The Late Battalion

John McCain's 'No' Vote Sinks Republicans' 'Skinny Repeal' Plan

Russell Berman

The Arizona veteran cast an unexpected vote against Mitch McConnell’s last-ditch proposal to partially repeal the Affordable Care Act, leaving the GOP once again without a way forward.

Senator John McCain brought down the latest Republican health-care plan early Friday morning.

In a moment of high drama on the Senate floor, the Arizona senator, stricken with brain cancer and railing against his party’s secretive legislative maneuvering, provided the decisive vote against Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s proposal to partially repeal the Affordable Care Act. The amendment fell, 51-49, thwarting once again the GOP’s longstanding efforts to deliver on a central campaign promise. Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska also voted against the bill, continuing their opposition to the GOP’s partisan repeal effort. But it was McCain who surprised the Senate, breaking with his party after earlier helping it on a key procedural vote.

Flowers are pictured on the grave of Sergei Magnitsky at the Preobrazhensky cemetery in Moscow. — Mikhail Voskresensky / Reuters

Bill Browder's Testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee

Rosie Gray

“I hope that my story will help you understand the methods of Russian operatives in Washington and how they use U.S. enablers to achieve major foreign policy goals without disclosing those interests,” Browder writes.

The financier Bill Browder has emerged as an unlikely central player in the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Sergei Magnitsky, an attorney Browder hired to investigate official corruption, died in Russian custody in 2009. Congress subsequently imposed sanctions on the officials it held responsible for his death, passing the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government retaliated, among other ways, by suspending American adoptions of Russian children.

Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who secured a meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort, was engaged in a campaign for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act, and raised the subject of adoptions in that meeting. That’s put the spotlight back on Browder’s long campaign for Kremlin accountability, and against corruption—a campaign whose success has irritated Putin and those around him.

Donald Trump stands eating pie. — Lisa Hornak / Reuters

Donald Trump Eats First

Conor Friedersdorf

Even prominent right-wing populists are beginning to worry that they invested their faith in an unstable leader.

This week, as Donald Trump publicly attacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions, an assault one restrained observer described as “a multitiered tower of political idiocy, a sublime monument to the moronic, a gaudy, gleaming, Ozymandian folly,” even David Horowitz, the anti-Leftist intellectual and author of Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America, felt compelled to admit something to his Twitter followers: “I have to confess, I'm really distressed by Trump's shabby treatment of Sessions.”

Trump has always been vehemently opposed from the left and distrusted on the right by Never Trump conservatives, who continue to be dismayed by his behavior. But this week as never before, public doubts surfaced among Trump boosters and apologists, prompting Jay Cost to quip, “at the end it's just gonna be Sean Hannity huddled in a corner, quietly whispering to himself that Trump is a great American.”

How Long Can This Go On?

David A. Graham

One of Trump’s top aides viciously attacks the others, even as the president lambastes his own attorney general. Is there any limit on this administration’s dysfunction?

If Anthony Scaramucci is conducting an experiment in radical transparency at the White House, then things are going well. Otherwise, his tenure as communications director might not be off to a great start.

Thursday began with Scaramucci giving a preposterous interview to CNN—cutting off a segment with New Yorker journalist Ryan Lizza—in which he accused White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus of leaking to the press, suggested he is trying to “save America from this president,” and likened his own relationship with Priebus to that of the biblical figure Cain and to Abel, the brother he slew.

The day closed with Lizza writing his own, devastating account of a deranged conversation he’d had with Scaramucci Wednesday night, after Lizza reported on a dinner Scaramucci had with Fox News personalities past and present. Politico had also published Scaramucci’s financial disclosure, obtained by a routine public-records request, but which Scaramucci was for some reason convinced had been leaked. (One fascinating lesson of Scaramucci’s appointment is how fast the debilitating paranoia of this White House can infect a new hire.)

Why Does the Kremlin Care So Much About the Magnitsky Act?

Julia Ioffe

What Russian officials mean when they talk about “adoptions”

Let’s get something straight: The Magnitsky Act is not, nor has it ever been, about adoptions.

The Magnitsky Act, rather, is about money. It freezes certain Russian officials’ access to the stashes they were keeping in Western banks and real estate and bans their entry to the United States. The reason Russian (and now, American) officials keep talking about adoption in the same breath is because of how the Russian side retaliated to the Magnitsky Act in 2012, namely by banning American adoptions of Russian children. The Russians vowed they were punishing Americans who violated the human rights of Russians, after an adopted Russian toddler died of heat stroke in a Virginia family’s car. But the only Americans the bill directly targeted were the ones involved in putting the Magnitsky Act together.

