Josh Marshall
Tomorrow appears to be the day that The Trump Organization and Trump’s Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg will be charged by the Manhattan District Attorney for various tax crimes.
Josh Kovensky managed to get on the phone with Willis Johnson, the auto-salvage billionaire who is paying for the South Dakota state national guard – yes, a state that almost borders Canada – to go to the border with Mexico to patrol the situation.
GOP Prez Primary Race Moves into State Militia Rental Phase
Here’s a new story that manages to be both absurd and silly and also pretty outrageous. As part of her 2024 presidential ambitions South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is deploying elements of the state national guard to the Texas boarder to combat the “border crisis” which is mainly an element of the Republican campaign agenda for 2022. And the money to do it is coming from a private donor.
This is an issue I first mentioned on Friday. While Senate Republicans are going full performance art drama about whether they can still support the proposal they already agreed to support, there’s another element of the drama in some ways just as interesting.
The bill – or rather outline proposal, there’s no bill – could not include any new taxes and had to be paid for. Republicans insisted on those conditions. The bill includes a number of “payfors” meant to accomplish this. But they are at least half phony. Some are more real than others. In some cases there’s legitimate debate about how much revenue they could yield – stepped up tax enforcement on the super wealthy is an example of that. But the core issue is that a lot of it is pretend. Now the Post has talked to experts about the list of payfors and it confirms in detail what was pretty clear in general: a mix of wishful thinking and hocum. In other words, the negotiation over the bipartisan mini-bill was largely a process of finding notional ‘payfors’ that Republicans could pretend were real.
Here’s the Holocaust humor from a guy named Nick Fuentes, a far-right holocaust denier and white supremacist commentator who is holding a fundraiser July 1st with Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona. Classic joking, smiling denial of the death of six million Jews and being endorsed by a Republican member of Congress in good standing – committee membership, campaign support, the whole deal. Video after the jump.
There’s been a lot of fretting over the last couple days about whether a group of Republicans who had not actually committed to support the bipartisan mini-bill were no longer going to support it, thus putting in doubt President Biden’s entire infrastructure agenda. But that’s the wrong way to look at this. This has always been and remains an issue in Democrats’ hands – especially Joe Manchin’s hands. Republicans are just players on a chess board in which Democrats are making the moves. And Joe Manchin made this pretty clear this morning.
Like Adele’s Ex, They Coulda Had It All
There is a great irony in the fact that Democrats tried very hard to create a truly bipartisan Jan 6th Commission in which – critically – Republicans had an effective veto on any and all actions the Commission would take. That means, among other things, subpoena power. And not just anyone with R after their name – not Tom Keane or Jack Danforth or pick your list of Never Trump Republicans – but commissioners chosen by Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy. They even had a guarantee it would finish its work well ahead of the 2022 election cycle – yet another unmerited protection. But all but ten opposed the bill in the House and Republicans filibustered a vote on the empowering legislation in the Senate.
Oh Boy! As you’d expect, having taken the whole shocked, stunned, totally really angry line at face value Politico Playbook is shifting gears to this …
Thanks, Mitch!
No, really. Thanks to Mitch McConnell for confirming how he suckered most of the big DC publications with the faux drama over President Biden’s ‘veto threat’. The word from the bigs over the weekend was that yes, all knew that Democrats were proceeding with the two bills in tandem, that the two were linked. It was just that Biden made this too clear by saying he would not sign the bipartisan mini-bill if only that one came to his desk.
But now McConnell is helpfully clarifying that in fact he is objecting to what everyone knew in advance and that even he spoke about numerous times on the record.
I’ve spent some time over the last few days trying to puzzle out the available information on vaccine efficacy, the Delta variant and what if anything we can see about the future from what’s happening today in a few test case countries around the world.