cheney’s book in a post on Truth Social on Monday, calling it “boring,” saying Cheney is “crazy,” and writing that McCarthy visited him at Mar-a-Lago after the 2020 election “to get my support, and to bring the Republican Party together – Only good intentions.”

Cheney also offered a critical assessment of Johnson, portraying him as particularly susceptible to flattery from Trump and ambitious in seeking proximity to the former President. She recounts how Johnson allegedly pressured Republican members to support an amicus brief aimed at challenging the election results in four states that Trump had lost, even when faced with criticisms of the legal arguments.

“When I confronted him with the flaws in his legal arguments,” Cheney wrote, “Johnson would often concede, or say something to the effect of, ‘We just need to do this one last thing for Trump.’” She adds: “He would then continue championing his arguments in public or with our colleagues. Worse, he was telling our colleagues he was a constitutional law expert, while advocating positions that were constitutionally infirm.”

Cheney’s narrative underscores her belief that Johnson, among other so-called Trump “enablers” in the House, pose a significant threat to the democratic process. (She even quotes Rep. Mark Green, a Tennessee Republican, allegedly calling Trump “the Orange Jesus,” a comment he denies making).

While Cheney is yet to formally declare her candidacy, there is a long history of presidents as authors. Nearly all of the past and current presidential candidates have published some kind of text, from memoirs to political manifestos. Books have, in many ways, become the telltale sign that someone in Washington is serious about running for office. Cheney’s memoir not only adds to this trend but positions itself as a pivotal component in a potential bid for the White House, inviting readers to delve into her reflections on the Trump presidency while laying out her vision for the future.

The 2024 race has already garnered a few third-party challengers, including Cornel West and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who trail frontrunners President Joe Biden and Trump significantly in polls. But Cheney would potentially face even more significant hurdles if she decides to run. Not only do many Republicans view her actions against Trump as traitorous, but the process for getting on state ballots for an election less than a year out would be enormously expensive and difficult. Small parties often work for years to get ballot access, and Cheney would need to run on the ticket for a third party that already has ballot access or petition for her own place on state ballots. A super PAC backing Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential candidacy, for example, is planning to spend $10 million to $15 million to get him on the ballot in 10 states.

Cheney, who faced a defeat in the Wyoming Republican primary last year, told The Washington Post on Monday that in years past she would not have contemplated a third-party candidacy, but expressed concern over the influence of Trump on the Republican party, stating, “I happen to think democracy is at risk at home, obviously, as a result of Donald Trump’s continued grip on the Republican Party, and I think democracy is at risk internationally as well.” But Cheney underscored that she would not take any actions that might take votes away from Biden and aid Trump’s return to power. 

However unlikely the prospects for Cheney’s potential third-party run, her book offers hints about how she’d govern and attempt to realign the Republican party without Trump.

“At some point, a genuinely conservative Republican Party—a party that stands for limited government, a strong national defense, and the rule of law—can reemerge and win the presidency,” she writes. “But if Donald Trump is the Republican nominee in 2024, we must do everything we can to defeat him. If Trump is on the ballot, the 2024 presidential election will not just be about inflation, or budget deficits, or national security, or any of the many critical issues we Americans normally face. We will be voting on whether to preserve our republic.”

(WASHINGTON) — Federal regulators are investigating ExxonMobil’s $60 billion deal to acquire a Texas oil company in what would be one the largest mergers in the energy industry in two decades, according to securities filings.

The Federal Trade Commission, which enforces federal antitrust law, has asked for additional information from the companies about Exxon’s proposed acquisition of Pioneer Natural Resources. The request is a step the agency takes when reviewing whether a merger could be anticompetitive under U.S. law. Pioneer disclosed the request in a filing Tuesday.

The investigation comes after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and 22 other Democratic senators urged the FTC to investigate the Exxon-Pioneer deal and a separate acquisition by oil giant Chevron, a proposed $53 billion purchase of Hess Corporation. Both deals are among the largest petroleum deals in U.S. history and could violate antitrust law, the Democrats said. There’s no public indication of a federal inquiry into the Chevron merger.

Schumer said Tuesday he asked the FTC to “take a hard look at Exxon’s blockbuster merger and block it if it would lead to higher prices, hurt competition or force families to pay more at the pump. I’m glad the FTC is taking this step.”

Read more: How Chevron and Exxon’s Latest Fossil Fuel Deals Compare To Their Green Spending

The FTC, which shares antitrust authority with the Justice Department, can sue in court to block a merger or decline to take action, effectively clearing the deal. A spokesman for the commission declined to comment Tuesday.

Chevron, Exxon and other oil companies have announced huge profits from strong energy prices and demand since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Exxon reported $9.1 billion in profits in the quarter that ended Sept. 30, while Chevron reported $6.5 billion in profits.

Exxon has said the proposed deal with Texas-based Pioneer Resources would enhance U.S. energy security and benefit the American economy and consumers.

Chevron said its proposed deal with New York-based Hess would strengthen long-term performance while “delivering higher returns and lower carbon” dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming.

Both deals must be approved by federal regulators.

Read more: Here’s Just How Huge Big Oil Would Be If It Were a Country

Environmental groups have denounced what some called “merger mania” in the oil industry that threatens competition.

“Exxon publicly promised to reduce emissions, yet subsequently spent $60 billion acquiring another fossil fuel company – doubling down on their commitment to oil and gas and putting profits over people,” said Alex Witt of Climate Power, a left-leaning advocacy group founded by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, League of Conservation Voters and Sierra Club.

“The FTC is right to investigate Exxon’s acquisition of Pioneer, which could raise prices at the pump and is aimed at keeping the U.S. reliant on fossil fuels,” Witt said.

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum ended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination on Monday despite a stronger-than-expected showing fueled by a gift card-for-campaign donation gimmick that helped get him on the debate stage.

Burgum, a second-term governor and wealthy software entrepreneur, was little known nationally when he launched his 2024 presidential campaign in June, touting his priorities of energy, the economy and national security, as well as his small-town roots and leadership of the sparsely populated state.

He participated in the first two Republican debates, meeting donor requirements of the Republican National Committee by offering $20 Biden Relief Cards — a jab at rising inflation rates during President Joe Biden’s term — in exchange for $1 donations. The tactic drew skepticism over its legality, though Burgum’s campaign said its legal advisers had reviewed and approved the method.

He failed to qualify for the third debate, however, after coming up short on the polling requirements. And it appeared that he would also not qualify for the fourth debate, which is being held Wednesday in Alabama.

Read More: Dean Phillips Is the Other Guy Running for President. Does He Have a Chance?

Indeed, he blamed the RNC, which sets qualifications for the debates, for “nationalizing the primary process and taking the power of democracy away from the engaged, thoughtful citizens of Iowa and New Hampshire.”

“It is not their mission to reduce competition and restrict fresh ideas by ‘narrowing the field’ months before the Iowa caucuses or the first in the nation New Hampshire primary,” he wrote in his statement announcing his departure. “These arbitrary criteria ensure advantages for candidates from major media markets on the coasts versus America’s Heartland. None of their debate criteria relate to the qualifications related to actually doing the job of the president.”

Ultimately, he was unable to gain much traction against his rivals in a contest dominated by former President Donald Trump. He joins former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, radio show host Larry Elder, businessman Perry Johnson, former Texas congressman Will Hurd and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez in suspending his bid.

Burgum injected millions of his own money into the race, accounting for $12.2 million of the $15.1 million raised by his campaign from March through September, according to Federal Election Commission filings. A super PAC supporting his bid raised over $11 million in the first six months of this year, according to filings.

He nearly missed his first opportunity for national public exposure when he ruptured his Achilles tendon the day before the inaugural debate in August in Milwaukee. But he persevered through, later telling reporters that he stood on one leg behind the podium.

He resumed campaigning with a boot and a knee scooter afterward.

Burgum was a political newcomer in 2016 when he staged an upset over the longtime attorney general in North Dakota’s Republican gubernatorial primary. He is now in his second term as governor and is eligible for a third in 2024, though he hasn’t indicated whether he plans to run again.

Burgum entered office amid the Dakota Access pipeline protests and a massive state revenue shortfall. He touted a vision of “reinventing” state government as a candidate and after winning.

Among his biggest legislative pushes have been a Theodore Roosevelt presidential library near Medora in 2019, income tax relief earlier this year, and again, though unsuccessfully, in an October special session, which kept him off the campaign trail for a few days.

He drew attention in the 2020 and 2022 elections for spending millions of his own money in an effort to target legislative seats held by fellow Republicans, including the longtime chairman of the powerful House budget-writing panel.

In 2021, he vetoed bills banning state-issued mask mandates and restricting transgender students from public schools’ sports, though the Legislature overrode him on the former. In 2023, he signed about a dozen bills opponents saw as restricting transgender people, including new sports bills and a ban on gender-affirming care for kids.

Before his time as governor, Burgum was largely known as a businessman who led Great Plains Software, which Microsoft acquired for over $1 billion in 2001. He stayed on as an executive with Microsoft until 2007. He’s led other companies in real estate development and venture capital.

The Other Guy running for President arrives in the basement auditorium of the Dartmouth Political Union with no fanfare. There’s no ripple of electricity through the half-full crowd of political junkies and curious voters, no security or designated press area, and you’d have to squint to find the campaign signs bearing his name. The Other Guy’s pitch for the job is simple: he’s running to offer Democratic voters a plausible alternative to the 81-year old incumbent. “I’ve never aspired to be generic,” Dean Phillips, the Democratic congressman challenging President Joe Biden, tells the crowd. But, he says, “I’ll be your generic Democrat if that means I can defeat Donald Trump.”

As a despondent electorate braces for the 2024 campaign, this is what passes for a rallying cry. In poll after poll, a majority of voters—including loyal Democrats—say they’re frustrated with a Biden-Trump rematch and want more options. A recent New York Times/Siena poll found the President trailing Trump in five of six key battlegrounds surveyed. When the pollsters asked about a race between a generic, unnamed Democratic candidate and Trump, those same voters said they favored the other guy over Trump by 8 points.

