Good morning. Or good afternoon if you are a Red Sox fan who was up late celebrating. I’m Walter Shapiro, and I’m pinch-hitting today in The New Republic’s lead-off slot. 

Coming off a three-day weekend, there is no dominant story in the news today as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal have all gone in different artistic directions with their online front pages. What we get in the lead position are what seem like long-planned trend stories about Chinese real estate (the Times), climate change (the Post), and the post-pandemic return to offices (the Journal).

To my mind, the biggest story today is something that hasn’t happened: any discernible progress by the Democrats toward passing either infrastructure or the Biden spending package. Nancy Pelosi did release a letter urging House Democrats to focus on doing “fewer things well” as the spending number gets whittled down from $3.5 trillion. But Senate Democrats still haven’t come close to agreeing on a number, and House Democrats haven’t clarified their priorities. Dilatory Democrats should remember that when the Senate was evenly divided under Dwight Eisenhower, from 1953 to 1955, nine senators died and one retired with control of the upper chamber changing each time. The clock is ticking.

This morning at NewRepublic.com, Alex Shephard grapples with an important topic—the meh feeling among voters about the reconciliation package. His smart key point, which is directly related to the delay on Capitol Hill: “As Democrats continue to bicker over its contents, significantly more attention is being paid to its top-line number than to its actual components.” Annie Geng adroitly reminds social liberals that national legislation—and not the vagaries of the courts—has always been the best way to guarantee the right to an abortion. And in a glorious review of John le Carré’s final novel, Silverview, Jake Bittle points out the underlying theme of the spymaster’s nearly two dozen novels: “The condition of being watched, observed, overheard, eavesdropped upon, monitored, followed, pursued, hunted—this is the essential condition of the novels of John le Carré.”

Happy trails to you until we meet again,
Walter Shapiro

Yesterday’s politics question: I assume you know that George W. Bush and Donald Trump both lost the popular vote but won the presidency. They are two of five presidents who got to the White House despite losing the popular vote. Who were the other three?

Answer:
The undisputed correct answer is: 1824 (John Quincy Adams), 1876 (Rutherford B. Hayes), and 1888 (Benjamin Harrison).

But a strong case can also be made that Richard Nixon and not John Kennedy won the popular vote in 1960. And the argument has nothing to do with shenanigans by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley or possible vote stuffing in Lyndon Johnson’s Texas. In 1960, JFK’s name was not on the Alabama ballot, but individual Democratic electors were. Those 11 victorious electors gave six votes to segregationist Harry Byrd and five votes to Kennedy. All tabulations for 1960 awarded Kennedy the full Democratic elector vote in Alabama. But JFK loses 175,000 votes if you only credit him with five-elevenths of the total. That adjustment would make Nixon the national popular vote winner by 60,000. (All this is taken from an intriguing footnote in Yale political scientist David Mayhew’s 2011 book, Partisan Balance.) 

Today’s Question: At a time when the Senate is paralyzed by the filibuster, it is worth looking back to the days when creative bipartisan deal-making was still possible. A great example is provided by “Mrs. Murphy’s boardinghouse.” What was it, and why was it important?

Hint: Mrs. Murphy had her moment of fame on Capitol Hill after World War II. This has absolutely nothing to do with the boardinghouse where the scandalous Peggy Eaton probably had affairs during the Andrew Jackson era. 

Second hint: Today’s question features a legislator whose name is on a congressional office building.   

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