Vox Sentences: John Boehner’s surprisingly consequential speakership

John Boehner shocks Washington and ends his political career; China unveils a plan to tackle climate change; and the Hillary Clinton email scandal resurfaces.

TOP NEWS

Dear John

(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

• Shocking pretty much everyone in Washington, Speaker of the House John Boehner announced today that he's resigning from the position, and from Congress, at the end of October.

  [Huffington Post / Sam Levine and Laura Barron-Lopez]

• Boehner's always been weirdly personable, and this account of his last night as speaker from the Post's Robert Costa is surprisingly intimate.

  [Washington Post / Robert Costa]

• What does Boehner leave behind? By one reckoning, not much: he spent his five-year speakership fighting with conservatives to keep the government open.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• If you look at government spending, though, Boehner should be a conservative hero, cutting the deficit by about $5 trillion.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is running basically unopposed to succeed Boehner.

  [Huffington Post / Ashley Alman and Ryan Grim]

• The real fight is to replace McCarthy as majority leader: both Boehner loyalists and conservative insurgents have already declared their candidacies.

  [Politico / Anna Palmer, Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan]

• If Boehner himself is anything other than happy as a clam, he doesn't show it: he literally came into his press conference today whistling "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah."

  [BuzzFeed / Hayes Brown]

Cap and trade with Chinese characteristics

(Win McNamee/Getty Images)

• Today, President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping (who's in the US on a state visit) formally announced some details of the US-China climate agreement they reached earlier this year.

  [New York Times / Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Coral Davenport]

• The highlight of the announcement: China is going to implement a "cap-and-trade" system for its greenhouse gas emissions.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• (Here's your quick refresher on what cap and trade actually is, and how much of it the US has done.)

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• This is a good time for China to switch: It's been moving away from heavy industry, which makes it easier for it to curb its emissions.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• Furthermore, the fact that China's economy is faltering could be good news for its emissions — it originally promised it could reduce emissions after 2030, but now the peak is looking more like 2025.

  [New York Times / Chris Buckley]

• That said, China's cap-and-trade pilot programs haven't been too effective — it appears that not enough people are interested in trading.

  [Wall Street Journal / Te-Ping Chen and Olivia Geng]

Oh! Man! Email! Ugh!

(Scott Eisen/Getty Images)

• Guess what's back? THAT'S RIGHT, the Hillary Clinton email scandal.

• The Obama administration has discovered that Hillary Clinton exchanged emails with Gen. David Petraeus just before and just after she became secretary of state and didn't turn them over to the State Department.

  [AP / Bradley Klapper]

• Brian Fallon, a Clinton spokesman, protested: "We always said the emails given to State dated back only to March 09. That was when she started using clintonemail.com."

  [Brian Fallon]

• But the AP reports that she had begun using clintonemail.com by January 28, months before Fallon claims.

  [AP / Bradley Klapper]

• As Jon Allen explains, it's doubtful Clinton is actually in legal trouble. This is mostly a political circus for her enemies to jump into.

  [Vox / Jonathan Allen]

MISCELLANEOUS

Terrorists sure love them some Toyota Tacomas [New Republic / Charles Bethea]

• Why are poor kids at elite schools less likely to get elite jobs than rich kids? Because they spend too much time studying and not enough time doing coke with the rich kids.

  [Washington Post / Henry Farrell]

• Is factory farming among the greatest crimes in human history?

  [The Guardian / Yuval Noah Harari]

• Remember in Parks and Recreation when Ben Wyatt brags about being a nationally ranked Settlers of Catan player? That is an actual thing.

  [SB Nation / Seth Rosenthal]

• You should read this profile of Grimes because a) Grimes is fantastic and unlike most musician profiles, this one makes you like her more, and b) there's a great scene where she freezes, Troy Barnes-style, upon meeting George R.R. Martin.

  [New Yorker / Kelefa Sanneh]

VERBATIM

"I hope my daughters grow up to have amazing sex. I really do. I do not hope they grow up to shoot someone in the face." [Shonda Rhimes to Women's Health]

• "I always used to be so envious, man, that Wiz Khalifa had that song ‘Black and Yellow,’ and it was just a song about Pittsburgh. Like, the world was singing a song about Pittsburgh! And I was just so baffled, as a songwriter, at how you stumbled upon a hit record about Pittsburgh."

  [Drake to Fader / Leon Neyfakh]

• "In an e-mail, Bollier told me that any suggestion that he was linked to the destruction of Pan Am 103 is a 'despicable accusation' and a 'fictional idea.' His e-mail address, which I discovered on his Web site, is Mr.Lockerbie@gmail.com."

  [New Yorker / Patrick Radden Keefe]

• "Demi Lovato was seen strutting her stuff in these $945 Saint Laurent 'Bianca' sandals, completely oblivious to that fact that this flirty summer look is indicative of a looming struggle between the two great, hostile camps of this world: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Stay fierce, Demi!"

  [StarWipe / Tim Sampson]

• "White people have never regarded us as human beings. There is a deep fear in me still that when I walk out on the street I will end up dead."

  [James H. Cone to New Yorker / David Remnick]

WATCH THIS

The math of being a Lyft driver [YouTube / Timothy Lee, Estelle Caswell, Joe Posner, Joss Fong]

(Vox/Estelle Caswell, Joe Posner, Joss Fong)