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Tag: next week

  • Rain expected to roll through Los Angeles next week

    Rain expected to roll through Los Angeles next week

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    Rain is expected to finally roll through Los Angeles and Southern California starting Monday and continuing through next week, according to the National Weather Service.

    Saturday’s sunny skies are projected to give way to some clouds on Sunday, with temperatures starting to slightly drop.

    The likelihood of showers in Los Angeles County, including downtown, is expected to increase on Monday with a 50% chance of rain.

    Chance of precipitation increases through the week, with a slight chance of thunderstorms Wednesday and Thursday. Temperatures are projected to drop to the 60s through the week.

    Total rain expected from Sunday through Tuesday could reach half an inch from a storm system moving inland that is expected to bring colder weather and rain throughout California, the weather service wrote on social media.

    Any precipitation should bring respite to an otherwise dry and somewhat gusty few weeks in Southern California, despite the state being in an El Niño weather pattern that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expects to provide an unusually warm and wet season for parts of the west.

    While Los Angeles isn’t currently under any red flag warnings or other fire-risky watches, the weather service did upgrade Los Angeles and Ventura counties to “locally brief critical fire weather conditions” until early Sunday, largely concentrated in the hills and mountains, due to wind and low humidity.

    “Gusts of 25 to 35 mph will be common, strongest into Sunday morning with isolated gusts to 45 mph,” the weather service wrote. “Conditions will change rapidly Sunday night with an active storm
    pattern through next week.”

    California has otherwise experienced a mild wildfire season, after dozens of atmospheric rivers pummeled the state earlier this year and delivered record rainfalls.

    Tropical Storm Hilary showered Southern California with several more inches of rain in August, which caused flooding in Coachella Valley.

    Weather experts anticipate a strong El Niño weather pattern through the first few months of 2024, increasing California’s likelihood for even more rain after years of drought and extreme wildfires.

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    Hannah Wiley

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  • Early season atmospheric river to bring significant rains next week to Southern California

    Early season atmospheric river to bring significant rains next week to Southern California

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    While strong winds remained a concern Thursday, meteorologists have their eye on a moisture-rich storm expected to bring significant rains to Southern California by the end of next week.

    An atmospheric river system with a “decent moisture plume” is forecast to hit Southern California as early as Wednesday, and is expected to bring up to 4 inches of rain to some areas, said David Sweet, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Oxnard.

    “We anticipate getting more than an inch, maybe as much as two inches” to much of the Los Angeles area, Sweet said. The mountains could see as much as 4 inches.

    “It will certainly tamp down any fire threat that we’re dealing with currently,” Sweet said.

    While the storm is still almost a week out, Sweet said models show slightly different timing and rain amounts for the system. But he said with confidence the “pineapple express” system will bring significant precipitation with some strong southerly winds. Rains are likely to be most significant Thursday and Friday next week.

    But in the short term, officials are still warning about dangerous fire conditions in most L.A. County valleys and mountains, as well as a the Malibu coast, with a red flag warning still in effect through Thursday evening. Gusty Santa Ana winds up to 50 mph, along with low humidity, mean that any fire start could spread rapidly, the weather service warned.

    Those winds are expected to die down by Friday, causing minor cooling, Sweet said. However, the offshore winds will have a slight resurgence over the weekend, though not to the point of further concern, he said.

    “Those Santa Ana-type winds [this weekend] will boost our temperatures back up into the 80s,” Sweet said.

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    Grace Toohey

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  • The Other Group of Viruses That Could Cause the Next Pandemic

    The Other Group of Viruses That Could Cause the Next Pandemic

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    Whether it begins next week, next year, or next decade, another pandemic is on its way. Researchers can’t predict precisely when or how the outbreak might begin. Some 1.6 million viruses are estimated to lurk in the world’s mammalian and avian wildlife, up to half of which could spill into humans; an untold number are attempting exactly that, at this very moment, bumping up against the people hunting, eating, and encroaching on those creatures. (And that’s just viruses: Parasites, fungi, and bacteria represent major infectious dangers too.) The only true certainty in the pandemic forecast is that the next threat will be here sooner than anyone would like.

