| Michael Luo
Editor, newyorker.com It was an act of petulance, really. On Tuesday evening, the former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that she had been ordered by Representative Patrick McHenry, a North Carolina Republican and the new Speaker pro tempore, to immediately vacate her special office in the Capitol building. Pelosi was in California, mourning the death of her friend, the late Senator Dianne Feinstein. Subsequent reporting revealed that it was actually the newly ousted House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who had ordered her out. It is as good an illustration as any of the dismal state of American politics today.  Illustration by Ben Hickey Here is a recap of the past week: one of our three branches of federal government stopped functioning; a major political party all but surrendered to its most extreme faction; and a judge in New York imposed a partial gag order on a defendant in a civil fraud trial who is also a leading contender for the White House in 2024, after the defendant attacked one of the judge’s law clerks on social media. Tonight, during The New Yorker Festival, I’ll be in conversation with the staff writers Jelani Cobb, Jill Lepore, and Evan Osnos about the state of American democracy. We’re calling the panel “A More Perfect Union.” To prepare for it, I’ve been reading a lot of their writing in The New Yorker, as well as that of other contributors, on the existential crisis confronting the Republican Party, on the brittleness of our Constitution, and on what it would take to pull our politics back from the brink. The pieces make for sobering reading, but I also came away feeling invigorated. Democracy is not just an idea; it is an act. In order to bolster it, we must all put our shoulders to it. That’s what I’m hoping to talk about with my colleagues. | 
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