Outside the Beltway

Tammy Duckworth recently became the first sitting Senator to give birth. Thanks to a rule change, she’ll be allowed to bring her baby on the floor of the Senate if she needs to.

Top positions in the State Department are vacant, and there’s only one person to blame for that.

President Trump is talking about pulling American troops out of Syria, but his own White House is contradicting him.

As a general rule, Presidents are entitled to have a Cabinet and advisers he is comfortable with, but a Cabinet full of “yes men” is not ideal with any President, and certainly not with this one.

In selecting John Bolton as his National Security Adviser, Donald Trump has signaled to the world that he’s likely to take action that will only serve to make the world a more dangerous place.

From Europe to the Middle East, to Asia, America’s allies are concerned about what the selection of John Bolton as National Security Adviser means going forward. They should be, and so should every American.

Uh oh.

Profiles in courage? With Republicans in the Trump Era, it’s more like profiles in cowardice.

H.R. McMaster appears to be on the way out as National Security Adviser. The important question is, who replaces him?

The selection of Mike Pompeo as the next Secretary of State makes it more likely that President Trump will take the foolish and dangerous step of withdrawing the United States from the nuclear deal with Iran.

The nominations of Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel could be in trouble in the Senate.

By all accounts, Gina Haspel is exceedingly well qualified to be the next C.I.A. Director, but she has a troubling past that the Senate will need to at least force her to answer questions about.

While the nature of Rex Tillerson’s firing as Secretary of State was shocking in its abruptness, taken in context with the rocky nature of his tenure it was hardly surprising.

Rex Tillerson was an awful Secretary of State who simply had to go, It’s quite possible his successor will be an even greater disaster.

Next up: Pompeo

By threatening to withdraw from the nuclear deal with Iran, Donald Trump is making it far less likely that any upcoming talks with North Korea will succeed.

National Security Adviser H.L. McMaster is the latest person rumored to be considering moving on from the Trump Administration.

Despite what his own intelligence chiefs are saying, President Trump still does not believe that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

Administration officials are admitting that it’s likely that Russia will try to interfere in the midterm elections just as it did in 2016, but they don’t seem inclined to do anything about it.

Once again, President Trump is going soft on Russia. Why? I’ll leave that up to the reader to decide.

With the results from Alabama. the GOP faces a hard road ahead defending its majority in the Senate.

It appears that Rex Tillerson’s days at the State Department may be numbered, but his proposed replacement leaves a lot to be desired.

More indications that Donald Trump Jr. was heavily involved in Trump campaign efforts to coordinate with foreign contacts regarding damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

The Harvard Kennedy School pulled its Visiting Fellowship from the controversial figure after predictable outcry.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has expanded his investigation to include the allegation that President Trump may have attempted to obstruct justice

James Comey’s testimony today wasn’t the end of the Russia investigation. Indeed, we are only at the beginning of the beginning, and it’s likely to get worse for the President before it gets better.

Based on his just released opening testimony, tomorrow’s testimony by Former F.B.I. Director James Comey is likely to be explosive.

Most Americans believe that President Trump has been actively trying to block the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation

A seemingly ‘safe choice’ for F.B. I. Director.

Democrats came close to picking up what has been a solidly Republican seat for nearly forty years but ended up falling short. Instead, we’ll have a runoff in two months.

Republicans held on to Mike Pompeo’s seat in the House, but the outcome was closer than many expected.

The first full day of Donald Trump’s Presidency consisted largely of obsessions with irrelevant facts and outright lies.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is speaking out against several of President-Elect Trump’s proposed Cabinet nominees.

Alabama’s Jeff Sessions will become the nation’s top law enforcement officer. That’s not a good thing.

Some House Republicans are trying to delay the vote on the Iran Nuclear Deal with an argument that has no merit whatsoever.