    But scientists can at least make an educated guess about what might catalyze the next Big One. Three main families of viruses, more than most others, keep scientists up at night: flu viruses, coronaviruses, and paramyxoviruses, in descending order of threat. Together, those groups make up “the trifecta of respiratory death,” Sara Cherry, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me.

    Flu and coronavirus have a recent track record of trouble: Since 1918, flu viruses have sparked four pandemics, all the while continuing to pester us on a seasonal basis; some scientists worry that another major human outbreak may be brewing now, as multiple H5 flu viruses continue to spread from birds to mammals. The past two decades have also featured three major and deadly coronavirus outbreaks: the original SARS epidemic that began in late 2002; MERS, which spilled into humans—likely from camels—in 2012; and SARS-CoV-2, the pandemic pathogen that’s been plaguing us since the end of 2019. Common-cold-causing coronaviruses, too, remain a fixture of daily living—likely relics of ancient animal-to-human spillovers that we kept transmitting amongst ourselves.

    Read: Bird flu has never done this before

    Paramyxoviruses, meanwhile, have mostly been “simmering in the background,” says Raina Plowright, a disease ecologist at Cornell. Unlike flu viruses and coronaviruses, which have already clearly “proven themselves” as tier-one outbreak risks, paramyxoviruses haven’t yet been caught causing a bona fide pandemic. But they seem poised to do so, and they likely have managed the feat in the past. Like flu viruses and coronaviruses, paramyxoviruses can spread through the air, sometimes very rapidly. That’s certainly been the case with measles, a paramyxovirus that is “literally the most transmissible human virus on the planet,” says Paul Duprex, a virologist at the University of Pittsburgh. And, like flu viruses and coronaviruses, paramyxoviruses are found in a wide range of animals; more are being discovered wherever researchers look. Consider canine distemper virus, which has been found in, yes, canines, but also in raccoons, skunks, ferrets, otters, badgers, tigers, and seals. Paramyxoviruses, like flu viruses and coronaviruses, have also repeatedly shown their potential to hopscotch from those wild creatures into us. Since 1994, Hendra virus has caused multiple highly lethal outbreaks in horses, killing four humans along the way; the closely related Nipah virus has, since 1998, spread repeatedly among both pigs and people, carrying fatality rates that can soar upwards of 50 percent.

    The human versions of those past few outbreaks have petered out. But that may not always be the case—for Nipah, or for another paramyxovirus that’s yet to emerge. It’s entirely possible, Plowright told me, that the world may soon encounter a new paramyxovirus that’s both highly transmissible and ultra deadly—an “absolutely catastrophic” scenario, she said, that could dwarf the death toll of any epidemic in recent memory. (In the past four years, COVID-19, a disease with a fatality rate well below Nipah’s, has killed an estimated 7 million people.)

    All that said, though, paramyxoviruses are a third-place contender for several good reasons. Whereas flu viruses and coronaviruses are speedy shape-shifters—they frequently tweak their own genomes and exchange genetic material with others of their own kind—paramyxoviruses have historically been a bit more reluctant to change. “That takes them down a level,” says Danielle Anderson, a virologist at the Doherty Institute, in Melbourne. For one, these viruses’ sluggishness could make it much tougher for them to acquire transmission-boosting traits or adapt rapidly to spread among new hosts. Nipah virus, for instance, can spread among people via respiratory droplets at close contact. But even though it’s had many chances to do so, “it still hasn’t gotten very good at transmitting among humans,” Patricia Thibault, a biologist at the University of Saskatchewan who studied paramyxoviruses for years, told me.

