@fendifille/AP

This image provided by the Twitter page of @fendifille shows a computer at Greater Preston CCG as Britain's National Health Service is investigating 'an issue with IT' May 12. British hospitals were among those hit by the WannaCry attack, which affected more than 200,000 computers worldwide. Victims' data was encrypted unless they paid a ransom to unlock their software.

When automakers have shipped cars with bad brakes, they’ve faced multimillion-dollar government fines. Appliance companies have paid hefty legal settlements for selling flawed coffee pots. And the government brought criminal charges against food executives for contaminated peanut butter.

But the multibillion-dollar US software industry has so far been immune to civil or criminal liability for serious – and growing – problems that result from bad code. When it comes to keeping computer systems safe from malware and viruses, warding off criminal hackers, or simply updating buggy programs, it largely rests on consumers to keep systems safe even when the underlying technology may be flawed.

Now that a so-called “ransomware” attack has affected more than 300,000 computers worldwide, according to US officials, encrypting thousands of victims’ data until they pay ransoms to unlock files, cybersecurity experts are asking whether software makers should be held to a standard similar to other industries as a way of ensuring their products are safer from serious and costly computer attacks.

“The solution is going to be regulation. We need to change the incentives right now,” says Bruce Schneier, a noted cryptographer and chief technology officer at IBM Resilient. “We've picked fast and cheap. Wait until this happens to your car, or your refrigerator, or airplane avionics, or when your internet-enabled lock has locked you out.”

Indeed, says Mr. Schneier and many other technology experts, while the worst software vulnerabilities may have allowed malicious hackers to cripple business and government systems or compromise sensitive personal data, cyberattacks may soon have more costly consequences since software is increasingly embedded into automobiles, medical devices, utilities, and other critical systems. Therefore, experts say, there’s a growing urgency to ensure faulty code can’t be so easily exploited or manipulated.

When a patch isn't enough

Typically, software companies will alert their users when they detect a vulnerability in their products and push out a software update that fixes the security hole. That’s what Microsoft did when it learned about a serious flaw in Windows that could give criminals an opening to execute a ransomware attack.

Yet it’s unclear if that message reached all the victims targeted in Friday’s attack, which continued through the weekend. This particular strain of ransomware called WannaCry (also known as WannaCrypt or WanaDecrypt) appears to have spread through a malicious email campaign that installed the virus on victims’ computers through attachments. According to the White House, the criminals behind WannaCry have made off with less than $70,000 from victims.

The Windows software exploit that WannaCry utilized surfaced on internet forums as part of a cache of cyberweapons linked to the National Security Agency.

A hacker group calling itself the Shadow Brokers dumped the spyware on the web earlier this year. In a blog post Sunday, Microsoft President Brad Smith called out the NSA for stockpiling such digital vulnerabilities, equating the problem to the US government “having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen.”

But some experts are less enthusiastic about chastising spy agencies, who have long taken advantage of software flaws in operating systems and mobile phones to spy on their targets. “It’s unfair to single out the NSA," says Patrick Wardle, a computer expert who worked at the NSA and now serves as chief security researcher at the firm Synack. "Why aren’t we blaming Microsoft? They developed and deployed buggy code. They should take some share of the blame.”

Software makers held to different standards

Unlike many other industries such as health care or electronics, software makers aren’t subject to the same legal standards when it comes to product safety. In a series of New Republic articles in 2013 on the software liability debate, the Hoover Institution’s Jane Chong says that software companies have traditionally avoided any claims of liability over faulty code because the user agreements. “Software providers typically shunt all the risks associated with their products onto users through these license agreements, which the courts have generally treated as enforceable contracts,” wrote Ms. Chong, a national security and law associate at the institution.

When users have tried to sue software companies over data breaches, the cases are often thrown out of court, she noted. For instance, a California court dismissed a class action case by LinkedIn users who alleged the social media company was the victim of a major hack because it didn’t take industry standard security precautions.

For courts to begin holding software companies responsible for cybersecurity lapses would take tougher federal regulations when it comes to the quality of code. It would also take judges who can understand the complex issues around software vulnerabilities and how those can lead to cyberattacks.

In this case, some of the Microsoft Windows systems affected were old versions that hadn’t been updated or patched, noted Ross Schulman, codirector of the Cybersecurity Initiative and senior policy counsel at New America's Open Technology Institute. The company has already supported those systems “for a really long time compared to best practices; they gave everybody ample warning that they were going to stop supporting it.”

What’s more, many experts have noted, Microsoft did act responsibly in this case and alerted its customer about the vulnerability. Instead of blaming Microsoft, says Tom Cross, chief technology officer for the cybersecurity firm OPAQ, "regulators should be asking why certain organizations were not prepared, particularly if those organizations are in critical infrastructure sectors.”

US officials are beginning to take steps to deal with the spread of the WannaCry, with victims including a handful of US companies, such as FedEx. At Tuesday's White House press briefing, White House Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert said intelligence agencies are engaged in an ongoing investigation into the hacks – but don't yet know who's behind them.

