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The business of the midterms is the redress of old grievances and the introduction of new characters. In Tuesday night’s twin primaries for the U.S. Senate in Texas, which opened the 2026 midterms, each party was navigating a balance between its current iteration and what may replace it—in one case, delicately, and in the other, not so much.

The Republican primary scorched the earth. It had the unusual feature of an underdog incumbent: Senator John Cornyn, the four-term stalwart of Mitch McConnell’s Senate, who consistently backed Trump’s agenda but had annoyed the White House through persistent stylistic defections, among them generally refusing to say that the 2020 election had been stolen. His opponent, the Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, had no such compunction; he sued four states that went blue in 2020. The axiom of the Trump-era G.O.P. is that the Trumpier candidate is the favorite, and so, for much of the year, the presumption was that it was Paxton’s race to lose.

But, as primary day approached, Trump’s grip on politics appeared weaker than usual and, for a leading U.S. Senate candidate, Paxton was unusually scandal-plagued. He had endured a high-profile divorce, the result of an ongoing affair; a disbarment action, which was dismissed; and a public whistle-blower allegation by seven of his aides who accused him of bribery, among other transgressions, four of whom the state paid a $6.6-million settlement after Paxton fired them. (Trump didn’t endorse either candidate.)

Everything is bigger in Texas, even the attack ads. Cornyn, still the establishment conservative, raised roughly sixty-nine million dollars; Paxton just four million. In the final stages of the primary, the incumbent, still trailing in the polls, released a spot for the ages, which opened: “It’s voting time, so let’s cut through the bullshit. Crooked Ken Paxton cheated on his wife. She’s divorcing him on Biblical grounds.” Paxton’s camp deployed the candidate’s daughter in a last-minute response ad, and called Cornyn “a desperate shell of a man clinging to power.” But, on Tuesday night, neither candidate managed to get fifty per cent of the vote, which means they’ll face off again in a runoff election, in May. In theory, Republican voters might have been ready to throw out the last vestiges of the pre-Trump party. But not for Ken Paxton. At least not yet.

Democrats have not won a statewide race in Texas since 1994. But, last fall, they seemed to have found an interesting prospect in the thirty-six-year-old state representative and seminarian James Talarico, a religious progressive who emphasized the decency of ordinary conservatives and who seemed intent on elevating political discourse to a slightly spectral plane. Tad Friend, profiling Talarico in this magazine, quoted one of the candidate’s advisers: “All the D.C. consultants in the world can tell James, ‘Just say, “Groceries, groceries, groceries,” and he’ll say, ‘No, it’s “Healing, healing, healing.” ’ ” Talarico proved unusually eloquent, impressing figures as diverse as the podcaster Joe Rogan and the former President Barack Obama. “Really talented young man,” Obama said. “Now more than ever, what people long for is some core integrity.”

Do they? Talarico is a vision of a Democratic future reminiscent of high points from the Party’s recent past—rhetorical precision, hopes, dreams. But he had to endure a tense primary, after Jasmine Crockett, a House member from Dallas, and a more pugnaciously partisan figure entered the race. (She had cruelly, if memorably, referred to the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, as Governor Hot Wheels.) Crockett’s challenge to Talarico had less to do with ideological difference than with style—a somewhat repetitive January debate between the two candidates kept returning not to policy but to the question of whether it was better to establish common ground with some conservatives in the hope of winning their votes (Talarico’s position) or simply to rally your side by making clear what you opposed (Crockett’s). Crockett seemed to see enemies everywhere, and closed her campaign lashing out at certain political consultants and reporters. The congresswoman’s team expelled Elaine Godfrey, who’d published a critical profile of the candidate in The Atlantic, from an event for being a “top-notch hater.” The resulting back and forth on social media, between the campaign and its liberal critics, consumed much of the race’s final days.

By 10 P.M., no major news outlet had called the race, but Talarico was up by about five percentage points—less than a thematic mandate but enough to become the nominee. The Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman, a highly respected election analyst, had “seen enough,” predicting that Talarico was the winner. In a defiant address, Crockett, pointing to a chaotic situation at polling places in Dallas, her electoral stronghold, said, “I can tell you now that people have been disenfranchised.”

