Dianne Feinstein’s decision to step back as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee as she recovers from shingles is a reminder of a larger dilemma facing the Senate: what to do when senators, serving six-year terms, are incapable of fulfilling their role for months or even years. Outside of voluntary resignation, the options the Senate faces are either expulsion—requiring a two-thirds vote—or living with a long-term vacancy or a senator truly incapable of making appropriate decisions.

[Ronald Brownstein: Who will replace Dianne Feinstein?]

This is not a new problem, but it’s one we need to fix, finally. Karl Mundt, a senator from South Dakota, suffered a debilitating stroke late in 1969, and remained unable to work while occupying his Senate seat until his term ended in January 1973. During those three-plus years, he was removed from his committees and his wife ran his staff. But she refused every request to have him resign. South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, who served for 46 years in the Senate until age 100, was visibly infirm and confused during his final term, and his chief of staff was effectively making decisions for him for years.

Then there are cases of senators suffering serious and debilitating physical injuries or diseases. Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Mark Kirk of Illinois had brain injuries that kept them out of the Senate and facing surgery and rehabilitation for months before both returned to finish out their terms. Ted Kennedy and John McCain had glioblastomas that meant long absences until both died from their brain tumors. And there are more limited absences, such as John Fetterman’s for two months to deal with his clinical depression.

When the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution created the Continuity of Government Commission after 9/11, my fellow members and I grappled with this issue. We considered what to do when a terrorist attack and an anthrax scare aimed at the Senate had the possibility of putting dozens of senators in intensive care, leaving the chamber potentially for months or years without a quorum and unable to operate. And then, of course, COVID created another danger of mass incapacitation with no clear remedy.

Our original commission recommended a procedure for temporary emergency replacements, individuals who could serve until the incapacitated lawmakers could sign affidavits indicating that they were ready and willing to resume their seats. After the pandemic began, our reconstituted commission recommended a form of remote voting if lawmakers were not capable of physically coming to the Capitol to vote on the floor or in committees. The House implemented a system of proxy voting, which was eliminated this year when the Republicans took the majority. The Senate did nothing.

This is not the first time Democrats have had to think about the 89-year-old Feinstein’s service. In late 2020, after what they viewed as an embarrassing performance during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett, Senate Democrats got her to relinquish the top spot on the Judiciary Committee to Dick Durbin. And questions about her memory have been raised repeatedly over the past few years, leading many outside the Senate to call for her resignation.

[Read: Rewriting the rules of presidential succession]

The recent push to get her to relinquish her seat on Judiciary had a special urgency. When Mundt, Johnson, and Kirk had their long absences, the Senate had clear-cut majorities, as well as norms dictating that senators would not exploit absences for political gain. Those norms no longer apply—and the Senate has a 51–49 split. Without Feinstein, the Judiciary Committee has an even number of Democrats and Republicans, and if the Republicans all refuse to vote on a confirmation for a judge, the nomination can be either stymied or forced to go through additional hoops. And that is just what Republicans have done during Feinstein’s absence for multiple judicial nominations.

This kind of problem will no doubt reemerge. It is time for the Senate to do something to minimize the problem, to make sure there is continuity in representation and no possibility of gaps for weeks, months, or years when a senator is unable to vote or take part in proceedings. First, the body should take up a constitutional amendment allowing for emergency interim replacements when senators (and House members as well) cannot serve for lengthy periods of time. Ideally, the incapacitated senators could themselves indicate the need for a replacement, and designate an individual to serve during the absence; if they are unable to do so, the decision should be made upon a vote of two-thirds of the members of the senator’s party caucus. The replacement would serve only until the senator was ready to return to duty.

Second, the Senate should implement a rule that it inexplicably failed to do during the height of the pandemic, and provide for a form of remote voting in committee and on the Senate floor when individual senators cannot be there in person for reasons of health or disasters, whether natural or from terrorist attacks. It can be via proxy voting, as the House did, or through another mechanism, and it should include appropriate safeguards against abuse—for example, using remote voting just for convenience—but it is a needed safeguard to make sure the Senate has full and adequate representation.

