Gail Collins: President Biden has a big speech coming up this week, Bret. Before we delve deep — or, hey, maybe at least deepish — can I use it as an excuse to talk for a minute about Walter Mondale?

Gail: Way back in 1971, when he was a senator, Mondale led a fight to fund high quality pre-K education beginning at age 3 for every child whose family wanted it. Plus after-school programs for kids with working parents. Passed the Senate 63-17. And then Richard Nixon vetoed it. The end.

Bret: I remember sitting through an interminable parental session years ago at one “high quality,” highly expensive, private preschool in Lower Manhattan. There was a somewhat fraught exchange on the green snot-yellow snot dichotomy, along with discussions of various pedagogical methodologies, as if admission to Harvard depended on it. My wife and I sent our kiddos elsewhere.

“The Blumstein family, consisting of Mr. B, age 43, his wife, same age, and their two children, ages 6½ and 2½ arrived in the United States on 12/21/50,” begins the social worker’s minutely detailed account of my grandparents’, and my father’s, first weeks as refugees in the United States.

My father was born stateless in Uzbekistan in 1945, as World War II was winding down. His Polish-born Jewish parents had spent years in flight — first to Russia in 1939, when Hitler invaded their home country, only to be deported via cattle cars into forced labor in Siberia. My father’s older brother perished of diphtheria during the war. Postwar, my grandparents boarded trains west, but at the Polish border heard the news that nearby villagers had murdered Jews who returned and gave up on their plan to reclaim their home.

“Misrepresentation in visa and citizenship applications is a matter of U.S. immigration law, and few if any of the normal due process rights accorded to defendants in criminal trials apply,” my father wrote in his memoir, “Lies That Matter,” which will be published next month. “And so deportations to the U.S.S.R. followed by a firing squad were seen as not really ‘punitive,’ as if lives were not at stake.” To my father this was not justice: The immigration system did not take into consideration whether the punishment fit the crime. He left O.S.I. after 18 months.

Democrats struck a chord with voters in the 2020 elections by campaigning on the need for the wealthiest Americans to pay higher taxes. Now the party is flirting with a major change in tax policy that would allow the wealthiest Americans to pay lower taxes.

The primary beneficiaries would be an even smaller group of the very wealthiest Americans. The 1 percent of households with the highest incomes would receive 54 percent of the benefit, on average paying about $36,000 less per year in federal income taxes.

The SALT deduction is an inefficient subsidy. The primary beneficiaries are the wealthy people who get a tax break. It would make more sense to collect those dollars from the wealthy and then to provide direct federal financial support to state and local governments.

New York’s congressional delegation will shrink by one seat after the 2022 election, the Census Bureau announced on Monday, but the state came excruciatingly close to snapping an eight-decade streak of declining representation in Washington: It was 89 residents short, to be precise.

Ms. Menin said she believed that the personal animus between Mr. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio was a driving factor in the state’s approach to the census, adding that she was “100 percent” sure that an additional 89 people would have been counted had there been greater state involvement. “It’s unconscionable,” she said.

California will remain the state with the largest congressional delegation, with 52 districts, losing one seat. Texas will pick up two seats for a total of 38. Florida and New York had been tied with 27 seats each, but Florida will gain a seat as New York sheds one, part of a broader trend of population shifts to the South and West in recent decades.

Until recently, the question of what counts as infrastructure was an academic matter. Today, thanks to President Biden’s $2 trillion proposal to upgrade and transform the nation’s infrastructure, it’s the most important issue in American political and economic life.

Republican leaders have accused Mr. Biden and his fellow Democrats of smuggling their entire domestic agenda into the word “infrastructure.” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas caricatured the plan on Twitter: “Abortion is infrastructure. Gun control is infrastructure. Forced unionization is infrastructure.” He and his colleagues argue that “real” infrastructure is little more than roads, bridges, tunnels and ports.

Political officials and corporate leaders now use the concept of infrastructure capaciously, as Mr. Reagan did. Governments make substantial investments in energy infrastructure, transit infrastructure, communications infrastructure and health infrastructure. But as Mr. Biden’s proposal makes disappointingly clear, adequate investments in civic and social infrastructure are less common.