If Talarico hangs on to his lead, he will have to wait for the results of the Republican runoff to know who his Republican opponent will be; in either case, he will start as the underdog. But this was a good night for him and his party. According to NBC’s estimates, a hundred thousand more voters cast ballots in the Democratic primary than in the Republican contest. Cornyn and Paxton will now spend the next three months in what may be a brutal fight while Talarico consolidates his resources. As the votes were being counted, senators in Washington were warning of a spreading war, despite general public disapproval, and the Times reported “a frantic effort to evacuate” across the Middle East; a portal to a post-Trump political future opened, just a crack. In national politics, the parties’ fortunes have each bent around the singular figure of Trump. In the Texas primaries, each party wanted to get to a future a little beyond its candidates’ reach—in which political destiny was tempered and interrupted by the particularity of its characters. ♦

Whether a nation has just cause to begin a war and whether it conducts that war justly are matters of international law. Whether a U.S. President has the power to declare war is a matter of American constitutional law. That question can be answered doctrinally, politically, or historically. Whichever way, everything hinges on the year 1964.

On August 2nd of that year, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the U.S.S. Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. Following a much-disputed report of a second attack, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a bombing raid and asked Congress to pass a joint resolution of support. Johnson had been angling for such a resolution since the last weeks of 1963 and had begun discussing it in earnest the following February. “Being sprung from the loins of the Congress,” Johnson’s adviser Jack Valenti later said, “he was very, very disgruntled and discontented with the fact that we were messing around in Southeast Asia without congressional approval.” As a senator, Johnson had particularly objected to Harry Truman having sent troops to Korea without seeking support from Congress. If any President tried to get away with that while Johnson was Senate Majority Leader, Valenti said, “Lyndon Johnson would have torn his balls off.”

Pressed by Johnson to prop up the Administration’s actions in Vietnam, Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, set to work wrangling his colleagues immediately following the attack on the Maddox. On the Senate floor, he offered reassurance that the measure was exceedingly narrow, but it was also clear that at least some members of the Senate understood the breadth of the resolution.

MR. BREWSTER: My question is whether there is anything in the resolution which would authorize or recommend or approve the landing of large American armies in Vietnam or in China.

MR. FULBRIGHT: There is nothing in the resolution, as I read it, that contemplates it. I agree with the senator that that is the last thing we would want to do. However, the language of the resolution would not prevent it. It would authorize whatever the Commander-in-Chief feels is necessary.

On August 7th, Congress issued a joint resolution declaring its support for “the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent any further aggression.” Johnson was delighted, remarking that the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, “like grandma’s nightshirt . . . covered everything.”

Fulbright came to regret both the vote and the war whose conduct it authorized. In 1967, he presided over hearings investigating American military operations in Vietnam. As the historian Bruce Schulman reported in his book “Lyndon Johnson and American Liberalism,” Johnson, furious at what he considered a betrayal, said, “You know when you’re milking a cow and you have all that foamy white milk in the bucket and you’re just about through, when all of a sudden the cow switches her tail through a pile of manure and slaps it into that foamy white milk. That’s Bill Fulbright.” In 1971, weary of the war in Vietnam, Congress repealed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Two years later, determined to prevent “another Vietnam,” Congress jointly passed the War Powers Resolution; that measure aimed to claw back for the legislature its exclusive constitutional power to declare war, narrowing the circumstances under which a President could do so to “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.” This week, Congress is expected to vote on another War Powers Resolution, which would say about the same thing and would be about as effective, which is to say, not at all. “The Constitution says we’re not supposed to be at war without a vote of Congress,” the Democratic senator Tim Kaine told NPR. This resolution is not expected to pass, and if it did pass, it would be ignored.