There is no obvious answer when an octogenarian or nonagenarian, elected by the voters of a state, insists on serving even when they are not capable of doing so adequately. But we can avoid most of the problems that occur with lengthy absences from the Senate. It would be a fitting tribute to the long and distinguished career of Dianne Feinstein if the Senate finally acted to resolve these issues.

What’s happened in Tennessee in recent weeks should be no surprise, coming from a party whose sensibilities and racial attitudes are embodied by Donald Trump.

Earlier this month, House Republicans in Tennessee, the state in which the Ku Klux Klan was founded, overwhelmingly voted to expel two young Black lawmakers, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson. Their offense? A breach of decorum and procedural rules. They led protest chants on the House floor following the mass shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville. Representative Gloria Johnson joined Jones and Pearson in the protests, but the vote to expel her fell short.

When she was asked why she had avoided expulsion when her two Black colleagues had not, Johnson, who is white, said, “It might have to do with the color of our skin.” Republican lawmakers denied the charge, calling it “disgusting, untrue, and highly offensive.”

[Read: The Tennessee expulsions are just the beginning]

That statement might be more credible if Trump, the leader of the Republican Party, who has a very troubled history when it comes to race, hadn’t had as his dinner guest a few months ago an outspoken anti-Semite and racist. Nor does it help the GOP case that in 2016, the then–chief of staff to former Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada sent explicitly racist texts.

What we do know is that expulsion is extremely rare, with only two lawmakers previously ousted from the House of Representatives in Tennessee in the past 157 years. One lawmaker had been convicted of accepting a bribe; the other faced allegations of sexual misconduct. No House member has ever been removed from elected office for simply violating the rules of decorum. So these expulsions were extraordinarily punitive, especially because lesser penalties could have been invoked.

Tennessee Republicans engaged in an act of political vengeance, but did so with comical ineptness. Both of the Democratic lawmakers have already been reappointed, but now they are prominent figures with a national following.

On Monday, after being sworn in, Jones returned to the legislature accompanied by Johnson. Pearson—whose reappointment came two days later—looked on from the balcony.

“No expulsion, no attempt to silence us will stop us, but it will only galvanize and strengthen our movement,” Jones said. “Power to the people!” he shouted, bringing cheers from the gallery.

But perhaps the most revealing statement during this manufactured crisis came from Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton, who compared the incident to the insurrection and attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

“What they did today was equivalent, at least equivalent, maybe worse depending on how you look at it, to doing an insurrection in the state capitol,” Sexton said. When he was pressed about his statement, he said, “That quote did not say absolutely it was worse. It said it could be.”

No one, not even Republicans in the Tennessee state legislature, can watch what happened last week on the floor of the House and the January 6 attack on the Capitol and consider them remotely comparable.

[Tom Nichols: The January 6 attack is not over]

What happened in Tennessee wasn’t an “insurrection.” It was indecorous, a breaking of procedural rules, but it was also an event without violence or destruction, without assaults or deaths, without heavily armed mobs or nooses hanging from gallows. No one in Tennessee will be charged and convicted of seditious conspiracy against the United States. And what happened in Tennessee didn’t include peddling lies and embracing crazed conspiracy theories in order to overturn a free and fair election. So what’s going on here?

We’re watching Trump-induced idiocy. For more than seven years, Republicans have defended Trump’s cruel, unethical, and deranged behavior. They are constantly having to deny what they have become in service to him. It’s created cognitive dissonance. How can the party of “family values” defend a moral degenerate like Trump? How can law-and-order Republicans defend a violent insurrection and threats against judges and prosecutors? How can “constitutional conservatives” rally around a man who attempted to subvert the Constitution by overthrowing an election?

The human mind’s capacity to rationalize such things is extraordinary, but not limitless. Some Republicans have the sense, even if it’s only in their quiet moments, that they have acted not only hypocritically but dishonorably. And it gnaws at them. They know they would eviscerate any Democrat who did a fraction of what Trump did. They therefore have to expend enormous psychological energy to keep from becoming sick with themselves for what they have become. Shame is a toxic emotion, and it often causes people to direct hostility outward rather than inward.

