This week in the saga

The year turns badly. In the first hour of January a truck drives into a crowd on a New Orleans street and fourteen people die, and by mid-morning he has folded it into the sentence he has been saying since the escalator. On Friday the Speaker survives his own party by one ballot and he sends good luck three hours before the vote and congratulations three hours after it. On Monday morning the northern prime minister resigns, and inside four hours the resignation has been annexed too: they love being the fifty-first state, and the man who knew it is gone. And then, at half past eight on the morning of January the sixth, in a chamber under snow, with the roads closed and the city shut, Congress counts the votes and certifies them, and it takes almost no time at all. He posts eighty-four characters about it. Four years ago to the day the same chamber counted the same kind of count and the crowd came up the steps; this time nobody comes, nothing happens, and the quiet is the entire point. Fourteen days remain.