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 Since 2011, Charles P. Pierce has cut through it all to tell you what matters and why with some of the most incisive, honest, funny, and often-cathartic political journalism in America.
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The Night the Capitol Did Not Sleep  The end of a working day in the U.S. Capitol can come at any time. If it comes at the customary time, which is to say in the early evening, the place takes on a crepuscular feeling, as though you can hear the figures in the frescoes breathing sighs of relief and feel the marble in the floors and staircases soften beneath your feet. What was a particularly ornate office building at the height of the day passes through changes by which it becomes a not overly popular museum and then, as night truly falls, a kind of tomb in which the day’s events are interred, one after another after another, year after year.
September 24, 2019, was an odd kind of day, in that this softening night never fell. The frescoes remained silent. The marble never gave way. The very air in the place was charged even though there were few people left in the halls to charge it. After three years in which each nightmarish news cycle followed another, on September 24, it became obvious there were not successive news cycles but one continuous rush that began on Inauguration Day in 2017. The corruption in the United States government was revealed to be a single foul organism, like one of those giant, three-thousand-year-old fungi that spread over a square mile or two. On the surface, you see only the mushrooms that pop from the ground. The immense scale of the organism is hidden underground. It feeds itself by tapping into the roots of trees, which it then drains of their nutrients until the trees are consumed by a dry rot.
September 24, 2019, was the day that the deadliest poison mushroom emerged, but the sweeping subterranean organism had been hollowing out the government for three years. It was all one great creature made of greed and crime and psychological death juice, and now everybody could see how far and how deep it had spread. Over the next two days, we all got a sweeping look at the malignant growth that is the corrupt administration of Donald J. Trump. It was the day the whistleblower entered the ecosystem, and the earth opened up, and the sheer scale of it was revealed.
The whistleblower revealed that, in essence, the president was trying to shake down poor Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine—who had been feeling the hot breath of Vladimir Putin on the back of his neck from the moment he took office—for the purpose of ratfucking the 2020 election. It was all there: the contempt for the rule of law and for constitutional barriers, the personalization of foreign policy for private gain, the narcissistic insistence that he alone can run the government and turn a buck on the deal, the tailoring of foreign policy to the benefit of his friends (at best) in many lands, and the pure authoritarian bullying tied up in all of the above. Those were all the surface blooms. But this event gave us a look at the vast organism beneath the ground that subsists on the rot of living things.  The Capitol is wide awake. A new emotion ran through the halls of the Capitol. It lurked in the committee rooms. It ran as a dark countermelody under all the careful quotes given out in a suddenly electric media environment. It has been a shadow over all the days since. What you began to feel around the government in those days was horror. After the 2016 election, there was a closed briefing given to members of Congress about the extent of the Russian ratfucking, and emerging from that meeting, many of the participants appeared to have looked down into their own graves. That is the feeling that has crept in through the widening gaps in a rotting democracy ever since this past September. Nobody knows the whole thing, but everything they’ve learned has been worse than everything they thought they knew. Every day suddenly has become fraught with unexpected monsters, real and imagined. And that has become the permanent state of things in Washington.
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