Tired from choosing to defend the indefensible, enraged at being called out, Trump’s supporters lash out. They desperately want to make critics of Trump the focus, forcing them to answer for their sins. Pointing to the misdeeds of their political foes allows Republicans to tell themselves, one another, and the rest of the world, See, we’re not so bad after all. They also catastrophize the threats posed by Democrats, because people will tolerate an awful lot of misconduct from their leaders if they’ve convinced themselves that the threat posed by the other side is existential.

As we’ve seen in Tennessee, this frantic state of mind leads Republicans to preposterous places and to act in politically self-destructive ways. One of the two most important political parties in the world is dominated by people who are enraged, embittered, and anarchic.

I understand the temptation to look away and to move on, to become inured to what’s happening, to consider the MAGA takeover of the GOP “old news.” But unless that mania subsides, until there’s a clean break with Trumpism, our political and civic culture will become even more deformed, even more monstrous, even more violent. This is no time to grow weary in doing good, “for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart.”

Last Tuesday’s Wisconsin election might have been overshadowed by the news of Donald Trump’s arraignment, but Trump and his party were likely paying close attention to the race—and the dangers it portends for the GOP in 2024.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Cover story: American madness The real hero of Ted Lasso Please don’t ask me to play your board game.

An Iron Grip

Last Tuesday, the liberal Milwaukee County judge Janet Protasiewicz won an election that gave Wisconsin liberals a 4–3 majority on the state’s supreme court after 15 years of conservative control. The results of the state’s judicial race are a likely barometer—and a possible determinant—of the GOP’s prospects in 2024.

As my colleague Ronald Brownstein noted in the days leading up to the Wisconsin election, the contest would prove “a revealing test of the electoral strength of the most powerful wedge issues that each party is likely to stress in next year’s presidential race.” A Protasiewicz win, he wrote, would also affirm that support for legal abortion has hastened college-educated suburban voters’ collective “recoil” from the Trump GOP. “Such a shift could restore a narrow but decisive advantage for Democrats in a state at the absolute tipping point of presidential elections,” Ron explained.

In an Atlantic article last week, the former Milwaukee talk-radio host and The Bulwark editor at large Charlie Sykes doubled down on Brownstein’s assertion. “‘As long as abortion is an issue,’ one Republican legislator told me, ‘we won’t ever win another statewide election,’” Sykes wrote.

With Protasiewicz’s victory, Wisconsin Republicans may have even more to worry about than voters’ attachment to reproductive rights. That’s because, as my colleague Adam Serwer noted last weekend, Wisconsin is a notoriously fickle swing state that Republicans have gerrymandered “with scientific precision” since 2010—driven, in no small part, by its conservative-majority supreme court.

Adam writes:

Thanks to their precise drawing of legislative districts, Republicans have maintained something close to a two-thirds majority whether they won more votes or not … And year after year, the right-wing majority on the state supreme court would ensure that gerrymandered maps kept their political allies in power and safely protected from voter backlash. Some mismatch between the popular vote and legislative districts is not inherently nefarious—it just happens to be both deliberate and extreme in Wisconsin’s case.

“Extreme” is no overstatement. Robert Yablon, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a faculty co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative, told me by email that although Democrats have won more of Wisconsin’s statewide elections in recent years than their Republican opponents have, “under the maps that the Republican-controlled legislature drew in 2011, Republicans maintained an iron grip on the legislature throughout the last decade—even in years when Democratic candidates won more votes statewide.”

Following the 2020 census, the Wisconsin Supreme Court went on to uphold revised electoral maps that further solidified Republicans’ advantage in the state. Although Wisconsin Democrats saw the reelection of Governor Tony Evers last November, Republicans claimed a two-thirds supermajority in the State Senate following a special election to fill a suburban Milwaukee seat last Tuesday. Republicans are just short of a supermajority in the state assembly and hold six of the state’s eight U.S. House seats.

But Democrats still hope to turn the Badger State around. Last week, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released its House Democrats’ Districts in Play plan for the 2024 election cycle, outlining which congressional districts the party will target in its efforts to retake control of the House. The DCCC’s plan listed Wisconsin’s first and third districts among the 31 Republican-held House seats Democrats deem particularly flippable next fall—an outlook that appears to hinge (at least in part) on the prospect of electoral redistricting. If Protasiewicz were to make good on a remark from earlier this year, in which she hinted at plans to review challenges to the state’s current electoral maps, the court could approve new maps that would improve Democrats’ odds of clawing back power in those districts.