"This was not a – a tool developed by the NSA to hold ransom data," Mr. Bossert said. "This was a tool developed by culpable parties, potentially criminals or foreign nation-states, that have put it together in such a way so that they deliver it with phishing e-mails; put it into embedded documents; and cause infection, encryption, and locking."

As experts and officials attempt to unravel who was behind the attack, it could also be a moment for the industry and government to reevaluate whether there's a way to encourage software companies to ship products with code that's more secure and resilient against these kinds of attacks, says Joshua Corman, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank.

"I certainly think it’s a watershed moment,” says Mr. Corman. “There will be a much clearer case for the argument for some form of software liability.... I’d love to see some sort of trigger for corrective action."

Steve Helber/AP

American Civil Liberties Attorney, Omar Jadwat, gestures as he speaks after a hearing before the US Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., Monday, May 8, 2017. The court examined a ruling that blocks the Trump administration from temporarily barring new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. It's the first time an appeals court will hear arguments on the revised travel ban, which is likely destined for the US Supreme Court.

For the second time in seven days, the Trump administration will defend the constitutionality of its second travel ban executive order. Last week in Virginia, Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall made arguably the strongest defense of the order to date, including one claim that is likely to be voiced again in arguments today in California.

“You have a global injunction resting on one plaintiff,” said Mr. Wall on May 8 to 13 judges on the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.

Even if they disagreed with him that the injunction blocking the order’s implementation should remain in place, Wall added, “I think the court has got to narrow the injunction to the alleged injuries of” the one plaintiff.

It may sound like a fair argument to many. Why should the grievances of a single individual affect the entire country? Or in the case of this order, which seeks to temporarily restrict the admission of immigrants from a half-dozen Muslim-majority countries, affect people in seven countries?

Neither the 4th nor the 9th Circuit Court, which hears arguments May 15, is likely to oblige the government, experts say. And if this narrative sounds familiar, it is because it played out several times in court battles over the Obama administration’s executive actions.

Indeed, a nationwide injunction is something that has become familiar to federal judges around the country in recent years as the ideological fight over government policies has shifted from Congress to the White House and the courts. Some experts, and judges, believe such injunctions circumvent the fundamental deliberative role of the American judiciary, yet for the most part judges have been happy to do so.

“Often the government has argued that while the case may not be limited to those individuals, the injunction should be restricted to those individuals, and courts have consistently said no,” says Josh Blackman, an associate professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston. “If courts find that something is being done illegally, they say that if it’s illegal here, it’s illegal everywhere.”

Nationwide injunctions became more common during the Obama administration, as some conservative states regularly banded together to challenge his executive actions, persuading a federal judge – often a federal judge in Texas – to issue a nationwide injunction.

Liberals were outraged when Judge Andrew Hanen of the district court in Brownsville, Texas, blocked the implementation of Obama’s executive actions on immigration in 2015 at the behest of 26 states. The next year, a dozen states repeated the trick when Judge Reed O’Connor of the district court in Wichita Falls, Texas, blocked the Obama administration’s guidelines allowing transgender students to use school bathrooms and other facilities that correspond with their gender identity.

Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration flipped them onto the plaintiff’s side of the courtroom, civil rights and immigration groups – and attorneys general from left-leaning states – have adopted similar tactics, and enjoyed similar success. Nationwide injunctions from district court judges have blocked Trump’s first travel ban, his second travel ban, and, most recently, his executive order on sanctuary cities.

Some district court judges have chosen to issue narrow injunctions, and while the smaller scope may mean sparser public attention, legal experts and judges say it better represents how the judiciary is supposed to operate.

The first judge to rule against the revised travel ban, for example, was a district court judge in Wisconsin who limited the injunction to the plaintiff’s family. A district court judge who blocked Trump’s first travel ban also limited the injunction to her state of Virginia, partly “to avoid encroaching on the ability of other circuit [courts] to consider the questions raised.”

Allowing other federal courts to weigh in on a complex issue or policy, commonly referred to as “percolation,” is something that means “a difficult legal question is more likely to be answered correctly,” Richard Posner, a federal appeals court judge, has said. And that is something that is cut short by a nationwide injunction.

Yet most court watchers believe that the nationwide injunction against the second travel ban will be upheld, if not by the 4th Circuit, then by the 9th Circuit. If so, a Supreme Court showdown is likely to follow.

“I don’t expect the courts will have any meaningful opposition,” says Professor Blackman, noting that both the 4th and 9th circuits have majorities of judges appointed by Democratic presidents.

So the “one plaintiff” in question in Richmond last week – a scientist and lawful permanent resident of Iranian origin who lives in Maryland, referred to in court filings as “John Doe #1” – could see his case end up before the highest court in the land.

His wife had received initial approval for a spousal immigration visa to relocate from Iran when Trump signed the second travel ban order. The order, he says in court filings, “has created significant fear, anxiety, and insecurity for my wife and I” and “forces me to choose between my career [in the US] and being with my wife.”

He adds that “the anti-Muslim views” behind the travel ban have caused “significant stress and anxiety for me,” and that “I worry I may not be safe in this country.”

