—The Senate Judiciary Committee begins deliberations today on the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court. Republicans need five more Democratic votes to overcome a filibuster that Democrats have vowed to mount on the nomination.
—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4).
Trump Donates His First-Quarter Paycheck to the National Park Service
Carlos Barria / Reuters
President Trump donated his first three months of salary to the National Park Service (NPS) on Monday. The total comes to $78,333.32, which Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, handed in the form of a check to an NPS employee. During his election campaign, Trump promised to donate his $400,000 annual salary if elected, even asking for the press corps’s help in deciding where to send it. The NPS is overseen by the Department of Interior, which said the money would go toward maintaining historic battlefield sites. At these areas alone, the NPS faces a $229 million budget shortfall. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has said the NPS faces an overall maintenance shortfall of $12 billion, and he’s made this one of his top priorities. But it’s unclear how that shortfall will be made up because Trump’s “skinny” budget calls for a 12 percent cut to the Interior Department.
UPDATE: Democrats Have Enough Votes to Filibuster Gorsuch's Nomination; GOP Vows to Press Ahead
(Joshua Roberts / Reuters)
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 11-9 along party lines Monday to move the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to a full Senate vote. The move comes after Senate Democrats said they have the 41 votes needed to filibuster Gorsuch’s nomination, likely forcing Republicans to use the so-called “nuclear option” and put the Supreme Court nominee’s appointment to a full vote. Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee to fill the vacancy created by the death last year of Judge Antonin Scalia, has the support of all 52 Republicans in the Senate, as well as of at least three Democrats—Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and Joe Donnelly of Indiana—from conservative states that went to Trump. He needed 60 votes—a supermajority—for his nomination to be approved. The “nuclear option” would allow Gorsuch’s nomination to be approved by a simple majority of senators rather than the 60-vote supermajority. Democrats, who are still angry over the Republican refusal to hold hearings for Judge Merrick Garland, whom President Obama nominated to fill Scalia’s spot on the court, insist that if Republicans don’t have 60 votes for Gorsuch, Trump should nominate a judge who can win the support of a supermajority of lawmakers. Despite their opposition, however, Gorsuch is expected to be confirmed.
President Trump meets Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in the Oval Office on April 3, 2017. (Kevin Lamarque / Reuters)
President Trump welcomed Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to the White House Monday, marking the Arab leader’s first visit to Washington since he assumed power following former President Mohamed Morsi’s ouster in 2013. “I just want to let everybody know, in case there was any doubt, that we are very much behind President al-Sisi,” Trump told reporters at the meeting. “He’s done a fantastic job in a very difficult situation. We are very much behind Egypt and the people of Egypt.” Though Egypt has been a longstanding U.S. ally—receiving approximately $1.3 billion in U.S. military aid annually—Sisi was never afforded an invitation to the White House under the Obama administration. Indeed, Obama froze aid to the country for two years after Sisi, then Egypt’s defense minister, led a popular uprising against Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood-led government, which was elected the previous year. The U.S.-Egyptian relationship was further strained by alleged human-rights abuses by the Sisi government, including mass arrests, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial executions. Though Trump noted that both countries “have a few things” they do not agree upon, he said the two countries will work together “to fight terrorism and other things.”
Ecuador's New Socialist President Is Good News for Julian Assange
Mariana Bazo / Reuters
Socialist candidate Lenín Moreno narrowly won Ecuador’s presidential election Sunday night, though his opponent has demanded a recount and protesters from both sides took to the streets. Moreno’s win bucked a trend of center-right victories in South America, and was also good news for Julian Assange, whose fate as an asylee in Ecuador’s embassy in London was predicated on the win. Moreno, a former vice president, won 51 percent of the vote over his opponent, Guillermo Lasso. Lasso was a former banker who offered voters a change from leftist economic policies he blamed for the country’s sagging economy. He also promised to kick Assange out of the embassy within 30 days of taking office. At least one respected exit poll had put Lasso ahead Sunday night, so when news of Moreno’s win came later that evening, Lasso denounced it as fraudulent, saying, “We won’t let them cheat us!” His supporters stormed the country’s election headquarters and battled riot police. As oil prices and exports have fallen in the region, countries like Argentina, Peru, and Brazil have turned to center-right leaders who’ve promised fiscal reforms. But by selecting Moreno, Ecuador remains in the company of Socialist-led Bolivia and Venezuela.
