The tech industry is laying off workers at an alarming pace as it braces for a potential recession, raising fears that widespread job losses could spill into the broader U.S. economy.

Despite still-solid job growth and high wages in many industries, Big Tech is battening down the hatches amid a darkening economic outlook for the industry. 

If the midterm elections could be rerun this month, Democrats would probably end up in full control of Congress. President Biden’s approval ratings are rising. Inflation is down, and consumers are feeling more optimistic. And Americans are getting a better look at the G.O.P.’s actual policy agenda, which is deeply unpopular.

If it’s possible to sum up a presidency in a single number, that number would be the president’s approval rating — or the share of Americans who approve of the job he’s doing. Arguably, that simple percentage can determine the fate of an entire presidency.

For instance, a high approval rating can marshal support for a president’s agenda and minimize his party’s losses in the midterm elections — not to mention help the president himself win reelection. But a low approval rating can be electoral poison and imply that a president has lost the mandate to govern entirely.

President Joe Biden is increasingly looking like a candidate for reelection, but the latest controversies encircling his White House raise new questions about whether Democrats should welcome that fact.

The pendulum on Biden’s reelection swung back in his favor after Democrats successfully weathered the midterm elections, retaining the Senate and minimizing House losses. Biden was not immediately reduced to lame-duck status.

Stop the pearl-clutching, my fellow Republicans. This drama over the House speakership is the best thing that could have happened. 

Well, maybe not the best thing: that would have been a 30-vote Republican majority in the House.  That would have stopped the Democrat’s big spending, radical leftist agenda dead in its tracks. That would have let the Speaker of the House to tell Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to pound sand. But the supermajority didn’t happen.  

The bitter battle to confirm Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as House Speaker is finally over, and the groundwork has been laid for the 118th Congress. 

But the multiday, historically long process laid bare the divisions and potential issues McCarthy and House Republicans face as they seek to pass legislation, launch investigations and get reelected in two years.

So what lies ahead for McCarthy, the GOP and Democrats? 

Here are six things to watch as Speaker McCarthy takes his seat:

How much did the Speaker battle weaken McCarthy?

On the fourth of 14 failed attempts this week to elect Kevin McCarthy as speaker, Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) complained that Democrats and the media were enjoying the House Republicans’ meltdown too much.

“In some ways they’re salivating,” the lawmaker complained in his speech re-re-renominating McCarthy. “The schadenfreude is palpable.”

No doubt some took pleasure in the Republicans’ pain. But as a longtime reviewer of political theater, I found nothing enjoyable about this performance.

What happens when Rep.-elect George Santos of New York goes to Washington, DC, in January will be a real test of today’s Republican Party. Does honesty and integrity matter at all? Or is GOP leadership so power-hungry that it will allow a serial fabulist to remain in office despite deceiving the public – and the voters who elected him – about key aspects of his biography?

He’s the low-rent con artist everyone’s talking about, and for Republicans, he’s the one we deserve.

I refer, of course, to George Santos, the Republican congressman-elect who recently was forced to admit to “embellishing” facts on his resume, including (but not limited to) his ancestry (he claimed to be Jewish…then later, “Jew-ish”), his job history (he claimed that he “worked directly" for Goldman Sachs), and his education (he claimed to have graduated from Baruch College and New York University).

In today's Republican Party, you can be openly gay and Hispanic. What you can't be is poor.