The fate of the second travel ban could hinge on this latter argument more than any other, says Steven Schwinn, a professor at the John Marshall School of Law in Chicago. The executive order itself makes no mention of Islam, but comments made by Mr. Trump and members of both his campaign and administration have featured heavily in decisions against the White House so far.

“Can the court look behind the executive order at what President Trump and other administration officials said during the campaign and after, or is the court limited to the face of the executive order?” says Schwinn. “The entire case turns on that.”

Rahmat Gul/AP

US and Afghan forces patrol Pandola village in Afghanistan, near the site of a US bombing in the Achin district of Jalalabad, east of Kabul, on April 14, 2017.

On the scale of the foreign-policy issues President Trump has to consider, the proposed surge of up to 5,000 more US troops into Afghanistan may not register as the most pressing.

Compared with the nuclear threat posed by North Korea (another missile test over the weekend), or the challenge of defeating the self-declared Islamic State (Turkey’s president is in Washington May 16 amid a sharp dispute over the US arming of Syrian Kurds), to surge or not to surge once again in what has become America’s longest military engagement might be relatively small foreign-policy potatoes.

But an Afghan surge would be Mr. Trump’s first significant commitment of US troops to war – he has dispatched a few hundred to Syria to help fight ISIS there – and as such his decision will offer clues to how this new president intends to resolve the contradictions in his foreign policy vision.

How Trump comes down on Afghanistan will offer hints as to how far he intends to go with the “America First” theme of his campaign – or whether he will pursue the shift toward a more traditional exercise of American power and leadership that has characterized his early foreign-policy decision-making.

The White House has suggested Trump will make a decision on Afghanistan troop levels before he attends a meeting of NATO leaders May 25 – but all indications are he is poised to accept the recommendation of his top national security advisers, whose influence has grown steadily in the first months of his administration, and add at least several thousand troops to the 8,400 now in Afghanistan.

And if he does, foreign policy analysts say, it will be further evidence that the inward-focused worldview inherent in “America First” is losing out.

Trump is “having trouble sticking to the ‘America First’ approach to foreign policy that he advocated in the campaign, and there’s a reason for that,” says Bruce Jentleson, a former State Department policy planning official who is now a professor of international relations and diplomacy at Duke University in Durham, N.C. “He’s finding out that ‘America First’ is hard to do in a way that doesn’t leave you shooting yourself in the foot.”

Trump was going to label China a currency manipulator and slap steep tariffs on its goods, but then it became clear the US needed good relations with China – to help rein in North Korea, among other things.

Trump was going to withdraw from NAFTA, but then the farmers in the counties that voted most heavily for Trump made it clear to the president that they depend on the trade deal with Mexico and Canada.

NATO was obsolete and too expensive – until after Trump took office, when he described the Alliance as “the bulwark of international peace and security.”

Afghanistan illustrates that dilemma, too, Professor Jentleson says. According to the nationalist vision that candidate Trump espoused, the US would be quickly extricating itself from conflicts it had no business getting into in the first place – from Afghanistan to Iraq and on to Syria.

Carolyn Kaster/AP

President Trump greets members of the military as he arrives on Air Force One at Harrisburg International Airport in Middletown, Pa., Saturday, April, 29.

But Trump also pledged to take on “radical Islamist terrorism” more aggressively and destroy it. That won’t be done simply by hunkering down at home.

“There was always a contradiction in how he was going to confront national security challenges and other international issues,” says Jentleson.

“On Afghanistan and tackling the terrorism threat more broadly, it was ‘I’m going to bash the bad guys more than anyone has before me,’” he says, “but then it was also, ‘Oh wait, if I’m going to make America great again, I don’t want to make those expensive commitments.’”

'Hawkish' side's advantage

It should not be too surprising that a new president with no foreign-policy experience would gravitate, once in office, toward a more conventional policy line and away from some of the more sensational positions staked out in the campaign. But some of Trump's key steps since he took office also explain the pattern his foreign policy is following, some experts say. 

“The tensions in Trump’s foreign policy go as far back as the beginning of the campaign, when he would express deep skepticism about involvement in distant wars and nation-building – only to counter that with very hawkish language about how he would defeat ISIS and Al Qaeda,” says John Glaser, associate director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington.

If Trump’s more “hawkish” side is winning the day, it’s in part because the president decided early on to give his generals more latitude and greater say in decision-making, Mr. Glaser says. “Trump basically said, ‘You develop the strategies and I’ll support you,’ and so in Afghanistan you get a bigger US presence on a roughly permanent basis – which is what [the generals] have wanted for a long time.”

For Glaser, another explanation for the evolution in Trump foreign policy is the thin stable of advisers he had to draw on when he took office.

“When he came in he didn’t have a deep bench to work with on all these issues, so he was left to turn to the military, the intelligence community, and the foreign-policy community,” he says. “But the bulk of those people tend to have really hawkish and interventionist views.”

Bannon opposing the surge

Again, Afghanistan is a case in point. Trump came into the White House with chief strategist Steve Bannon, who continues to counsel the president to stay out of Middle East wars and focus on the home front. But Mr. Bannon – who was initially named a principal of the National Security Council before having the lofty position stripped away – has seen his star fall as those of national security adviser H. R. McMaster and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis have risen.

