The Shutdown Racket Has a New Cure, If the Senate Will Take It

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(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Something has shifted in Washington, and not for the better. The government shutdown — once a rare and dramatic last resort, a sign that the system had genuinely broken down — has become routine. A tool. A tactic. A lever pulled with increasing comfort by those who calculate that chaos serves them. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., wants to change the calculus. Quietly, without fanfare, he set up a vote this week on a resolution from Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., that is simple in concept and pointed in implication: if the government shuts down, senators don’t get paid. Kennedy,

Dinner Gunman Enters Not-Guilty Plea as Defense Targets Pirro’s Entire Office

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(Photo by U.S. Department of Justice/Getty Images)

Cole Tomas Allen said nothing. Handcuffed, shackled, dressed in an orange jail uniform, the 31-year-old from Torrance, California, stood before a federal judge Monday morning and let his lawyer speak for him. The plea was not guilty. The charge: attempted assassination of the President of the United States. Allen is accused of breaching a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on April 25, armed with guns and knives, and firing a shotgun at a Secret Service officer who moved to stop him. The officer — struck once in a bullet-resistant vest — survived. Allen was injured in

Virginia’s High Court Delivers a Blunt Verdict on Redistricting

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(Photo by Mike Kropf/Getty Images)

Something important happened in Virginia on Friday, and it deserves more than a passing glance. The Supreme Court of Virginia — sharply divided, 4 to 3 — struck down a set of congressional maps that Democrats had engineered through a referendum last month. The court called the process unlawful. It voided the new districts. It reinstated the map drawn after the 2020 census, the one voters and politicians had lived with for years. That’s the legal story. But the political story is larger. The maps Democrats pushed through were not modest corrections to reflect population shifts. Analysts warned the new

The Pope, the Secretary, and a Message That Would Not Bend

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(Photo by Andrew Medichini / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)

Marco Rubio is a Catholic man who flew to Rome and sat across from the new pope. That matters. Not as theater, but as texture — a reminder that the great questions of our time are not only strategic or geopolitical. They are, in some sense, moral. The meeting was described as “friendly and constructive.” Both sides spoke of shared commitments to peace and human dignity. The State Department said the right things. The Vatican said nothing that contradicted them. But underneath the diplomatic courtesy, something real was being worked through. Pope Leo had spoken in April with unmistakable feeling

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