Israel Passes Over Netanyahu, Trump Targets Impeachment Talk

Read the episode (Narration script)

Greetings once again and welcome to Political Science. It's Sunday, November 8th. Let's see what the hell's been going on.

Benjamin Netanyahu's party won the most seats in Israel's election, and someone else gets the first try at forming a government. President Isaac Herzog said Saturday night he will hand the mandate to Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief who entered politics only four years ago. Sixty-seven members of the Knesset recommended Eisenkot. Forty-six recommended Netanyahu.

The catch is where those sixty-seven came from. Eisenkot's own bloc has forty-eight seats. The other nineteen belong to two Arab-led parties, which won a record number of seats and backed him anyway, out of anger at Netanyahu and his far-right allies. Eisenkot says he won't govern with them. That leaves a deal with the ultra-Orthodox parties his camp campaigned against, or a unity government with a Likud he says can't include Netanyahu. Running through all of it is whether ultra-Orthodox men should be drafted, and one ally, Avigdor Liberman, now says he'll accept "painful compromises" to avoid another election.

Netanyahu stays prime minister until someone wins a confidence vote. Eisenkot has twenty-eight days, plus a possible two-week extension. If he succeeds, he'd be Israel's first prime minister from the Mizrahi community, Jews with roots in the Middle East and North Africa. His son and two nephews were killed fighting in Gaza.

In Washington, President Trump has told the Justice Department to investigate Democrats for talking about impeachment. In a Truth Social post Saturday, he said Democrats were threatening people "including the Attorney General," Todd Blanche, called it "extortion at the highest level," and wrote, "I am ordering the Department of Justice to look into this criminal act, immediately!" The only Democrat he named was Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin.

So far, Democrats have said they'll hold hearings and issue subpoenas, and a few House members have said Blanche should be impeached. Impeachment is a power the Constitution gives the House. The department being told to investigate is run by one of the officials they want to impeach. The Justice Department didn't respond to questions, and no case has been reported.

South Africa's governing party just had its worst local election ever. With ninety-nine percent counted, the African National Congress has about thirty-one percent, down roughly fourteen points from five years ago. The Democratic Alliance has twenty-five. The ANC's secretary-general called it "catastrophic" and said the honest answer is "not to argue with them but to go home and put our house in order." Years of water outages and power cuts will do that. In Johannesburg, the Democratic Alliance leads with about thirty-five percent, behind Helen Zille, who campaigned on fixing potholes and leaking pipes. Parties now have two weeks to build coalitions in the many cities nobody won outright.

In Paraguay, the former president has gone from house arrest to a military facility. A judge on Saturday ordered Santiago Peña held before trial so he can't leave the country. He's charged with breach of trust and administering for personal gain, each carrying up to ten years. Prosecutors allege he used his office to keep public money at the failed lender Ueno while he still had financial ties to it. Peña pleads not guilty. For the savers, the central bank says about a hundred and sixty million dollars has now gone to nearly one point two million people, out of roughly three million customers.

America recorded its largest drop in homelessness on record, according to the federal government. January's count found about six hundred and ninety-eight thousand people without a home on a single night, down six point three percent, or roughly forty-seven thousand people. Housing Secretary Scott Turner credited border enforcement and a shift away from the policy known as Housing First, while noting homelessness remains near a historic high.

The details complicate the credit. According to the New York Times, places where shelters had filled with asylum seekers, including New York City, Chicago and Denver, account for nearly half the decline. Chronic homelessness, people without housing for a year or more, rose about one percent. The National Alliance to End Homelessness says the main federal program is "vastly underfunded" and that the administration keeps trying to cut it.

In Poland, a gunman fired from a car into Krakow's main market square on Saturday afternoon, killing six people, including a British tourist, and wounding more than a dozen. Police shot and arrested the 24-year-old, who held a gun license. Prime Minister Donald Tusk said three more bodies, likely relatives, were found at his home. The interior minister said everything points to far-right ideology. Poland has never seen a mass shooting on this scale.

And the Iran war keeps finding new edges. The US military launched a task force Saturday to choke off what reaches Iran by land and across the Caspian Sea, after a Reuters investigation found at least two billion dollars in military hardware and trucks getting in that way despite the naval blockade. On Sunday, debris from intercepted Houthi missiles blew out windows across several floors of Saudi Aramco's tower in Riyadh. No one was hurt. A day earlier, the Houthi-run health ministry said Saudi airstrikes killed thirty-three people near Yemen's capital.

That should do it for today. And remember, if you keep your expectations low, you'll never be disappointed. Thanks for listening, see you next time.