Reports trickling out of the White House portray a jilted Bannon trying desperately to convince his boss that the Afghan troop surge recommended by General McMaster and the Pentagon would betray the worldview that carried Trump into office.

Proponents of sending more troops to Afghanistan say it would allow the US to work more closely with the NATO-trained Afghan security forces and to build pressure on the Taliban to come to the negotiating table.

Skeptics, among them Jentleson and Glaser, say a few thousand more US troops will have virtually no chance of influencing a stalemated war that is fueled by unresolved political conflicts and corruption.

Yet while that may be true, Jentleson says that other than the occasional flash of an America First impulse, he expects Trump’s evolution to a more traditional internationalist foreign policy to continue.

“When Trump handed [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel a bill at the White House for what he says Germany owes NATO, I guess that was a bit of America First,” Jentleson says. “But there’s a difference between that sort of thing and getting the best deal you can for the country.”

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP/FILE

Storm clouds enshroud the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

It was a somber scene in the GOP-controlled Senate. Republicans were set to blow up a historic Senate rule so they could bust through a Democratic blockade and confirm Neil Gorsuch for the US Supreme Court with just a majority vote.

Rather than the usual milling around at vote time, when senators from both parties mix it up with slaps on the back and chitchat, many members began the series of votes on this April morning sitting quietly at their desks. Republicans on one side, Democrats on the other.

Which is why Sen. Susan Collins stood out. Carrying a bright green folder, the Republican from Maine crisscrossed the chamber floor, quietly approaching her colleagues – placing her hand on a shoulder, bending down to whisper, then opening her folder.

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP

SEN. SUSAN COLLINS (R) OF MAINE.

Even as the Senate was “nuking” the 60-vote threshold for Supreme Court nominations – a high bar meant to forge consensus and protect minority-party rights – Senator Collins was gathering signatures for a bipartisan letter to the Senate leadership. The petition sought to preserve the chamber’s last supermajority threshold – not for court appointments but for passing legislation itself.

This was classic Collins, ranked in 2015 as the most bipartisan of the Senate. Such moderation actually makes her a particularly powerful senator. In this increasingly polarized era, Collins is a crucial swing vote in a chamber where Republicans hold only a tenuous 52-to-48 majority, putting her in a position to help shape or stall the legislative agenda of President Trump.

When it comes down to it, experts say, the Trump revolution will largely succeed or fail in the Senate, depending on lawmakers like Collins and various constellations of members that shift with the issues. Trying to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, as well as dealing with issues such as tax reform, infrastructure spending, and the federal budget, will require a careful corralling of senators – even as powerful forces, such as elections, tug at lawmakers’ political ids.

“The crux of the Trump agenda begins and ends with that body,” says Jim Manley, former spokesman for retired Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

Of course, there are caveats to the Senate being the arbiter of the Trump presidency. One is the White House itself: Can this politically inexperienced administration unify its message and learn to engage more successfully with Congress? And what about the mercurial and fractious Republicans in the House?

Still, it is generally the Senate – with its traditions and rules that enhance the individual power of each of its 100 members – that will shape much of what happens in the next four years, rather than the much larger House, where the majority rules. The tight divide in the Senate complicates matters. When Senate rules require a simple majority vote, Republicans can afford at most two defections. When the rules require a 60-vote threshold, as they still do for spending bills and most major legislation, Republicans – if they hang together – will need eight Democrats.

How much ultimately gets done will hinge in large part on the Senate’s two Kasparov-like chess masters – majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky and minority leader Charles Schumer (D) of New York. But behind them are a number of coalition builders and busters who will play crucial roles, including these six, who range from a rookie Californian to an octogenarian songwriter.

Susan Collins: Courting a moderate

Collins is a fifth-generation public servant who draws inspiration from Maine’s first female US senator, Margaret Chase Smith, and from her political lineage. Both her parents served as mayor of her hometown of Caribou, on the northeastern tip of Maine, where her family runs a lumber business that dates back to 1844.

The state has a tradition of sending independent-minded senators to Washington, and the moderate Republican carries on that tradition. It’s what makes her one of the most wooed members of the chamber.

“Not a day goes by that I do not hear from a colleague in the Senate, asking me to either join in an initiative, or what I will do on a particular issue,” she says in an interview. “That’s very nice in some ways, but it puts a lot of pressure on me,” especially now that the president is a member of her own party, she explains.

Still, that hasn’t changed her approach to her work: searching for compromise when she can, checking the president when she feels she must.

Though she did not vote for Mr. Trump in November, she stood with him on the Gorsuch nomination after having tried – and failed – to broker a bipartisan truce to avoid the explosive rules change. But she did not support Trump’s choice for Education secretary, Betsy DeVos.

Collins has deep reservations about the GOP plan to overhaul Obamacare that narrowly passed the House May 4, saying it would hurt Mainers, particularly senior citizens. She and several other Republican senators have made it clear the bill will never survive the Senate intact. Their message helped stall it in the GOP-controlled House in March.

