THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was already irritated by what he describes as “unnecessarily contentious” questions from the team vetting him to be Kamala Harris’s running mate when a senior aide made one final inquiry: “Have you ever been an agent of the Israeli government?”The question came from President Biden’s former White House counsel Dana Remus, who was a key member of Harris’s vice-presidential search team.Shapiro, one of the most well-known Jewish elected officials in the country—and one of at least three Jewish politicians considering a run for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination—says he took umbrage at the question. “Had I been a double agent for Israel? Was she kidding? I told her how offensive the question was,” Shapiro writes in his forthcoming book, Where We Keep the Light, a copy of which The Atlantic obtained ahead of its release on January 27. The exchange became even more tense, he… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

History might not repeat itself, but the slogans sometimes do. And in the days since an ICE officer shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis, some Democratic candidates and commentators have joined in on a familiar refrain. “Dismantling ICE is the moderate position,” Graham Platner, the U.S. Senate candidate in Maine, said in a statement on X. “If Trump’s ICE is shooting and kidnapping people, then abolish it,” wrote Jack Schlossberg, a candidate for Congress in New York. Even Bill Kristol, the erstwhile Republican turned Trump critic, logged on to share a simple, straightforward message: “Abolish ICE.”A growing number of Americans disagree with how the agency is handling its mission. But where many Democrats hear “Abolish ICE” as a righteous call to action, others in the party register the clanging of alarm bells. These anxious Democrats believe that such a maximalist demand plays directly into Republicans’ hands by making the… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

When he was a kid, Harry Reid seldom left the small town of Searchlight, Nevada, without his parents. But the summer after his brother Dale had graduated from high school, he invited young Harry to join him in Ash Fork, a tiny dot in Arizona along Highway 40. Dale had found work at a gas station in the railroad town near an Indian reservation. Not much was memorable about the town, the railroad, or the people Harry met, but he never forgot one lesson he learned there.Dale’s girlfriend had a younger brother about a year older than Harry, and they spent the summer playing games together. Reid could easily outplay him but invariably lost anyway. “I never won a game,” he wrote decades later, “because as we got into the games, he would keep changing the rules.” He resolved never to do the same himself. He would try to understand… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

“We don’t do politics in the Department of Homeland Security,” Tom Ridge, the nation’s first DHS secretary, liked to say whenever reporters would ask how he handled pressure from the White House. Ridge, a moderate Republican and a Vietnam vet with a square jaw and gentle manner, was the governor of Pennsylvania when nearly 3,000 Americans were killed on September 11, 2001. The nation was gripped with fear and horror, and President George W. Bush put the bipartisanship-seeking Ridge in charge of making sure there wouldn’t be another terrorist strike. The new Cabinet-level entity that he would lead mashed together more than 20 federal agencies under one Orwellian name.I’ve spoken with Ridge a few times over the years about DHS’s origins, and I thought of him on New Year’s Eve, when a serene image popped up on the department’s social-media accounts showing a classic car on a sandy beach with… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Could the Trump administration really cancel an election? President Trump once again mused about the possibility, telling Reuters recently that he’s accomplished so much that “we shouldn’t even have an election” in response to the prospect of the GOP losing ground in the midterms. This isn’t the first time the president has flirted with the idea of forgoing the midterm elections, and his repeated remarks on the matter have turned what many previously dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory into a real concern.At an Atlantic Across America event in Arizona this week, staff writer Yvonne Wingett Sanchez interviewed Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and asked what he believed could happen. “Look, you can’t cancel the election,” he told her. “We’ve got a whole bunch of scenarios that we’re playing through to make sure that we’re prepared for the types of processes that might be necessary to preserve our democracy… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.