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Kevin McCarthy has begun his job as speaker by servicing the demands of the most extreme—and weirdest—members who supported him, thus handing the People’s House to the Clown Caucus.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

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The Ringmaster

Now controlled by its most unhinged members, the Republican Party has returned to power in the People’s House. Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the ringmaster of this circus, is happily paying off his debts by engaging in petty payback, conjuring up inane committees, threatening to crash the U.S. economy, and protecting a walking monument to fraud named George Santos, who may or may not actually be named “George Santos.”

In the enduring words of Emerson, Lake & Palmer: Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.

Politics, in Washington or anywhere else, is about deals. No one should have expected McCarthy to make his way to the gavel without signing a few ugly promissory notes along the way. Sometimes, friends are betrayed and enemies are elevated; an important project can end up taking a back seat to a boondoggle. Just ask Representative Vern Buchanan of Florida, who got pushed out of the chairmanship of Ways and Means in favor of Jason Smith of Missouri, a choice preferred by the MAGA caucus. “You fucked me,” he reportedly said to at McCarthy on the floor of the House. “I know it was you, you whipped against me.” Buchanan, a source on the House floor told Tara Palmeri at Puck, was so angry that the speaker’s security people were about to step in. (McCarthy’s office denies that this happened.)

It’s one thing to pay political debts, even the kind that McCarthy accepted despite their steep and humiliating vig. It’s another to hand off control of crucial issues to a claque of clowns who have no idea what they’re doing and are willing to harm the national security of the United States as long as it suits their political purposes.

Let us leave aside the removal of Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from the Intelligence Committee. The republic will not rise or fall based on such things, and if McCarthy wants to engage in snippy stoogery to ingratiate himself with the MAGA caucus and soothe Donald Trump’s hurt feelings, it is within his power to do so. In his letter to Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the speaker claimed his decision was all about “integrity.” This is not just the death of irony; it is a North Korean–style, firing-squad-by-anti-aircraft-gun execution of irony. Worse, McCarthy even has the right to channel, as he did, Joseph McCarthy, and smear Swalwell by alluding to derogatory information that the FBI supposedly has about him. It might not be honorable or professional, but he can do it.

McCarthy’s shuffle of the Intelligence Committee pales in comparison to the creation of two new committees, both of which were part of the Filene’s Basement clearance of the new speaker’s political soul. One of them, on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, is a continuation of the Republican assault on science that predated Trump but reached new heights with the former president’s disjointed gibbering about bleach injections. The committee will include the conspiracy theorist and McCarthy’s new best friend Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Ronny Jackson of Texas, the former White House physician who assured us in 2018 that Trump only weighed 239 pounds and was in astoundingly good health.

The COVID committee is unlikely to move the needle (if you’ll pardon the expression) on public health. No one’s mind will be changed if Jackson and Tucker Carlson bloviate to each other about things neither of them really believes. Most of the damage from such a committee will likely be concentrated among the vaccine refusers, who already seem determined to get sick and die to make a political point.

The “weaponization” committee is worse, and likely to do far more damage to the United States, because it is starting from the premise that the machinery of the United States government—law enforcement, the intelligence community, and federal agencies—has been turned against the average American citizen. Jim Jordan, who stands out even in this GOP for his partisan recklessness, will serve as chair. The committee will include members whom I think of as the “You-Know-Better-Than-This Caucus”: people with top-flight educations and enough experience to know that Jordan is a crank, but who nevertheless will support attacks on American institutions if that’s what it takes to avoid being sent back home to live among their constituents. Two standouts here are Thomas Massie (an MIT graduate who apparently majored in alchemy and astrology), and the ever-reliable Elise Stefanik (Harvard), whose political hemoglobin is now composed of equal parts cynicism and antifreeze.

The committee will include other monuments to probity, such as Chip Roy; Dan Bishop, who has claimed that the 2020 election was rigged; Harriet Hageman, the woman who defeated Liz Cheney in Wyoming; and Kat Cammack of Florida, who alleged that Democrats were drinking on the House floor during the speakership fight. All of them will have access to highly sensitive information from across the U.S. government.

Jordan and his posse are styling themselves as a new Church Committee, the 1975 investigation into the Cold War misdeeds of American intelligence organizations headed by Idaho Senator Frank Church. This dishonors Church, whose committee uncovered genuinely shocking abuses by agencies that had for too long escaped oversight during the early days of the struggle with the Soviet Union. Church himself was a patriot, unlike some of the charlatans on this new committee, but even Church’s investigation did at least some damage with its revelations, and some of the reforms (especially the move away from relying on human intelligence) undertaken later based in part on its findings were unwise. In any case, his fame was short-lived: He was defeated for reelection in 1980 and died in 1984. (Full disclosure: I spoke at a conference held in Church’s honor many years ago and met with his widow.)