Before the House even unveiled its plan, she and a Republican colleague, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a physician, wrote their own compromise bill: States that like Obamacare could keep it; those that don’t could use Affordable Care Act funds to develop a plan that covers more people. They've picked up four Republican co-sponsors and are reaching out to Democrats.

Collins says the president called her about the bill. He found it intriguing and sent White House economic adviser Gary Cohn and an assistant to talk to her and Senator Cassidy about the specifics.

In the end, though, the administration backed the House version. It aimed to pass it through a special budget maneuver that requires only a majority vote in each chamber.

As a steadfast defender of the Senate’s deliberative traditions – Collins herself has never missed a vote in her 20-year tenure – she is skeptical of circumventing the normal legislative path for such big and complex issues as health care and tax reform. She prefers the committee process, hearings, and amendments in which the House and Senate have a chance to work their will and come to some kind of bipartisan solution.

“I don’t think this is a good way to proceed, and I would think we would have learned from [Obamacare] when President Obama jammed the bill through the Senate,” she says.

The GOP leadership in the Senate has meanwhile set up a working group of 13 Republicans to fashion the Senate's own Republican health-care bill. Neither Cassidy nor Collins is on it – and notably, no women either. At least one former Washington insider suggests that Senate leaders should consult closely with the even-tempered Collins, not just because she is a crucial swing vote, but because she also serves on some powerful committees, including appropriations.

“I used to work very closely with Susan every day. And the same thing with Olympia Snowe,” says former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R) of Mississippi, referring to Collins’s former colleague from Maine. “If you get them in on the takeoff, they’ll probably be there on the landing.”

Yet there is some question whether Collins will even be in the Senate in a few years. She is weighing a 2018 bid for governor. The deciding factor, she has said, is where she can “do the most good” for Maine.

KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

SEN. JOE MANCHIN (D) OF WEST VIRGINIA WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP.

Joe Manchin: Squeeze play

When Trump gave his first address to a joint session of Congress in February, most Democrats sat stone-faced or clapped politely in their laps. Not Sen. Joe Manchin (D) of West Virginia – an ultra-red state that Trump won by more than 40 percentage points. Like a jack-in-the-box, the West Virginian kept popping up to applaud.

Political analysts point to Senator Manchin and nine other red-state Democrats up for reelection in 2018 as a possible source of votes for Trump’s priorities. These are relative moderates who – like Collins – could turn out to be key swing votes.

“The Senate in some respects belongs to Joe Manchin and Susan Collins,” says John Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif.

Manchin hates it when reporters bring up his looming race as a possible factor in his votes and friendly relations with the president. It doesn’t weigh “one iota” in his decisions, he tells a scrum of reporters. He’s simply representing his state. And as a former governor, he’s showing deference to Trump as a fellow executive.

While many of Manchin’s colleagues have put up a wall of resistance to the president, the West Virginian was one of three Democrats who voted to confirm Mr. Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. He has also voted to approve several of Trump’s most controversial cabinet nominees, such as former Sen. Jeff Sessions as attorney general, Steven Mnuchin as Treasury secretary, and Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). He has the most conservative voting record of Senate Democrats.

Manchin disagrees with Trump on health care, but he comes from a coal state and has railed against EPA over-regulation. (He keeps a bronze statue of a coal miner in his office.) The crosscurrents he is facing are similar to those confronting Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D) of North Dakota – also an energy state and one that Trump won by more than 35 points.

Both Manchin and Senator Heitkamp trekked to Trump Tower for a visit with then-President-elect Trump and were invited to the White House with a small group of moderate Democratic senators early in his administration. Manchin feels he can call the president at any time, as he did recently to get his support for health care for miners.

In six weeks, “I spoke ... with this White House and this president more than I did with the other president in six years,” he says, referring to Barack Obama.

When minority leader Schumer announced his new leadership team last year, Manchin was designated as the Democrats’ outreach guy to Republicans.

But the West Virginian says there hasn’t been much to reach out about yet. The GOP has been focused on nominations or other issues – such as health care and regulation rollbacks – that have only required a majority vote. Presumably, that will change now that Congress is moving into budgeting and other legislating that will require bipartisan support to clear the Senate.

“If this place is going to work, you’re going to have to look at 10 or 12 Democrats,” says Manchin, striding from the Capitol to his office on a gloriously warm spring day. He is a tall man, with a thick shock of salt-and-pepper hair, who lives on a houseboat when he’s in Washington.
Republicans will have to bring in moderates, he continues, and “get off this hard-line thinking that everybody else has got to bow to them because they’re the majority.”

The question is whether Democratic moderates will play. At the start of the year, Republicans seemed confident they would get enough Democrats to back Gorsuch to clear a 60-vote threshold. In the end, only three Democrats, all red-staters, voted to confirm him.

“They can’t count on red-state Democrats coming to them just out of fear of defeat,” says Ross Baker, an expert on the Senate at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

JIM BOURG/REUTERS

SEN. ORRIN HATCH (R) OF UTAH.

Orrin Hatch: Writing a Trump ballad?

