USA

The Senate passed legislation on Monday night to end the nation’s longest government shutdown, after a critical splinter group of Democrats joined with Republicans and backed a spending package that omitted the chief concession their party had spent weeks demanding.

The 60-to-40 vote, on Day 41 of the shutdown, signaled a break in the gridlock that has shuttered the government for weeks, leaving hundreds of thousands of federal workers furloughed, millions of Americans at risk of losing food assistance and millions more facing air-travel disruptions.

The measure goes next to the House, which is expected to take it up no sooner than Wednesday and where the small Republican margin of control and intense Democratic opposition could make for a close vote. President Trump has indicated that he will sign it.

A deal aimed at ending the US government shutdown has passed the Senate, paving the way for the record-breaking impasse to be broken.

After a weekend of negotiations in Washington, a minority of Democrats joined with Republicans and voted in favour of an agreement.

The vote is a procedural first step towards passing a compromise to fund the government since it ran out of money 1 October.

… What are the main issues in play? The one that has gotten the most ink concerns the recent recrudescence of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment on the right. The two are not synonymous, as Kevin Roberts was at pains to point out in his initial video. But the phenomena overlap and nurture each other.

Another issue, and the one I wish to focus on here, is what I think of as the play behind the play in the attack on Kevin Roberts. John Daniel Davidson, writing in The Federalist, summed up the plot of that supervening play in the subhead to a recent column: “Genuine concern about antisemitism on the right is being hijacked by neocons to attack J. D. Vance in hopes of retaking control of the GOP.”

That is the nub of the matter.

Is it too soon to say the truth about Dick Cheney?

Washington says American taxpayers will no longer support media outlets interfering in the domestic affairs of ally nations like Hungary.

The chief executive officer of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), Kari Lake, informed lawmakers in a letter that Washington will terminate the Hungarian-language service of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), known as Szabad Európa.

It’s so cute to see them puff up their scrawny chests and crow that they are now ascendant, and Orange Man Bad and all us “Maggers” (as then-President Biden used to sneeringly call us, and no, I haven’t forgotten how creepy that felt; I totally understood how Democrats are the party of the Klan at that moment) are minced meat now.

Brutal election night for Republicans, though the ugliness mostly happened in blue states and probably has limited meaning over the long term. A long series of “however” paragraphs follow.

Abigail Spanberger is a harbinger, East Coast Katie Hobbs: bland, empty, relentlessly platitudinous, tactically cowardly. The fact that she won comfortably tells you what’s going to win comfortably. Listen if you must to her NPR interview this morning, where she says literally nothing for seven minutes.

We can draw a few conclusions from an off-year election, when iconic races in blue states went, as expected, overwhelmingly Democratic.

Nevertheless, there is only a year left before the midterms. So Republicans must react to even these paltry results.