In 1964, the House voted unanimously in favor of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and only two senators voted against: Ernest Gruening, a Democrat and former governor of Alaska, and Wayne L. Morse, a Democrat from Oregon and a former dean of the Oregon Law School. (They often voted together, in dissent. “Morse and Gruening may be right, but they have been written off,” another senator remarked.) Gruening, who trained as a doctor, spent his early career as a foreign-policy journalist, and was an editor at The Nation. His position regarding U.S. involvement in Vietnam dates to his opposition to the U.S. occupation of Haiti. A so-called peace progressive of the Wilsonian era, the anti-imperialist, pro-democracy Gruening had objected to American involvement in foreign wars since the nineteen-twenties. Elected to the Senate in 1958, he had consistently warned against U.S. entry into the war in Vietnam, questioning American intelligence (“the repeated optimistic statements of our officials . . . have been promptly refuted by events”) and calling it, in March of 1964, an “impossible war.” During the debate over the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, Gruening accused his colleagues of having propped up “corrupt and unpopular dictatorships which owe their temporary sojourn in power to massive American support,” leaving him convinced that the “allegation that we are supporting freedom in South Vietnam has a hollow sound.”

Morse’s dissent is the more interesting case. Morse, a progressive Republican from Wisconsin and an avid Cold Warrior, had been elected to the Senate from Oregon but left the Republican Party in part because of its failure to denounce Joseph McCarthy and, in 1955, became a Democrat. In 1957, he objected, unsuccessfully, to a resolution that Dwight Eisenhower presented to Congress, seeking pre-authorization for military action in the Middle East, calling it “constitutionally dangerous.” After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, in 1962, Morse described the C.I.A. as “an unchecked executive power that ought to be brought to an end,” and warned of the executive’s increasing recourse to unauthorized military action, predicting that “we are in a situation in which we shall probably never again see Congress pass a declaration of war prior to the beginning of a war.” History proved him right.

Morse so frequently opposed unauthorized military action, and so often spoke at the end of the day, before an empty chamber, that he earned the nickname the Five O’Clock Shadow. In 1963, the week before John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he told Morse, “Wayne, I want you to know you’re absolutely right in your criticism of my Vietnam policy.” In the spring, when Johnson sought a military appropriation, Morse accused him of “trying by indirection to obtain congressional approval of our illegal, unilateral military action in South Vietnam without coming forward with a request for a declaration of war.”

In August, Morse objected to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution on constitutional grounds, calling the resolution a “predated declaration of war” and an “evasion of congressional responsibility,” and a de-facto amendment of the U.S. Constitution. He warned his colleagues that “the American people will quickly lose their liberty if you do not stop feeding the trend toward Government by executive supremacy.” In 1965, when Johnson ordered the bombing of North Vietnam and sent fifty thousand troops to South Vietnam—“This is really war,” the President said that summer—Morse became a leading speaker at rallies in the growing antiwar movement.

Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to “declare war.” When, at the Constitutional Convention, in Philadelphia, in 1787, Pierce Butler of South Carolina raised the possibility that the President should wield this power, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts responded that he “never expected to hear in a republic, a motion to empower the Executive alone to declare war.” The general view of the delegates was reflected by Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 75: “The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a magistrate created and circumstanced as would be a President of the United States.”

Abraham Lincoln, while serving in Congress, summarized the Convention’s thinking this way:

Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.

If a President were to be granted this kingly power, Lincoln warned, there would be no turning back:

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure.

That later Presidents did indeed engage in military action without consulting Congress, creeping on to a power reserved for the legislature, is a fact of the past century and a half of American history but especially since the rise of the national-security state during the Cold War. Does the fact of that frequent practice alter the Constitution? This question has been a subject of heated legal dispute since the late nineteen-sixties.

Reviewing the state of the debate in 1971, the Yale legal scholar Alexander M. Bickel addressed the contention that the provision of the Constitution that grants only Congress the power to declare war had been informally amended by the executive’s regular exercise of this authority. After all, as Louis Brandeis had written, the Constitution “is capable of growth.” Bickel was unpersuaded by this argument. Growth there might be, but you can’t extend the length of a Presidential term, or abolish the Electoral College, by “growth,” and neither can you grant the executive the power to declare war by force of habit. To be clear, Bickel opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam. “I formed the opinion some years ago that the war has been a moral and political disaster,” he wrote, “and I believe further that we might have avoided it, or might at least avoid its repetition, if our institutional arrangements were such as to foreclose presidential wars.” But his argument, here, was merely the constitutional one: “No one should ever reasonably have assumed that the United States could go to war by presidential say-so.”