Phillips, who is 54, with a full head of hair and the vibe of visiting dad on Parents Weekend, has stepped forward to become that Other Guy. In 2022, he was one of the first Democratic officials to call for Biden not to run for re-election. For more than a year, he urged someone—anyone!—to mount a primary challenge to a vulnerable President dogged by inflation, an affordability crisis, and deep, persistent concerns about his age. But the party’s better-known rising stars all took a pass on a long-shot quest to dethrone the incumbent, even as Biden’s polling continued to sink. “Within the Beltway, everyone’s saying, ‘Oh, there’s no problem. Just hopes and prayers and everything’s gonna work out just fine,'” Phillips told the audience at Dartmouth. “And it’s not going to work out fine.”

As a candidate to fill the role of Generic Democratic, Phillips is certainly plausible: a wealthy, politically moderate Midwestern congressman with a business background who flipped a conservative House district in 2018. But his bid for President may already be too little, too late. Despite widespread anxiety about Biden, the national Democratic Party has followed tradition by throwing its support behind the sitting President, coordinating closely with Biden’s re-election campaign (which is standard when there’s an incumbent) and declining to hold sanctioned debates. Phillips is sprinting to build the infrastructure required to mount a competitive campaign, let alone the base of support to sustain one. He has no national fundraising apparatus yet, and will likely need to raise millions of dollars in order to even appear on the ballot across the country. He’s already missed filing deadlines in two states and is struggling to build name recognition. He’s polling at 4% in one recent Yahoo/YouGov survey.

Nor is it clear why a Democratic voter would choose Phillips over Biden, other than age. Both reject fire-breathing progressive activism in favor of reaching the exhausted center. Phillips is neither the leader of a new ideological movement, as Sen. Bernie Sanders was in 2016, nor is he running a campaign steeped in Internet-fever-swamp grievances, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now. According to the political analysis website 538, Phillips has voted with Biden 100% of the time. The premise of Phillips’ campaign is a simple belief that Biden is the only Democrat who would lose to Trump in a rematch.

I met Phillips a week before Thanksgiving, high above midtown Manhattan, in a swanky office he was borrowing from a friend at a hedge fund. While fiddling with the top of his water bottle, he tried to explain why he was so much more than “Biden, but younger.”

Phillips grew up in Edina, Minn. He never met his father, who died in the Vietnam War when he was just six months old; he didn’t learn the details of his biological father’s death until he was 10. When Phillips was three, his mother remarried into a prominent family that ran the Phillips Distilling Company, known for producing the first American schnapps, and they adopted him as a son and grandson. His adoptive grandmother was the famous advice columnist behind “Dear Abby.”

Phillips points to his long career outside of politics as one of the key differences between him and the President. After attending Brown University and earning his MBA at the University of Minnesota, he joined the family business, expanding it to include luxury alcohol like Belvedere vodka. He rose to CEO and ran the company from 2000 to 2012. In 2012, he stepped down to co-manage another investment, Talenti Gelato (his favorite flavor is pistachio), before selling it to Unilever in 2014.

When Trump was elected in 2016, Phillips’s daughters, then teenagers, “woke up in tears,” he recalls. “I promised them I would do something.” In 2018 he ran for a Minnesota House seat that had been in Republican hands for nearly 60 years, and beat a five-term Republican Congressman by more than 10 points. His career in Congress has been a fairly quiet one, without a singular issue that has defined his tenure. He only started really making headlines when, in a July 2022 radio interview, he became one of the first elected Democrats to publicly say that President Biden shouldn’t run for re-election, calling on the incumbent to instead pass the torch to a “new generation” of Democrats.

Read More: Why Dean Phillips Is Running Against Joe Biden.

Phillips stepped down in the fall from a minor role in House Democratic leadership in protest of his party closing ranks around Biden. About a week later, he says, he got a message from the political operative Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s former campaign manager, who had started the Lincoln Project to convince Republicans to break from Trump. Phillips went on Schmidt’s podcast, and the next day Schmidt called him and suggested he talk to his family about running for President. Phillips did so over the Yom Kippur holiday, and came back to say he was in. But he was concerned about how the campaign would actually work.

“I don’t have name recognition. I don’t have a national profile. And I just don’t see how we could do this within two weeks,” he recalls telling Schmidt. “And we sat at my kitchen table, and in two weeks, we stood up a presidential campaign.” Just after Thanksgiving, he announced he would not run for re-election to the House.

As President, Philips says, he would be focused on lowering costs for basic necessities like housing, health care, and childcare. While he has supported Biden’s agenda, Phillips says the President’s accomplishments have done too little to address the affordability crisis. “The infrastructure bill was important; that’s not lowering costs for people. The CHIPS act, very important. That’s not lowering costs for people. The Inflation Reduction Act, despite its name, was really a climate bill. That’s outstanding, too. But it’s not going to lower costs for people,” he says. “If anything, some of these things probably raise costs a little bit.”

To increase affordability, Phillips says he would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, back a “national health insurance program”—not for the delivery of care, but for “insurance and payment”—and modify the tax code to allow families to deduct their childcare expenses. “We’ve not had a President who made housing an all-hands-on-deck priority as I would,” he says, adding that he supports rent vouchers as a “band-aid” but that “the solution is production: we need to be building more.”

Phillips points to daylight between himself and Biden on immigration, where he proposes to change the U.S. asylum process by filing cases in migrants’ countries of origin, and cannabis, which he wants to legalize. He says he “absolutely” uses cannabis himself. “I smoke it. In the last year, I certainly have,” he says, adding: “I haven’t now since my campaign started, and I won’t do it during my campaign and as President.”

Phillips’s critiques of Biden remain fairly gentle. Most of his argument is rooted in polling that suggests Americans are ready for a change. He is not out to impugn the President’s character or dismiss his accomplishments. “I respect him. I think he’s a good man. I think he was the only one who could have beat Donald Trump in 2020,” Phillips says. “And I believe he is the only moderate Democrat who could possibly lose to Donald Trump in 2024. And it appears that he will.”

The President is “at the very sunset of his life, let alone his career,” Phillips continues. “There are not many 80-plus-year-olds in leadership positions in any category, in any industry, in any capacity around the world.”

Phillips’ brain trust includes a group of political operatives who have almost nothing in common except for their skepticism of establishment Democrats and their desire to beat Donald Trump. Phillips calls them his “team of rivals.” There’s senior advisor Jeff Weaver, who ran Sanders’ 2016 campaign and advised his 2020 run; campaign manager Zach Graumann, who served in the same role for Andrew Yang’s campaign in 2020; and Schmidt, who recently departed the team in order to start a new super PAC, Pass the Torch USA, to support Phillips.

This team sees a path to an upset. Biden is not appearing on the ballot in New Hampshire because the Democratic National Committee reordered its calendar to give South Carolina the first primary; New Hampshire refused to move their primary, and Biden chose not to buck the party by appearing on the New Hampshire ballot. Phillips sees a victory there, even with an asterisk, as key to his campaign, and his aides see a glimmer of good news in a Nov. 15 Emerson College poll of New Hampshire voters, which found that just 27% plan to write in Biden’s name, with Phillips polling at 15% just a few weeks into his launch. A plurality of the respondents— 44%—say they’re still undecided. “Among Democratic voters in New Hampshire, if the President loses or comes close to losing, it’s a clear message,” says Weaver.

Read More: Biden’s Shrunken Legislative Agenda.

Another pillar of Phillips’ early-state strategy is Michigan. “Supporters of the President would list his perceived electability against Trump as one of the justifications for him running again and being the nominee,” says Weaver. “A strong showing by Congressman Philips in Michigan would cause people to perhaps rethink that assumption.” The team hopes that a win in New Hampshire can create momentum in the primary, while a good performance in Michigan would demonstrate Phillips’s electability in a critical battleground.

To stay competitive, Phillips will need to raise millions of dollars to overcome his lack of name recognition. He’s vowed not to take money from lobbyists, but hasn’t gotten much traction courting traditional Democratic big-dollar donors, so he loaned his campaign $2 million out of his own fortune in early November. The campaign believes that a win in New Hampshire will lead to a significant fundraising boost, as Pete Buttigieg experienced in 2020.

Phillips says he’s had a series of conversations with the Silicon Valley tech titan Sam Altman about potentially supporting his campaign. “We’ve talked about the country, we’ve talked about the need for change,” he says. In their conversations, which Phillips says have included “a number of calls and Zooms,” Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, “shared some interesting perspective about how artificial intelligence could significantly reduce costs in the United States, as relates to health care costs, as it relates to any data processing …there’s remarkable potential,” Phillips says. While he won’t say that Altman has pledged financial support, “he has certainly been a source of great counsel, ideation, and perspective,” Phillips says.

Phillips is on the ballot in at least 13 states and territories so far, according to a senior campaign aide, but he’s already missed ballot deadlines in Nevada and Kentucky and at this point Florida plans not to hold a primary. Phillips is still waiting to learn whether he’ll make the ballot in California, North Carolina, and Iowa, but his campaign says it’s confident in his chances. The scramble to simply appear on these ballots, however, means pouring limited campaign money into canvassers in those states. “We’re gonna get on as many ballots as possible. But I’m not saying we’re good on all ballots, because I did not know how unbelievably rigged the system is,” Phillips says. “Getting on the ballot is probably the most significant challenge I face.”

Phillips says he is determined not to play spoiler. He plans to “assess” the state of the race after Super Tuesday in early March, “and if I’m not in a position to win, I would get behind whoever is best positioned to beat Donald Trump.” But the source familiar with the campaign says that with the number of states where he’ll be on the ballot, the Phillips campaign plans to be at the Democratic convention next summer with delegates, even if they don’t outright win any states. “He’s going to stay in as long as it takes for the party to get an accurate assessment of who is best able to beat Donald Trump,” says Weaver.

Phillips is not interested in discussing the specific conditions that would cause him to drop out of the race. Instead, he’s focused on calling on Biden to “pass the torch” to new leadership. “That’s my invitation to Democratic voters: to assess what this is really about,” Phillips says. “It’s not about a personality contest. It’s not about rewarding someone who did a nice job four years ago. It’s about moving to the future and preventing the most dangerous man in the world from returning the White House.”

