This is an version of The Atlantic Daily, a publication that guides you thru the most important tales of the day, helps you uncover new concepts, and recommends one of the best in tradition. Sign up for it right here.
House Republicans are readying their subpoenas.
But first, listed below are three new tales from The Atlantic.
Probable Probes
After a few (er, 14) preliminary stumbles, House Republicans have elected a speaker and handed out committee gavels, and at the moment are poised to ship on the one promise to voters that they’ve the unchallenged energy to maintain: pursuing aggressive investigations of President Joe Biden, his administration, and, sure, even his household.
The flurry of inquiries that Republicans, beneath the auspices of Congress’s oversight energy, plan to launch within the coming days and weeks may effectively overwhelm the Biden administration, to not point out the general public. None of the hearings are prone to command the eye of final yr’s Democratic-led January 6 committee, however they’ve the potential to disclose new details about how the federal authorities has operated over the previous two years and to create political complications for the president as he prepares to run for reelection. The investigations additionally carry dangers for Republicans, who may lose public help if they look like tilting too far at conspiracy theories or pursuing overly partisan—and private—takedowns of Biden and his son Hunter.
Here’s a information to the probes which might be prone to make headlines within the months forward.
The Southern Border
Multiple House committees are planning hearings on a problem that Republicans made, together with tackling inflation, a centerpiece of their nationwide marketing campaign. They’ve accused Biden of willfully neglecting the inflow of migrants throughout the southern border, and though the assaults incessantly devolve into immigrant-bashing, the ethical and authorized conundrum over tips on how to deal with asylum seekers is changing into a much bigger political legal responsibility for the president. Big-city Democratic mayors equivalent to Eric Adams of New York are complaining that they lack the funds to accommodate the migrants who wind up on their streets. An enormous query is whether or not the hearings will keep targeted on coverage or whether or not they’ll flip into an impeachment drive towards Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s secretary of homeland safety.
Hunter Biden
The private and enterprise dealings of the president’s surviving son have been a Republican obsession for years, and now the get together has the ability to carry hearings on what Representative Elise Stefanik of New York has referred to as “the Biden crime family.” Hunter Biden is already beneath investigation by federal prosecutors in Delaware, and Republicans are intent on demonstrating each that he traded on entry to his well-known father abroad and that the president was conscious of what his son was doing. The youthful Biden could also be in actual authorized jeopardy, however the GOP faces a difficult check in making the broader public care about Hunter Biden and maintaining its probe targeted on his alleged corruption relatively than the extra sordid private actions of a troubled son.
The “Weaponization of the Federal Government”
To safe the House speakership, Kevin McCarthy agreed to conservative calls for to create a choose subcommittee modeled on a Nineteen Seventies Senate panel that investigated abuses by the intelligence group. This one is targeted on what Republicans name “the weaponization of the federal government,” and it’s prone to zero in on complaints from Donald Trump–aligned conservatives that the FBI and different federal law-enforcement companies have unfairly focused the previous president and his supporters. Democrats see a extra malicious motive: to undermine and thwart the various ongoing investigations involving Trump and GOP lawmakers, together with the particular counsel’s inquiry into Trump’s possession of categorized paperwork at Mar-a-Lago.
Biden’s Own Classified Documents
Republicans had barely claimed their new House majority when information broke that categorized paperwork had been discovered at a assume tank in Washington, D.C., the place Biden had stored an workplace, and Biden’s residence in Delaware—handing them a recent line of inquiry towards the president. GOP leaders shortly launched a congressional investigation, however they are going to be competing with the Justice Department, which appointed Special Counsel Robert Hur to look into the matter.
U.S.-China Relations
Democrats might even see the opposite deliberate investigations as partisan workouts geared toward tarnishing the president, however not this one. A House vote final week to create a choose committee on the “strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party” earned broad bipartisan help, together with from the entire high Democratic leaders. The committee is predicted to deal with how the U.S. ought to counter China’s rising financial and army power, the specter of its doable invasion of Taiwan, and American issues about its human-rights abuses. Stronger U.S. coverage towards China has lengthy been a bipartisan trigger in Congress; former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who voted for the invoice, is a hawk who angered the Chinese authorities together with her high-profile go to to Taiwan final yr. That consensus is probably going so as to add legitimacy to the committee’s work, though some progressives are cautious of its potential to generate anti-Asian rhetoric.
Related:
Today’s News
- A helicopter with senior Ukrainian officers onboard crashed in a Kyiv suburb, killing greater than dozen folks, together with Ukraine’s minister of inside affairs. The explanation for the crash remains to be unknown.
- Microsoft is planning to put off about 10,000 staff as a part of a broader effort to chop prices.
- New analysis reveals that areas of Greenland are hotter than they’ve been at any level previously 1,000 years.
Dispatches
Explore all of our newsletters right here.
Evening Read
This Is the Band That’s Supposedly Saving Rock and Roll?
By Spencer Kornhaber
Early December, a tchotchke store in Brooklyn—an worker advises me about which novelty socks to pair with which comical greeting card for a good friend. Then her voice, beforehand curious and chatty, good points a sudden seriousness. She tells me a couple of live performance she went to the night time earlier than. The band was Italian, it was saving rock and roll, and it’d play within the metropolis once more, that night time. I out of the blue understood the distinction between a salesman and an evangelist. The girl gave me an order: You should go see Måneskin.
I didn’t go, however I did know who Måneskin was. I first turned conscious of the group whereas attending a watch get together for the 2021 Eurovision Song Competition. No one on the get together may perceive why a bar band in burgundy leather-based, taking part in what appeared like a Rage Against the Machine music edited for a Chevy advert, ran away with the highest prize. Eurovision is thought for Abba-style spectacle, foolish and brilliant. Måneskin is all about scowling, and guitars that sound like carburetors. But clearly, the band had sparked ardour someplace—the form of ardour that, it seems, converts listeners into proselytizers.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. “The Bug,” a brand new poem by Daniella Toosie-Watson.
“What did you expect? For me to let the bug / just be a bug. To leave it alone / when it already planned on dying.”
Watch. Hawa, streaming on Amazon Prime, precisely captures teen grief.
P.S.
I’ve been studying, and totally having fun with, James Kirchick’s ebook Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, which got here out final yr. The title, with its deal with a single American metropolis, really undersells the ebook’s scope. More than a case examine or chronology of a civil-rights motion, Secret City is a captivating historical past of the previous century of American politics. It reveals, or reminds, the reader of the supporting and sometimes central position that the scandal of homosexuality—because it was too lengthy understood—performed in so lots of the nation’s pivotal moments, together with the Red Scare of the Nineteen Forties and ’50s, the Kennedy assassination, and Watergate. I had no thought, for instance, that Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan had been all topic at one time or one other to rumors that they had been homosexual. Kirchick paperwork how homosexual life developed from subculture to easily tradition in Washington over the course of some many years, and the way the nation’s capital was each behind and forward of the curve within the gradual however profound shift in acceptance of homosexual women and men in public service.
— Russell
Isabel Fattal contributed to this article.