Editors’ Blog
Where Things Stand: Pence Knew He’d Be Whisked Away On Jan 6 
Then-Vice President Mike Pence refused to get in a car to leave the Capitol building after being evacuated from his ceremonial office on Jan. 6, primarily because he knew it would prevent him from doing his job — certifying President Biden’s electoral college victory.
The President as Coup Plotter
We’re seeing a raft of stories yesterday and today about a new book from two Washington Post reporters which among other things provides Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley’s account of the aftermath of the 2020 election. In short, he says he and his colleagues were seriously concerned that the defeated President was plotting a coup to remain in office and did everything he could to stand against it.
Milley is a critical and fascinating player in this whole drama. You’ll remember that he accompanied the President on his Lafayette Square photo op debacle and then felt compelled – rightly – to apologize for having done so. But long before that the word was that Milley had gotten the top job in significant part because he had leaned more forward in ingratiating himself with the President than the other top contender for the job. More recently he’s been having a bit of a moment with Democrats. There was that exchange he had in his Capitol Hill testimony pushing back against anti-Critical Race Theory hysteria. And there have been a series of reports over recent weeks which hint at these new revelations.
Remember that little more than a week ago Donald Trump was revving up his rally crowd to go lynch the Capitol Police officer who shot the insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt as she broke the last barricaded door protecting fleeing members of Congress. “Now if that were on the other side, the person who did the shooting would be strung up and hung. Now they don’t want to give the name. Who shot Ashli Babbitt? It’s got to be released.” The right wing media has been going full tilt identifying the officer as a black man.
Josh Kovensky digs deeper into the racist fury behind the Ashli Babbitt martyr narrative.
Scratching your head about the inner workings of the Senate? Wondering what on earth is going on with infrastructure and the filibuster? For Inside members, tomorrow at 3pm eastern I’ll be talking with Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii. Please join us live and ask your own questions. Register here.
Where Things Stand: Taxpayers Are Not Funding TX Dems’ Walkout
Despite what Texas Gov. Greg Abbott claimed on Monday, the Texas Democrats walkout trip to Washington, D.C. is not a “taxpayer-paid junket.”
In Tennessee’s hard move away not only from COVID vaccine outreach but all vaccine this directive stands out to me: “no outreach whatsoever regarding the HPV vaccine.”
I’m seeing lots of mainstream press commentary that Bernie Sanders had to scale back his ambitions a lot, essentially take a loss agreeing to a $3.5 trillion reconciliation framework. He wanted $6 trillion but had to settle for $3.5T. This seems to me a wildly blinkered view, verging on oblivious or tendentious.
You don’t negotiate by starting with what you’ll settle for or even what you want. You start with a high bid as Sanders clearly did here. That’s not a loss. That’s negotiating. The other point to keep in mind is that when you add up $3.5 trillion plus the bipartisan mini-bill plus the spending on the China/innovation legislation you come to a total number pretty close to Biden’s high end original set of proposals.
McAuliffe Baits Youngkin To Lean Into Trump
Republicans have a good model with winning out-year governors races in state like Virginia and New Jersey that hold their elections off the even numbered two year cycle. Bank on the energy of hungry Republicans partisans looking to win and election while presenting themselves to the electorate at large as a salt-of-the-earth problem-solver just looking to lend a hand. (Dems of course have their own version of this playbook.) But the situation in Virginia today shows how the Trump era may pose some problems for that model.
Glenn Youngkin is a former private equity CEO who played hard for Donald Trump’s endorsement to be the Republican nominee for Governor in Virginia. It worked. He got Trump’s endorsement and the nomination. But he’s generally eschewed the Republican label in the general election campaign and certainly not leaned into Trump and all that goes with him.
Where Things Stand: It Was Always Going To Be A Lie
“Just say we won.”
While former President Trump was pushing lies about voter fraud for months leading up to the 2020 election, new reporting on what occurred on election night at the White House is a reminder of the extent to which Trump’s democracy dismantling was rooted in absolutely nothing. That night, Rudy Giuliani was leading the lie-flinging charge.
As noted, fired Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul’s decision to show up for work on Monday as though nothing had happened was deprived of some drama and charge since he was logging on from the home office in his mansion in New York. He found his login credentials had been revoked. “I’m here to do the job, but I can’t do anything with the communications shut down.”