Before the stop at Dartmouth, Phillips visits Lou’s Diner in Hanover, a burger-and-milkshake spot that specializes in freshly made pies. It’s mid-November, just two weeks since he announced his candidacy, and his campaign is so new that most people don’t know who he is.

“If there was another realistic Democratic alternative, I’d vote for them instead of Biden,” says William O’Malley, a Dartmouth sophomore who spoke with Phillips as he waited for his burger to arrive. But he remained “skeptical” of Phillips’ chances.

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It took three tries, but the House on Friday finally summoned sufficient decency to boot from its ranks George Santos, the Ferragamo-footed fabulist who fittingly represented the North Fork of Long Island where a fictional Jay Gatsby held court and built a castle built from little more than swagger. And yet, Santos’ expulsion was hardly as forceful as might have been expected, as the top ranks of Santos’ fellow Republicans offered up their own tepid apologia for supporting his sticking around.

In the end, Santos’ political empire found a foundation built on even less than Gatsby, although his fall from grace was markedly more difficult than the F. Scott Fitzgerald icon. Despite a fictional biography that included stints at Goldman Sachs, leadership of a college volleyball team, and a family tree that included Holocaust victims and a 9/11 survivor, Santos almost survived a third attempt to kick him to the curb in less than a year. Expulsion required support of a two-thirds majority, or 290 votes. The final vote was 311-to-114, meaning fewer than two-dozen Republicans could have preserved Santos’ fortunes through next year’s elections.

As defiant and tone-deaf as ever, Santos petulantly exited Congress with the same contempt shown when he arrived in D.C. at the start of the year as an exposed liar. “Why would I want to stay here? To hell with this place,” he told the phalanx of reporters trailing him on Capitol Hill.

The fact that Santos’ expulsion was far from guaranteed speaks to the craven and self-preserving nature of the current GOP caucus. Staring down the hardening likelihood of a re-nomination of Donald Trump for the top of the ticket, Republican leaders went into Friday’s vote uncertain of the outcome. Top leaders told rank-and-file members to vote their conscience, while no one had an accurate whip count of the vote. The ambiguity speaks to the GOP’s lack of true disgust with Santos’ alleged abuse of campaign funds to cover the costs of Botox, casinos, and porn.

Santos faces 23 criminal counts stemming from his alleged use of the campaign accounts to pay for his personal lifestyle, including $6,000 at shoe maven Ferragamo. In all, tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donors’ cash allegedly went to prop up the image of Santos, who unexpectedly won the New York district last year in a state that had served as a GOP seawall against the expected backlash over the fall of Roe. New York Republicans wanted Santos gone, national Republicans weren’t much fond of the fiction-driven character, and donors were in active mutiny. Still, party leaders understood their razor-thin majority could ill-afford trouble, and all four of the top Republicans voted to let him finish his term on the basis that he had yet to have his day in court.

  All of which comes together to paint an unflattering portrait of the modern Republican Party, one whose leadership would rather have a known serial fabricator in their ranks as long as it gives them ever-so-slightly-more of an advantage. Santos survived votes to boot him in May and in November, as a significant contingent of the House insisted on waiting for the Ethics Committee to complete its investigation. The Committee’s report apparently offered sufficient proof that Santos is bad news. And yet, 112 Republicans and two Democrats went on the record on Friday to oppose his ouster. (Even for offices that are sticklers for ethics and campaign finance rules, the nightmare of an errant page or entry can spook doubt that expulsion should come based on mere internal findings or unproven court filings.)

Even so, Santos’ exit is unlikely to be the final word when it comes to this scandal-soaked fabricator. His upcoming criminal trial will haunt GOP leadership and amuse Democratic trolls. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers find themselves without a voting representative member of the House for at least the next two months. Sure, Santos’ remaining staffers may be able to help expedite passports and grant petitions, but keep in mind these were staffers whom Santos picked. For instance, when Santos arrived in a Jaguar at the Capitol on Thursday, his chauffeur was a former drug dealer. 

So Santos has been sent packing, and Republicans are expecting to lose the seat. But that’s not to say they weren’t willing to bend their standards to hold onto it for the next year. And that should tell Americans about what the GOP is willing to prioritize right now: power over principle, Ferragamos over fibs, a majority over mendacity. It might work in the short term, but voters next year will remember this, and many, many Republicans just put their name next to a vote that history will not judge kindly.

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If hurling insults, distorting facts, and pandering to Americans’ worst instincts are the hallmarks of leadership, then Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis emerged the winner in the debate with California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

In a 90-minute debate with Fox News host Sean Hannity as moderator, DeSantis launched blistering attacks on his opponent, calling him a habitual liar and a “slick and slippery politician.” He said Newsom shields himself from his state’s failures by sending his children to private school and dining at the exclusive French Laundry restaurant while his state was on pandemic lockdown.

Among his more preposterous claims were that Los Angeles is in a state of “collapse” and that California knowingly exposes its schoolchildren to books depicting lurid sex acts. He even took out a map purporting to show that almost the entire city of San Francisco is sullied with human feces.

But incivility and distorted facts are not measures of leadership. In the end, DeSantis came off as he always does, mean-spirited and bullying, which Newsom was able to point out in one of his few statements that was not interrupted by DeSantis trying to talk over him.

“You’re nothing but a bully,” Newsom said. “I understand that. Intimidating and humiliating people—that’s your calling card.”

The debate, which Hannity dubbed the Great Red-Blue State Debate and was held without an audience, was in some respects an exercise in irrelevance, a matchup between a fading presidential candidate and a governor who is currently not running for anything. It seemed mainly designed to shore up DeSantis’s candidacy by allowing him to treat Fox viewers to a national takedown of a rising Democratic star.

Fox has pounded into its audience for years that Californians are fleeing their state to get away from homelessness, public disorder, and out-of-control housing costs, and this was a chance to showcase such misleading propaganda before a wider audience.

Read More: DeSantis and Newsom Offer a Glimpse at an Alternate 2024 With No Trump or Biden Running

To that end, Hannity, who pledged in his opening statement to be a neutral moderator, proceeded to load every question against California, displaying charts that were always negative toward the Golden State and often included misleading facts.

For instance, his chart showing that California has higher crime than Florida was meaningless since the FBI’s crime reporting is currently in transition and many municipal police departments are not even sharing data. One of the few measures of crime that is reliable, the Centers for Disease Control’s data on homicide mortality, shows that Florida has a higher murder rate.

What was missing from Hannity’s charts was the raft of data showing that Florida ranks below California in most measures of social and economic well-being. California has higher median income and greater educational attainment. The Golden State has lower rates of cancer deaths, infant mortality, teen births, accidental deaths, and suicide, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On average, Californians also live longer than Floridians.

The health statistics are hardly a surprise since Florida, one of only 10 states that has refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, ranks fifth lowest among the 50 states in the percentage of its citizen with medical insurance, 11.2% compared with 6.5% in California.

Health care was not even mentioned in the debate. With Hannity making no effort to be what he called a “hall monitor” and stop the debate from degenerating into indecipherable bickering, Newsom had little opportunity to raise substantive issues and was on the defensive almost the entire time.

DeSantis was able to deride California’s economy with almost no challenge from Newsom or Hannity. “They tax too much. They regulate too much. It is not a good climate for business,” DeSantis said.

But the numbers tell a different story. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, California’s real gross domestic product in 2022, on a per-capita basis, was 48% higher than Florida’s. California’s real per-capita GDP grew by 16.6% between 2017 and 2022, compared with Florida’s growth of 13.1%.

California’s superior economy stands out in more ways than just GDP. Matthew Winkler, former editor and chief of Bloomberg News, pointed out in a 2021 essay that California’s economy roared out of the pandemic by adding more than 1.3 million people to its non-farm payrolls between April 2020 and June 2021, more than any other state. In the same period, California’s household income increased by $164 billion, more than Florida, Texas, and Pennsylvania combined

California’s economic activity has outpaced Florida’s at the very time that the Sunshine State’s two recent conservative governors, DeSantis and Rick Scott, have been cutting taxes and curtailing the regulation of business—not exactly a marquee advertisement for the superiority of red-state governance.

There can be no doubting that California has its share of challenges. Soaring housing prices, the highest in the nation, have produced a wide gulf between the state’s richest and poorest citizens and have indeed prompted many working people to decamp for other states. The California Department of Finance estimates that California had a net loss of nearly 600,000 people from 2020 to 2023, while Florida added an estimated 655,000 people in roughly that same period.

Both Democrats and Republicans in the legislature, and at the municipal level, spent decades trying to shield residential communities from multi-family housing, the “Not In My Backyard” (NIMBY) effect run amuck, and that helped produce the affordability crisis. In 2016, the McKinsey Global Institute found that the housing shortage was costing California an annual $160 billion in lost economic output, and it recommended the construction of 3.5 million homes by 2025. Despite an aggressive effort to promote housing construction, the state has not even come close to that number.

But California differs from Florida and other red states in its willingness to confront its problems and work toward building a better society, rather than simply catering to corporations and wealthy donors. For instance, between 2018 and 2022, California spent $17.5 billion to combat homelessness.

Newsom said homelessness has been an issue in California for decades but that his administration is making substantial progress in dealing with the problem, taking 60,000 off the streets during his tenure.

By contrast, DeSantis has a poor record in attempting to improve the lives of Floridians, especially those without seven-figure incomes. His governorship has mainly been about attacking “woke” politics, undermining public education with one of the nation’s largest voucher programs, and demonizing immigrants. Florida has the stingiest unemployment benefits in the country, ranks toward the bottom of the 50 states in teachers’ salaries and per-pupil funding, and ranks 43^rdin funding for long-term elder care, despite being a mecca for retirees. DeSantis opposed an increase of the state’s minimum wage when it was only $8.65 an hour.

Read More: No One Is Talking About What Ron DeSantis Has Actually Done to Florida

The governor boasts about Florida having no personal income tax and low corporate tax rates, but never mentions that the state’s revenues come mainly from sales and excise taxes, which fall hardest on the poor and middle class. A 2018 study by the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that Florida had the third-least equitable tax system in the country, with the poorest 20% of the state’s residents paying 12.7% of their income in taxes, compared with 4.5% paid by the top 4% of earners.