One of Trump’s indispensable allies on the Hill is Orrin Hatch of Utah, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate. The octogenarian, who admiringly calls the president “a shrewd cookie,” chairs the Senate Finance Committee. Almost everything Trump cares about runs through that panel: tax reform, infrastructure, trade, and revisions to health care.

“Any way you slice it, Orrin Hatch will be a key player,” says former GOP majority leader Mr. Lott.

On taxes, Senator Hatch is conferring regularly with the top GOP tax writer in the House and with the Trump administration. This is a hugely complex issue, he tells reporters, “even more complex than health care.” It will test his 40-plus years as a legislator – and his ability to create harmony out of discord.

Republicans are divided over tax reform. While they generally agree on the president’s broad goals of a simpler code, lower business taxes, and a middle-class tax cut, they disagree over details – especially how to pay for it all. Hatch and other Republicans, for instance, doubt the president’s proposed low corporate tax rate of 15 percent will make it through Congress.

This internal division does not bode well for the party’s strategy on pushing through an overhaul. As with repealing Obamacare, the GOP plan is to use a special budgetary procedure to pass a tax bill with only a majority vote.

Republicans found out how tough that was with their health-care bill. So might they try a more bipartisan strategy? That was the road to the last big tax overhaul in 1986.

Despite his deep conservatism, Hatch is also known for his bipartisan work – and friendship – with the liberal lion from Massachusetts, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. Hatch even wrote a love song, “Souls Along the Way,” for Senator Kennedy and his wife, Vicki, that was featured in the film “Ocean’s Twelve.”

The senator is an established songwriter, including one he scratched out during a committee hearing, with gold and platinum albums to his name.
Some wonder whether this could be a Kennedyesque moment for Hatch – a time to come together with the lead Democrat on his committee, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon. The two have worked well together in the past, for instance, on trade.

“Oh yeah,” Hatch said in a recent interview. “I intend to work with him, and I intend to work with House Democrats as well,” he said, rumbling toward his office on one of the Capitol subway trains. However, he lamented, “I wish we had more Democrats in the House and Senate who [were] more willing to work with us.”

Senator Wyden’s affection for Hatch is mutual. “We’re former basketball players,” says the 6-foot-4 Wyden about his 6-foot-2 colleague. “We like telling stories. He sort of treats me like I’m his kid, and I’m very fond of him.”

However – and this is the key complaint of Wyden – for something as serious and difficult as tax reform, Democrats need to be consulted from the “get-go.” When Republicans go off on their own, write the bill they want, and then try to round up some Democrats if they need them, that’s not bipartisanship, he says.

Yet Democrats are playing tough, too. They demanded that Trump release his tax returns as part of any tax overhaul. When the White House outlined Trump's tax reform plan April 26, Wyden denounced it as offering “crumbs” to working people and “cakes to the fortunate few.”

Hatch reminisces that it was Kennedy who, early on, came to him. The committees at that time were almost all chaired by Southern Democrats who did not have a very high opinion of the senator from Massachusetts – though they did like Hatch.

“Kennedy was wise enough to realize that, ‘hey, I might be able to get something done with Orrin,’ and as you know, we passed all kinds of important legislation.”

But as Hatch so often comments these days, the Senate isn’t what it used to be. He sounds like Manchin, but with the GOP perspective: “The question is whether we can get the Democrats to work with us – to get off the kick that Hillary should have won.”

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP/FILE

SENS. JOHN MCCAIN (R) OF ARIZONA (L.) AND LINDSEY GRAHAM (R) OF SOUTH CAROLINA.

John McCain and Lindsey Graham: birds of a feather

It was a tender scene: Sen. John McCain wiping his eyes as his close friend Sen. Lindsey Graham sang his praises at a CNN town hall in March. “I love him to death,” said Senator Graham, who then dabbed his own eyes.

They were acting like a couple of lovebirds in that moment, but usually these two are fierce defense hawks, with Senator McCain of Arizona chairing the Armed Services Committee and Graham of South Carolina, also on the committee, as his wingman.

During the presidential campaign and into Trump’s presidency, the two senators regularly clashed with the commander in chief – criticizing him about Russia and his “America first” policy that seemed to vacate the country’s leadership in the world.

The two were shaping up to be formidable opponents of the president’s stances on foreign affairs. That is, until Trump in April ordered a barrage of Tomahawk cruise missiles to rain down on a Syrian airbase in response to a chemical weapons attack. Both men immediately released a supportive joint statement: “Unlike the previous administration, President Trump confronted a pivotal moment in Syria and took action.”

The plaudits from both men have been flowing since then. April turned into a month of muscle flexing, with the US dropping the “mother of all bombs” on Islamic State fighters in Afghanistan and taking a tough stance on North Korea.

“I am like the happiest dude in America right now,” Graham told “Fox & Friends” on April 19. “We have got a president and a national security team that I’ve been dreaming of for eight years.”

The senator said North Korea and China should start thinking anew about Trump. “I am all in. Keep it up, Donald,” he said.

All in? Perhaps for now, but it is not clear whether the president will go far enough over the course of his presidency to satisfy this duo – or other hawks in Congress. 

