The battle for control of the 119th Congress, which was already about as tight and evenly divided as any Congress ever, became just a little more complicated this week, straining Mike Johnson’s three-vote margin and creating new headaches for whips on both sides of the aisle. Yesterday, the House honored Houston Democratic Rep. Sylvester Turner, who died on Wednesday from “enduring health complications,” according to a family statement—less than a year after the death of his predecessor in the 18th District, Sheila Jackson Lee, who passed away from pancreatic cancer. A 70-year-old freshman, Turner ended up serving only 62 days in the House. With Turner’s passing, there are now three official House vacancies: the Houston seat; Florida’s 1st, previously held by Republican Matt Gaetz, who resigned; and Florida’s 6th, which Mike Waltz abdicated to serve as Trump’s national security advisor. All three are safely ensconced in highly partisan geographies, and are not expected to change parties, but they will be closely watched. Nevertheless, there’s a possibility that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott will keep Turner’s seat open until November, per KPRC, denying Democrats a vote until then. That’s not the only looming margin complication: The Texas Tribune reported last week that Republican Rep. Michael McCaul is in the running to serve as the Texas A&M University system’s chancellor, which would require him to resign his seat. The 10th district isn’t particularly competitive either—McCaul won his last election by nearly 30 points—but Democrat Mike Siegel came within five points of unseating him in 2018, during the last Democratic wave. (The district was redrawn afterward.) These vacancies serve as a reminder that when every single vote counts, the pressure falls to the whips. Right now, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer and his Democratic counterpart, Katherine Clark, have two of the hardest jobs in American politics. There may be more focus on the Republican whip counts, but Clark is tasked with disrupting Republican vote-counting by herding as many Democrats as she can into the chamber for key votes. (That was illustrated last week when Colorado Rep. Brittany Pettersen and California Rep. Kevin Mullin dramatically raced across the country—Pettersen bringing a 3-week-old newborn to the House floor; Mullin with a post-op IV drip still in his arm—to bolster Democrats’ numbers when Republicans successfully passed their budget resolution.) This battle of inches is likely to continue throughout the 119th Congress, with both parties using every tool at their disposal to expand their margin. To wit: Senate Republicans are currently holding off on confirming New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik as the U.N. ambassador in order to postpone creating yet another vacancy. This race should not be competitive—Stefanik won reelection in November by 24 points—but there’s an opportunity for Democrats to experiment with messaging and fundraising in Republican territory, playing off the economic turbulence that’s already buffeting Trump’s second term. Seasoned political operatives predict the special election for Stefanik’s seat will be an early bellwether for where Republicans stand electorally, though none are going so far as to expect her seat will flip. As one Republican operative recently reminded me, Stefanik’s sprawling 21st District shares the state’s longest border with Canada, where even Republican voters are likely worried about local repercussions from Trump’s trade war. Currently, insiders expect Stefanik to resign in May. By then, of course, the border economy could be in much worse shape.

Medicaid funding cuts pose a threat to children, seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities.

Medicaid funding cuts pose a threat to children, seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities.

