In today’s Daily Comment, Jane Mayer writes about Senator Ted Cruz and Communism. Mayer reports on a speech Cruz gave at Harvard Law School, during which he accused the school of harboring a dozen Communists on its faculty when he studied there, “who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government”: http://nyr.kr/12WUgKO

Photograph by Lauren Lancaster.

Read Ryan Lizza on Ted Cruz and the future of Texas politics.

In today’s Daily Comment, Jeffrey Toobin explains why the D.C. Circuit’s ruling that essentially removed the President’s ability to use recess appointments is a judicial atrocity: 

The decision matters because it is a huge gift to the contemporary Republican Party—especially to Republican Senators. Senate Republicans have engaged in an unprecedented level of obstruction of President Obama’s nominations—to executive-branch positions, to independent agencies, and especially to federal judgeships. Recess appointments have given Obama a small degree of leverage to fight back…

Photograph by Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty.

(Source: newyorker.com)

In today’s Daily Comment, George Packer looks at the decaying Senate and considers whether filibuster reform can save it: “The Senate is in a prolonged, self-induced coma. It does not produce creative legislation. It does not inspire important debate. It is not responsive to key national problems. Its pretense of institutional dignity is so battered that junior senators openly mock it.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/UrSAlC

…If it hadn’t been for those antediluvian attacks on contraception, we’d be calling this the Year of the Woman. If there was a war on women this year, it looks like the women are winning.

Margaret Talbot on the female candidates in yesterday’s Senate races, and the “war on women” narrative in this election cycle: http://nyr.kr/RfWGw4

Photograph by Josh Reynolds/AP.

In the current Senate, like the current Supreme Court, party labels mean just about everything. Republicans vote one way, Democrats another. That world wasn’t one that Specter wanted, or one where he belonged anymore.

Continue reading Jeffrey Toobin on former Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter.

“If you are trapped in a room with Newt Gingrich and he tells you that you have a “moral obligation” to do something, what is your best move?  What if the room is, as it was for certain listeners, in an Italian restaurant in Missouri, and he is telling you that you must support Todd Akin—the Senate candidate who, this summer, started talking about “legitimate rape”—saying that it would be “historically irrational” for you not to, and you have the distinct sense that he is about to start talking about the elections of the eighteen-sixties if something isn’t done?”

Amy Davidson on what it will mean if Todd Akin wins the Senate race: http://nyr.kr/Orynxq

The Other Election: In today’s Daily Comment, Steve Coll looks at what’s at stake in the fight for the Senate: http://nyr.kr/Q23Swh

in today’s Daily Comment, Alex Koppelman looks at Chris Shays’ defeat in the CT Senate primary, and the dying breed of moderate politicians: http://nyr.kr/OkTr4W

Photograph by Jessica Hill/AP.

Depending on what happens in November, the nomination of Mitt Romney will be widely regarded as a safe and therefore wise choice, or else as a historic blunder. Either way, his nomination is bound to be seen as a fluke: after a years-long conservative insurgency, Republicans somehow selected a candidate who can’t plausibly present himself as one of the insurgents—most days, Romney campaigns as if the Tea Party doesn’t exist.

But away from the Presidential campaign, the insurgency has continued; plenty of conservatives, returning the favor, are campaigning as if Mitt Romney doesn’t exist. …right now, in Texas, David Dewhurst, the Republican Lieutenant Governor, who once seemed like a prohibitive favorite, seems to be trailing his insurgent opponent, Ted Cruz, in the Republican primary for the state’s open Senate seat.

This week in the magazine, George Packer writes about dysfunction in the Senate. Join him for a live chat today at 3 P.M. E.T., or leave a question for him now.

An excerpt from “The Empty Chamber”:

“The two lasting achievements of this Senate, financial regulation and health care, required a year and a half of legislative warfare that nearly destroyed the body. They depended on a set of circumstances—a large majority of Democrats, a charismatic President with an electoral mandate, and a national crisis—that will not last long or be repeated anytime soon. Two days after financial reform became law, Harry Reid announced that the Senate would not take up comprehensive energy-reform legislation for the rest of the year. And so climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing.”