Blast Reported at Metro Station in St. Petersburg, Russia
A general view of St. Petersburg, Russia (Maxim Zmeyev / Reuters)
Updated at 9 a.m.
Russian news reports say an explosion in the St. Petersburg metro system has killed at least people. The blast reportedly occurred at the Sennaya Square metro station.
In light of the revelations about the senator’s temper, let’s revisit her interrogation of Brett Kavanaugh.
Treating subordinates like dirt is a moral flaw, and I would be mortified to be accused of it. (I avoid these accusations by having no subordinates.) By now the evidence of Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar’s guilt in this respect is overwhelming. The New York Times has replicated the findings of BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post before it: Klobuchar, who is now seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, is a workplace terror with a penchant for winging binders and phones at underlings. It is possible that her aides are oversensitive. As a Minnesota native, I can attest that snowflakes abound there, including in Klobuchar’s hair. But I doubt these accusations are due to an abundance of them on the candidate’s staff. Their willingness to approach the media about personnel issues bespeaks true abnormality. She must really be a monster, at least when under stress.
A significant minority seldom or never meet people from another race, and they prize sameness, not difference.
Most Americans do not live in a totalizing bubble. They regularly encounter people of different races, ideologies, and religions. For the most part, they view these interactions as positive, or at least neutral.
Yet according to a new study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic, a significant minority of Americans do not live this way. They seldom or never meet people of another race. They dislike interacting with people who don’t share their political beliefs. And when they imagine the life they want for their children, they prize sameness, not difference. Education and geography seemed to make a big difference in how people think about these issues, and in some cases, so did age.
When Becky Evans started studying cat-human relationships, she kept hearing, over and over again, about how cats are psychopaths.
On one hand, anyone who has looked into the curiously blank face of a catloaf knows exactly what that means. But also, exactly what does it mean to apply a human mental diagnosis to felines? We let these clawed creatures into our homes and our beds, but we still have trouble understanding them on anything but our own human terms.
Evans, a psychology graduate student at the University of Liverpool, recently devised a survey for owners who think that their cats are psychopaths. The survey asks owners to describe the allegedly psychopathic behaviors, and so far they have included bullying other pets, taking over the dog’s bed, and waiting on the kitchen counter to pounce on unsuspecting family members. In short, pretty typical cat behavior.
The fevered speculation about when the special counsel will conclude his work overshadows how much the public already knows about the president and Russia.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report could come out as soon as next week, CNN reported on Thursday. Unless, of course, it doesn’t—after all, there have been various suggestions for months that the end was in sight, and the Justice Department said Friday there would be no report next week. And anyway, none of this matters if the newly installed Attorney General Bill Barr decides not to release the report, or releases only a limited summary, or delays the release, or …
Because of the many uncertainties about when the report will arrive, and what the public will see, and what shape the report might take, and what steps might come next, the report has taken on outsize importance in discourse and coverage about the presidential campaign, Russia, and Donald Trump. That’s risky, though. Perhaps the Mueller report will deliver a stunning new revelation about Trump’s campaign or business ties, but it could just as plausibly turn out to be a short, dry summary of material that’s already known.
The country offers a cautionary tale about democracy and voting rights.
“Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”
In the half century since John F. Kennedy said those famous words, the balance has definitely shifted toward asking what your country can do for you. In almost every democracy, citizenship today offers more rights and imposes fewer responsibilities than it did in 1961.
How much should that balance shift? Canadians have been debating that question this winter—and landed in favor of rights, against responsibilities. Canada’s example offers cautionary lessons for others.
The story starts far from Canadian shores, in Lebanon, in the summer of 2006. A cross-border raid by Hezbollah triggered an armed Israeli response. The fighting rapidly escalated into a serious Israeli-Iranian proxy war. Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel. Israeli troops crossed the border to destroy the rocket launchers. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese were displaced in the fighting.
As winters grow warmer in North America, thirsty ticks are on the move.
