Attention to the Unseen

Aaron Blake writes: It’s not clear yet that House Republicans’ inability to elect a new speaker has significantly recast the political paradigm in this country. But the danger for the party is in a drawn-out process continuing to cast doubt on the GOP’s ability to actually govern when voters give it power. A poll released this weekend showed two-thirds of Americans agreed that “Congress needs to elect a speaker as soon as possible” to deal with issues such as Israel, Ukraine and…

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Noah Berlatsky writes: The ongoing GOP House speakership debacle has been a clownish, humiliating spectacle which has made basically every Republican involved look like a dunderhead unfit to look smug on Sean Hannity’s show, much less govern the country. So it’s all the more surprising that one legislator who has emerged as a figure of resolve is Colorado’s Ken Buck. Buck has not, up to now, been a figure of integrity, to put it mildly. He’s a radical right Freedom…

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Matthew Duss writes: In his popular 1998 book, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, the late scholar Fouad Ajami offered a critique of 20th-century Arab nationalists and intellectuals for having built what Ajami saw as a fictional sense of their own accomplishments, which he claimed in turn had promoted a chauvinistic and conspiratorial worldview. “In an Arab political history littered with thwarted dreams, little honor would be extended to pragmatists who knew the limits of what could and could not…

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Paul Kane writes: Rep. Jake Ellzey (R-Tex.) described his Monday meeting with Rep. Jim Jordan as “very cordial,” one that ended with the retired Navy fighter pilot explaining why he would quietly oppose the Ohio Republican’s bid for speaker. Three days later, as a group of Republicans opposed to Jordan’s candidacy met with the speaker-designate, Ellzey remained quiet, again. But he was restraining himself from yelling at Jordan. “I didn’t say anything. Because I would have said something to him,…

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Anne Applebaum writes: This summer I spent several days in Israel talking with people who were afraid for their country’s future. They were not, at that moment, focused on terrorism, Gaza, or Hamas. They feared something different: the emergence of an undemocratic Israel, a de facto autocracy. In January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his justice minister had announced a package of judicial “reforms” that, taken together, would have given their coalition government the power to alter Israeli legal institutions…

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