But straight out of high school, Aidan fulfilled his dream in this patriotic town south of Pittsburgh, where there are crisp American flags around memorials to veterans in front of the municipal building. Today, Aidan is 20 and stationed with the Army in Kentucky. And this past week, his father exhaled in profound relief when President Biden announced that American troops would be coming home from Afghanistan.

“I’m not a Biden fan but I’m for that, pulling the troops out of there,” said Mr. Miller, 46, a salesman. He dismissed the arguments of some Republican officials and military leaders that Taliban extremists would overrun the country once Americans left. “We can’t babysit everybody,” he said.

“It’s a very complicated question,” said Rick Palma, standing outside McGrogan’s Tap Room, reflecting on Mr. Biden’s decision. Mr. Palma is a retired manager at a United States Steel mill in nearby Clairton, which is the fictional setting for “The Deer Hunter,” the 1978 movie that powerfully evoked blue-collar communities whose young men went to Vietnam.“Is it time to bring them home? Perhaps,” Mr. Palma, a former Army officer, said. “If you bring them all the way back, there’s the possibility that Al Qaeda will regroup.”

Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas, who led the challenges to President Biden’s victory in their chamber, each brought in more than $3 million in campaign donations in the three months that followed the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia who called the rampage a “1776 moment” and was later stripped of committee assignments for espousing bigoted conspiracy theories and endorsing political violence, raised $3.2 million — more than the individual campaign of Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, and nearly every other member of House leadership.

Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, a freshman who urged his supporters to “lightly threaten” Republican lawmakers to goad them into challenging the election results, pulled in more than $1 million. Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado — who like Ms. Greene compared Jan. 6 to the American Revolution — took in nearly $750,000.

WASHINGTON — President Biden used his daily national security briefing on the morning of April 6 to deliver the news that his senior military leaders suspected was coming. He wanted all American troops out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

“I take what you said as a decision, sir,” General Milley said, according to officials with knowledge of the meeting. “Is that correct, Mr. President?”It was.

The two Pentagon leaders stood before Mr. Biden near the same Resolute Desk where President George W. Bush reviewed plans in 2001 to send in elite Special Operations troops to hunt for Osama bin Laden only to see him melt over the border into Pakistan. It was the same desk where President Barack Obama decided on a surge of forces in 2009, followed by a rapid drawdown, only to discover that the Afghan military was not able to defend itself despite billions of dollars in training. It was there that President Donald J. Trump declared that all American troops were coming home — but never carried through a plan to do so.

WASHINGTON — Top liberal lawmakers are set to unveil legislation on Monday that would modernize the public housing system and start a transition to renewable energy, offering a clear policy marker for progressives as Democrats haggle over the details of President Biden’s infrastructure plan and how to push it through Congress.

Some lawmakers are floating the prospect of downsizing Mr. Biden’s legislative plan to win the 10 Republican votes needed to overcome the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate, amid a flurry of lobbying from rank-and-file members. Progressive Democrats like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Mr. Sanders are instead doubling down on their call for a larger package than the president proposed and pushing to shape what could be one of the largest investments of federal dollars in a generation.

“Republicans are not going to partner with Democrats on the Green New Deal or on raising taxes to pay for it,” Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said at a news conference last month. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, has repeatedly warned that the infrastructure plan is “a Trojan horse” for liberal priorities, while Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican, declared last week that “it’s a lot of Green New Deal” that would lead voters to turn away from Democrats.

Gail Collins: Bret, my city (and yours — if you work here you at least have rooting rights) tends to switch back and forth between regular party Democrats and feisty independents. De Blasio, a deep, dull Democrat, was preceded by Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg, who were very, very different versions of the political outsider.

Gail: And New York has had some. But except for Nelson Rockefeller our gubernatorial Republicans weren’t very exciting. Have we ever discussed the George Pataki years? No? At least with Andrew G. we’d have a Republican who knows how to putt …

Bret: Hemlock or cyanide? Devoured by a saltwater crocodile versus bitten by a venomous sea snake? A year of solitary confinement in a supermax prison or an all-expenses paid trip to Cancún in the company of Ted Cruz? I’m trying to think of equivalently horrible alternatives.

After the Republican Party suffered a surprising (well, to Republicans) defeat in the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee famously commissioned an autopsy that tried to analyze how the party had fallen short. It made a range of recommendations, but they were distilled by the headlines — and the wishful thinking of certain party elites — into a plan for the G.O.P. to win back the presidency mostly by shifting left on immigration.