We found the moose calf half an hour in. He lay atop thin snow on a gentle slope sheltered by the boughs of a big, black spruce, curled up as a dog would on a couch. He had turned his long, gaunt head to rest against his side and closed his eyes. He might have been sleeping. The day before, April 17, 2018, when the GPS tracker on the moose’s collar stopped moving for six hours, this stillness had caused both an email and a text to alert Jake Debow, a Vermont state field biologist who stood next to me now with Josh Blouin, another state biologist, that moose No. 75 had either shucked his collar or died.
“You want pictures before we start?” Debow asked me. He’s the senior of the two young biologists, both still in grad school, both in their late 20s, young and strong and funny, from families long in the north country, both drawn to the job by a love of hunting and being outside. Debow had always wanted to be a game warden; in college, he “fell in love with the science.” His Vermont roots go back 10 generations. “Jake Debow,” Josh told me, “is about as Vermont as you can get.” It was Debow’s second season on the moose project, and Blouin’s first. This was the sixth calf, of 30 collared, that they’d found sucked to death by ticks this season. They were here to necropsy the carcass, send the tissues to a veterinary pathology lab in New Hampshire, and try to figure out as much as possible about how and why these calves were dying.
“Intuitive eating” encourages people to eat whatever they want. It might be great advice.
In 2016, Molly Bahr changed her whole life with a Google search. Bahr, a therapist, was at a professional training on eating disorders when a speaker mentioned in passing that participants might be interested in something called intuitive eating. Bahr looked up the term. “I went home that day and it was like a light switch,” she says. “I felt like I got hit by a truck.”
Bahr decided that she wanted to spread the word about intuitive eating, but there was one problem. Up to that moment, she had been dedicated to traditional ideas of dieting and health, encouraging followers of her growing fitness-focused Instagram account to weigh their food, watch their nutritional macros, and fret over their weight as a primary indicator of their health. Intuitive eating, on the other hand, is a theory that posits the opposite: Calorie counting, carb avoiding, and waistline measuring are not only making people emotionally miserable, but contributing to many of the health problems previously attributed to simple overeating.
The Green New Deal’s mastermind is a precocious New Yorker with big ambitions. Sound familiar?
The economic thinker who most influenced the Green New Deal isn’t Marx or Lenin. No, if you want to understand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s bid to remake the economy to fight climate change, you need to read Hamilton.
Yes, Alexander Hamilton. Long before he was associated with theatrical hip-hop, former Treasury Secretary Hamilton called for policies that sound familiar to us today. Like Representative Ocasio-Cortez, he wanted massive federal spending on new infrastructure. Like Donald Trump, he believed that very high tariffs can nurture American manufacturing. And like Elizabeth Warren, he was willing to bend the Constitution to reform the financial system.
Hamilton, in short, successfully used the power of the federal government to boost manufacturing, to pick winners and losers, and to shape the fate of the U.S. economy. He is the father of American industrial policy: the set of laws and regulations that say the federal government can guide economic growth without micromanaging it. And the Green New Deal, for all its socialist regalia, only makes sense in light of his capitalistic work.
A collection of images from Chicago as it was some 75 years ago
Jack Delano was one of the photographers who worked in Roy Stryker’s Farm Security Administration photography program in the early 1940s, traveling the American countryside, photographing people and places with the stated goal of “introducing America to Americans.” In 1942 and ’43, Delano spent time in the rail yards of Chicago, documenting the busy freight hub and the countless workers who kept the trains running 24 hours a day. Some of his most striking images were made on Kodachrome color transparencies, wonderfully preserved in the Library of Congress today. Collected below, a handful of images from Chicago as it was some 75 years ago.
The controversy around Google’s Nest home-security devices shows that consumers never really know what their personal technology is capable of.
Google apologized Wednesday to customers who purchased its Nest Secure home-security system. The device is equipped with a microphone that has gone unmentioned since it went up for sale in 2017. Earlier in February, Google announced on Twitter an upcoming software update that activated the microphone, making the Nest Guard responsive to voice commands and Google Assistant technology. The tweet startled users, who were never told the system could pick up sound.
“Have I had a device with a hidden microphone in my house this entire time?” one user asked.
Missing from the Nest account’s response was the word “yes,” but to be clear: Yes.
“We included a microphone in the Nest Guard with features such as the Google Assistant in mind. It has not been used up to this point, and you can enable or disable it at any time using the Nest app,” the company wrote on Twitter.