The Church Committee was, in its day, a necessary walk across the hot coals for Americans who had invested too much power and trust in the executive branch. I suspect that the Jordan committee will not look to uncover abuses, but rather to portray any government actions that it does not like as abuses, especially the investigations into Trump. It will be the Church Committee turned on its head, as members of Congress seek to protect a lawless president by destroying the agencies that stand between our democracy and his ambitions.

Kevin McCarthy will be fine with all of it, as long as he gets to wear the top hat and red tails while indulging in the fantasy that he is in control of the clowns and wild animals, and not the other way around.

Related:

Speaker in name only Why Kevin McCarthy can’t lose George Santos

Today’s News

President Joe Biden announced that he would send M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, and Germany announced that it would send an initial shipment of 14 Leopard 2 tanks. The arraignment of the suspect in the Half Moon Bay, California, mass shooting was postponed until Feb. 16. School officials were warned on three separate occasions that a 6-year-old who later shot his first-grade teacher in Virginia had a gun or had made threats, according to an attorney for the teacher.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Public outrage hasn’t improved policing, Conor Friedersdorf argues.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Getty; The Atlantic

Why the French Want to Stop Working

By Pamela Druckerman

If you want to understand why the French overwhelmingly oppose raising their official retirement age from 62 to 64, you could start by looking at last week’s enormous street protest in Paris.

“Retirement before arthritis” read one handwritten sign. “Leave us time to live before we die” said another. One elderly protester was dressed ironically as “a banker” with a black top hat, bow tie, and cigar—like the Mr. Monopoly mascot of the board game. “It’s the end of the beans!” he exclaimed to the crowd, using a popular expression to mean that pension reform is the last straw.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

The Church Committee revealed outrages (including assassination plots) that today might seem like they were taken from bad spy-movie scripts. But such things were deadly serious business, as the United States moved from World War II into the Cold War determined to do whatever it took to defeat Soviet communism. For decades, Americans romanticized spies and spying as glamorous and exciting, but in reality, espionage was a nasty business. Our British cousins knew this better than we did, which is why British spy fiction was always grittier than its American counterpart. (The James Bond novels are pretty dour, sometimes even sadistic; Hollywood cleaned them up.)

But just because we lost our innocence about spying doesn’t mean we can’t still enjoy the culture it produced back in the day. In that spirit, let me recommend to you Secret Agent, an offering on a wonderful, listener-supported San Francisco–based internet radio station called SomaFM. There are plenty of great channels on SomaFM—I especially like Left Coast 70s, which is just what it sounds like—but Secret Agent is a lot of fun, a mixture of 1960s lounge and light jazz, soundtracks, and other tidbits, with the occasional line from 007 and other spies spliced in here and there. It’s a nice throwback to the days when espionage was cool, and it’s great music for working or a get-together over martinis, which should be shaken and … well, you know.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

The next front is rapidly emerging in the struggle between supporters and opponents of legal abortion, and that escalating conflict is increasing the chances that the issue will shape the 2024 election as it did last November’s midterm contest.

President Joe Biden triggered the new confrontation with a flurry of recent moves to expand access to the drugs used in medication abortions, which now account for more than half of all abortions performed in the United States. Medication abortion involves two drugs: mifepristone followed by misoprostol (which is also used to prevent stomach ulcers). Although abortion opponents question the drugs’ safety, multiple scientific studies have found few serious adverse effects beyond headache or cramping.

Federal regulation of the use and distribution of these drugs by agencies including the FDA and the United States Postal Service has long been overshadowed in the abortion debate by the battles over Supreme Court nominations and federal legislation to ban or authorize abortion nationwide. But with a conservative majority now entrenched in the Court, and little chance that Congress will pass national legislation in either direction any time soon, abortion supporters and opponents are focusing more attention on executive-branch actions that influence the availability of the pills.

[Read: The abortion backup plan no one is talking about]

“The reality of abortion care has been changing very, very rapidly, and now the politics are catching up with it,” Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who served as one of Biden’s advisers in 2020, told me.

Tens of thousands of anti-abortion activists will descend on Washington today for their annual March for Life—the first since the Supreme Court last summer overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a nationwide right to abortion. The activists will cheer the swift moves by some two dozen Republican-controlled states to ban or severely restrict abortion since the Court struck down Roe.

