As has become something of a ritual during Barack Obama’s Presidency, elected officials are once again debating vital measures that, in times past, were more matters of procedure than principle. “The likelihood of a government shutdown and/or defaulting on the national debt seems more likely this time than the previous two years,” Ryan Lizza says on this week’s Political Scene podcast. John Cassidy, who joins Lizza and the host Amelia Lester on the podcast, offers an outside-the-Beltway view: “In Washington, as Ryan says, people are now taking seriously the prospect of a government shutdown or a default on the debt; on Wall Street, people are thinking it’s just the usual jokes.” Lizza, who is in D.C., concurs with that pessimistic take. “Up close,” he says, “it doesn’t look like there’s any deal to be had,” at least not while Republicans in the House condition funding the government on defunding Obamacare.

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In a few short weeks, the Obama Administration’s response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria has taken a number of unexpected turns. Steve Coll wrote that the unique devastation wrought by chemical weapons justified a U.S. intervention. George Packer warned of the risks of military action. But this week, after the threats had been made but before Congress took an authorizing vote, a third, more peaceful option has taken center stage. Jon Lee Anderson and Packer join host Dorothy Wickenden on this week’s Political Scene podcast to discuss Vladimir Putin’s willingness to encourage Bashar al-Assad to relinquish Syria’s chemical weapons—and why we should still consider other options.

President Obama’s decision to seek congressional approval for military action in Syria has been applauded by many observers—including, for example, our own Amy Davidson. But in such a complex situation, even what may appear to be the best move is fraught with pitfalls. “I think he’s boxed himself in—left, right, and center—with a set of options that he’s very unhappy with, and rightly so, because they’re bad,” Philip Gourevitch says. The President has yet to provide any convincing arguments for how the U.S. can be effective in stopping the atrocities in Syria, and it’s still not even totally clear what he would do if Congress votes not to intervene. (Deputy national-security adviser Tony Blinken did tell NPR on Friday that Obama has no “intention to use that authority absent Congress backing him,” but the President hasn’t answered that question directly himself.) Gourevitch and John Cassidy join host Dorothy Wickenden on this week’s Political Scene podcast to discuss how we got to the brink of intervention and what other options might still be available to the President.

“Everything about him and his entire history would suggest that he would much rather be going down the U.N., multilateral route,” Cassidy says. Gourevitch, who has written about the United Nations, agrees, and adds, “There’s a lot that hasn’t been done,” namely leveraging diplomatic pressure against China in order to better negotiate with Russia. “It looks to me like, so far in his Presidency, Obama’s big mistake,” Gourevitch says.

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Photograph by Pete Souza

In the wake of what appears to have been the large-scale use of chemical weapons by forces loyal to the Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, the United States and its allies seem to be approaching sort of muscular intervention into Syria’s civil war. But the questions that have kept the West from substantive action thus far still apply: What would such an action require of the United States in the long term? Would getting involved stop Assad from using chemical weapons again? If the rebels prevail, who really wins? On this week’s Political Scene podcast, Dexter Filkins and George Packer join Dorothy Wickenden to discuss President Obama’s dilemma and the options he has now.

With Michael Bloomberg’s twelve-year term as mayor of New York City coming to an end, Ken Auletta and Ben McGrath—who have both written about Bloomberg for the magazine—joined host Amelia Lester on the Political Scene podcast to discuss his time in office and the mark he has left on the city.

McGrath says, “In a way, I think his biggest legacy will be some of the things that he wasn’t personally passionate about at all, which are public health and the environment.” McGrath attributes many of the changes most closely associated with Bloomberg’s tenure—bikes lanes and the smoking ban, for instance—to the Mayor’s businesslike tendency to “delegate authority to commissioners who show him numbers that he trusts.” Auletta says that Bloomberg’s background in business has been one of his strongest assets—“As an administrator, as an executive, Mike Bloomberg is first class,” he says—as well as one of his greatest liabilities, in that it has resulted in a tendency to over-rely on quantifiable measures of success. And it is impossible to discuss Bloomberg’s mayoralty without bringing up his vast personal fortune, which gave him a certain freedom from partisan politics. It has also caused many observers to ask the question Lester raises: “To what extent did he buy his way into office?”

