“We had a good day for the anarchists,” Harry Reid said Tuesday morning, when the Senate met briefly to deal with the House’s final, late-night act of legislative vandalism. Twice Monday the House Republicans were sent a bill, approved by the Senate, to keep the government open for about six weeks. The first time, they added a measure to put off much of Obamacare for a year. The second time, the Republicans effectively threw the thing over their shoulders, muttering about maybe sending it to a conference committee. By then midnight had come, the fiscal year had run out, names were being called, and reporters were tweeting about the smell of alcohol. Within hours, there were barricades up around museums and libraries in Washington; eight hundred thousand federal workers had been told to stay home while others got messages saying that they were essential to the preservation of life and property and had to come in—it just wasn’t certain when or if they’d get paid. Is that how anarchists operate, or people who don’t care, or are simply somewhat mad? (If real anarchists were in charge, one of the first federal-government operations to go down—the panda cam at the National Zoo—might have been the only thing left running.) Who are these House Republicans, and what have they done with our government?

On Saturday night, members of the House stayed up late screaming, voting after midnight; on Sunday morning, the Senators, after perhaps a peek at what their colleagues had passed—unserious amendments to a spending bill that would have kept the government open for just two and a half months while delaying Obamacare for a year—pulled the covers back over their heads and said they’d deal with it on Monday. A good part of the government will shut down at midnight, when the fiscal year ends, if there’s no agreement; the Senate Democrats’ plan is to wait until this afternoon to reject the amendments, giving the House only enough time to reject or approve a clean spending bill, rather than initiating an extra cycle of legislative sabotage. We’ll see in a few hours how well that works. Tuesday is also the day that insurance exchanges, marketplaces where the forty-eight million uninsured Americans can buy affordable or subsidized plans, will open. And that is what the G.O.P. wants to stop. So far, the Republicans have been wrapped up in deciding whether their fight is best compared to the Bataan Death March (Senator Ted Cruz, in his non-filibuster) or to the passengers of flight United flight 93’s stand against Al Qaeda hijackers (Congressman John Culberson, reportedly shouting after John Boehner announced the latest plan: “Like 9/11—let’s roll!”). Both parties have indulged in metaphors involving ticking bombs and guns to the head—just another day in Congress.

Do people really think that a Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign is a good idea—for the Democratic Party, our collective sanity, even for her? Maybe it doesn’t matter; some political locomotives just move ahead, even if the wreck is predestined, and her campaign is now coming around the bend. There is talk of the real rollout beginning this week, which may make for slightly odd timing given that a better focus might be on introducing Obamacare, aspects of which go into effect October 1st. Bill Clinton is supposed to be helping with that. Then again, it’s also the week of the big Clinton party, the Clinton Global Initiative summit, with all sorts of worldly people in town for the General Assembly, too. That could help Hillary, who will introduce her husband and Obama at the summit tonight, and whose name, with her daughter’s, has been added to the name of the Foundation. But there are also two new magazine stories out, at least one of which won’t help her at all.

“In Buenos Aires I used to receive letters from homosexual persons who are ‘socially wounded’ because they tell me that they feel like the church has always condemned them,” Pope Francis said in a long, occasionally mesmerizing interview with Father Antonio Spadaro that was published Thursday by sixteen Jesuit journals, in a range of languages. (The English version is in America.) “But the church does not want to do this.” He had just told Spadaro that wounds were what the Church was meant to heal: “I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds.”