Newsom did manage did point to point out Florida’s inequitable tax structure, but his statements on the issue were almost lost amid his opponent’s constant interruptions. Newsom’s finest moments came when he was able to characterize DeSantis’s incivility toward so many of his citizens.

“I don’t like the way you demean people,” he told DeSantis. “I don’t like the way you demean the LGBTQ community. I don’t like the way you demean and humiliate people you disagree with, Ron.”

It was one of the few issues on which DeSantis had no response.

George Santos became the sixth member of Congress to be expelled from the House of Representatives on Friday. Now voters in his district will finally have an opportunity to replace the alleged fraudster.

His removal leaves the seat vacant, temporarily tightening the already-slim Republican majority in the House and giving Democrats two opportunities to flip the battleground Third District in 2024. 

The first opportunity will be a special election to fill the seat through January 2025. New York Governor Kathy Hochul must announce the date of the special election within ten days, and the election must take place 70 to 80 days after that. Instead of holding typical primaries, county party leaders will choose the candidates for the special election. The winner of that race will finish Santos’ term.

Voters in the Long Island-based district will vote again on who should represent them in the House in the regular election next November. The already-crowded race gives party bosses on both sides of the aisle numerous options to choose as their pick for the special election. 

Both races are likely to be among the most closely watched in the country next year.

Nassau County Democratic Chair Jay Jacobs previously told ABC News that several candidates are in consideration for the special election, including Santos’ predecessor, Tom Suozzi, who is considered the party’s frontrunner in the regular election. Jacobs also mentioned former state Senator Anna Kaplan, who is also already running in the regular primary, and Robert Zimmerman, who lost the general election to Santos last year in a district that backed Biden in 2020. Jacobs has stressed that the party needs a “moderate” candidate to win back the seat. 

On the Republican side, more than a dozen candidates are in consideration for the special election. Among the Republicans already running for the seat are Kellen Curry, a veteran who has earned the endorsements of some members of Congress and has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. Retired NYPD detective Michael Sapraicone boasts similarly impressive fundraising and is considered a likely pick for the special election, while Nassau County legislator Mazi Melesa Pilip may also be under consideration. 

The Iowa caucuses are a little more than a month away, and the Republican presidential candidates are running out of opportunities to prove themselves.

On December 6, the field will gather in Tuscaloosa, AL for the fourth—and possibly the last—primary debate before voters weigh in. Once again, former President Donald Trump is planning to skip the event as he continues to hold an increasingly insurmountable lead in the polls. He is expected to hold a private fundraiser instead, according to NBC News. 

The debate stage is likely to be the smallest yet. To qualify, the Republican National Committee requires candidates to have drawn donations from 80,000 individuals, including at least 200 donors from at least 20 different states. They also need to show having 6% support in two qualifying national polls or in a combination of one national poll and one poll from two different early states. Additionally, they must sign a loyalty pledge agreeing to support whoever the party eventually nominates. They have until 48 hours before the debate on Wednesday to meet those criteria. 

Five candidates attended the last debate, but one of them, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, dropped out of the race shortly afterwards.

More From TIME

Here are the candidates likely to be on the debate stage:

Nikki Haley

Off the back of her strong performances in previous debates, Haley, Trump’s former Ambassador to the United Nations and a former governor of South Carolina, has steadily gained in the polls while attracting renewed attention from influential Republicans. Many are drawn to her foreign policy credentials and her calls to focus on finding a “consensus” on abortion that can pass Congress. Since Scott, the other South Carolina politician in the race, dropped out last month, Haley has picked up more support from the state’s deep-pocketed donors, as well as Wall Street bigwigs. Most recently, she earned an endorsement from Americans for Prosperity, the major advocacy group in the Koch political network. Some national surveys have found Haley running in second place to the former president, and she is running firmly in second in New Hampshire. With the first nominating contests less than 45 days away, Haley appears to be solidifying the support of Trump-averse Republicans who are hoping against hope that the party avoids a 2020 general election rematch. 

Ron DeSantis

The fight between Haley and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to define themselves as the best alternative to Trump has continued throughout November. One place where DeSantis has strengthened his position is in Iowa, where he earned the endorsement of Governor Kim Reynolds, as well as that of Bob Vander Plaats, president and CEO of the Iowa-based conservative group The Family Leader. But even there, he faces stiff competition from Haley, who has been rising in polls of the Hawkeye state. Still, DeSantis often places second in polls of Iowa, and in national polls. After his campaign got off to a rocky start, highlighting controversial culture war issues, he has more recently emphasized his record in Florida, where he won reelection last year by 20 points after rejecting COVID-19 restrictions. (His approach to the pandemic was one key topic in an unusual debate on Thursday that pitted him against California Governor Gavin Newsom.) DeSantis signed a law in Florida this year that would ban most abortions after 6 weeks of pregnancy. He has committed to supporting a 15-week national ban.

Vivek Ramaswamy

While he got plenty of attention for his attacks on other candidates and even the moderators at the last debate, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has not gained much ground in the polls. He has continued to draw little contrast between himself and the former President; in fact, his political director recently left his campaign to join Trump’s. He has continued to slam elected Republicans, make pledges to slash positions in federal agencies, and issue warnings about preventing World War III. But Ramaswamy has made some strategic shifts. After rising to prominence running an unconventional campaign, Ramaswamy has woven in more traditional approaches this fall, opening an Iowa campaign headquarters and spending millions of dollars on TV ads. 

Other Candidates Who May Make the Debate Stage

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who has largely framed his campaign in opposition to Trump, announced that he had hit the donor threshold for the next debate. Additionally, his team has pointed to two national polls in which he received more than 6% support, but it’s unclear whether or not those polls meet the RNC’s criteria. Christie is also polling above 6% in New Hampshire, where he has focused his bid. 

North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum and former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson are also still in the race, though neither has participated in an RNC debate in months, and recent public polls don’t show them anywhere near the 6% threshold.

Sandra Day O’Connor, the former U.S. Supreme Court justice who died Friday at the age of 93, secured the first line for her obituaries back in 1981, when she became the first woman ever appointed to that position. Today, however, a different fact about her appointment may stand out: the widespread bipartisan support with which her nomination was met.

A little over four decades after her nomination made history, she has been followed by five other women to the Supreme Court bench. But the welcome she was offered by Washington — on both sides of the aisle — has become increasingly rare.

When she was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in the summer of 1981, it was the realization of a promise the President had made during the 1980 campaign season. He had told voters that, given the opportunity, he would end a nearly 200-year streak for the Supreme Court, during which its more than 100 justices had all been men. That opportunity came with the retirement of Associate Justice Potter Stewart.

Though observers had noted that Reagan’s administration was extremely light on the representation of women—and TIME quoted sources saying that some in the White House still resisted the idea of a woman on the Supreme Court—this was a promise he intended to keep, narrowing his list of finalists to a handful of women before summoning the 51-year-old Arizona State Court of Appeals judge to meet with him in Washington. His announcement that she would be his pick pleased many, as she was widely seen as a “meticulous legal thinker” whose devotion to the law would triumph over ideology.

TIME explained why so many approved of the choice in a 1981 cover story about the nomination:

Other than on the far right, reaction to the nomination ranged from warm to ecstatic. Feminists generally were pleased. Eleanor Smeal, president of the National Organization for Women, termed the choice “a major victory for women’s rights.” Patricia Ireland, a Miami attorney and a regional director of NOW, said she was “thrilled and excited” by the selection, adding: “Nine older men do not have the same perspective on issues like sex discrimination, reproductive rights or the issues that affect women’s rights directly.” Declared former Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, a black lawyer: “I congratulate the President. The Supreme Court was the last bastion of the male: a stale dark room that needed to be cracked open. I don’t know the lady, but if she’s a good lawyer and believes in the Constitution, she’ll be all right.”

Liberal politicians joined the praise. House Speaker Tip O’Neill, who has been feuding with Reagan over his budget cuts and tax policies, termed the choice “the best thing he’s done since he was inaugurated.” Said Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy, who sits on the Judiciary Committee that will hold hearings on O’Connor’s nomination: “Every American can take pride in the President’s commitment to select such a woman for this critical office.”

Many conservative Republican Senators added their endorsement. Utah’s Orrin Hatch called it “a fine choice.” Reagan’s close friend, Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt, was enthusiastic, and Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker said he was “delighted by the nomination.” But South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, was a bit more restrained. “I intend to support her,” he said, “unless something comes up.”

The only significant opposition to O’Connor’s nomination came from the far right; in particular, some questioned whether—despite her statements that, personally, she found abortion “repugnant”—she would turn out to support reproductive rights as a justice. (In fact, she did end up having a major impact on American abortion rights law, but in a far more complicated manner than her 1981 foes feared.) Other conservatives believed that she was a supporter of the ultimately doomed Equal Rights Amendment. Mainstream conservative Washington, however, supported her nomination, and at her Senate confirmation hearing she won praise for “skillfully limiting her answers only to what the law is” rather than opening the door to questions on her personal beliefs.

That September, she was confirmed by a vote of 99 to zero.

“In an age of mounting judicial workloads and increasing technicality, we demand of our judges a wisdom that knows no time, has no prejudice, and wants no other reward,” Reagan said at an event for judges during the week of her confirmation. “The challenge seems impossible, and yet you’ve dedicated your lives to it.”

“A wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion,” Sandra Day O’Connor used to say.

As the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court, O’Connor was a testament to — and a test case for — that sentiment. O’Connor died on Friday at age 93. The Supreme Court said she died in Phoenix “of complications related to advanced dementia, probably Alzheimer’s, and a respiratory illness.”

While O’Connor felt that “her achievements are independent of her sex,” says lawyer and legal scholar Viet Dinh, who clerked for her in 1994, she never shied away from her own ambition or for her inevitable place as a role model for her gender.

“She felt the value but also the responsibility and burden of being the first,” Dinh says.

Where other legendary justices have been prone to sweeping rulings and florid prose, O’Connor was incremental in her holdings and restrained in her language. She was known for her centrist pragmatism, even as she often voted with the conservative bloc and waded into some of the most contentious issues in the country during her 25 years on the bench.

