Kelly Jane Torrance

Trick or treat, Mr President? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tried to deliver the former with the House resolution — passed today entirely on party lines — outlining rules for the impeachment inquiry she announced more than a month ago. Ignoring precedent and the fact that every other presidential impeachment inquiry began with a House vote to authorize it, Pelosi insisted that because there was no constitutional requirement for a vote, she was under no obligation to hold one. She made sure to point out that today’s resolution wasn’t a vote to authorize the inquiry either — that would be admitting that the month of work Democrats have done so far wasn’t fair.

The Democrats’ impeachment inquiry has raised many questions. Did President Trump withhold military aid to Ukraine because he wanted the country’s new president to investigate possible 2020 rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter? Was the whistleblower who alerted the country to the phone call between the two TV star presidents politically motivated? And what is it like to be Rudy Giuliani, the man outside the administration at the center of it all? I can offer some insight into that last one. The day after House speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the impeachment inquiry, I sat across from Giuliani on a train from New York City to Washington. The three-hour ride was a rollicking one, with the former mayor of NYC indicating he was more than ready to rumble.

Kirsten Gillibrand has always been a woman of the moment. But has her moment passed? She obviously doesn’t think so, and the New York senator was riding high in one poll on Tuesday night — she was trending on Twitter across the country. Gillibrand appeared on the top-rated late-night talk show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, on which the host asked the Democrat the question no one has been asking. ‘I’m just curious — do you have anything you would like to announce?’ She grabbed Colbert’s hands, holding them hokily on his desk for a few moments before answering. ‘I’m filing [pause] an exploratory committee [pause] for president of the United States [pause] TONIGHT!’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?

The 116th Congress opened this week with little fanfare in the Senate, where all eyes were on whether there was still some hope a partial government shutdown could be prevented or at least concluded quickly. Things were very different in the House of Representatives, where a change in control led to a lot of children running around and pumping their fists in celebration. I do mean children literally — I’m not trying to characterize the Democrat-controlled House and its 101 new members as juvenile, even if that day one called the president a ‘motherfucker’ (Rashida Tlaib) and another taunted Republicans on Twitter with ‘Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas’ (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who else?).

All day Election Day, everyone — well, everyone in the business — looks for early signs of the results to come. I heard reports from friends in real life and on Twitter that the lines at polling stations were far longer in the D.C. suburbs and New York City today than they were during the contentious Trump-Clinton contest of 2016. Such anecdotal data seemed to confirmed the predictions of most pundits that a ‘blue wave’ would see Democrats take over the House of Representatives and make it difficult for Republicans to keep control of the Senate. But of course cities of the elites would see a lot of enthusiasm today: They’re the centers of the #Resistance determined to vote against the president, even if he isn’t directly on the ballot himself.

Friday brought boffo news for the Republicans, just four days before the midterm elections that will determine if the party keeps control of both chambers of Congress. The Wall Street Journal succinctly captured the story: ‘Wages Rise at Fastest Rate in Nearly a Decade as Hiring Jumps: Unemployment rate held at a 49-year low in October; wages increased 3.1%.’ As the story went on to explain, a few factors converged to paint a particularly positive economic picture last month. ‘Employers shook off a September slowdown to add 250,000 jobs to their payrolls in October, above monthly averages in recent years, the Labor Department said Friday. With unemployment holding at 3.7 percent, a 49-year low, and employers competing for scarce workers, wages increased 3.

The FBI’s additional background check on Brett Kavanaugh isn’t the only document regarding President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee being presented to the Senate today. On Wednesday night, the New York Times published online a letter headlined ‘The Senate Should Not Confirm Kavanaugh, Signed, 650 Law Professors.’ By Thursday, the number of signatories had jumped to more than 1,700. The letter comes as Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell set in motion events that will likely result in a final vote on Kavanaugh’s appointment early Saturday evening. Word had it that the FBI hadn’t found any additional evidence to corroborate Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation that Kavanaugh attempted to rape her when they were high school students.

This week in Washington, the big political stories centered on sex — one with an unfortunate lack of specificity, the other offering all too many details. After days of rumours that Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s pick for the open Supreme Court seat, was facing an allegation somehow related to sexual assault, his accuser came forward and told her story to the Washington Post. Christine Blasey Ford shed her anonymity and said Kavanaugh had attempted to rape her when they were high school students. She remembered how the event occurred, she said, but not exactly when or where. These details are important, but it seems we’ll never know what exactly happened at a suburban Washington house party sometime in the summer of 1982.

Donald Trump on Wednesday finally caved to pressure—from both sides of the aisle—and did what just days earlier he claimed he couldn’t do: he signed an executive order that he said would end the separate detention of family members who together crossed the border illegally. Images of children being held in cage-like facilities—even minus those pictures that had actually been taken during the Barack Obama administration—had led the news cycle for a week. A dozen Republican senators urged the administration to halt the policy while lawmakers scrambled to develop a legislative fix. It wasn’t just President Trump’s own party calling on him to show compassion; his family members did, too.

Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. That’s an old proverb but one that the 78-year-old Nancy Pelosi never seems to have heard. The House Democratic leader gave an interview yesterday to the Boston Globe in which she was by turns doubtless, defensive, and defiant. “Nancy Pelosi wants you to know she’s not going anywhere,” the Globe’s story began, and that encapsulates the congresswoman’s attitude. She is confident the Democrats will retake the House of Representatives in November’s midterm elections, and she is confident she will remain leader and thus become the speaker of the House when that happens.

Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, has spent the last few days in New York, using American media to make a full-court press in a last-ditch attempt to persuade the United States not to tear up the nuclear deal with his country. As President Trump and Macron discussed what to do about Iran, Zarif complained about the lack of respect Donald Trump’s administration has shown the Islamic Republic. Talking about the prospect Trump will decide by the May 12 deadline not to recertify the deal, he asked rhetorically, “Who would, in their right mind, deal with the U.S. anymore?”It’s a striking strategy, not least because President Trump couldn’t make a similar media tour in Iran.

So Rudy Giuliani finally got a job from Donald Trump. The former mayor of New York was one of the few establishment Republican figures to back Trump early in his run for president. His support was enthusiastic, and he broadcast it forcefully and repeatedly during the campaign. He thought it would lead to a plum post in a Trump administration—he had his sights set high, on either secretary of state or attorney general—but he was rebuffed. Now he’s got a job, though it’s one almost no one else in the country wanted: personal legal counsel to the president.