‘Unity’ does not mean ideological consensus

On Thursday afternoon, twenty-eight hours after Joe Biden was sworn in as president, Michael D. Shear, a reporter at the New York Times, asked Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, a question that was more of a comment. “There’s this call for unity that the president made in his speech yesterday, but there has so far been almost no fig leaf to the Republican Party,” he said, presumably meaning “olive branch”; Biden, Shear went on, has thus far not appointed a Republican to his cabinet,...