    The genetic stability of paramyxoviruses can also make them straightforward to vaccinate against. Our flu and coronavirus shots need regular updates—as often as annually—to keep our immune system apace with viral evolution. But we’ve been using essentially the same measles vaccine for more than half a century, Duprex told me, and immunity to the virus seems to last for decades. Strong, durable vaccines are one of the main reasons that several countries have managed to eliminate measles—and why a paramyxovirus called rinderpest, once a major scourge of cattle, is one of the only infectious diseases we’ve ever managed to eradicate. In both cases, it helped that the paramyxovirus at play wasn’t great at infecting a ton of different animals: Measles is almost exclusive to us; rinderpest primarily troubled cows and their close kin. Most flu viruses and SARS-CoV-2, meanwhile, can spread widely across the tree of animal life; “I don’t know how you can eradicate that,” Anderson told me.

    The problem with all of these trends, though, is that they represent only what researchers know of the paramyxoviruses they’ve studied—which is, inevitably, a paltry subset of what exists, says Benhur Lee, a virologist at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. “The devil we don’t know can be just as frightening,” if not more, Lee told me. A pattern-defying paramyxovirus may already be readying itself to jump.

    Researchers are keyed into these looming threats. The World Health Organization highlights Nipah virus and its close cousins as some of its top-priority pathogens; in the U.S., paramyxoviruses recently made a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases list of pathogens essential to study for pandemic preparedness. Last year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced a hefty initiative to fund paramyxovirus antiviral drugs. Several new paramyxovirus vaccines—many of them targeting Nipah viruses and their close relatives—may soon be ready to debut.

    Read: We have a mink problem

    At the same time, though, paramyxoviruses remain neglected—at least relative to the sheer perils they pose, experts told me. “Influenza has been sequenced to death,” Lee said. (That’s now pretty true for SARS-CoV-2 as well.) Paramyxoviruses, meanwhile, aren’t regularly surveilled for; development of their treatments and vaccines also commands less attention, especially outside of Nipah and its kin. And although the family has been plaguing us for countless generations, researchers still don’t know exactly how paramyxoviruses move into new species, or what mutations they would need to become more transmissible among us; they don’t know why some paramyxoviruses spark only minor respiratory infections, whereas others run amok through the body until the host is dead.

    Even the paramyxoviruses that feel somewhat familiar are still surprising us. In recent years, scientists have begun to realize that immunity to the paramyxovirus mumps, once thought to be pretty long-lasting and robust, wanes in the first few decades after vaccination; a version of the virus, once thought to be a problem only for humans and a few other primates, has also been detected in bats. For these and other reasons, rubulaviruses—the paramyxovirus subfamily that includes mumps—are among the potential pandemic agents that most concern Duprex. Emmie de Wit, the chief of the molecular-pathogenesis unit at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, told me that the world could also become more vulnerable to morbilliviruses, the subfamily that includes measles. If measles is ever eradicated, some regulators may push for an end to measles shots. But in the same way that the end of smallpox vaccination left the world vulnerable to mpox, the fall of measles immunity could leave an opening for a close cousin to rise.

    The next pandemic won’t necessarily be a paramyxovirus, or even a flu virus or a coronavirus. But it has an excellent chance of starting as so many other known pandemics have—with a spillover from animals, in parts of the world where we’ve invaded wild habitats. We may not be able to predict which pathogen or creature might be involved in our next big outbreak, but the common denominator will always be us.

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    Katherine J. Wu

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  • How Bad Could BA.2.86 Get?

    How Bad Could BA.2.86 Get?

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    Since Omicron swept across the globe in 2021, the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 has moved at a slower and more predictable pace. New variants of interest have come and gone, but none have matched Omicron’s 30-odd mutations or its ferocious growth. Then, about two weeks ago, a variant descended from BA.2 popped up with 34 mutations in its spike protein—a leap in viral evolution that sure looked a lot like Omicron. The question became: Could it also spread as quickly and as widely as Omicron?

    This new variant, dubbed BA.2.86, has now been detected in at least 15 cases across six countries, including Israel, Denmark, South Africa, and the United States. This is a trickle of new cases, not a flood, which is somewhat reassuring. But with COVID surveillance no longer a priority, the world’s labs are also sequencing about 1 percent of what they were two years ago, says Thomas Peacock, a virologist at the Pirbright Institute. The less surveillance scientists are doing, the more places a variant could spread out of sight, and the longer it will take to understand BA.2.86’s potential.