Unsurprisingly, Graham’s name has come up a lot in recent days. “Now we know that Bezos is no Katharine Graham,” Marty Baron, the storied editor who led the Post through its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” phase, wrote this week in The Atlantic. “It has been sad and unnerving to watch Bezos fall so terribly short of her standard as he confronts the return of Donald Trump to the White House. It’s been infuriating to observe the damage he has inflicted in recent months on the reputation of a newspaper whose investigative reporting has served as a bulwark against Trump’s most transgressive impulses.” On X, Peter Baker, the D.C. establishmentarian who spent 20 years at the Post before joining the Times, said the new Graham documentary “reminds us of what it was like to have a person of principle and courage own the Washington Post.” On Tuesday, in one of the more bemusing acts of protest, former Post managing editor Cameron Barr wrote a column for U.S. News & World Report in which he restated his own professional disassociation from the paper where he’d been on contract since stepping down in 2023. His most memorable assignment, of course, was leading the Post’s own investigation into Lewis during the newsroom’s hysteria over Lewis’s past life as a Murdoch deputy amid the phone-hacking scandal. As a kicker, Barr intimated, albeit half-heartedly, that Bezos should sell the paper. Barr is smart enough to know that a sale is not in the cards, just as Baron must surely know that his public criticisms aren’t going to inspire his former boss to have a come-to-Jesus moment. Indeed, Bezos’s current transformation of the Post is only just beginning. And while it can be hard to fathom that the origin of this bewildering journey dawned with Lewis’s infamous managerial snafus, the defection of dozens of the paper’s most high-profile journalists, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of angry subscribers, Bezos is ostensibly playing for a future that’s bigger than most of the paper’s existing and former staff have probably countenanced. After all, he isn’t Patrick Soon-Shiong, a proper billionaire but one who still feels the sting of his $500 million misadventure with the LA Times, or even Laurene Powell Jobs or Marc Benioff—who appear willing to nurture less expensive and expansive legacy magazine brands into a new age with a polite mix of tenderness and expectation. Instead, he’s about seven or eight times wealthier than the three of them combined, and fresh off a midlife crisis that seemingly inured him to public opinion. While Post veterans hem and haw over the paper’s legacy, Bezos surely sees the broader context. Even in that halcyon Baron-Trump era, when the Post was growing subscriptions 50 percent year over year, the business never really came within spitting distance of the Times, which has dominated the market for sophisticated liberal-inflected news and lifestyle content, and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future. But despite all its success, even the Times has proved that this total addressable market is smaller than many had imagined—and, perhaps, not hospitable to multiple participants. At least 50 percent of the country will likely never tolerate the Times, no less pay for a subscription. And while that might be tolerable for the Sulzbergers, who still feel the twinge of nearly losing the asset more than a decade ago, it’s probably not palatable to the world’s third-wealthiest man.

One of the ironies of the Post’s troubles, of course, is that so many beleaguered employees fought for Bezos’s attention for so long that they may not have realized what it entailed. Now that he appears dug in, or at least as engaged as he’s been in years, Bezos has expressed a desire to tinker with his paper—moving it to the center, if not the right; tolerating the reorganization of the newsroom; and supporting a leader, in Lewis, who makes many of his employees’ skin crawl. And it’s unlikely he’s done all this in order to revert to the status quo. Clearly, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin didn’t buy a media asset merely in the hope that it might break even while living in the Times’s shadow. In time, Bezos’s attempt to match the Journal’s “free markets, free people” editorial ethos may prove prescient. Depending on how things go with Rupert’s family trust, the Journal itself may one day be on the table. And if it’s not, perhaps the FT will be. Or Substack. But it’s hard not to conceive of a world whereby the Post experiments with producing its own journalism while also using its platform to license and disseminate the work of other affiliate partners—a strategy deployed with great success at Amazon, Prime, and Whole Foods. Either way, the change has only just begun. In any event, the latest round of Bezos critiques and Graham remembrances may mark the final wave of nostalgia for the Post’s previous iteration. At the end of his Atlantic essay, Baron encouraged Bezos to visit the Post newsroom and gaze upon the principles that Katharine’s father, Eugene Meyer, had set for the paper nearly a century ago. “No. 1: ‘The first mission of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained.’ And then No. 5: ‘The newspaper’s duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owners.’” Sound principles, of course, but the more salient point is that they’re on the wall only because Meyer bought the paper out of bankruptcy in 1933. Seventy years later, Bezos effectively did the same. And yet it’s hard to avoid the parallelism between what’s taking place in Washington—as the world’s wealthiest man takes a DOGE-sized chainsaw to sacred programs—and Bezos’s own imagining of his media asset. In a town bound by traditions and rooted in orthodoxy, it’s just the latest sign of the times: We live in a world where individual billionaires are, indeed, bigger than the institutions that came before them.

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