But even as abortion opponents celebrate, they are growing more frustrated about the increased reliance on the drugs, which are now used in 54 percent of U.S. abortions—up dramatically from less than one-third less than a decade ago, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. “With the overturning of Roe, [with] COVID, and with President Biden’s loosening of the restrictions on these [drugs] … there is a new frontier that everyone is pivoting to,” Rebecca Parma, the legislative director for Texas Right to Life, a prominent anti-abortion group, told me.

George W. Bush and Donald Trump, the two Republicans who have held the presidency since the drugs were first approved under Democratic President Bill Clinton, in 2000, took virtually no steps to limit their availability. But conservative activists are already signaling that they will press the Republican presidential candidates in 2024 for more forceful action.

“Our job is to make sure … this becomes an issue that any GOP candidate will have to answer and address,” Kristan Hawkins, the president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, told me. “No one can be ambivalent again; it will simply not be an option.”

The challenge for Republicans is that the 2022 midterm elections sent an unmistakable signal of resistance to further abortion restrictions in almost all of the key swing states that tipped the 2020 presidential election and are likely to decide the 2024 contest. “Would you really want to be Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump running in a close election saying, ‘I’m going to ban all abortion pills in Michigan or Pennsylvania’ right now?” says Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis, who has written extensively on the history of the abortion debate.

Sunday is the 50th anniversary of the original Roe decision, and the Biden administration will mark the occasion with a defiant pro-abortion-rights speech from Vice President Kamala Harris in Florida, where GOP Governor DeSantis, a likely 2024 presidential contender, signed a 15-week abortion ban last April.

White House officials see access to abortion medication as “the next battlefront” in the larger struggle over the procedure, Jennifer Klein, the director of the White House Gender Policy Council, told me. She said she expects Republicans to mount more sweeping efforts to restrict access to the drugs than they did during the Bush or Trump presidencies. “The reason you’ve seen both Democratic and Republican administrations ensure access to medication abortions is because this is the FDA following their evidence-based scientific judgment,” she said. “So what I think is different now is you are seeing some pretty extreme actions as the next way to double down on taking away reproductive health and reproductive rights.”

Federal regulation of the abortion drugs has followed a consistent pattern, with Democratic presidents moving to expand access and Republican presidents mostly accepting those actions.

[Read: The other abortion pill]

During the 2000 presidential campaign, for instance, George W. Bush called the Clinton administration’s initial approval of mifepristone “wrong” and said he worried it would lead to more abortions. But over Bush’s two terms, his three FDA commissioners ignored a citizen petition from conservative groups to revoke approval for the drug. Under Barack Obama, the FDA formalized relatively onerous rules for the use of mifepristone. Physicians had to obtain a special certification to prescribe the drug, women had to meet with their doctor once before receiving it and twice after, and it could be used only within the first seven weeks of pregnancy.

The FDA loosened these restrictions during Obama’s final year in office. It reduced the number of physician visits required to obtain the drugs from three to one and increased to 10 the number of weeks into a pregnancy the drugs could be used. The revisions also permitted other medical professionals, such as nurses, to prescribe the drugs if they received certification, and eliminated a requirement for providers to report “adverse effects” other than death. Trump didn’t reverse any of the Obama decisions. He did side with conservatives by fighting a lawsuit from abortion-rights advocates to lift the requirement for an in-person doctor’s visit to obtain the drugs during the COVID pandemic. But by the time the Supreme Court ruled for the Trump administration in January 2021, Biden was days away from taking office. Within months, women seeking an abortion could consult with a doctor via telehealth and then receive the pills via mail.

On January 3 of this year, the FDA took another major step by allowing pharmacies to dispense the drugs. In late December, the Justice Department issued a legal opinion that the Postal Service could deliver the drugs without violating the 19th-century Comstock Act, which bars use of the mail “to corrupt the public morals.”

The paradox is that the impact of these rules, for now, will be felt almost entirely in the states where abortion remains legal. Obtaining abortion pills there will be much more comparable to filling any other prescription. But 19 red states have passed laws that still require medical professionals to be present when the drugs are administered, which prevents pharmacies from offering them despite the FDA authorization. And although the FDA has approved use of mifepristone for the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, medical professionals cannot prescribe the drugs in violation of state time limits (or absolute bans) on abortion. In terms of anti-abortion states, the Biden administration’s actions have had “basically no impact,” Greer Donley, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who studies abortion law, told me in an email.