    Peacock told me that he will be closely tracking the data from Denmark in the next week or two. The country still has relatively robust SARS-CoV-2 sequencing, and because it has already detected BA.2.86, we can now watch the numbers rise—or not—in real time. Until the future of BA.2.86 becomes clear, three scenarios are still possible.

    The worst but also least likely scenario is another Omicron-like surge around the world. BA.2.86 just doesn’t seem to be growing as explosively. “If it had been very fast, we probably would have known by now,” Peacock said, noting that, in contrast, Omicron’s rapid growth took just three or four days to become obvious.

    Scientists aren’t totally willing to go on record ruling out Omicron redux yet, if only because patchy viral surveillance means no one has a complete global picture. Back in 2021, South Africa noticed that Omicron was driving a big COVID wave, which allowed its scientists to warn the rest of the world. But if BA.2.86 is now causing a wave in a region that isn’t sequencing viruses or even testing very much, no one would know.

    Even in this scenario, though, our collective immunity will be a buffer against the virus. BA.2.86 looks on paper to have Omicron-like abilities to cause reinfection, according to a preliminary analysis of its mutations by Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, in Washington, but he adds that there’s a big difference between 2021 and now. “At the time of the Omicron wave, there were still a lot of people out there that had never been either vaccinated or infected with SARS-CoV-2, and those people were sort of especially easy targets,” he told me. “Now the vast, vast majority of people in the world have either been infected or vaccinated with SARS-CoV-2—or are often both infected and vaccinated multiple times. So that means I think any variant is going to have a very hard time spreading as well as Omicron.”

    A second and more likely possibility is that BA.2.86 ends up like the other post-Omicron variants: transmissible enough to edge out a previous variant, but not transmissible enough to cause a big new surge. Since the original Omicron variant, or BA.1, took over, the U.S. has successively cycled through BA.2, BA.2.12.1, BA.5, BQ.1, XBB.1.5—and if these jumbles of numbers and letters seem only faintly familiar, it’s because they never reached the same levels of notoriety as the original. Vaccine makers track them to keep COVID shots up to date, but the World Health Organization hasn’t deemed any worthy of a new Greek letter.

    If BA.2.86 continues to circulate, though, it could pick up mutations that give it new advantages. In fact, XBB.1.5, which rose to dominance earlier this year, leveled up this way. When XBB.1.5’s predecessor was first identified in Singapore, Peacock said, it wasn’t a very successful variant: Its spike protein bound weakly to receptors in human cells. Then it acquired an additional mutation in its spike protein that compensated for the loss of binding, and it turned into the later-dominant XBB.1.5. Descendents of BA.2.86 could eventually become more transmissible than the variant looks right now.

    A third scenario is that BA.2.86 just fizzles out and goes away. Scientists now believe that highly mutated variants such as BA.2.86 are probably products of chronic infections in immunocompromised patients. In these infections, the virus remains in the body for a long time, trying out new ways to evade the immune system. It might end up with mutations that make its spike protein less recognizable to antibodies, but those same mutations could also render the spike protein less functional and therefore the virus less good at transmitting from person to person.

    “Variants like that have been identified over the last few years,” Bloom said. “Often there’s one sample found, and that’s it. Or multiple samples all found in the same place.” BA.2.86 is transmissible enough to be found multiple times in multiple places, but whether it can overtake existing variants is unclear. To do so, BA.2.86 needs to escape antibodies while also preserving its inherent transmissibility. Otherwise, Bloom said, cases might crop up here and there, but the variant never really takes off. In other words, the BA.2.86 situation basically stays where it is right now.

    The next few weeks will reveal which of these futures we’re living in. If the number of BA.2.86 cases starts to go up, in a way that requires more attention, we’ll know soon. But each week that the variant’s spread does not jump dramatically, the less likely BA.2.86 is to end up a variant of actual concern.