“Having more balanced electoral maps could certainly make a difference in 2024,” Yablon told me. “There’s no guarantee that such maps would enable Democrats to win a legislative majority, but they could create meaningful competition for legislative control for the first time in more than a decade. At a minimum, Republicans would likely see their current legislative majorities shrink.”

Whether or not new electoral maps could make a difference in 2024 will, of course, depend on their being redrawn and approved in the first place—and fast.

Related:

Make Wisconsin a democracy again. The first electoral test of Trump’s indictment

Today’s News

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg sued Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio in a move to block interference by congressional Republicans in the criminal case against Donald Trump. In a dramatic effort to conserve supplies from the drought-stricken Colorado River, the Biden administration proposed a plan that would reduce the amount of water allotted to California, Arizona, and Nevada. The shooter who killed five of his colleagues at a bank in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, yesterday morning legally bought the AR-15-style rifle used in the attack, the interim Louisville Metro Police chief said today.

Evening Read

Bettmann / Getty

The Moms Who Breastfeed Without Being Pregnant

By Sarah Zhang

While her wife was pregnant with their son, Aimee MacDonald took an unusual step of preparing her own body for the baby’s arrival. First she began taking hormones, and then for six weeks straight, she pumped her breasts day and night every two to three hours. This process tricked her body into a pregnant and then postpartum state so she could make breast milk. By the time the couple’s son arrived, she was pumping 27 ounces a day—enough to feed a baby—all without actually getting pregnant or giving birth.

And so, after a 38-hour labor and emergency C-section, MacDonald’s wife could do what many mothers who just gave birth might desperately want to but cannot: rest, sleep, and recover from surgery. Meanwhile, MacDonald tried nursing their baby. She held him to her breast, and he latched right away. Over the next 15 months, the two mothers co-nursed their son, switching back and forth, trading feedings in the middle of the night. MacDonald had breastfed her older daughter the usual way—as in, by herself—a decade earlier, and she remembered the bone-deep exhaustion. She did not want that for her wife. Inducing lactation meant they could share in the ups and the downs of breastfeeding together.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Why California can’t catch a break Five people died in the Kentucky shooting. The full toll is much higher. Pleather’s new name

Culture Break

Gilles Mingasson / ABC

Read. Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton’s new novel, a biting satire about the idealistic left.

Watch. Abbott Elementary (and pay special attention to Mr. Johnson, the janitor on the ABC comedy).

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I suppose this is where I out myself as a native Wisconsinite—a cheesehead, if you will—who has followed the electoral goings-on of my home state with varying degrees of attentiveness (and mounting bafflement) in the years since my departure. But if there’s any single resource that’s helped fill in the blanks of my political literacy, it’s The Fall of Wisconsin. The 2018 book by the journalist Dan Kaufman, also from Wisconsin, traces the “conservative conquest” of a state that was, until relatively recently, taken for granted as a progressive stronghold. In case the book’s title doesn’t make it incredibly obvious, Kaufman is not exactly an ideologically impartial observer. But his deep research provides useful background for understanding the past 15 years of Badger State politics and, by extension, broader rifts in the American electorate.

— Kelli

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Of all the characters on Abbott Elementary, there’s one who never fails to make me laugh. I’m talking about Mr. Johnson, the janitor whose dry humor and droll facial expressions make him one of the funniest personas on ABC’s hit comedy. Here’s what we know about Mr. Johnson: He’s probably in his 70s. He’s worked at Abbott forever, his institutional knowledge rivaling that of the longest-tenured teachers. He has alluded to past lives as an Olympic athlete, a nude model, a champion rib eater, and Dorothy Hamill’s paramour. He thinks that lizard people live under the Denver Airport and that the Illuminati run the world. He does not believe in the moon (not the moon landing—the actual moon). All of this is to say that Mr. Johnson’s origin story is mostly a patchwork of jokes: We don’t know anything substantial about the guy, not even his first name.

