Primary season treated Randall’s allies particularly poorly. Several key Republican lawmakers who’d worked with Democrats to shepherd the bill through the House lost to Far Right challengers, including the legislation’s Republican cosponsor, Judith Kastor. Republicans find themselves facing revolt from a rabid base crying out for answers to this summer’s ongoing violence at the US-Mexico border.
Multiple incidents along Arizona border towns have created a siege mentality in a state rocked by water shortages and a struggling housing market. In April, a firefight in the desert between suspected drug cartel operatives and the paramilitary group the American Patriot League left five Americans and thirteen Mexican nationals dead. Meanwhile, refugees from Central America and Mexico continue to pour northward at an unprecedented rate, and Border Patrol estimates that attempted crossings have increased to nearly two thousand per day, with most of that increase being children. A spokesperson said the agency expects to process nearly 710,000 asylum seekers this year.
Jennifer Braden, star of the insurgent right-wing news network Renaissance Media, continues to draw criticism for emboldening groups like the APL and the Hawkeye Brigade. She has called for militarizing the border in a fashion similar to the partition between North and South Korea. Braden’s views continue to find purchase on the right and have the backing of several billionaire financiers who are spending vast sums to fuel the Republicans’ internal insurgency. The drumbeat to challenge Randall for the nomination in 2032 has grown louder, with names like R. Holden Jons and Russ Mackowski leading the conversation. Yet the Draft Braden movement has the fury of social VR and a newly formed Super PAC already behind it.
As President Randall moves to guard her right flank, her climate bill could be the first victim of that maneuver. In a Sunday interview, she told CBS’s John Dickerson, “I’ve said over and over, we will not pass a bill that will harm American business. I cannot repeat that enough. The bill—if any bill passes at all, that is—the bill will not be punitive. These are the same companies, after all, working with their ingenuity and the power of the market to come up with the next technologies that will fix this issue.”
Meanwhile, with four arrests made for the Ohio and Kentucky attacks, law enforcement seems to have begun unraveling the Weathermen’s network. Yet for Washington, this is not enough. The Senate’s bipartisan Gang of Nine has proposed combining elements of PRIRA with a security and immigration bill, the Protecting America’s Borders and Energy Independence Act, introduced by Nebraska republican Bob Syracuse.
“We’re looking at where our interests overlap,” said Victor Love, the junior Democratic senator from Montana, during an interview with CNN. “I think my party and the Randall administration are taking our lead from the American people, who are clearly saying, ‘Yes, we want to deal with climate change, but no, we don’t want onerous new taxes and regulations, and we want to be secure.”
Love’s elevated voice in the Democratic Party has been greeted with hostility from the Left.
“Any politician who backs down now, we will campaign to remove from office come November,” said Rekia Reynolds, spokesperson for the climate activist organization A Fierce Blue Fire.
However, Reynolds’s threat may not be as potent as it was two years ago. Key allies like Pennsylvania senator Cy Fitzpatrick are behind in the polls while the House bill’s primary Democratic sponsor, Joy LaFray, has become enmeshed in a scandal after a leaked Slapdish xpere revealed her interacting inappropriately with her seventeen-year-old stepson.
That a sex scandal involving a fifty-nine-year-old congresswoman and a minor has made only a glancing blow at the headlines of the day says something about the “derecho summer” of America in 2030.
HazelHorizon is a machine-learning language model. Azi Paybarah and Heather Abramowitz contributed reporting.
T
HE
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EATHERMEN
2030
The drive was eight hours of bitter winter scenery, up through Iowa and Minnesota, under low clouds hovering above glass office boxes and half-abandoned strip malls with empty acres of parking lot, past endless billboards advertising everything from Jesus Christ to laser sculpting to assault rifles with smart bullets. The day had begun at 5:30 a.m. when they caught the Greyhound from Lawrence to Des Moines. Halfway into the five-hour ride, Lali pulled the children’s VR set from her face and demanded her fiddle, which Shane had of course forgot. Lali started to cry, proclaiming loudly and tearily that she didn’t want to take a “robe trip” without her fiddle. Though she could play only basic notes, she carried the thing around like other kids carried dolls.
Once upon a time Shane had packed carefree. Now journeying more than a mile from home was like prepping for a military deployment, and the worry that she might forget some crucial childcare item made it a certainty that she would. She just never counted on the fiddle.
By the time they got to Des Moines, as she led her daughter by the hand away from the bus station to the big-box parking lot a quarter mile down the road, Lali started complaining she had to go to the bathroom. Shane quickly found the car the op had left her, a forest-green Subaru Outback with the GPS and LoJack disabled. But she couldn’t find the magnetic box with the key fob beneath the passenger door.
“Mama, I gotta go,” Lali wheedled.
“No, no, no, c’mon.” She scraped her hand in the muck beneath the door. She tried under the driver’s side, but it wasn’t there either. Could the op have forgotten to leave the fucking key? Just walked away with it still in his pocket?
“Mama, where are we?”
“Lali, just give me a second, okay?” She tried to keep her voice calm. Don’t make demands of children, the mothering hive mind said. Be firm, but not harsh. Lali whined away, and she had to ignore her while she searched beneath the other doors. People walked from their cars to stores in this clot of cheap Midwestern retail, and she kept waiting, checking, scanning to make sure no one had narrowed their eyes at this woman looking like she was trying to boost a car. It was freezing out too. Her fingers were numb, and her nose wouldn’t stop running.
“Mama,” Lali’s tone flipped to stern.
How had the fucking op forgotten to leave the key? She had no phone. No way of contacting Kai or the others. No emergency number to call. As she scraped her hand along the entire frame of the Subaru, she felt tears choking her throat. She hated crying in front of her daughter because she’d spent so much time doing it lately. Lali wouldn’t be able to help herself, and her color would go from pale beige to bright pink as she flooded with shame. Her own weeping would soon follow.
“Mama,” Lali moaned.
“Just one second, honey,” Shane pleaded, and she had to bite down on the sob that trailed it. She jammed her finger on something and hissed. But the pain was momentary, and the magnetic box was there. The op had inexplicably left it under the back left wheel well. “Thank fuck,” she whispered, pulling the key fob from inside. “C’mon, Lals, let’s blow this popsicle stand. Outlaws forever, right?”
But when she turned, she saw the stain running down her daughter’s little pink sweatpants and her mortified sourpuss face. “Okay, doll. First we change.”
She had at least remembered another pair of pants.
FRESH AIR Had Terry Gross interviewing Zeden, and Shane stopped the dial there. Gross asked the pop star about the controversy she’d stirred when she wore a tank top to the Grammys that said I’M WITH THE WEATHERMEN. Zeden’s response wasn’t the least defensive. “Because they’re doing what no one else has the guts to do.” Gross: “So you endorse their use of violence?” Zeden: “What they’re doing is not violence. What the people who owned those coal plants were doing—that’s violence.” A pop star who’d gotten her start with a #1 single about her boyfriend’s hair certainly had a better grasp on the situation than most journalists.