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    Sarah Zhang

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  • A Rare Reprieve From the Permanent Presidential Campaign

    A Rare Reprieve From the Permanent Presidential Campaign

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    Does anyone want to be president?

    Typically, by the time a president delivers the State of the Union address at the start of his third year in office, as Joe Biden will on Tuesday, at least half a dozen rivals are already gunning for his job. When Donald Trump began his annual speech to Congress in 2019, four of the Democrats staring back at him inside the House chamber had already declared their presidential candidacies.

    Not so this year. The only Republican (or Democrat, for that matter) officially trying to oust Biden is the former president he defeated in 2020. Trump announced his third White House run in November and then barely bothered to campaign for the next two months before holding relatively small-scale events in New Hampshire and South Carolina in January. Trump will finally get some company next week, when Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, plans to kick off her campaign in Charleston. More Republicans could soon jump into the presidential pool. But the 2024 campaign has gotten off to a decidedly slow start, and the first weeks of 2023 have brought a rare reprieve from what has become known—with some derision—as the permanent campaign. This pause is not the result of some collective cease-fire; it’s what happens when you have a former president who lost reelection but still inspires fear in his party, along with a Democratic incumbent—the oldest to ever serve—who is not exactly itching to campaign.

    Even New Hampshire—normally one of the first states to welcome would-be presidents—has been subdued. “Other than Trump, I can’t think of a leading person being here for the last couple of months,” Raymond Buckley, the longtime chair of the state’s Democratic Party, told me. He said he’s used the lull to prioritize party building, “instead of constantly focusing on one Republican senator or governor after another.”

    The same is true in Iowa, that other presidential proving ground with a year-round appetite for stump speeches. “It’s pretty quiet on the western front,” David Oman, a Republican strategist and former co-chair of the Iowa state GOP, told me. As my colleague McKay Coppins recently reported, most of the Republicans who want the party to nominate someone other than Trump are, once again, reluctant to actually do anything about it. Trump’s potential GOP rivals have been similarly shy about taking him on; until Haley put out word about her announcement last week, no one in the emerging field—which could include Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, among others—was willing to be the first target of the barrage of insults and invective Trump would surely hurl their way.

    Read: Republicans’ 2024 magical thinking

    The momentary quietude has dampened any pressure for Biden to shift back into campaign mode, and he’s in no rush anyway. Tuesday’s State of the Union address will likely yield even more performance reviews than usual, as pundits and viewers alike judge the toll that Biden’s advancing age has taken on his oratory. As for the substance of his speech, White House officials told me Biden will continue the project he began months ago: promoting the accomplishments of his first two years in office, especially his bipartisan infrastructure law and the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act that he signed last summer.

    In the absence of a fully formed GOP presidential field, Biden has been content to use the new House Republican majority as a foil—adopting a strategy that Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama employed after Democrats lost power in Congress during their first terms. Biden has vowed to protect programs such as Medicare and Social Security from GOP budget cuts; refused to negotiate over the debt ceiling (although the White House said last week he’d entertain “separate” conversations on deficit reduction); and eagerly highlighted ill-fated GOP proposals to replace the federal income tax with a 30 percent national sales tax.

    Yet with Speaker Kevin McCarthy seated behind the president on the House rostrum for the first time, Biden is expected to stress conciliation over confrontation. “The president will once again amplify his belief that Democrats and Republicans can work together,” a White House official told me, speaking anonymously to preview a speech that hasn’t been finalized, “as they did in the last two years and as he is committed to doing with this new Congress to get big things done on behalf of the American people.”

    Biden allies expect the president to formally announce his reelection bid sometime after the State of the Union, but they note that could still be months away. Such a wait isn’t unusual for incumbents, who don’t need to introduce themselves to the electorate and generally want to be seen as focused on governing. But no president since Ronald Reagan has faced as much uncertainty about whether he would seek a second term. (Then the oldest president, Reagan was eight years younger in 1983 than the 80-year-old Biden is now.) Outgoing Chief of Staff Ron Klain pointedly referenced a reelection bid as he departed the White House last week, telling Biden he looked forward to supporting him “when you run for president in 2024.” But other White House officials routinely affix the qualifier “if he runs” to discussions about a potential campaign, suggesting it remains less than a sure thing.