But just because there hasn’t been a formal reckoning, thick with focus groups and bullet points, doesn’t mean that G.O.P. elites don’t have a theory of how to fix their party’s problems in time for the next presidential cycle. It’s just that this time the theory is less a message than a man: Right now, the party’s autopsy for 2020, and its not-Trump hopes for 2024, are made flesh in the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.

So DeSantis has a good narrative for the Covid era — but his appeal as a post-Trump figure goes deeper than just the pandemic and its battles. The state he governs isn’t just a test case for Covid policy. It’s also been an object lesson in the adaptability of the Republican Party in the face of demographic trends that were supposed to spell its doom.

Awash in grief and anger, we invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 to hunt down Osama bin Laden and punish the Taliban for letting him turn a maze of caves into a launching pad to attack America.

I remember touring Afghanistan and Iraq with Obama’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, at the time, flying over the snow-capped mountains that make Afghanistan a natural fortress and sinkhole for empires. I asked him if the president had been rolled by the generals. “That’s ridiculous,” Gates snapped, adding: “Anybody who reads history has to approach these things with some humility because you can’t know. Nobody knows what the last chapter ever looks like.”

As Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who was the Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015 for the secret “Afghanistan Papers,” a project on how things went a cropper: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

Although zoning may seem like a technical, bureaucratic and decidedly local question, in reality the issue relates directly to three grand themes that Joe Biden ran on in the 2020 campaign: racial justice, respect for working-class people and national unity. Perhaps no single step would do more to advance those goals than tearing down the government-sponsored walls that keep Americans of different races and classes from living in the same communities, sharing the same public schools and getting a chance to know one another across racial, economic and political lines.

Single-family exclusive zoning, which was adopted by communities shortly after the Supreme Court struck down explicit racial zoning in 1917, is what activists call the “new redlining.” Racial discrimination has created an enormous wealth gap between white and Black people, and single-family-only zoning perpetuates that inequality.

By addressing a problem common to America’s multiracial working class, reducing exclusionary barriers could also help promote Mr. Biden’s third big goal: national unity. Today, no two groups are more politically divided from one another than working-class whites and working-class people of color. For centuries, going back to Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, right-wing politicians have successfully pitted these two groups against each other, but every once in a while, America breaks free of this grip, and lower-income and working-class people of all races come together and engage in what the Rev. William Barber II calls “fusion politics.”

Last week, President Biden introduced a $2.2 trillion infrastructure plan, calling it “a once-in-a-generation investment in America.” In a speech, he outlined many of the package’s details, including how to “pay for” it. A close look at those so-called pay-fors, however, shows Democrats are thinking about fiscal responsibility the wrong way. They could be on the verge of sparking some unpleasant short-term overheating of the economy, in which price increases accelerate and the purchasing power of our dollars falls somewhat. And if the final legislation were to grow much larger — toward the $10 trillion level many progressives in Congress are pushing — it could send such inflation soaring.

She’s right that it is possible for Congress and the Biden administration to go bigger, faster — but only by shifting to a completely different budgeting framework: Instead of passing legislation that leans on taxing corporations and the rich to keep spending from increasing the deficit, they would have to develop a robust plan with a focus on containing inflationary pressures as that heightened government spending hits the real economy.

So it was unfortunate that in his long-awaited infrastructure speech, President Biden promised “not a contract will go out, that I control” that isn’t for “a company that is an American company with American products, all the way down the line, and American workers.”

As Israel struggles to put together a ruling coalition, I was struck by a television report there that a senior ultra-Orthodox rabbi and spiritual leader of the United Torah Judaism party said he’d prefer a government propped up by Israel’s Islamist Raam party than one with leftist Jewish parties, because Israeli Arab lawmakers were less likely to turn everyone secular.

This, understandably, added Seidman, is prompting a lot of Israelis and Americans to ask: “What is the unifying basis of our shared association going forward? What worthy journey are ‘we the people’ truly on together?”

Indeed, Netanyahu and Donald Trump were each so polarizing that they both stimulated breakaway factions within their own parties: “Anyone but Bibi” and “Never Trump.” But because their enemies hate each other as much as they hate Bibi and Trump, their ability to create broad-based alternatives has been limited.