And yet the Church “sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules.” And then, in a passage that will probably always be associated with his papacy, he went on to make clear what he considered small, or smaller-minded:

On Tuesday, Judge Claire Eagan, of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, released an opinion that reflected a certain number of oddities, both about the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone-call metadata and about the entire set of N.S.A. revelations since this summer. Some of those have to do with the FISC itself: its work is usually secret, and, along with telling the government that it could order a phone company to hand over information about calls, Eagan herself asked permission to make her opinion public. That request was directed to the FISC’s presiding judge; in this, as in other aspects of the court’s dealings, the lines of accountability look like a closed circle. As to why she wanted it out there:

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Just before 8:30 on Monday morning, people in the cafeteria of Building 197, at the Washington Navy Yard, started hearing the sound of gunfire. In a short time, thirteen people were dead, the police said, including one they believed to be the gunman, a man later identified as Aaron Alexis; more were wounded, and many friends and relatives would be getting awful calls in the next hours. The Navy issued a broad order for all uniformed personnel to report where they were—an abrupt muster that will also, for some, be a comfort. But the question, in the first hours, was less how we could be, as President Obama said in a statement, “confronting yet another mass shooting,” or even whether it could happen in the capital—they happen everywhere, and frequently—than where this one fits in the taxonomy of gun violence.

“Well, you know, I think that folks here in Washington like to grade on style,” President Obama told George Stephanopoulos, in an interview about Syria that aired on Sunday. “And so had we rolled out something that was very smooth and disciplined and linear they would have graded it well, even if it was a disastrous policy. We know that, because that’s exactly how they graded the Iraq War until it ended up blowing in our face.” There is a certain amount of retrospective reassurance there, especially given that Secretary of State John Kerry and Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, agreed, over the weekend, on a plan to do away with Syria’s chemical weapons in the course of the next year, with the first steps (an accounting of an arsenal that Assad didn’t even acknowledge having a week ago). A deal on a plan on one of the sorts of weapons at work in Syria’s civil war—worked out in a room filled with Russians—may not be as kinetically satisfying as firing a cruise missile, but it is eminently more sensible than bombing who knew what in Syria (it wouldn’t have been the chemical weapons themselves, for fear of dispersing them), toward who knew what end.

Anthony Weiner, at the end of his concession speech Tuesday night, talked about fun. “Here we are on Election Day, when we all divide up into different camps, and that’s part of the fun of it,” he said, as a small crowd cheered; his wife, Huma Abedin, did not appear to be among them, and he never mentioned her. “Some people say, ‘Why do you show so much enthusiasm, have so much fun at parades?’ I make no apologies for that,” he said. His expression of joy was strained and sad, with a filmy layer of jitteriness; but then one of the problems with Weiner is that his idea of fun is a pretty strange one. He’d been dodging Sydney Leathers, one of the women he’d communicated with in the guise of Carlos Danger, and would later flash his middle finger at a reporter. He had “put a call in” to Bill de Blasio, Bill Thompson, “and Christine Quinn, to be on the safe side”—three of the four candidates who finished ahead of him in the Democratic primary, in which he got under five per cent—but didn’t say whether any of them came to the phone.

“If Bashar al-Assad yields control of his chemical weapons to international authorities, are we back from the brink? Is ‘military strike’ on pause?” Diane Sawyer, of ABC News, asked President Obama. “Absolutely,” he replied. “If, in fact, that happened.”

What did just happen? Sawyer’s was one of six interviews that the President gave on Monday. They were meant to be previews of a speech he is giving on Tuesday night; that’s now likely been re-written, after Secretary of State John Kerry said something that he might not have meant to, which turned out to be what everyone wanted to hear. When Kerry appeared before the press with British Foreign Secretary William Hague, Margaret Brennan of CBS asked Kerry if there was anything Assad’s government “could do or offer that would stop an attack?”

What would it cost Barack Obama if Congress votes against taking military action in Syria? The latest counts suggest that it is a real possibility, and not one that the President can dismiss as blind Republican recalcitrance: he doesn’t have his own party behind him, either. “I knew this was going to be a heavy lift,” Obama told reporters at a press conference, in St. Petersburg, in which he said he would address the U.S. about Syria on Tuesday, and try to bring the public around to his point of view. He said that he knew that Congressmen were hearing from their constituents that they didn’t want to get involved in Syria; he hoped that could be overcome. “It’s—it’s a hard sell, but it’s something I believe in.”