Ink and blood have been spilled on this question abundantly since Vietnam, especially with regard to U.S. military action in the Middle East, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and, this week, in Iran. The debate, as a legal scholar once explained, tends to fall into two camps. One camp sticks strictly to the claim that Congress alone has the power to declare war. The other camp argues that the President has the power, as Commander-in-Chief, to engage in military action to defend Americans in case of emergency. Both of those statements can be true and yet this can scarcely be said to be a stalemate, or even a proper separation of powers. Congress, having repeatedly failed to exercise its war power, no longer really can. And, as to what constitutes an emergency, the President gets to decide, allowing him, as Lincoln put it, to make war at pleasure. ♦

Martin Parr, who died in December, at the age of seventy-three, had a specific paint color in mind for the first room of “Global Warning,” a retrospective of his photographs that’s currently on display at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris. The show’s curator, Quentin Bajac, had suggested that they go with something classic—i.e., white—but Parr was very clear that he wanted a more exuberant hue. The one he chose might commonly be called bubblegum, but anyone who’s visited the show may be inclined to think of it forever after as Parr Pink: the pink of a hibiscus on a garishly printed bikini bottom, of bootleg perfume bottles, of diaper packages and cookie icing; the pink of slack mouths and dangling uvulas and nostrils shown so close up that you can see every last busted blood vessel, suggesting a lifetime of excess in a world of overconsumption.

Parr spent his career examining human appetites and the contradictions they engender, but his approach wasn’t always so frontal. One of the strengths of the Jeu de Paume show is that it comprises some hundred and eighty photographs made in the course of fifty years, not just instantly recognizable works such as Parr’s hyper-saturated portraits of oiled-up working-class vacationers at resorts in New Brighton or Benidorm.

In the early nineteen-eighties, for instance, Parr drove around the west coast of Ireland in a Morris Minor, documenting other, abandoned Morris Minors that dotted the landscape. Shot in black-and-white, the resulting photos have an elegiac quality and suggest the eventual mortality of any innovation or craze—ashes to ashes, rack-and-pinion steering to rack-and-pinion steering. They also make the case that Parr had a stronger conceptual bent than he is commonly given credit for: according to the rules he set for himself, anytime he saw a Morris he had to stop and shoot.

Parr went electric in 1983, inspired by John Hinde’s postcard photography and the pungent colors coming out of America in the work of Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore. An image from Salford, England—I think it’s his masterpiece—shows a pair of women backed up against the pebble-dash wall of a supermarket, gripping the handles of their stuffed shopping carts. They look like racecar drivers getting ready to do battle on the homestretch. Behold the competition, pride, and preening aggression that Parr detects in our eternal need to prove ourselves through the things we buy!

Food is one of his favorite thunderdomes, and it’s interesting to compare his images of cakes and meats and popsicles to those of someone like the American painter Wayne Thiebaud. The artists share an attraction to the gleaming counters and alluring rows of postwar consumer culture, but Parr holds his gaze longer, seeking the nausea after the binge. At the Jeu de Paume, forty-two photographs from Parr’s “Common Sense” series are hung together in a grid. Wedged in among phallic pastries and slabs of iridescent ham is a portrait of a priest, cropped so tightly that practically all you see is a collar and a chin. Stray threads protrude from his cassock; the fabric looks so cheap you can practically hear it squeaking. It’s unclear whether we’re looking at a holy man or some dude who ordered a Halloween costume on Amazon.

Parr had to fight to get into Magnum, the prestigious photographic coöperative. Henri Cartier-Bresson, a co-founder of the agency, considered Parr’s work cruel and garish, reportedly telling him, “We’re from two different solar systems.” Parr thrust back: “I acknowledge there is a large gap between your celebration of life and my implied criticism of it. . . . What I would query with you is, Why shoot the messenger?” Eventually, the men reconciled and Parr became a Magnum man, sneaking in with just enough votes.