“She was a careful, practical jurist,” says attorney Andrew McBride, who clerked for her in 1988. “She wasn’t ideological. She didn’t champion any one judicial philosophy.”

That increasingly rare position put her in the influential middle of a court that would uphold the constitutional right to an abortion, define the boundaries of affirmative action and decide the results of a hotly contested presidential election. With her death— coming five years after the retirement of noted swing vote Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2018—that’s a position of power without comparison today.

Early years

O’Connor was born on March 26, 1930, and grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona called “Lazy B,” riding horses from an early age. It ”was no country for sissies, then or now,” she and her brother, Alan Day, wrote in an affectionate memoir about the ranch. She went on to Stanford and then Stanford Law School, where she met her husband, John, and was a classmate of future Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Despite graduating near the top of her class in 1952, as a woman O’Connor could only find work as an unpaid deputy county attorney in California.

And yet she plugged ahead, unwavering in her self-confidence and drive. “She faced challenges and just refused to let circumstances dictate what her life would become,” says attorney Allyson Ho, who clerked for her in 2002.

O’Connor went on to be assistant Attorney General of Arizona and then an Arizona state senator — eventually becoming the first woman to be a state Senate Majority Leader. After nearly three terms, she left political life and became a judge, ultimately rising to the Arizona State Court of Appeals. It was there that she caught the attention of President Ronald Regan, who had promised during his campaign to appoint the first woman to the Supreme Court. In 1981, he made good on that pledge, nominating O’Connor to replace Justice Potter Stewart.

“She is truly a person for all seasons,” Reagan said at the time, “possessing those unique qualities of temperament, fairness, intellectual capacity and devotion to the public good which have characterized the 101 brethren who have preceded her.”

Her own brand of feminism

For a pioneering woman, O’Connor practiced a self-possessed form of feminism, never sacrificing her role as a wife and mother during her groundbreaking career.

“I come to you tonight wearing my bra and my wedding ring,” she used to tell audiences in Arizona, according to Joan Biskupic’s biography of the Justice. Indeed, it was a decision to prioritize her family that eventually led to her surprise retirement in 2006 to spend more time with her husband, John, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease—the same disease that likely contributed to her death 14 years later. (John passed away in 2009. They are survived by their three sons.)

Accordingly, O’Connor “was particularly careful in cases involving women and children,” says her former clerk McBride. It is perhaps fitting that one of the most consequential decisions she made during her quarter-century on the court was on abortion.

Abortion-rights activists and objectors alike pinned their hopes on the first female justice in the years after the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, which was settled nearly a decade before O’Connor’s arrival on the bench. While she didn’t prove to be a firebrand for either side — she upheld some abortion restrictions early in her tenure — O’Connor delivered a major win for the pro-choice flank in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, modifying Roe’s framework but affirming a woman’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. She delivered the plurality opinion — authored by her, Justice Kennedy and Justice David Souter — from the bench with her typical subdued style. “Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles or morality, but that cannot control our decision,” O’Connor said. “Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.”

While she wasn’t a philosophical justice, certain lines of jurisprudence did appear in O’Connor’s thinking. Over the course of her career, she engaged with numerous federalism cases, and her past as a state legislator became apparent in her decisions, which consistently tipped the scales of power from the federal government back to the states. During her decades on the court, there was “a significant shift in how the court views federal-state relations,” Dinh says, “and that was largely led intellectually by Justice O’Connor.”

Judicial views

O’Connor also staked out a middle ground on the sensitive issue of affirmative action, unwilling to say that policies had to be completely colorblind but still uncomfortable with the idea of strongly race-conscious admissions policies. In 1989, in City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., O’Connor wrote for a five-justice majority and decided that affirmative action policies should be held to the standard of “strict scrutiny”— increasing the burden on people who wanted policies designed to help minorities to the same standard that had historically been used for discriminatory ones like Jim Crow laws. Fourteen years later, O’Connor again wrote for a 5-4 majority in an important affirmative action case, this time applying the strict scrutiny standard and upholding the admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School in Grutter v. Bollinger. While recognizing that the school had a compelling interest in promoting diversity, O’Connor noted, “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

But of all the controversial issues she faced — issues that are still passionately debated today — the most politically provocative case of O’Connor’s tenure came in 2000, when the Supreme Court had to step in and effectively decide the results of the presidential election. In a 5-4 split along ideological lines, with O’Connor joining the conservatives in the majority, the court ruled that vote recounts in Florida could not go forward. As a result, George W. Bush would become president, defeating Al Gore. Bush v. Gore would become one of the most divisive Supreme Court decisions in recent memory, tainting the justices with accusations of partisanship and testing Americans’ faith in their electoral system.

“There was a great deal of criticism,” O’Connor said of the case in 2002. “We don’t enjoy being thrust into the middle of political controversy.”

Closeness with her colleagues

But the stamp O’Connor leaves on the highest court in the land is not just in her decisions, which she once described as footsteps in hardening in wet concrete behind her. Her imprint can also be seen in the way the justices interact with one another. If the Supreme Court still practices collegiality and bipartisan warmth, even as the rest of the country moves rapidly in the opposite direction, it is thanks in no small part to her example. She used to insist that all nine justices eat lunch together after oral arguments and would go out of her way to welcome new justices who were seated during her tenure. She would take her clerks on spontaneous adventures and outings — hiking Old Rag Mountain in Virginia, visiting the National Arboretum — and host ‘musicales,’ as she called them, for other clerks and justices, often cooking for the occasion.

Indeed, O’Connor told TIME in the months after her 2006 retirement that she remained close to her colleagues. “During the term of the court, I stop by and have lunch with the rest of them like we always have. There are many occasions to see each other, and I will continue that. We all get along very well and like each other. We all meet together. We don’t make it a little one-on-one deal. It’s a group thing.”

“There aren’t many people, particularly those who leave a historic legacy, who combine an amazing confidence with a sense of humility and focus on others,” says Ho.

Still, she could sometimes be a stern boss; McBride remembers that a clerk for a different justice was afraid of O’Connor’s “beams of fire” glare. O’Connor, who battled and overcame breast cancer during her time on the bench, was “one of the most strong-willed people I’ve ever met,” he says. “She had an iron will, and if she wanted something to get done in a certain way, it generally got done her way.”

Life after the Supreme Court

After O’Connor left the bench, she founded iCivics in 2009, a civics education program that uses interactive games to engage with learners and that reports reaching more than 7.5 million students in all 50 states. “There is no more important work than deepening young people’s engagement in our nation,” O’Connor wrote in a 2018 letter announcing her dementia diagnosis. “I hope that I have inspired young people about civic engagement and helped pave the pathway for women who may have faced obstacles pursuing their careers.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in her 2017 Time 100 profile of O’Connor that her predecessor on the Supreme Court was not only a “pioneer” for becoming the first female justice, but for her work educating millions of children about the importance of civic engagement. “Today there could not be more pressing work,” Sotomayor wrote.

Justices Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett have already followed O’Connor’s path and become Supreme Court Justices. And speaking about her historic career in 2003, O’Connor said, “It’s fine to be the first, but you don’t want to be the last.”

Perhaps her greatest bequest to the country is the fact that, through her own smarts and tenacity, she has already ensured that she won’t be.

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The event was billed by some as a 2028 preview but it was more of a bizarro version of 2024—one where neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden were running for a second term.

In that alternate reality, it turns out, we would all be arguing a lot more about the pandemic.

“You were not following science. You were a lock-down Governor,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis told California Governor Gavin Newsom Thursday evening.

So much of the current political landscape can be traced to the national trauma of 2020’s Covid-19 pandemic and its fallout. Now almost four years on, the reverb continues to define political identity and ambition for two Governors with national aspirations and inclinations to be bullies. As DeSantis, who is running for President right now, and Newsom, who is not, clashed on Fox News, it was clear that their divergent approaches to pandemic was evidence in miniature why both men have a loud following among their parties’ partisans and why they rankle their detractors.

“I had Disney open during Covid and we made them a fortune and we saved a lot of jobs. You had Disney closed inexplicably for over a year,” DeSantis said of the popular theme parks in each of their states.

Newsom had a retort at the ready, noting that DeSantis had actually engaged in mass closures and other limits in 2020 until the Republican base had clearly sided with Donald Trump’s nothing-to-see-here approach. “You should apologize for your Covid record,” Newsom said. “You were with [Anthony] Fauci. You aligned with vaccines. You aligned with CDC guidelines until you didn’t. Tens of thousands of people died.”

DeSantis countered that he saw the light. “When we opened schools we bucked all of those people in June of 2020. He kept the schools closed for a long time,” DeSantis said.

The mutual enmity between the two men is as apparent as it is helpful to their national ambitions. Ultimately, neither of these men is particularly likable. DeSantis seemed like he was trying to get familiar and find his footing in a 2024 campaign that is slipping through his fingers, while Newsom seemed indifferent to public opinion of his smugness. Neither, though, is yet a viable nominee in the current environment.

DeSantis smirked through Newsom’s thumping, reduced to Trumpian staccatos of “lies” and “false.” DeSantis, whose presidential campaign is struggling by every objective measure, spent his time defending his tenure as Florida Governor and making the case that his version of conservatism is the future of the nation, while California is an outlier of American values and priorities.

“You’re trolling folks and trying to find migrants to play political games to get some news and attention so you can out-Trump Trump. By the way, how’s that going for you, Ron? You’re down 41 points in your own home state,” Newsom said.

DeSantis, who has made the culture wars a hallmark of his tenure as Governor and his platform for President, asserted that President Joe Biden is in cognitive decline and should step aside as the leader of the Democratic Party. “That’s why he’s running a shadow campaign,” DeSantis said of the man to his left.

Newsom declared he is not running for President in 2024 and again repeated that Vice President Kamala Harris is the obvious heir should Biden become incapable of running for a second term. “Joe Biden will be our nominee in a matter of weeks,” Newsom said. “It’s not even an option.”

At another point, Newsom corrected DeSantis’ pronunciation of Harris’ name: “By the way, it’s not Kah-mah-la Harris. Shame on you. It’s Comma-la Harris, Ron. Madame Vice President to you.”