In a lesser comedy, he’d be a two-dimensional character who floats through the background, peppering in laughs as necessary. Not so with Abbott. Even without a fully fleshed-out past, Mr. Johnson has become a core part of the show, a character who seems to exist entirely in the present tense. He’s crucial enough that the actor who plays him, William Stanford Davis, was promoted to a series regular in Season 2. As the school’s janitor, Mr. Johnson is the gatekeeper to Abbott, bringing us in and contextualizing the everyday interactions within the school.

[Read: 20 perfect TV shows for short attention spans]

In contemporary English, janitor refers to someone whose job it is to take care of a building, usually a hospital or a school. The job entails cleaning and keeping a place orderly by sweeping floors, wiping down counters, and taking out trash. But that’s not all janitors do. The word comes from the Latin janus, which means “arch” or “gate” and is also the name of the two-faced Roman god of doorways and portals. This etymology makes sense when you consider that people like Mr. Johnson are also ushers and space definers: They prepare a building before we even enter it, look after it while we are there, and continue to care for it after we’ve left. Part of their job is to pay attention—to the structures they oversee, yes, but also to people who pass through their doors.

Mr. Johnson encapsulates this role perfectly. He’s seemingly everywhere within Abbott’s walls, meaning he notices the emotional weather of the teachers and students inside. In Season 1, he’s among the first people to detect the romantic feelings between the teachers Janine and Gregory, raising his eyebrows at what looks like a lover’s quarrel. In Season 2, when the history teacher, Jacob (Chris Perfetti), has no idea why his students are obsessed with a show about talking socks, Mr. Johnson appears in the classroom doorway and begins speaking the program’s indecipherable language with bewildering fluency. He knows what the young people are up to just as much as he knows what the adults are thinking. Sometimes he’s the school’s protector: He also knows that if the scoreboard in the gym goes above a certain number, it’ll come crashing down. When the smooth-talking businessman Draemond fails to convince a gym-full of parents that Abbott should become a charter school, it is Mr. Johnson who sweeps him off the stage, physically enacting everyone’s disdain.

[Read: The comedies that understand what peak scammer TV does not ]

It’s not just that Mr. Johnson sees everything; everyone sees Mr. Johnson too. In a late Season 2 episode, the teachers at Abbott vote on which of them should get two free tickets to an NBA game. The prize is supposed to go to an educator, as a paltry show of appreciation from the district. But the principal, Ava, announces Mr. Johnson as the unanimous winner, to his delight. When someone complains that he’s not a “real teacher,” he retorts, “You know how many classes I subbed?” He knows he deserves the tickets—he may not have the credentials, but viewers have seen him called to “teach” class after class, filling in the cracks of a broken (and broke) public-education system.

Ava asks the obvious question: Why did everyone vote for Mr. Johnson? One teacher, Melissa, responds that she chose him because she was annoyed with everyone else. But his landslide victory shows just how enmeshed he is in Abbott’s fabric. He’s the person every teacher thought of first, besides themselves, to put on the ballot. He is a vital part of the school, so much so that he’s almost synonymous with it. Abbott Elementary is a show that puts the hilarity, grossness, frustration, and joy of public schools on full display, so audiences can see how much energy and love goes into these institutions. They’re places where children learn, places of work, places where the community gathers to handle crises and hold celebrations. Wry, hardworking, and a little bit quirky, Mr. Johnson embodies the many-faceted world of Abbott in all its splendor and stumbles.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

“Collective grief can have a way of warping the historical lens,” my colleague Vann R. Newkirk II explains in Holy Week, a new Atlantic podcast series exploring the week of fiery uprisings that broke out across many major U.S. cities following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. I spoke with Vann about what happened during that week, exactly 55 years ago, and how it diverted the civil-rights movement in ways that history is in danger of forgetting.

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

Chimamanda Adichie: Nigeria’s hollow democracy The god that couldn’t possibly fail How rural America steals girls’ futures Epoch-Defining

Kelli María Korducki: The story of the mass uprisings that immediately followed King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, isn’t widely included in most Americans’ civil-rights history education. When did you learn about it?