Trump wants an increase of $54 billion in defense spending for 2018. McCain and his House counterpart want far more and vow to defend State Department funding. Last week, McCain took to the opinion pages of the New York Times to lambaste Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for giving short shrift to defending human rights around the globe.

Militarily, the president authorized one strike on one airfield in Syria. But McCain and Graham want the Syrian Air Force completely grounded, more support for vetted opposition fighters, and a no-fly zone over Syria.

“The only thing they understand is force,” McCain told reporters, speaking of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

JOSE LUIS MAGANA/AP

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS (D) OF CALIFORNIA.

Kamala Harris: Great expectations

Only four months in the Senate and Kamala Harris is already telling Californians she’s got “bloody knuckles” from fighting Trump.

It’s rhetorical flourish, true, but there’s no question that the Golden State’s freshman senator has started off fiercely opposing the president. When Senate Democrats say they’re the “emergency brake” on the Trump administration, that includes members such as Senator Harris – considered a rising star in the party, and sometimes mentioned as a possible 2020 presidential or vice presidential candidate.

“Within days of being sworn in, she was smart enough to disregard the old rules about freshman senators [being] seen and not heard,” says Mr. Manley, the former spokesman for Mr. Reid.

There she was, a featured speaker at the Women’s March on Washington, then joining protesters against the president’s travel ban, and aggressively questioning his cabinet choices at hearings. She jumped to the defense of Sen. Elizabeth Warren after majority leader McConnell shut down the floor speech of the Massachusetts Democrat for impugning a colleague – Republican Senator Sessions, who went on to become attorney general.

“We need to watch this Jeff Sessions,” said Harris at a recent town hall in Los Angeles. Questioning Mr. Sessions's objectivity, Harris said last week he should resign over the firing of FBI Director James Comey.

The question is what the Democrats, as the minority party, can do other than just watch. They couldn’t block the president’s Supreme Court nominee nor his cabinet picks, though they did manage to build enough momentum against fast-food executive Andy Puzder that he withdrew from consideration as Labor secretary.

Democrats, however, are not without power, especially in the Senate, where they can still threaten to block legislation and use rules to delay things. Now that Congress is addressing spending issues – its main job – Democrats can throw up a 60-vote barrier.

So when Harris promised folks – to rapturous cheers – at her town hall that she would do all she could to block a budget if it included money for the president’s border wall, that wasn’t an idle threat. The wall didn’t make it into this year’s budget.

Still, it would be a mistake to think of her as a flat-out “resister” to all things Trump. Harris says she is defending the interests of her state – one that voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton, has more unauthorized immigrants than any other state, leads the country in the number of people covered by Obamacare, and is at the forefront of the fight against climate change.

At the same time, the senator is willing to work with the Trump administration on such issues as infrastructure and disaster relief – perennial needs in her state. And she has urged progressive activists to rally behind, rather than protest, vulnerable conservative Democrats such as Manchin and Heitkamp.

“She is more practical than her reputation suggests,” says Professor Pitney. As for her “stardom,” Pitney describes her as “new and fresh” compared with the senior set of Democratic power brokers in Washington.

Harris is the first Indian-American and second African-American woman to serve in the Senate (her parents came from India and Jamaica). Growing up in Berkeley, Calif., she attended civil rights marches with her parents. Though her progressive roots run deep, some liberals think she was too cautious on criminal justice and other reforms while she was California’s attorney general.

The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao By Ian Johnson Knopf Doubleday 480 pp.

We are all familiar with the standard signs of China’s role in a globalized world – its electronics exports, its burgeoning military prowess, its influence on other developing countries seeking the road to prosperity, its often crass materialism.

In his fascinating new book The Souls of China, Ian Johnson introduces us to a lesser-known aspect: religion. China, he shows, no less than Western nations, “is a country engaging in a global conversation that affects all of us: how to restore solidarity and values to societies that have made economics the basis of most decisions.”

As religious faith spreads in China, many voices are making themselves heard in this conversation. The question of how to live an ethical life in a country that discarded traditional morality a century ago with the end of Imperial rule is prompting a bewildering range of answers. And the ruling Chinese Communist party, militantly atheist but nonetheless claiming the right to regulate religion, is having an increasingly hard time keeping control.

Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, guides us on his exploration of the resurgence in religious belief by using a map grounded in tradition. He frames his book around the Chinese lunar calendar seasons such as The Awakening of the Insects or The Hungry Ghosts Festival. It is a charming conceit that provides a living link to ancient beliefs.

En route, he introduces us to a rich cast of well-drawn characters who bring the pages alive. Their faith brings a personal dimension to this meticulously researched book, six years in the making.

With Li Bin, a fortune teller, funeral director and musician in the Daoist folk tradition, we bury a deceased peasant farmer in a village in northern China. We sit at the feet, metaphorically, of Master Nan, an enigmatic 90-year-old sage whose knowledge of traditional Chinese scholarship draws wealthy urban truth-seekers to his Great Hall of Learning on the shores of Lake Tai.

