You think you know why our government in Washington is broken, but you really don't. You think it's broken because politicians curry favor with special interests and activists of the Left or Right. There's something to that and it helps explain why these politicians can't find common ground, but it misses the root cause. A half century ago, elected officials in Congress and the White House figured out a new system for enacting laws and spending programs--one that lets them take credit for promising good news while avoiding blame for government producing bad results. With five key tricks, politicians of both parties now avoid accounting to us for what government actually does to us. While you understand that these politicians seem to pull rabbits out of hats, hardly anyone sees the sleight of hand by which they get away with their tricks. Otherwise, their tricks wouldn't work. DC Confidential exposes the sleights of hand. Once they are brought to light, we can stop the tricks, fix our broken government, and make Washington work for us once again. The book explains the necessary reform and lays out an action plan to put it in place. Stopping the tricks would be a constructive, inclusive response to the anger that Americans from across the political spectrum feel toward what should be our government.

Major General Arnold Punaro, USMC (Ret.), served 35 years in uniform. He spent 24 years in the U.S. Senate, becoming Staff Director of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He was a top industry executive and is currently CEO of a small business. He serves on numerous boards and commissions related to national security

Includes a new foreword to the paperback edition.

This account of the machinations following Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, and their damaging effects, is “a gripping tale of insider Washington” (The Boston Globe). In this book, the Chief Washington Correspondent for the New York Times provides a richly detailed, news-breaking, and conversation-changing look at the unprecedented political fight to fill the Supreme Court seat made vacant by Antonin Scalia’s death—using it to explain the paralyzing and all but irreversible dysfunction across all three branches in the nation’s capital. The embodiment of American conservative jurisprudence, Scalia cast an expansive shadow over the Court for three decades. His unexpected death in February 2016 created a vacancy that precipitated a pitched political fight that would change not only the tilt of the court, but the course of American history. It would help decide a presidential election, fundamentally alter longstanding protocols of the Senate, and transform the Supreme Court—which has long held itself as a neutral arbiter above politics—into another branch of the federal government riven by partisanship. In an unheard-of development, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to give Democratic President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, a confirmation hearing. Not one Republican in the Senate would meet with him. Scalia’s seat would be held open until Donald Trump’s nominee, Neil M. Gorsuch, was confirmed in April 2017. Hulse tells the story of this battle to control the Court through exclusive interviews with McConnell, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, and other top officials, Trump campaign operatives, court activists, and legal scholars, as well as never-before-reported details. Confirmation Bias provides much-needed context, revisiting the judicial wars of recent decades to show how they led to our current polarization. He examines the politicization of the federal bench and the implications for public confidence in the courts, and takes us behind the scenes to explore how many long-held democratic norms and entrenched bipartisan procedures have been erased across all three branches of government. Includes a new afterword “An absorbing, if dispiriting, look at the maneuverings of inside players like McConnell and Donald McGahn, Trump’s first White House counsel, and outside advocates like Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, who appears to have steered judicial selection as much as anyone in the White House.” —The Washington Post

The first comprehensive, in-depth book on the Trump administration’s assault on asylum protections Arnovis couldn’t stay in El Salvador. If he didn’t leave, a local gangster promised that his family would dress in mourning—that he would wake up with flies in his mouth. “It was like a bomb exploded in my life,” Arnovis said. The Dispossessed tells the story of a twenty-four-year-old Salvadoran man, Arnovis, whose family’s search for safety shows how the United States—in concert with other Western nations—has gutted asylum protections for the world’s most vulnerable. Crisscrossing the border and Central America, John Washington traces one man’s quest for asylum. Arnovis is separated from his daughter by US Border Patrol agents and struggles to find security after being repeatedly deported to a gang-ruled community in El Salvador, traumatic experiences relayed by Washington with vivid intensity. Adding historical, literary, and current political context to the discussion of migration today, Washington tells the history of asylum law and practice through ages to the present day. Packed with information and reflection, The Dispossessed is more than a human portrait of those who cross borders—it is an urgent and persuasive case for sharing the country we call home.

A compulsively readable novel in the vein of The Bonfire of the Vanities—by way of The Nest—about what Washington, DC’s high society members do away from the Capitol building and behind the closed doors of their suburban mansions. They are the families considered worthy of a listing in the exclusive Green Book—a discriminative diary created by the niece of Edith Roosevelt’s social secretary. Their aristocratic bloodlines are woven into the very fabric of Washington—generation after generation. Their old money and manner lurk through the cobblestone streets of Georgetown, Kalorama and Capitol Hill. They only socialize within their inner circle, turning a blind eye to those who come and go on the political merry-go-round. These parents and their children live life free of consequences in a gilded existence of power and privilege. But what they have failed to understand is that the world is changing. And when the family of one of their own is held hostage and brutally murdered, everything about their legacy is called into question. They’re called The Cave Dwellers.