    Franklin Foer: How Joe Biden wins again

    Aiding Biden is the fact that no Democrats of note (besides Marianne Williamson) have made any moves to challenge him for the nomination, and the president’s allies are operating under the assumption that he will have the field to himself. “I would be shocked at this point if this becomes a competitive primary,” Amanda Loveday, a senior adviser to the pro-Biden super PAC Unite the Country, told me.

    The bigger question is how many Republicans will challenge Biden knowing they’ll have to get through Trump first—and when they’ll see fit to jump in. GOP officials told me they expect Haley’s announcement to prompt others to enter the race soon. But Trump clearly froze the field for a while. All through 2021 and most of 2022, Buckley told me, “rarely a week went by without a major visit” to New Hampshire from a White House aspirant. “It all came to a grinding halt once Trump announced,” he said. Jeff Kaufmann, the Republican Party chair in Iowa, told me that the first months of 2021—the brief period after January 6 when Trump’s political future was in doubt—were busier for GOP hopefuls than this past January, just a year before the caucuses.

    For most of American history, the observation that barely anyone was campaigning more than a year and a half before the election would be entirely unremarkable. Only in this century has a two-year campaign for a four-year term in the White House become the norm. (As recently as 1992, the governor of a small southern state declared his candidacy only 14 months before the election, and he did just fine.)

    For most of the country, this respite from presidential politics is probably welcome, especially for voters who were inundated with nonstop campaign ads leading up to the midterm election. The view is a bit different, however, in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the quadrennial pilgrimage of politicos brings welcome attention and a sizable economic boost. Republicans in both states want to ensure that the GOP does not follow the Democrats in trying to leave them behind. Kaufmann told me he wasn’t worried; Senator Tim Scott would be coming out to Iowa in a few weeks, and others were calling to schedule events, perhaps preparing their launches. By March, he assured me, all would be back to normal. This extended presidential halftime will be over, and America’s never-ending campaign will resume in full.

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    Russell Berman

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  • Speaker in Name Only

    Speaker in Name Only

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    Having at long last put down a rebellion from within his party, Kevin McCarthy is now House speaker. He finally has the gavel he’s long coveted, but the job he secured after 14 consecutive drubbings is not the one he envisioned.

    Last night, he suffered one more indignity to get it, perhaps the most stunning in a week’s worth of humiliations. McCarthy had to literally beg his most hated Republican foe, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, for the deciding vote, and a fight nearly broke out on the House floor. But after 14 failed votes, it was finally over.

    McCarthy’s victory on the 15th ballot concluded an extraordinary week of defeats that froze half of Congress and turned the California Republican into a national laughingstock. The denouement was the most dramatic scene yet, as the House reconvened for what McCarthy assured reporters would be the final victorious vote. Earlier yesterday, McCarthy had convinced all but six of his GOP opponents to support him, and he needed only to turn two more. But Gaetz, who had repeatedly vowed never to support him, waited until the very end and withheld his vote one more time. In full view of C-Span’s cameras, Gaetz refused animated appeals from McCarthy’s closest allies and even from the would-be speaker himself. McCarthy walked over to Gaetz, spoke to him for a few minutes and then, head down, slumped back to his chair. A furious Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama had to be physically restrained from lunging at Gaetz.

    Dejected and confused, McCarthy’s allies moved to adjourn the House until Monday. But while that vote was going on, McCarthy secured the acquiescence of Gaetz and the remaining holdouts. The House stayed in session and voted again. “Madam Clerk, I rise to say, ‘Wow,’” Democratic Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota said to laughter from a stunned chamber. On the 15th and last ballot, McCarthy’s remaining GOP opponents all voted “present” and allowed McCarthy to clear the majority threshold without their explicit support.