The evening chugged along as the two men interrupted and stammered over each other. With DeSantis consistently chasing far-ahead frontrunner Trump and Newsom serving as a loyalist defender of the current White House, the Californian couldn’t help but to tweak DeSantis and his lagging campaign. “There’s one thing that we have in common: Neither of us will be the nominee for our party in 2024,” Newsom said dryly.

“When are you going to drop out and at least give Nikki Haley a shot to take down Donald Trump?” Newsom jabbed as the evening lurched to a close beyond the agreed-upon time limit. “She laid you out.”

“You wish,” was all DeSantis could summon.

DeSantis was clearly not ready to acknowledge the reality of the political landscape and instead kept his eyes trained on his immediate debating rival. “Gavin Newsom did huge damage to people in California. He ruined livelihoods,” DeSantis said. “We reopened the state very quickly. We saved thousands of jobs. We saved hundreds of thousands of jobs, thousands of businesses. We had our kids in school. He had kids locked out of schools because of the teachers’ unions.”

Host Sean Hannity, who struggled to keep the men on stage there in Georgia in check and listening to their counterparts, at times ready to cede control of the conversation.

“You’re nothing but a bully,” Newsom said as DeSantis kept interjecting with impunity.

“You’re a bully,” DeSantis shot back like they were on a school playground and not a national stage.

“You intimidate and humiliate people,” Newsom said. “By the way, how well is this campaign going for you?”

DeSantis largely ignored the taunts and instead kept hammering Florida’s supremacy over California. While he kept making the case for his nomination—now or in 2028—the night was unlikely to change DeSantis’ polling or fundraising as he chases the 2024 nomination. But Newsom, who is laying the groundwork for a 2028 campaign, kept dinging DeSantis as a relic.

“You want to bring us back to a pre-1960s world. America in reverse,” Newsom said.

For his part, DeSantis seemed ready to go in the opposite direction, to run the clock ahead to 2028, when both men could end up the nominee. But it’s entirely obvious the events of 2020 won’t be far from their planning.

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WASHINGTON — Two big-state governors with presidential ambitions, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, battled Thursday over the economy, pandemic restrictions and President Joe Biden‘s leadership in a prime-time showdown filled with fiery clashes over policy and personal insults.

“He’s joined at the hip with Biden and (Vice President Kamala) Harris,” DeSantis charged after repeatedly referring to Newsom as “slick.” “California represents the Biden-Harris agenda on steroids.”

Read More: Ron DeSantis on Fatherhood, Parents’ Rights, and the 2024 Campaign

Newsom welcomed the attack: “I’m proud of the work Biden and Harris have done,” he said. And he addressed DeSantis’ struggling presidential bid head on: “Neither of us will be the nominee for a party in 2024.”

The host, Fox News Channel, billed the 90-minute affair hosted by Sean Hannity as “The Great Red vs. Blue State Debate.” Yet it was held in a television studio with no audience in Georgia, a location chosen for its key swing-state implications in national politics. And it played out in the heart of presidential primary season with voters in both parties paying closer attention to their 2024 options heading into next fall’s general election.

As leaders of two of the three most populous states, DeSantis and Newsom have spent much of the past year poking each other’s policy choices and leadership style from afar. But on Thursday night, they were getting their first chance to challenge each other on the same national stage.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, aware that the unusual event was drawing national attention, unleashed a slew of fresh insults at DeSantis, one of his strongest Republican primary rivals, in a statement shortly before it began.

“Ron DeSanctimonious is acting more like a thirsty, third-rate OnlyFans wannabe model than an actual presidential candidate,” the Trump campaign wrote, using one of the many nicknames the former president has given his rival. “Instead of actually campaigning and trying to turn around his dismal poll numbers, DeSanctus is now so desperate for attention that he’s debating a Grade A loser like Gavin Newsom.”

DeSantis, a 45-year-old Republican governor elected to his second and final term last fall, is already actively running for president. But he has struggled for momentum in a 2024 campaign plagued by missteps in his bid to defeat Trump, who remains the overwhelming front-runner in the GOP primary.

Newsom, California’s 56-year-old term-limited Democratic governor, has positioned himself to seek the presidency someday, but like the rest of his party’s most ambitious leaders, he declined to challenge President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination in 2024. Instead, he’s emerged as a leading defender of Biden and a formal campaign adviser.

Ahead of the debate, Newsom sent out a message to supporters encouraging them to donate at least $10 to Biden’s reelection. “I want to tell Fox News viewers something they’ve never heard before… The truth about Joe Biden’s record,” he wrote. “But before I do — Joe Biden needs your help as well.”

Still, both Newsom and DeSantis saw Thursday night’s meeting as a real opportunity to strengthen their political standing in the short and longer term.

DeSantis’ allies have been talking up the event in recent days as a rare opportunity to prove his strength against one of the nation’s most prominent Democrats — a sharp contrast from recent Republican presidential debates where he’s struggled to break through on a stage where the candidates agree on most issues. And even some of DeSantis’ Republican rivals privately acknowledged he would likely raise a significant amount of money through online donations as a result of the appearance.

Meanwhile, Newsom, who, like DeSantis, will be out of a job come January 2027, has been eager to broaden his political profile ahead of a possible presidential bid in 2028 — or sooner, should the 81-year-old Biden unexpectedly drop out. Newsom has repeatedly shut down whispers about his interest in a 2024 bid.

But on Thursday, the California Democrat was speaking to a new set of voters on the conservative friendly Fox News, in line with his recent political strategy. In March, Newsom launched the “Campaign for Democracy” committee, which has allowed him to travel to red states that Democrats typically avoid. In recent months, he has visited Arkansas, Missouri, Montana, Utah and Florida.

Newsom has paid particular attention to Florida as DeSantis racked up conservative policy wins in recent years that pushed the purple state farther and farther to the right. In turn, DeSantis traveled to California earlier in the year and posted a video to social media highlighting drug use and homelessness in San Francisco, blaming the state’s “leftist policies.”

“Whether Newsom or Biden is the Democrat nominee in ’24, they both offer the same failed and dangerous ideology for America that helped get us in this mess,” DeSantis spokesperson Andrew Romeo posted on X, formerly Twitter. “We look forward to putting Ron DeSantis’ record of success up against it.”

Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State known for his realist approach to foreign policy during the Nixon and Ford administrations, has died. He was 100.

News of his death was confirmed by a statement from his consulting firm.

Kissinger was a highly influential but polarizing figure. His impact extended beyond his tenure as national security adviser from 1969 to 1975 and overlapping/concurrent service as Secretary of State from 1973 to 1977, for decades spanning from the Vietnam War to the aftermath of 9/11. He leaves behind a mixed legacy: Once the most admired man in America according to a 1973 Gallup poll—the same year that he was controversially named the joint recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize for the Paris Peace Accords, along with North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho—he has also been fiercely criticized as a war criminal.

As Secretary of State, he was known for pioneering a policy of détente with the Soviet Union and promoting an open door policy toward China. He’s also credited with eventually (some would argue belatedly) extricating America from the Vietnam War. But his critics have argued that his policies contributed to millions of deaths by permitting heavy bombing in Cambodia and Laos, blocking the ascension of a democratically elected leader in Chile, genocides in East Timor and Bangladesh and civil war in southern Africa.

Born in 1923 near Nuremberg, Germany, Heinz Alfred Kissinger and his Jewish family fled the Nazis in 1938. (Once in America, he changed his name to Henry.) As a new American citizen, he served in the U.S. Army for three years, returning to Europe to fight in World War II and receiving a Bronze Star in 1945. Kissinger then earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard, where he held a faculty appointment from 1954 to 1969.

Kissinger was one of the leading practitioners of realpolitik, arguing that pragmatism—rather than idealism—should govern America’s approach to foreign policy. He once famously said that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” a mentality that manifested itself, some critics alleged, in a calculating and opportunistic approach to his professional relationships.

In the 1968 presidential election, Kissinger hedged his bets. After Nixon won the nomination, Kissinger—a former adviser to rival Republican Nelson Rockefeller, then Governor of New York—sent vague updates to the Nixon campaign about the status of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s peace talks with North Vietnam. But Kissinger played both sides: offering, but never ultimately delivering, Rockefeller’s opposition research on Nixon to Hubert Humphrey’s campaign.

Once Nixon appointed him national security adviser, Kissinger proved adept at navigating the administration’s atmosphere of suspicion and wiretaps, reportedly authorizing FBI investigations and wiretaps against at least one member of his staff and further knowledge of staff surveillance.

He managed to escape the Watergate scandal largely unscathed, continuing to serve as Secretary of State until the end of the Ford administration in 1977, when he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.

After co-founding an international consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, Inc., in 1982, he continued to leverage his global connections and remain active in diplomatic circles.

Though he was no longer Secretary of State, he continued to advise future administrations. Reagan appointed him chair of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America, which he led from 1983 until 1985. He also served as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1984 to 1990.

In November 2002, President George W. Bush appointed Kissinger chairman of the 9/11 commission, but he resigned a few weeks later amid questions about potential conflicts of interest. Kissinger also served as a “powerful, largely invisible influence” on that administration’s approach to the Iraq War, according to Bob Woodward’s State of Denial. However, Kissinger tipped his hand a bit in a 2005 op-ed, writing that “victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy.”

Kissinger’s influence also extended to another Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who once wrote in The Washington Post that she “relied on his counsel.”

Some critics have objected to Kissinger’s continued involvement in American foreign policy, arguing that his actions as America’s top diplomat created long-lasting problems that the nation continues to grapple with today, such as aiding fundamentalist Islamic movements in the Middle East and playing a role in fostering American dependence on Saudi oil.

Nevertheless, Kissinger continued to remain active in both society and diplomatic circles well into his 90s. Continuing to meet with leaders from Russia and China, including at least 17 meetings with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. In June 2018, at the age of 95, he warned against the advent of artificial intelligence in a piece for The Atlantic entitled “How the Enlightenment Ends.” Two years later, in November 2020, Kissinger also warned incoming President Joe Biden to work quickly to restore U.S.-China relations that deteriorated during the Trump Administration.

But until the end, his political philosophy remained pragmatic. “America would not be true to itself if it abandoned [its] essential idealism,” he wrote in his book World Order at age 91. “But to be effective, these aspirational aspects of policy must be paired with an unsentimental analysis of underlying factors.”