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Photograph by Damon Winter/The New York Times/Redux

On this week’s Political Scene podcast, Hendrik Hertzberg and John Cassidy join host Amy Davidson to talk about President Obama’s proposals to make the National Security Administration’s surveillance programs more transparent and more sensitive to civil liberties. The President’s plan includes appointing an independent lawyer to argue against the government before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court and reforming the Patriot Act to strengthen safeguards against the government listening in to citizens’ phone calls. “The steps he outlined,” Hertzberg says, “were gestures in the right direction, but they were really kind of feeble.” What’s more, as Cassidy says, the politics of security and counterterrorism may stand in the way of any substantial policy changes. “The political incentive for Obama and everybody in the White House is to act as tough as possible on all this national-security stuff, including this N.S.A. thing,” he says. “Even though there’s going to be a big brouhaha over this, the policies are basically going to continue.” After all, as he notes, no President wants to risk opening the doors to another terrorist attack.

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Photograph by Andrew Burton/Getty.

On Monday, the Washington Post Company announced that it had agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Jeff Bezos, the founder and C.E.O. of Amazon, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. The sale is a story that extends beyond the numbers of the deal and even beyond the uncertain direction of the newspaper industry—it has political reach, and, for many people, a personal element, too. “I think his heart is broken,” David Remnick says on this week’s Political Scene podcast, referring to Donald Graham, the chairman and C.E.O. of the Washington Post Company, and one in a long line of members of his family to have run the paper. Remnick continues:

The Grahams knew that the only way to make it with the Post financially was to undermine the thing itself, was to cut and cut and cut. And he couldn’t do it. He’d done it too many times, and he knew in his heart that the paper was less than it was.

The important question now is about where things are going, not where they’ve been. John Cassidy, who joins Remnick and host Dorothy Wickenden on the podcast, says, “I’ve been more interested in the other side of it—what Bezos brings to the party.… I wish the Post all the best, but I’m skeptical about its future.”

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“The easiest way to talk about” rape culture, Ariel Levy says on this week’s Political Scene podcast, “is in action as opposed to in abstract definition. Rape culture in action simply means taking a situation where a woman—by virtue of the progress that our society has made over the last hundred years—where a woman is in a situation where something has nothing to do with sex and where sex is forced upon her.” In the latest issue of the magazine, Levy writes about the presence and role of rape culture in the Steubenville High School case, but, as she and Ryan Lizza discuss with host Dorothy Wickenden, it’s not restricted to such places—in fact, sexual violence has retained a stubborn hold on the U.S. military that is only now finally being addressed as a political matter.

In a span of just six days, starting last Friday and ending today, President Obama addressed the country twice, speaking on two very different subjects. But both events appear to signal new post-reëlection messages. On this week’s Political Scene podcast, David Remnick and Ryan Lizza join Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the two speeches and what they suggest about Obama’s plans for the future.

Last Friday, Obama surprised the White House press corps with remarks on Trayvon Martin and race that Remnick calls “very effective, very affecting.” It was, Remnick says, a rare glimpse into the President’s true feelings:

From my experience of the Obamas, the degree to which they downplay their interest—and I think in the best sense—in race and in raising up African-Americans, from the distance between the podium at the White House and at home, is really marked.

And on Wednesday, Obama gave a speech on the economy and rebuilding the middle class that Lizza says was his “opening argument in the resumption of the economic battles in Washington.” “The sequester and the debt limit and the budget battles,” Lizza notes, “are all set to return in September, and he’s laying out his argument for what he wants out of these coming budget negotiations.”

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Photograph by Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty.

Trayvon Martin’s death and George Zimmerman’s acquittal have a lot of people talking about race, guns, and the nature of self-defense. That hasn’t been an entirely good thing. “I have been just shocked by the polarized, angry reaction that I have seen on social media about this case,” Jeffrey Toobin says on this week’s Political Scene podcast. There are some things that really do need discussing, though. “It’s difficult to say that the jury got it right. In terms of being in accordance with the law, it seems as if they were,” Jelani Cobb says. But getting it right “raises other, thornier questions about what, exactly, are the parameters of self-defense, and whether or not the law is constructed in such a way as to produce verdicts that might be legal, but not necessarily just.” Listen as Toobin and Cobb join host Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the placement of this case in America’s politics, culture, and history.

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Photograph by Orlando Sentinel/AP