Although the red states have largely walled themselves off from Biden’s efforts on medication abortion, conservatives have launched a multifront attempt to roll back access to the pills nationwide. Students for Life has filed another citizen petition with the FDA, arguing that doctors who prescribe the drugs must dispose of any fetal remains as medical waste. In a joint letter released last week, 22 Republican attorneys general hinted that they may sue to overturn the new FDA rules permitting pharmacies to dispense the drugs. In November, another coalition of conservative groups filed a lawsuit before a Trump-appointed judge in Texas seeking to overturn the original certification and ban mifepristone. Jenny Ma, the senior counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, says that decision could ultimately have a broader effect than even the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe: “This case,” she told me, “could effectively ban medication abortion nationwide. It means people in every state … may not be able to get abortion pills.”

Republicans will also ramp up legislative action against the pills, although their proposals have no chance of becoming law while Democrats control the Senate and Biden holds the veto pen. Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi is planning to reintroduce her “SAVE Moms and Babies Act,” which would restore the prohibition against dispensing abortion drugs through the mail or at pharmacies.

[From the May 2022 issue: The future of abortion in a post-Roe America]

However these legal and legislative challenges are resolved, it’s already apparent that the 2024 GOP presidential field will face more pressure than before to propose executive-branch actions against the drugs. “That’s going to be our clarion call in 2024,” says Kristi Hamrick, a long-term social-conservative activist, who now serves as the chief strategist for media and policy at Students for Life.

Katie Glenn, the state-policy director at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told me that, at the least, the group wants 2024 Republican presidential candidates to press for restoring the requirement to report adverse consequences from the drugs. Former Vice President Mike Pence, a likely candidate, has already suggested that he will support a ban on dispensing the pills through the mail. But the anti-abortion movement’s long-term goal remains the same: ban mifepristone altogether. Hawkins shows the growing fervor GOP candidates will face when she says, “This pill is a cancer that has now metastasized throughout our country.”

Simultaneously, abortion-rights advocates are pushing the Biden administration to loosen restrictions even further. “Medication abortion … has been overregulated for far too long,” Ma told me. Many advocates want the FDA to extend permitted use of mifepristone from 10 to 12 weeks, eliminate the requirement that the professionals prescribing the drugs receive a special certification, and begin the process toward eventually making the drug available over the counter.

The immediate question is whether the Biden administration will challenge the red-state laws that have stymied its efforts to expand access. Advocates have argued that a legal case can be made for national FDA regulations to trump state restrictions, such as the requirement for physicians to dispense the drugs. But Biden is likely to proceed cautiously.

“We don’t have a lot of answers … because, frankly, states have not tried to do this stuff in hundreds of years,” Ziegler, the author of the upcoming book Roe: The History of a National Obsession, told me. Even so, she added, it’s a reasonable assumption that this conservative-dominated Supreme Court would resist allowing the federal government to preempt state rules on how the drugs are dispensed.

These mirror-image pressures in each party increase the odds of a clear distinction between Biden (or another Democrat) and the 2024 GOP nominee over access to the drugs. Democrats are generally confident they will benefit from almost any contrast that keeps abortion prominent in the 2024 race. Some, like Lake, see access to the pills as a powerful lever to do that. The issue, she argues, is relevant to younger voters, who are much more familiar than older people with the growing use of medication abortion and are especially dubious that pharmacies can offer certain drugs in some states but not in others.

The impact of abortion on the 2022 election was more complex than is often discussed. As I’ve written, in the red states that have banned or restricted the practice, such as Florida, Ohio, and Texas, there was no discernible backlash against the Republican governors or state legislators who passed those laws. But the story was different in the blue and purple states where abortion remains legal. In pivotal states including Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, a clear majority of voters said they supported abortion rights, and, according to media exit polls, crushing majorities of them voted against Republican gubernatorial candidates who pledged to restrict abortion. Those Democratic victories in the states likely to prove decisive again in 2024 have left many Republican strategists leery of pursuing any further constraints on abortion.

What’s clear now is that even as abortion opponents gather to celebrate their long-sought toppling of Roe, many of them won’t be satisfied until they have banned the procedure nationwide. “It is totally unacceptable for a presidential candidate to say, ‘It’s just up to the states’ now,” Marilyn Musgrave, the vice president for government affairs at the Susan B. Anthony group, told me. “We need a federal role clearly laid out by these presidential candidates.” Equally clear is that abortion opponents now view federal regulatory actions to restrict, and eventually ban, abortion drugs as a crucial interim step on that path. The U.S. may seem in some ways to be settling into an uneasy new equilibrium, with abortion banned in some states and permitted in others. But, as the escalating battle over abortion medication makes clear, access to abortion in every state will remain on the ballot in 2024.

This story was originally published by High Country News.