The yearlong effort by House Republicans to impeach President Joe Biden is reaching a critical stage, as the President’s brother and son may testify in the coming weeks even as questions linger about whether the disjointed investigation has uncovered any impeachable offenses.

House Republicans have yet to prove that money made by Joe Biden’s son Hunter or other family members in overseas business deals made it to Joe Biden or influenced his actions while he was President or Vice President. Months of press releases and depositions by the Republican leaders of the House Oversight Committee have been big on fanfare and light on substance.

Joe Biden’s brother Jim Biden is scheduled to be interviewed by the committee on Dec. 6, and Joe Biden’s son Hunter is scheduled to be deposed on Dec. 13. 

Hunter Biden’s legal team believes the Republicans’ case against the President is weak enough that its lead lawyer on Tuesday challenged Rep. James Comer, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, to let Hunter testify at a public hearing. “Our client will get right to it by agreeing to answer any pertinent and relevant question you or your colleagues might have, but—rather than subscribing to your cloaked, one-sided process—he will appear at a public Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing,” Abbe Lowell wrote on Hunter Biden’s behalf. “A public proceeding would prevent selective leaks, manipulated transcripts, doctored exhibits, or one-sided press statements.”

Comer refused the offer, saying Hunter Biden would be deposed privately and could be called later to testify in a public hearing. The House Oversight Committee “won’t conduct this investigation on Hunter’s terms,” Comer wrote Tuesday on X. “The President’s son must first appear for a deposition.”

The public back-and-forth came as some House Republicans are acknowledging that the information uncovered so far hasn’t shown Joe Biden being influenced by money being made by his son or other family members, or it playing a role in any of his actions as a public servant. On Tuesday, Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo, who’s been driving attention toward Comer’s investigation for months, asked Rep. Lisa McClain of Michigan, a member of the Oversight Committee, if Republicans had found any policy changes Joe Biden made as a result of those business deals. “The short answer is no,” McClain said. “That’s what we are trying to get to right now.” 

The inquiry has produced evidence suggesting Hunter Biden traded off his family name to advance his business interests. Hunter Biden is also the focus of a federal criminal investigation and has been charged with lying about his drug use when he purchased a handgun in 2018.

Meanwhile, Comer has been casting his investigation farther afield. On Monday, the Kentucky Republican wrote in an op-ed published by Fox News that the Committee has concerns about the classified documents found last year in a closet in Joe Biden’s University of Pennsylvania offices in Washington, D.C., but that the prosecutor investigating the documents case, Special Counsel Robert Hur, refused to let House Republicans look at the material.

The inquiry into Biden’s improper possession of classified documents has unfolded alongside an investigation into former President Donald Trump’s taking of classified documents to his home in Florida, with Trump allegedly refusing to give some of them back. That led to Trump being federally charged in August in a case that could reach trial next year. Biden has said he didn’t know the classified documents were in his possession and that he returned them promptly when they were discovered.

Comer wrote that he was concerned individuals without security clearances may have had access to the Biden documents and that some of the documents were related to countries where Biden’s son and family members were doing business deals. But Comer hasn’t shown evidence that’s the case.

“President Biden’s mishandling of classified material and his involvement in his family’s business schemes threaten our national security,” Comer wrote in his op-ed, suggesting the documents could play a larger role than previously expected in an impeachment push that’s expected to reach its final stages early next year.

The House impeachment inquiry into Biden is picking up momentum after the House muddled through a leadership crisis throughout most of October, after the chamber voted to oust Rep. Kevin McCarthy as Speaker. His replacement, Speaker Mike Johnson, is watching the impeachment proceedings closely and said earlier this month that the inquiry is at “an inflection point” and that the “appropriate” next step is to put witnesses under oath and question them to “fill gaps in the record.” 

Idaho officials on Monday asked the Supreme Court to restore a strict abortion law that would allow the state to prosecute physicians conducting abortions in some cases. If the Supreme Court decides to weigh in, it would be the first time the nation’s highest court would render a judgment on punishing abortion-providing doctors after overturning the constitutional right an abortion.

The Idaho law, enacted in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, allows state officials to prosecute or revoke the professional license of doctors who perform abortions, except in cases where it is necessary to prevent the woman’s death or when the pregnancy results from rape or incest.

It’s unclear if the Supreme Court will step in, but the justices are yet to schedule an abortion hearing since the Dobbs decision. “It’s pretty routine when you lose in the lower court to ask the Supreme Court to intervene,” says Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California at Davis with an expertise in abortion. “Whether the court is willing to intervene or even wants to deal with yet another abortion case is a trickier question.”

Idaho’s law is one of the strictest in the nation, and whether the Supreme Court gets involved will have legal and political ramifications in the country’s shifting abortion landscape. A ruling against Idaho “may discourage states from going as far as Idaho has,” says Ziegler. “There’s also the politics of it, where we’ve seen voters being increasingly unhappy with sweeping abortion bans.”

Read More: Idaho’s New Law Will Punish Anyone Helping a Minor Access an Out-of-State Abortion With Up to 5 Years in Prison

The legal battle in Idaho is part of a broader wave of challenges following the Dobbs decision. Idaho’s near-total abortion ban has been contested in courts for over a year. After an initial appeal by the state, a panel of three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit issued a ruling that would have allowed the law to take effect. However, an en banc panel of 9th Circuit judges later put the law on hold earlier this month.

The law was originally challenged in court by the Biden Administration, which argued that the Idaho law would inhibit emergency room doctors from performing abortions that are necessary to stabilize the health of women facing medical emergencies and violated the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), a provision of a federal Medicare statute that bars states from imposing restrictions that would prevent emergency room doctors from treating patients.

U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill ruled in favor of the Biden Administration in August 2022, claiming that Idaho officials cannot enforce the abortion law against doctors who are also obligated to follow the federal EMTALA. Winmill expressed concern that doctors in emergency rooms could face an impossible task of complying with both federal and state law, given the complex and chaotic nature of emergency medical situations. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in September at first agreed to let Idaho enforce its ban pending appeal, but then the full panel of appeals judges in November lifted the stay, effectively meaning the law cannot go into effect.

In a court filing on Monday, Idaho’s Republican attorney general urged the Supreme Court to step in on an emergency basis to put the district court’s ruling on hold while it appeals the decision, claiming that it marked “an ongoing violation of both Idaho’s sovereignty and its traditional police power over medical practice.”

Idaho officials also argued that both Winmill’s initial decision and the recent 9th Circuit ruling infringe on the Supreme Court’s endorsement of states’ rights in the Dobbs decision. Idaho officials, represented by a conservative legal group that opposes abortion, contend that the federal emergency care law in question, EMTALA, is intended to prevent “patient dumping” rather than allowing the federal government to dictate state abortion law.

The Idaho case comes more than a year after abortion laws were thrown into turmoil following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, a longstanding ruling that guaranteed abortion rights to women nationwide.

All living U.S. first ladies and multiple Presidents are expected to attend a tribute celebrating the life of former first Lady Rosalynn Carter, who passed away on November 19 at 96 years old. 

The private tribute on Nov. 28 is part of a three-day memorial service for the former First Lady taking place across Georgia this week, which began on Monday with a wreath laying ceremony at Carter’s alma mater, Georgia Southwestern State University in Americus, Ga. In the evening, the public was able to pay their respects as her remains lay in repose at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum. The funeral will be held on Wednesday.

Here’s what to know. 

Who is expected to attend?

Former president Jimmy Carter, 99 and currently in hospice care, is planning to travel to Atlanta to attend his wife’s memorial service on Emory University’s campus.

He will be joined by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, along with their spouses. All the living former First Ladies — Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, Michelle Obama and Melania Trump— are also expected to be in attendance.

Multiple members of Congress will be present, including both Georgia senators, along with members of the Emory community, with whom the Carters had a longstanding relationship.

Memorial and funeral service

Tuesday’s service will be an invitation-only tribute to the former First Lady. The service is expected to include some of her favorite Scripture passages and songs, along with tributes from Carter’s longtime aide and friend Kathryn Cade, journalist Judy Woodruff, and grandson Jason Carter. Her surviving grandchildren will serve as honorary pallbearers. 

The memorial service will be followed by a funeral on Wednesday in Plains, Ga., at the couple’s family home where she lived most of her life alongside her husband and former President Jimmy Carter. 

“We are doing exactly what she wanted at the service,” her grandson Jason Carter told CNN. “She would have been amazed and gratified by the outpouring of love and support.”

Read more

Read TIME’s obituary for Carter, a pioneering First Lady who worked tirelessly to raise awareness for those with mental health illness, here.

Read about Carter’s decision to hire a wrongfully convicted murderer to serve as White House nanny here—and how they became lifelong friends.

Read about Jimmy Carter’s secret to living to 99, according to his grandson, here.

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.

To find the closest historical precedent to what George Santos is about to face, you have to go back 21 years, when James Traficant was standing in the well of the House, spinning his latest colorful tale of victimhood, and dang was it a doozy. 

With his last chance to convince his colleagues not to kick him out of the House, Traficant had a laundry list of defenses at the ready. That the 10-count racketeering indictment against the Ohio Democrat was the result of a personal vendetta by former Attorney General Janet Reno. That there was no truth to the allegation that he was involved in a murder-for-hire scheme to eliminate a horse trainer who might testify against him. That Traficant had done nothing wrong when congressional staffers “voluntarily” worked on his farm and houseboat, and he only “borrowed” his aides’ paychecks in what prosecutors alleged was a kickback scheme that had staffers sliding cash under his office door. That Traficant allegedly had plenty of his pals confessing on tapes that the feds had bullied them into testifying against him, that one of those agents attempted to rape a constituent to coerce her to testify, and that a friend had seen his business curiously firebombed to destroy evidence that exonerated him.

“They didn’t allow witnesses to testify,” he lamented as the presiding officer repeatedly told Traficant to drop his blue language that, by today’s standards for profanity, seems quaint. “They allowed none of my tapes. All of my tapes were exculpatory.”