We sit cross-legged in a darkened room in Beijing with Johnson as he learns Daoist meditation techniques, and we follow the pastor of a semi-legal Protestant "house church" operating from the 19th floor of a dingy office block in Chengdu as he navigates the nebulous grey area between official tolerance and repression.

They are all players in the remarkable rebirth of religion in China today, resurrected from the ashes left by Mao Zedong’s frenzy of destruction. Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, and Christianity claim around 300 million followers today, nearly one-third of China’s adult population. “Faith and values are returning to the center of a national discussion over how to organize Chinese life,” Johnson says.

That poses a dilemma for the Communist party. On the one hand, President Xi Jinping has launched what he calls “the great renewal of the Chinese nation,” which involves searching for an indigenous moral value system that would help bind society together and lend legitimacy to its rulers.

So traditional values and practices are encouraged as a source of stability and morality.

At the same time, Johnson points out, “faith is also feared as an uncontrollable force – an alternative ideology to the government’s vision of how society should be run.”

In a country where only the Communist party is allowed to network, churches and temples must be careful to avoid any semblance of political activity. But Johnson cites the well-known social commentator Li Fan, who has described China’s unregistered Christian churches as the only real example of civil society, independent organizations trying to change society.

And this is how the pastor whom Johnson befriends, Wang Yi of the Early Rain Reformed Church in the southwestern city of Chengdu, explains the humanitarian help his church gives to the families of jailed dissidents: “In Chinese society there is no force that’s independent and organized enough to help these people except the congregations.”

It is no coincidence, Johnson suggests, that a disproportionate number of the lawyers in the weiquan “rights defending” movement were practicing Christians. Faith prompts social action and spiritual transformation has consequences.

There are reports that Xia Baolong, the Communist party official who led a 2014 campaign in Zhejiang province to tear down crosses from church roofs, is slated to be put in charge of China’s security organs at next fall’s party congress.

That would not bode well for Christians, or for other religious Chinese: Mr. Xia is a strong believer in tailoring faith to suit Communist party purposes.

But in the end, Johnson concludes, the rediscovery of religion in China is laying the groundwork for a broad transformation of society, winning over hearts and minds to a search for justice and decency that transcends anything the authorities might be able to organize.

“A government that rules by fear cannot instill morality; it can only enforce behavior,” he writes, and it is hard to disagree. Ian Johnson has written a deeply knowledgeable, eminently readable and important book that reveals a side of China that foreigners rarely explore. He is an excellent and companionable guide.

(AP Photo

A warning from a ransomware attack appears on a screen, as captured by a computer user in Taiwan May 13. The extortion scheme has created chaos in 150 countries. The initial attack, known as "WannaCry," paralyzed computers running Britain's hospital network, Germany's national railway and scores of other companies and government agencies around the world.

Just days before last week’s massive cyber assault known as WannaCry struck computers in at least 150 countries, the telecommunications giant NTT issued a report on digital threats worldwide. One of its conclusions: “In today’s environment, everyone has an important role to play in cybersecurity.”

The advice was prescient. The May 12 “ransomware” attack that spread from China to Spain was slowed down by a 22-year-old British man who lives with his parents and who is self-taught in cybersecurity. His quick work in buying a web domain name connected to the cyber worm ended up being a temporary kill switch. This gave valuable time for companies, governments, and other users of Microsoft’s Windows OS to protect their systems and data, especially in the United States.

His $10 purchase saved billions. More to the point, his action shows that the users of digital devices connected to the internet must always be alert to hackers, even if only to notify experts. So-called phishing attacks like WannaCry, which often come through email, are responsible for as much as 73 percent of malware being delivered to organizations worldwide.

The NTT report says cybersecurity requires much more than a technological fix. New security software cannot keep up with evolving threats. The key solution is for people to be alert and to work together.

“To successfully navigate these challenges,” the report states, “organizations are going to be required to rely on their users more than ever.” This includes such steps as keeping software up to date with security patches, using complex passwords, and watching for potential cyberattacks in email, texts, and other methods.

A similar recommendation was offered last December by the US Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity, a nonpartisan panel set up by President Obama. Among its 16 suggestions, it said that effective cybersecurity “depends on consumer and workforce  awareness, education, and engagement in protecting their digital experience.” Individuals must keep advancing their “understanding and capabilities as vital participants in shaping their own – and the nation’s – cybersecurity.”

In a letter to The Washington Post, the commission’s former executive director, Kiersten Todt, wrote: “We have to stop giving each other a free pass on our personal responsibility for cybersecurity. If you have a smartphone, use a computer, use a Fitbit or connect your baby monitor to a computer, you need to know more about cybersecurity.”

To assist digital users, the commission called for a private body to develop the equivalent of a “nutritional label for technology products. Such an impartial, third-party assessment would help consumers better use cyber tools and curb large-scale harmful activity in cyberspace.

The NTT report makes one other and necessary point about the role of cyber experts in assisting computer users: “Our end goal is not to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt or to overcomplicate the current state of the threat landscape, but to make cybersecurity interesting and inclusive for anyone facing the challenges of security attacks....”