Marcus writes the retrospectives. He taught himself the congressional record and has never quite forgiven it.
campaign finance
The Supreme Court does not allow cameras, so on the morning of January 21, 2010, the country learned what happened inside Room One the way it always does: from reporters running down marble steps to a bank of pay phones and producers waiting outside with earpieces. Inside, Anthony Kennedy read
elections clause
The photograph is dated August 17, 2020, and it shows nothing more dramatic than a row of blue mailboxes outside a post office in Washington, sitting in the kind of heat that makes the asphalt shimmer. By that week the mailbox had become a partisan object. The new postmaster general,
welfare reform
The Rose Garden was full of people who had spent two years calling each other liars, and on August 22, 1996, they stood together and smiled for the cameras anyway. Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act that afternoon, his third attempt after two vetoes. The
immigration
On the morning of March 1, 2003, somewhere in a regional federal building whose exact address the record doesn't preserve, a maintenance worker took down a brass plate that read U.S. CUSTOMS SERVICE and put up a temporary sign, stick-on vinyl, reading BUREAU OF IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS
executive power
On November 14, 1979, Jimmy Carter declared a national emergency over the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The hostages came home in January 1981. The emergency did not. It gets renewed every November by a one-paragraph notice in the Federal Register, a formality nobody in the current
party politics
Outside the International Amphitheatre, on the night of August 28, 1968, the air over Grant Park was thick enough with tear gas that delegates arriving by cab could smell it through closed windows three miles away. On the floor, television correspondents were getting shoved by security guards on live camera.
Buffalo, New York, August 1848. The heat hadn't broken, and neither had the men filling the fairgrounds outside the city — several thousand of them, more than had ever assembled for a party that did not yet fully exist. They came from three factions that despised each other on
Tea Party
On the morning of February 19, 2009, a CNBC reporter named Rick Santelli stood on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, surrounded by traders in polo shirts who had not slept much and had opinions about the mortgage bailout that were about to become national policy. He proposed, more
data centers
The Republican Governors Association reserved seven million dollars in Kansas television time before the Democratic primary had even settled who it was running against. That is an unusual amount of money to spend defending a state's honor on the subject of server farms, and it tells you something
data centers
More than a hundred people packed into the Champaign County Board chambers in east central Illinois this spring, close enough to read each other's signs: "Protect Our Water." "Approve the Moratorium." They'd come because a wave of data center proposals had hit
On February 24, 2024, the line outside the W.L. Stephens Aquatic Center in Charleston smelled like chlorine and coffee, folding tables set up between the pool deck and the parking lot, poll workers checking names against a roll that didn't ask which party you belonged to, because
Democratic Party
At just past nine on the night of February 3, 2020, Pete Buttigieg stood in a hotel ballroom in Des Moines and told a cheering room that "by all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious." No results existed yet. Precinct captains across Iowa were still