Its not like they didn’t run on being the party of nonstop national crisis.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but congressional Republicans are once again careening toward internal crisis and a damaging government shutdown.
You may remember this song-and-dance from the last four or five times the party’s hard-line Freedom Caucus members held America’s economy hostage. That doesn’t make our latest spin on the roller coaster any less nauseating.
In the past, Republican leaders managed by the slimmest of margins to avert financial catastrophe by working with Democrats to pass temporary funding bills. This time it isn’t even clear they can achieve that minimum level of competence — in part because House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has blown his internal credibility to bits.
Meanwhile, the American people are watching the slow, loud and very public disintegration of Republican unity.
Once again, McCarthy’s own caucus has taken the sledgehammer to his knees. Over the weekend, a dozen Republican lawmakers publicly declared they would oppose the Speaker’s latest effort to keep the government open. Now McCarthy’s legacy risks being defined by the GOP’s transformation into a nonfunctional party of nonstop national crisis.
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For people who were alive then, this was a big fucking deal.
50 years ago today – Battle of the Sexes, exhibition tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs that took place on September 20, 1973, inside the Astrodome in Houston. The match was something of a spectacle as the in-her-prime King defeated the 55-year-old Riggs in three straight sets, but the event nevertheless was a significant moment in the second wave of the women’s movement that took place during the 1970s.
A number of other tennis matches over the years had been referred to as a “battle of the sexes,” notably a match earlier in 1973 between Riggs and Margaret Court and a 1992 contest between Martina Navratilova and Jimmy Connors. However, the King-Riggs match had by far the greatest cultural impact of any of the “battles.” The King-Riggs event also laid claim as the most-watched tennis match of all time, with an in-house attendance of 30,472 as well as a worldwide television audience estimated at over 90 million.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged former President Donald Trump on Tuesday to release details of an apparent plan that the 2024 Republican presidential front-runner claims would end the war in Ukraine “within 24 hours.”
Trump, 77, has wildly bragged in several interviews and campaign events that if elected president next year, he would lead peace negotiations between Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin and have the conflict resolved within one day.
The ex-commander-in-chief, however, has refused to provide details about the approach he would take to end the nearly 19-month-long war.
“He can publicly share his idea now, not waste time, not to lose people, and say, ‘My formula is to stop the war and stop all this tragedy and stop Russian aggression,’” Zelensky told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “And he said, how he sees it, how to push Russian from our land. Otherwise, he’s not presenting the global idea of peace.”