Last summer, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration observed dust blowing 85 miles from its source: Lake Abert and Summer Lake, two dried-up saline lakes in southern Oregon. This had happened before: Saline lake beds are some of the West’s most significant sources of dust. California’s Owens Lake was once the nation’s largest source of PM10, the tiny pollutants found in dust and smoke, and plumes blowing off the 800 square miles of the Great Salt Lake’s exposed bed have caused toxin-filled dust storms in Salt Lake City.

Saline lakes are rapidly losing water to climate change and agricultural and urban uses, becoming some of the West’s most threatened ecosystems. Now new legislation is offering some support. On December 27, President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan Saline Lake Ecosystems in the Great Basin States Program Act, which allocates $25 million in funding for research and monitoring of saline lakes across the Great Basin. Although this funding is an important step, it cannot give the lakes what they really need: more water.

The Interior West is full of salt lakes, created when snowmelt pools in the valley bottoms of the Basin and Range region. The valleys have no outflow, so the water remains until it evaporates, leaving behind the particles that were suspended in it. These accumulate over time, giving the lakes a high salinity.

“It creates a unique system that supports brine shrimp and alkali flies that can feed incredible populations of migratory birds,” says Ryan Houston, the executive director of the Oregon Natural Desert Association, which seeks to conserve Oregon’s high desert, including Summer Lake and Lake Abert.

[Read: Why we remember droughts and forget floods]

Yet this balance of runoff, salts, and evaporation also makes saline lakes highly sensitive to climate change. Decreasing snowpack and increasing evaporation due to higher temperatures means that there is less water in the lakes and a higher concentration of salt. That stresses shrimp and flies, which have adapted over time to specific salinities, and it also exposes dry lake beds, creating dangerous dust storms.

Decades of diversions for agricultural and municipal use have also taken the lakes’ water. Owens Lake, for instance, has been almost completely dry for nearly a century, since its water was diverted to Los Angeles. A report released earlier this month by Utah scientists and conservation organizations warned that the combination of water diversions and climate change has put the Great Salt Lake on track to disappear within five years.

Many see poor air quality as the main reason to save the lakes. But the dust is a sign that the entire ecosystem is withering. Saline lakes are key stops on the Pacific Flyway, the bird-migration route that extends from Alaska to Chile. “That we’re worried about dust says to me that we’ve already gone past the point of Lake Abert being lost as part of the Pacific Flyway, its most important ecological value,” Houston says. More than 80 species of birds either inhabit or migrate through Lake Abert, and 338 species depend on the Great Salt Lake.

The new legislation will create a research and monitoring program aimed at conserving salt lakes, including Lake Abert, Summer Lake, the Great Salt Lake, California’s Owens Lake and Mono Lake, and Nevada’s Ruby Lake and Walker Lake. According to David Herbst, a biologist who began conducting research at Mono Lake in the 1970s, only a “small core of scientists” conducts research on saline lakes, so there’s a strong need for more monitoring by federal and state agencies.

Geoffrey McQuilkin, the executive director of the Mono Lake Committee, told me via email that the Act is important “because it funds scientific research that will inform how to successfully manage valuable habitats to preserve their many benefits in the era of climate change.” Clayton Dumont, the tribal chairman of the Klamath Tribes, whose traditional territory borders Lake Abert, says, “We’re glad to see anything that will help restore that unique ecosystem.”

[Read: Suddenly, California has too much water]

This isn’t the first federal program dedicated to the lakes. The 2002 Desert Terminal Lakes Program provided more than $200 million to purchase water rights and support the conservation of Nevada’s saline lakes through scientific research. The $858 billion defense-spending act passed just two weeks ago included $10 million for saline-lakes-related projects to be undertaken by the Army Corps of Engineers. And at the state level, Utah’s 2022 Great Salt Lake Watershed Enhancement Act created a $40 million trust directed at conservation of the lake.

But some advocates say that monitoring and research isn’t enough. “This is great! But it doesn’t get water to Great Salt Lake,” the organization Save Our Great Salt Lake posted to its Instagram account after the bill passed the Senate.

The question of refilling the lakes is trickier. Water rights are generally governed by states, making it harder for the federal government to step in. “For lakes where basic measurement, basic monitoring, and some of the basic science is lacking—that’s where the federal government and other scientists can come in and provide a tremendous amount of support and information that advocates can use,” Houston says.

Still, most people are optimistic now that more attention is being paid to the lakes. “Unfortunately, it’s an exciting time, because there’s a crisis,” Houston says. “But it’s an exciting time in terms of a lot of people talking about it.”