Stephan Savoia / Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP / The Atlantic

Why Zuckerberg and Musk Are Fighting About the Robot Future

Ian Bogost

It looks like the two tech titans are arguing about AI’s impact on humanity. Really they’re protecting their personal brands.

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are having a spat about whether or not artificial intelligence is going to kill us all.

Musk, the chief of Tesla and SpaceX who has longstanding worries about the potentially apocalyptic future of AI, recently returned to that soapbox, making an appeal for proactive regulations on AI. “I keep sounding the alarm bell,” he told attendees at a National Governors Association meeting this month. “But until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react.”

In a Facebook Live broadcast, Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, offered riposte. He called Musk a “naysayer” and accused his doomsday fears of unnecessary negativity. “In some ways I actually think it is pretty irresponsible,” Zuck scolded. Musk then retorted on Twitter: “I’ve talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited.”

The Lesson Trump Hasn't Learned

McKay Coppins

Trump says that he surrounds himself with “the best people”—but too often, that means people like himself.

The world’s best Donald Trump impersonator is now in charge of White House communications—and if nothing else, it’s making for great television.

For evidence, look no further than Anthony Scaramucci’s mesmerizing Thursday morning interview with CNN. “The Mooch”—as he is known among his friends and admirers (a group that seems to include a growing number of reporters)—was coming off a late night spent waging a bitter and outrageously public battle against White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, when he called in to CNN’s morning show New Day. For the next 30 minutes, he put on a compulsively watchable performance that so precisely captured his boss’s style that it seemed designed to demoralize Alec Baldwin.

An abandoned, boarded up building in Chicago that two years before this photo was taken housed a school that was later closed — Jim Young / Reuters

Why the Myth of Meritocracy Hurts Kids of Color

Melinda D. Anderson

A new study finds that believing society is fair can lead disadvantaged adolescents to act out and engage in risky behavior.

Brighton Park is a predominantly Latino community on the southwest side of Chicago. It’s a neighborhood threatened by poverty, gang violence, ICE raids, and isolation—in a city where income, race, and zip code can determine access to jobs, schools, healthy food, and essential services. It is against this backdrop that the Chicago teacher Xian Franzinger Barrett arrived at the neighborhood’s elementary school in 2014.

Recognizing the vast economic and racial inequalities his students faced, he chose what some might consider a radical approach for his writing and social-studies classes, weaving in concepts such as racism, classism, oppression, and prejudice. Barrett said it was vital to reject the oft-perpetuated narrative that society is fair and equal to address students’ questions and concerns about their current conditions. And Brighton Elementary’s seventh- and eighth-graders quickly put the lessons to work—confronting the school board over inequitable funding, fighting to install a playground, and creating a classroom library focused on black and Latino authors.

Why Trump Is Threatening the Wrong Republican Senator on Health Care

Russell Berman

Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is no vulnerable GOP squish—she wields significant power over the Interior Department and once won her seat as a write-in candidate.

Updated on July 27 at 1:22 p.m. ET

It’s arm-twisting time in the Senate as Republicans close in on a decisive health-care vote, and the arm President Trump has decided to wring hardest belongs to Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

Murkowski, a former member of the party leadership now beginning her third six-year term, angered the president by defying him on a key procedural vote to begin debate on Tuesday. Along with Senator Susan Collins of Maine, she was one of two Republicans voting against the motion, which succeeded only when Vice President Mike Pence broke a 50-50 tie. Trump ignored Collins but assailed Murkowski in a tweet on Wednesday morning, saying she “really let the Republicans, and our country, down yesterday.”

A lamp on a desk against a dark background — INSAGO / Shutterstock

Snopes Faces an Ugly Legal Battle

Alexis C. Madrigal

The internet’s favorite fact-checkers are caught in a messy dispute.

On Monday, the editorial staff of Snopes.com wrote a short plea for help. The post said that the site needed money to fund its operations because another company that Snopes had contracted with “continues to essentially hold the Snopes.com web site hostage.”

“Our legal team is fighting hard for us, but, having been cut off from all revenue, we are facing the prospect of having no financial means to continue operating the site and paying our staff (not to mention covering our legal fees) in the meanwhile,” the note continued.

It was a shocking message from a website that’s been around for more than 20 years—and that’s become a vital part of internet infrastructure in the #fakenews era. The site’s readers have responded. Already, more than $92,000 has been donated to a GoFundMe with a goal of $500,000.