Vann R. Newkirk II: My whole life. My father got his Ph.D. from Howard University in the ’90s, and there were lots of buildings in Washington, D.C., at the time that had been burned in 1968 and weren’t yet replaced. But I didn’t quite understand what that week meant to America, and how things changed in that year, until much more recently.

Kelli: What exactly happened during Holy Week, 1968? And how did it challenge your understanding of the civil-rights movement until that point?

Vann: After King was killed, there were these uprisings in over 100 cities. The week marked the biggest street unrest in America, really between the Civil War and the George Floyd protests in 2020. You think about that type of thing usually as kind of era- or epoch-defining. People were coming out in grief over King’s death, but also about the loss of what he symbolized: a future that lots of Black Americans were really holding on to. It was kind of the last hope for a lot of people.

The 1960s saw the passage of major civil-rights bills that were, on paper, supposed to bring about certain measures of equality that lots of people had hoped for, in terms of housing, education, jobs, and so on. But by and large, Black Americans were still living in concentrated poverty in the ghettos. They still weren’t getting jobs. There were still staggering rates of school segregation and all types of discrimination in housing and jobs. So Holy Week saw those frustrations boil over.

At the same time, public opinion had been moving away from the movement for some years. King had an approval rating somewhere south of 30 percent in the year he was killed. Among the non-Black public, he was seen as even something of a villain after he came out against the Vietnam War. So what you also saw that week was the greater part of the American public deciding, firmly, that it was done with the civil-rights agenda.

Kelli: How did that play out?

Vann: Like a lot of things in politics, it was slow and then fast. Over the late ’60s, there was an erosion of public support for both protest and civil-rights legislation. And, at least in my reading of the polls and interviews with people who were active in the movement, the assassination appears to have really accelerated that process.

That spring, you also saw the 1968 primaries for president. Lyndon B. Johnson decided not to run again. On the Republican side, the people who were jockeying for the nomination were the people who would end up defining the modern party, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and both were running on these really robust “law and order” campaigns. They were pledging to build what we now know is the basis of the modern system of mass incarceration, courting disaffected white voters who used to vote Democratic and who still supported segregation, or at least didn’t want their communities integrated.

Then the assassination kicks everything into gear. You see a strong reaction from white America against the riots; public-opinion polling shows that the vast majority of Americans disapprove of the riots, and don’t believe that the protests have anything to do with King or with any long-standing disenfranchisement or inequality. A common interpretation was that the protesters were kind of being bad people. And the primary solution, as imagined by the majority of non-Black Americans, is not to implement policy measures that would address the concerns in the Black ghettos, but making sure that further uprising did not happen again, by any means.

Kelli: It sounds like the uprisings during Holy Week reframed Americans’ understanding of political dissent as a kind of dangerous outlier force, as opposed to a mass movement by ordinary people.

Vann: That’s exactly how I’d put it.

Kelli: Do you think that perception has changed at all in recent years?

Vann: The dominant narrative of the civil-rights movement still falls short of explaining why somebody like King would have such a low approval rating in late life, why he was still working and believed that the majority of his work lay ahead of him. Or why America reacted as it did in ’68, why these clashes and divisions transpired.

But I think that, when you go back and look at what led up to King’s death, and talk to people who were alive and politically engaged at that time—which is what we did—you see that although there was a really accelerated time frame of events, they all sort of followed logically from underlying conditions. There’s an ongoing erosion of support for the civil-rights movement and the solidification of backlash; there’s the rise of Black power and Black nationalism. They all happen at the same time, for the same reasons. I think more and more people are developing a more sophisticated understanding of the transition from what I will call the “movement era” to the modern era. Hopefully, this podcast is adding to that.

Related:

Introducing: Holy Week The second assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (from 2021) Today’s News The IRS unveiled a 10-year, $80 billion overhaul plan toward a “digital-first” future. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to enforce a West Virginia law that bans transgender girls from participating in girls’ sports at school. The Tennessee House of Representatives voted to oust the first of three Democratic lawmakers who led a recent gun-reform protest from the House floor. Dispatches Up for Debate: People can’t agree on what college diversity offices should do, Conor Friedersdorf writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Brook Pifer / Gallery Stock

The Scariest Part of a Relationship

By Faith Hill

The beginning is all fun and games. You go on a few dates with someone—no big deal, you’re not invested. Then you go on some more, and some more after that. This, whatever this is, is kind of nice. Maybe you mention it to your mom, and then she won’t stop asking about it. Next thing you know, you’re wearing your retainer when you stay over and texting them every time you see a cute dog. Are you … are you in a relationship?