    With the speaker’s gavel in hand, McCarthy will soon find out whether it was all worth it. To end the crisis, he cut a deal that essentially traded away a sizable chunk of power from the position, placing the new speaker at the mercy of the very hardliners who had thwarted him.

    Read: Kevin McCarthy’s predicament is a warning

    Under the agreement McCarthy struck, any Republican will be able to demand a vote on his ouster. McCarthy is reportedly guaranteeing the far-right House Freedom Caucus enough seats on the Rules Committee to give the group an effective veto over most legislation that comes up for a vote. He’s committing the party to pursuing steep—and, in all likelihood, politically unpopular—budget cuts while ensuring a partisan brawl over the debt ceiling that could damage the nation’s economy.

    What transpired this week was the most prolonged stalemate to begin a new session of Congress since before the Civil War. McCarthy’s struggle to lock down the speakership illuminated just how much of a challenge any Republican would have in leading a narrow, deeply divided majority. But his capitulation to the far-right holdouts could make the House all but ungovernable.

    For many if not most of the renegades, that was precisely the point. They saw the modern speakership, whether in Republican or Democratic hands, as a vessel for corrupt deals that resulted in too much spending and a bloated federal government. If a byproduct of decentralizing power in the House is dysfunction, they reasoned, so be it.

    McCarthy’s concessions have frustrated and angered some of his fellow Republicans. At least one McCarthy supporter, Representative Tony Gonzales of Texas, vowed to oppose a package of House rules formalizing much of the agreement between the new speaker and the holdouts. But for the most part, more moderate House Republicans have given McCarthy wide latitude to negotiate.

    Earlier this week, it looked as if McCarthy’s bid for speaker had stalled and that, for the second time in eight years, he might be forced to withdraw his nomination in the face of conservative opposition. But having evidently determined that a weakened speakership was better than no speakership, McCarthy persisted, dispatching emissaries to a flurry of meetings between failed floor votes. Progress came slowly, and then nearly all at once. McCarthy suffered 21 GOP defections on eight straight votes between Wednesday and Thursday. “Mr. McCarthy does not have the votes today. He will not have the votes tomorrow, and he will not have the votes next week, next month, next year,” Gaetz said on the floor before the 12th failed vote yesterday afternoon. A group of McCarthy’s allies walked out of the chamber in disgust, and it was on that ballot that McCarthy turned his faltering candidacy around. He flipped 14 of the 21 defectors, who voted without enthusiasm for the GOP leader while citing the emerging agreement. After one more vote, Republicans successfully adjourned the House to buy time for absent members to come back last night.

    McCarthy will likely receive some credit for sticking it out. He can also take some solace in the fact that expectations for what House Republicans could accomplish with a narrow majority are already quite low. The mere fact of a Republican majority in the House alongside a Democratic-controlled Senate guarantees that neither party’s legislative wish list will make it to President Joe Biden’s desk.

    Ask most House Republicans what they realistically hope to do over the next two years, and the answer is some variation of the phrase “hold Joe Biden accountable.” In the near term, that means issuing subpoenas and holding hearings focused on everything from the administration’s Southern border policy to Hunter Biden’s personal life and business dealings. Some members of the House GOP conference want to pursue the impeachment of Biden Cabinet officials such as Homeland Security Secretary Alexander Mayorkas, and potentially even the president himself, but it was already questionable whether Republicans could muster the votes for those moves with such a small number of votes to spare.

    McCarthy must confront how to raise the debt ceiling and how to keep the government open when the current fiscal year ends on September 30. His opponents have extracted promises that he’ll seek deep spending cuts alongside each task, which will undoubtedly be opposed by Democrats, who hold an equal share of power in the Senate and in the White House. Even before reports of his concessions were confirmed, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, issued a statement warning that the GOP’s proposed budget cuts were “all but guaranteeing a shutdown.”

    For McCarthy, however, those are crises for another day. For now, he has won over just enough of his critics, and with it, the speakership. All he had to do was sacrifice power, and no small part of his dignity, to get it.

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    Russell Berman

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