Are you a Republican voter irked by the state of American politics? If so, party leaders have some exciting marching orders for you: Dump your Diet Coke and shut off that episode of “NCIS” — or whatever ViacomCBS show you may be watching. Cash in your Delta plane tickets, close your Citibank account, flush your Merck meds and tell your kids not to ship you anything via UPS. And, oh, yeah, no patronizing Major League Baseball until further notice. Not the Yankees. Not the Dodgers. Not even the poor Pirates.

Ordinarily, Republicans enjoy a snuggly relationship with corporate America, which appreciates the party’s tax-slashing, antiregulatory inclinations. But the G.O.P.’s latest crusade hasn’t been so much pro-business as antidemocratic: pushing hundreds of measures in dozens of states that are expected to make voting more burdensome, especially for poor and minority communities.

This manipulation of the electoral system has sparked a fierce backlash. Activists, including some of Georgia’s faith leaders, have moved to organize boycotts against locally based companies they say did too little to oppose the bill. They also have called on companies to stop donating to lawmakers who backed it.

President Biden loves spending money. Last month, he signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to stimulate the economy. Now he’s pushing the $2 trillion American Jobs Plan to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. He vows to follow that with the American Families Plan to improve health care, child care and education, which could cost billions or trillions more.

The more money Mr. Biden tries to spend, the more loudly critics ask where he’s getting it. He borrowed the funds for the stimulus. He wants corporations to pay for the infrastructure plan. With every legislative battle, finding the money grows harder. All of which raises a question: Will Mr. Biden try to cut defense?

It’s not as if there aren’t places to cut. In 2016, Bob Woodward and Craig Whitlock of The Washington Post disclosed that, according to an internal study, the Defense Department could save $125 billion over five years simply by trimming its distended bureaucracy. The department, the study found, employed close to 200,000 people in property management alone. After a summary of the report became public, Mr. Woodward and Mr. Whitlock noted, the Pentagon “imposed secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings.” It remains the only federal agency that has never passed an audit.

Looming in the background of this “reform” is Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s conflict with Donald Trump, who pressured him to subvert the election and deliver Trump a victory. What won Raffensperger praise and admiration from Democrats and mainstream observers has apparently doomed his prospects within the Republican Party, where “stop the steal” is dogma and Trump is still the rightful president to many. It is not even clear that Raffensperger will hold office after his term ends in 2023; he must fight off a primary challenge next year from Representative Jody Hice of Georgia’s 10th Congressional District, an outspoken defender of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election.

Last Wednesday, for example, Republicans in Michigan introduced bills to limit use of ballot drop boxes, require photo ID for absentee ballots and allow partisan observers to monitor and record all precinct audits. “Senate Republicans are committed to making it easier to vote and harder to cheat,” the State Senate majority leader, Mike Shirkey, said in a statement. Shirkey, you may recall, was one of two Michigan Republican leaders who met with Trump at his behest after the election. He also described the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 as a “hoax.”

One Arizona Republican, John Kavanagh, a state representative, gave a sense of the party’s intent when he told CNN, “Not everybody wants to vote, and if somebody is uninterested in voting, that probably means that they’re totally uninformed on the issues.” He continued: “Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well.”

Burly and well over six feet tall, Andre Duncan takes pride in carrying the groceries for his wife, Michelle, and views himself as her personal bodyguard.

Now, she is his: Ever since she got the coronavirus vaccine in February, Ms. Duncan, who works in hospital management, has insisted she run their errands alone. When she goes shopping, Mr. Duncan, who is unvaccinated, stays home.

Some of the newly vaccinated are finding that the tentative return to normalcy is at least partly on hold as they navigate uncharted new worries: how to coexist with and care for relatives, roommates and partners who are not yet vaccinated.

Americans have entered a new phase of the pandemic where a large part of the U.S. population is vaccinated and most is not. That leads to a big question: What can you do after you’re fully vaccinated? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued new guidelines, and other experts have weighed in with their thoughts.

These questions do not take into account every possible factor relating to risk of infection, but they’re a place to start. How long an activity is and how ventilated the space will be play the biggest roles in safety. Even if you don’t know the ventilation system used in an indoor space, you can see if there’s an attempt to increase it, such as opening doors and windows.

New C.D.C data suggests that the authorized Covid-19 vaccines reduce the risk of getting and spreading the coronavirus. There is still a small chance after vaccination that you can get the virus and spread it.