Power

The House speaker fight was eerily reminiscent of 1923 — but the differences between the two will drive what comes next.

Political scientist Richard Bensel explains the feedback loops between policy commitments of political elites and the regional distribution of political power.

The Framers would have never tolerated debt-limit brinkmanship. It’s time to put this terrible idea on trial.

One hundred years ago, a strong leader brought House rebels to the table to elect a speaker. Can McCarthy do the same?

The battle is worth winning for Kevin McCarthy — and could reshape the Republican Party.

A look at socialism’s far-reaching influence on American thought.

Jedediah Purdy's new book examines why the U.S. has continuously failed to qualify as a system defined by popular rule.

The history of speakership contests underscores the corner Kevin McCarthy is painted into and the corner any Republican House leader is likely to face.

What we fight about when we fight about schools.

Kevin McCarthy's struggling bid to win the speakership has nothing on the epic 1856 contest that pitted abolitionists against proslavery members of Congress.

Video testimony and evidence presented by the House Select Committee to recommend criminal prosecution of Donald Trump.

Largely forgotten today, Albion W. Tourgée’s legislation could have prevented Moore v. Harper.

An overhyped new paradigm proved to be a slogan without a movement.

The FBI’s first director built the agency around some of his own worst instincts.

A new book argues that the American right emerged out of a backlash to multiracial democracy following the Civil War.

A new book traces the long history of cloaking racism in the language of resistance to an overbearing federal government.

Georgia’s own history highlights what out-organizing voter suppression really entails.

Georgia’s competitive runoff election is the result of centuries of white supremacist efforts.

Maybe the United States was doomed from the start. And Jean-Jacques Rousseau can explain why.

Mills exposed postwar American power and warned of an authoritarian turn in the book, which speaks to our own moment of inequality and right-wing anger.

Governors Ron DeSantis and Gretchen Whitmer took opposite approaches to covid in swing states — but each sailed to reelection.

Sen. Raphael Warnock and challenger Herschel Walker, both Black, square off in a contest designed to empower White voters.

Their plan required not only a social and legal division along racial lines but a political one, too — a separation that persists today.

James K. Polk is considered one of the most successful presidents, even though he did not seek reelection.

In a 2004 interview, then-President George W. Bush told the 9/11 Commission that he didn't know Al Qaeda had plans to strike the US. Records show otherwise.

Can the origins of today’s right be traced to the 1990s?

How a red wave in a solidly blue state helped tip the balance.

How Americans lost faith in the possibility of self-government.

Revisiting political assassinations.

Alexis de Tocqueville left France to study the American prison system and returned with the material that would become “Democracy in America.”