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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If it surprised you when Sen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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