Maybe Traficant truly believed his conspiracy-tinged paranoia that July day back in 2002, his last in the House. Nonetheless, it was an embarrassing day for those of us who ever called Traficant’s Youngstown-based district home. In that northeast Ohio district, Traficant may have been the kook who ended his out-of-nowhere speeches with the Star Trek slogan of “beam me up” but he won re-election easily. I still have a flag that flew over the House as a graduation present from a man I once interviewed as a high school intern at The Warren Tribune-Chronicle; he knew how to keep the locals happy and when to feed the media appetite for colorful quotes that made it seem like he really mattered.

Yet as a newly convicted felon, his colleagues wanted Traficant gone and didn’t want to rely on Mahoning Valley voters to get it right. Traficant didn’t take the hint and used 30 minutes of floor time to mount a last-minute, long-odds pitch to keep his job, though at times he seemed to know his effort was doomed from the start. “I’m prepared to lose everything. I’m prepared to go to jail. You go ahead and expel me,” he said with contemptuous fatalism.

And they did. By a 420-to-1 vote, Traficant became just the second House member since the Civil War to be expelled from the House. It turns out, even Congress has the occasional limit to its patience.  

More than two decades later, the House will face the same question again: Has the behavior of one of their own gone so far as to warrant expulsion? Santos, a New York Republican, would be just the third House member to meet that fate since lawmakers expelled 10 Confederates from their ranks during the first year of the Civil War. Santos is accused of serial misconduct in a scathing bipartisan, 56-page ethics report that spans the deceiving of donors, the embezzlement of campaign cash, and the use of it on Botox and subscriptions to a website mainly used for porn. A resolution to expel him from Rep. Robert Garcia, a California Democrat, was expected Tuesday afternoon, and under the House rules he would merit a vote within two days.

Read more: What I Learned Investigating George Santos

But rather than argue his innocence as Traficant mostly did in his unhinged final appeal to his colleagues (notwithstanding his allegation that donors bought “Senators’ girlfriends gifts”), Santos seems determined to burn down the House as he heads toward the exits. In a three-hour rant on Friday on the platform formerly known as Twitter, Santos unfurled invectives, insults, and insinuations. While he was objectively accurate when he said lawmakers cast the occasional vote while drunk, he was on potentially shakier ground when accusing others of skipping work on the regular because they’re too hungover after a night of booze and sex with lobbyists.

“Within the ranks of the United States Congress, there’s felons galore, there’s people with all sorts of sheisty backgrounds, and all of a sudden, George Santos is the Mary Magdalene of the United States Congress,” posited Santos, whose reported drag name was not Mary Magdalene but rather Kitara Ravache.

In the days since that online rampage, Santos has told anyone who will listen that he’s heading toward expulsion, no matter what he does. He’s probably right. 

Still, there is a non-zero chance that some of his colleagues will stick with him. There are two reasons that lawmakers may summon for defending a fabulist with a dodgy understanding of campaign finance laws and a totally unmoored relationship with the truth: 1) the GOP majority currently stands at a paltry four seats and the odds Republicans can hold Santos’ district are slim at best; and 2) absent a criminal conviction, as Traficant had, some members may feel that even an Ethics Committee report as damning as this one isn’t enough to override the will of the voters.

That second justification could play with lawmakers who would be on the fence in other circumstances. After all, an ethics lapse isn’t unheard of in Congress. Facing 23 criminal indictments, Santos survived a first attempt to expel him. The effort fell well short of the two-thirds tally—291 votes—to expel him; only 179 members said he should go and another 19 simply said they were present. 

While Santos seems determined to become a parody of himself worthy of Bowen Yang’s yeoman work on Saturday Night Live, he may be playing the long game within a party where truth has become a standing victim. And that might be what feeds a third bucket of reluctant Santos apologists: he might never go away, and making him a victim only gives him an easier glidepath back to relevance.

On his way out the door in 2002, Traficant spun up a credulity-stretching tale explaining his innocence, offering up as evidence that the feds didn’t bother to tap his phones, didn’t have his fingerprints on dollar bills, and no FBI or IRS agents who investigated him ever testified against him. He added scores of non sequiturs as well, such as the fact the forensic accountant injured his groin in a courtroom accident and the spouse of the judge worked for a law firm representing one of the witnesses. To cap off his yarn, Traficant said that when pulled over late one night, he passed a field sobriety test meant to bust a political opponent. “There’s no physical evidence,” he said defiantly before saying his colleagues implicated in a House page sex scandal got to stay in power so he should, too. (The whole video is cringeworthy and a masterclass in political theater.)

A few months after his expulsion, the booted nine-term lawmaker still earned 15% of the vote from his Pennsylvania jail cell while running as an independent. After serving seven years of an eight-year sentence, Traficant tried to make another comeback as an independent. That time, in 2010’s Tea Party wave, he snagged 16% of the vote.

Which is why, while most of Washington is eager to rid itself of Santos, there is a slice of the population that believed Traficant’s nutty version of reality and will believe Santos’ claim that he is actually cleaner than most of his colleagues at the Capitol. After all, Santos is barely trying to defend himself against any of the numerous allegations against him, noting he has given 40 speeches, taken 100 meetings, cleared 1,200 constituent cases, and repeatedly defended President Donald Trump. Americans love a comeback story, and there will always be room on far-right platforms to reward a panderer, no matter how ridiculous the record.

Doubt it? A 91-times-charged ex-President who has his own tenuous relationship with reality is the far-ahead leader of the current Republican Party and, just seven weeks from the Iowa caucuses, is seemingly unreachable. If Trump can make a comeback while fighting four separate criminal cases and a raft of other legal troubles in the wings, Santos might believe he could do the same in miniature. Given the state of the current GOP, Santos could be making the most fact-based assessment of his political prospects in an alternative reality where facts are actual liabilities and fabricated credentials are strengths.

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I first heard the name George Santos in 2019 when my editor assigned me a routine writeup about a new congressional candidate. At the time, I was doing one and often more pieces a day for Newsday’s newsletter about New York politics, and I was glad to have what seemed like a quick hit.

Santos got on the phone immediately. But it was a strange call. He claimed he was launching his campaign as we spoke, but also that he was currently in Florida for a work conference. He seemed vague on some policies, but he spoke defiantly about his personal story–a first-generation American (his phrase) and work in private equity for his whole career (which I eventually learned was wrong). 

I wrote the little piece and he shared it on Facebook and in one parallel universe, this could have been the last I heard or wrote about the Queens newcomer. But Santos’s strange doings created plenty of fodder for me in the following months. Like not being clear about whether he lived in the district, or raising money for a “recount” campaign committee for a race he’d definitely lost. He had some wild statements about abortion. Still, not many people were paying much attention to him. So even after negative pieces, he’d pick up the phone. 

Eventually, though, he started hiding. By his second campaign in 2022 (“second time’s the charm,” he accurately told me), he skipped an endorsement interview, and once hustled away when he saw me in the men’s room before a Newsday debate. (The editorial board endorsed his opponent.)

After he won, the New York Times published their blockbuster story that connected the dots for many of his lies and strangenesses. But now I just had further questions about this guy who’d been kicking around the back of my mind for years. Clearly he had lied about almost everything, but why? 

So began my effort to get inside George Santos’s head. He made it very clear from the outset that he would not be “lending” his voice (his phrase) to my book, The Fabulist, and that neither he nor anyone from his staff were interested in talking. Fine by me. I found plenty of people who were happy to chat, including over 100 individuals who knew him, from friends and family to former teachers and dates. I spoke to people he scammed and people who just remembered him as a pretty fun guy. I learned about his jokes and his routines, and how expensive a wine bottle he’d order ($200, one person said). These helped fill out his profile even without a personal interview—and even if he had chatted, how would I have trusted him not to lie?

I traveled to different places in search of him. I understood that Brazil had been a key beacon in his late adolescence–maybe a shining moment, even, of real happiness–and so I spent weeks there to learn more about his teenage years and experimentations with drag and romance. This is how I ended up in a “sauna” where sex could be purchased for $8, to watch Santos’s drag mentor perform the kind of show that Santos once watched and emulated. Santos has downplayed his drag history and there are only a few photos and brief videos, so watching Santos’s mentor in person was the only way to see the origin of Santos’s routine in full.

I listened to every podcast I could find where he did in fact lend some words. I read multiple books by KrisAnne Hall, a firebrand political author he said he admired, and gathered photographs and video of Santos from well before he got famous. I walked places where he had walked, including the now-shuttered College Point cube where he worked as a young man in a dreary call center, a place where the sound of airplanes lifting off from LaGuardia might have reminded him of all the places he wanted to fly but was not. I watched him in federal court, as in October when he donned bright red shoes and a funereal dark jacket, saying nothing to reporters but blowing a kiss by the courthouse steps. The chase could get alternately very solemn or surreal, and I could feel both far from him and very close, as when someone sent me a picture of his literal passport, as well as half-naked snapshots of him in a bath. 

I also knocked on a lot of doors in New York, and he was not thrilled with that: “We have video proof of you trespassing inside various buildings where my family members reside and leaving notes under their doors,” was the way he described my standard shoe-leather reporting. 

I did leave a lot of notes and knocked on lots of unopened doors, but you never know what can happen when you exercise your knuckles. Once, in an apartment unit that was associated with Santos’s dad, I spoke to a Greek man who was not Gercino dos Santos but who nevertheless was so thrilled about his connection with the whole Santos story that he banged on a few other portals and got some neighbors out on the landing to marvel the afternoon away. 

Sometimes, you also find someone you’ve been looking for. 

My search for the real Santos included knocking and calling until the absolute last moment. On the day I was last supposed to submit the manuscript I successfully caught a friend of Santos’s at home in Queens because there was a story I wanted to factcheck. Factchecking, by the way, was also something Santos refused to do. “This is your journey,” he texted me in response to a request on that front. “Now own up your short coming [sic] and know I will challenge any and all thing [sic] inaccurate in your book.”

The chase continued even after the book was done. Chatting with a Nassau GOP functionary recently, for example, I was told a delightful story about Santos “bidding” on a bowtie in an impromptu political raffle. This was during a GOP leaders meeting back in the fall of 2022. Santos went away with the bowtie, but supposedly the party never saw a check. 

Never change, George.