On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Chris Lehmann discusses why Republicans can’t govern.
Former House speaker Kevin McCarthy gestures towards the newly installed nameplate at his office after being sworn in as speaker of the 118th Congress in Washington in January 2023.(Matt Rourke / AP Photo)
Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
A government shutdown has been temporarily avoided, but congress remains a mess. Kevin McCarthy has been ousted from his position as House Speaker. The hand-shake deal he made over Ukraine funding is now in doubt and the prospect of another shutdown drama looms, bringing with it the real danger of a prolonged government closure.
Chris Lehmann, D.C. Bureau Chief for The Nation joins the program to look at the deep history of the GOP’s persistent proclivity for empowering extremists in congress. Special emphasis is given to Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party. This Politco interview with the sociologist Theda Skocpol is also discussed.
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A government shutdown has been temporarily avoided, but Congress remains a mess. Kevin McCarthy has been ousted from his position as House speaker. The handshake deal he made over Ukraine funding is now in doubt and the prospect of another shutdown drama looms, bringing with it the real danger of a prolonged government closure.
Chris Lehmann, D.C. bureau chief for The Nation, joins the program to look at the deep history of the GOP’s persistent proclivity for empowering extremists in Congress. Special emphasis is given to Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party. This Politco interview with the sociologist Theda Skocpol is also discussed.
Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
Running for president last year, Donald Trump disowned Project 2025, the laundry list of radical demands gathered together by right-wing think tanks. Trump claimed Project 2025 had no influence on him and was only being raised by Democrats as a political attack. But now Trump is in power, he’s enacting an agenda of dismantling the welfare state that is following Project 2025 in close detail, as my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann documented in a recent column.
Chris and Jeet Heer talk about Trump’s mobilization of Christian nationalist ideologues in the service of a making the state subservient to big business. We also take up the remarkable supine Democratic Party response, and also possible sources of resistance in the courts, the federal government and, most crucially, from outraged public opinion mobilized into protest.
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Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.