Every couple has, at some point, crossed the creaky, swaying bridge from “unofficial” to “partnered.” But when you’re still in between, it’s not always clear how to safely get to the other side.

Read the full article.

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Read. To 2040, the new collection of poems by Jorie Graham that exhorts readers to be present amid the demise of the world.

Listen. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, a “cheerfully animated” cinematic rendering of the beloved video-game franchise.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

It was in researching stories for the 2018 King-focused issue of the magazine that Vann uncovered the deeper, and lasting, significance of the events that followed King’s death. That issue can be found in full in our online archive, and makes for a great companion read to the Holy Week podcast.

— Kelli

Johnson & Johnson is trying once again to use the bankruptcy courts to settle tens of thousands of cases that claim its talc products cause cancer. The pharmaceutical company is now willing to pay $8.9 billion to plaintiffs over 25 years.

Johnson & Johnson (J&J) is willing to pay $8.9 billion to settle tens of thousands lawsuits alleging its talc-based baby powder cause cancer—an allegation the company continues to deny.

Read more...

Dwayne Johnson announces a live action remake of Moana just seven years after its animated release.

Dwayne Johnson, with the help of his two daughters, revealed on Monday that a live-action reimagining of Disney's "Moana" is in the works.

A huge event today could have a major impact on national politics—and it might not be the one you have in mind.

While a judge arraigns Donald Trump in New York City, voters in Chicago will be rendering their own verdict on who should lead the nation’s third-largest city: Paul Vallas, a 69-year-old former city-budget director and the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, or Brandon Johnson, a 47-year-old county commissioner, former teacher, and longtime paid organizer for the city’s most progressive political force, the Chicago Teachers Union. The outcome could have meaning well beyond the shores of Lake Michigan, offering an indication of where voters—Democrats in particular—are leaning on the issues of crime, policing, and race.

For Chicagoans, though, this election is about more than augurings for the nation. Crime and public safety are, far and away, the issues of greatest voter concern here. Although shootings and homicides are down from a year ago, Chicago’s homicide rate remains five times higher than New York City’s and 2.5 times higher than Los Angeles’s. In 2022, crime in Chicago rose in almost every other major category, including robbery, burglary, theft, and motor-vehicle theft. Those numbers and the pervasive sense of unease about public safety had a lot to do with the defeat of incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot in the city’s nonpartisan primary in February.

Even great cities are fragile—one furor or fire away from disaster. In the half century that I’ve called Chicago home, Carl Sandburg’s City of the Big Shoulders has been fortunate to produce a succession of larger-than-life leaders when they were most needed. It’s not clear if either candidate in Tuesday’s runoff is that leader. Chicagoans face an imperfect choice between an aging, white technocrat who believes the answer is more, and more effective, policing, and a relatively inexperienced young progressive, a Black man, whose vision for combatting crime and violence goes to conquering poverty and racial inequity.

[Alec MacGillis: The cause of the crime wave is hiding in plain sight]

The former, Vallas, is a charismatically challenged data nerd with roots in the city’s white bungalow communities and close ties to its conservative police union. Vallas has pitched almost his entire campaign around public safety, promising to add 1,800 police officers and promote “proactive policing” to confront “an utter breakdown of law and order.” He has also said that police have been “handcuffed” in pursuing crime. That phrase worries some Chicagoans who recall incidents such as the 2014 murder of Laquan McDonald, a teenager shot 16 times in the back while trying to flee Chicago police, which led to a Justice Department investigation and a consent decree with the Illinois attorney general requiring the Chicago police to make reforms.

Johnson, more comfortable in the spotlight than Vallas, began the race last fall with little name recognition in much of the city. But with the financial backing of the CTU, he finished strong enough to squeeze Lightfoot out of the runoff, largely by rallying white voters behind his progressive platform. Johnson has pledged $800 million in new taxes on large businesses and the wealthy to make significant investments in housing, mental-health services, and economic development in impoverished communities on the city’s South and West Sides.