Despite his reputation for levity, he was a social photographer in his own way, a photographe de rue who stretched the purview of street photography to the realms of mass tourism and trash culture, where the high-minded humanists of yore deigned not go. A photograph of a towering woman gassing up a zippy little car and wearing a plaid skirt and a T-shirt that reads, incongruously, “I’d Rather Be Truckin’ ” brings to mind a Quentin Blake illustration: Miss Trunchbull for the age of fossil fuels.

Parr’s humor is also detectably British, with a poking quality that only rarely verges into outright peevishness. Some of his japes have dulled with age—a series of tourists wielding selfie sticks doesn’t pack the punch it might have when the technology, and the narcissism that it implied, seemed like a novel development. But works like a postcard-like shot of a postcard rack parked in the middle of a ski path in the Swiss Alps are undiminished in their power to make you laugh while wondering, fondly, what the hell is wrong with people. And his images of royal-kitsch grotesqueries—an abandoned Prince William mask amid the ketchup-and-vodka detritus of a street party celebrating his wedding—seem particularly apt as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal continues to sully the House of Windsor. The Jeu de Paume show has been mobbed, to the point that the museum has added extended hours to accommodate the demand. You have to wonder what Parr would have made of his fans, queuing up in ponchos in the February drizzle. Would he have shot them as pilgrims or as chumps?

Cathédrale Notre-Dame, Paris, France, 1995.

What sets Parr’s jokes apart is that they’re not just visual. The conceptual intelligence of his early work—as in, say, a picture showing a grouping of stuffed animals arranged in front of the lace-curtained front window of a modest house in Ireland, rendering it a shadowbox theatre, carried through his œuvre. In one picture from 1995, a tourist in Paris maneuvers for the perfect shot of Notre-Dame’s spire. Parr has photographed him from behind, so that we see the world through his eyes without knowing his identity. All we can make out is his backward-facing baseball cap, reading, “New York Yankees.” It’s a wicked take on the persistence of human folly. Wherever you go, there’s Martin Parr.

Both the Democratic and Republican races in the Texas U.S. Senate primary are expected to be competitive. On the Democratic side, Jasmine Crockett, a U.S. House member from Dallas, is facing off against the state representative James Talarico. Crockett began to cultivate a national profile with a prime-time speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention and has since become one of her party’s most popular messengers, using an often brash communication style to manufacture viral moments. Talarico, a former public-school teacher, enrolled in seminary while serving as a member of the Texas House of Representatives; he gained national attention after delivering a speech on the state-House floor, in which he criticized a Republican effort to require the state’s schools to display the Ten Commandments.

In the Republican primary, the incumbent Senator John Cornyn is facing challenges from the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, and from Wesley Hunt, a congressman representing northwest Houston, in a race likely to go to a runoff in May. Paxton, a MAGA diehard who, as the state attorney general, sued to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 Presidential-election victory, has weathered a series of recent scandals. In 2023, he was impeached by the Texas House on charges of bribery and obstruction of justice, after allegedly using his office to benefit a Texas real-estate developer. (He was ultimately acquitted by the state Senate.) Paxton’s wife, a state senator, filed for divorce last summer on “biblical grounds,” amid accusations of adultery, which Paxton denies. Nonetheless, President Trump has declined to endorse any candidate in the race, saying instead, “I support all three.”

In the Texas gubernatorial primaries, both the incumbent Republican, Greg Abbott, and the Democratic state representative Gina Hinojosa are expected to move on to the general election. Abbott, whose campaign has reportedly raised a hundred and six million dollars, is seeking a fourth term, a feat that would be unprecedented in the state’s history. Trump has endorsed Abbott, praising him for his role in redrawing Texas’s congressional map last year to more heavily favor Republicans.

Before entering politics, Hinojosa, who represents a district in downtown Austin, worked as a lawyer for public-sector union employees. In 2012, after her son’s elementary school faced severe budget cuts, she ran for a seat on the Austin school board, and has made support for public education a major part of her campaign. Her main challengers in the Democratic primary are Chris Bell, a personal-injury lawyer and former U.S. congressman from Houston, and Bobby Cole, a dairy farmer who has never held elected office.