Vallas, who has the backing of the city’s business community, has been more circumspect about tax increases. Johnson has attacked Vallas as a crypto-Republican and an opponent of abortion rights (both of which Vallas denies). Vallas, in turn, has questioned Johnson’s experience and attacked him for owing thousands of dollars in city fees and fines. (City officials recently confirmed that Johnson has now paid off the debts.) And whereas Johnson is a bitter opponent of school vouchers and charter schools, Vallas, who has run public-school systems in four cities, favors them.

But the biggest line between the two has come over the issue of public safety and policing. Johnson has pledged to immediately train and promote 200 officers to the rank of detective to help improve the city’s dismal 30 percent clearance rate of unsolved homicides and other major crimes. But he has resisted Vallas’s call for more police, noting, correctly, that even with its current police manpower—down 1,700 officers since Lightfoot took office—Chicago still has more police per capita than New York, Los Angeles, and almost every other big city in America. Given that, Johnson argues, the city should approach its public-safety challenges with other strategies, namely by addressing the historic resource and investment discrepancies between predominantly white communities and communities of color.

[Annie Lowrey: The misery of being a big-city mayor]

Vallas has pummeled Johnson relentlessly for comments he made following George Floyd’s murder, when Johnson pushed for a county-board resolution calling for a shifting of funds from policing and incarceration to human services. In a radio interview in December 2020, Johnson was asked about a comment by former President Barack Obama, for whom I once worked, who had called “Defund the police” a “snappy” slogan. “I don’t look at it as a slogan,” Johnson said then. “It’s an actual, real political goal.”

John Catanzara, the outspoken and divisive head of Chicago’s local Fraternal Order of Police and a Vallas supporter, told The New York Times that there would be “blood in the streets” if Johnson wins, because as many as 1,000 current police officers would immediately leave the force. It was an ugly and incendiary comment. Still, Johnson’s past statement on defunding the police and his current policy proposals have caused cooler heads than Catanzara to worry about Johnson’s ability to effectively lead and motivate the police as mayor. Arne Duncan, Obama’s former education secretary who leads a violence-intervention program in the city, recently endorsed Vallas. “He’s best positioned to try to lead the change that’s needed in the Chicago Police Department,” Duncan told Politico. “Paul has credibility, and he has trust.”

Vallas, who has family ties to policing and helped negotiate the last city contract on behalf of the FOP, argues that his relationship with the rank and file would revive flagging morale and encourage retired, seasoned officers to return to fill some of the new detective slots he plans to create. He promises to offer more rigorous policing without violating the consent decree against excessive force that the city signed after the McDonald murder. But a major test would come if new cases of excessive force by police emerged on his watch.

[Patrick Sharkey: The crime spike is no mystery]

Johnson hopes that the endorsement of two national progressive icons, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, will help stir turnout among younger voters in the runoff. If Johnson wins, he will join them as a luminary of the left, lauded for his new public-safety paradigm. But he will also become a ready target for Republicans, who have made urban crime and the largely exaggerated specter of “defunding the police” a major focus of their attack on Democrats across the country. A Vallas victory, much like that of Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, would help Democrats rebuff such attacks in 2024.

The choice for Chicago voters is not exactly clear. Johnson’s aspirational vision of fighting crime by combatting injustice is more hopeful than the well-trod path of simply fine-tuning policing, but his is a long-term strategy for an immediate crisis. Vallas’s policing-heavy solution is not enough to end an epidemic that has deeper roots, but it is necessary. Although Johnson’s idealism is appealing, he has never run anything larger than a classroom and too often devolves into progressive sloganeering. Vallas’s long experience in government, however mixed his success, is reassuring. Yet, nearing 70, he seems more a caretaker, subsumed in a tangle of numbers, than the visionary the city requires.

We need a healthy dose of what each man offers but can choose only one, knowing that neither has the whole package. Chicagoans want a change. The rest of the country is watching to see which direction the city goes. But it’s possible that neither candidate can provide the transformation the city needs.