I’ve been hearing from people in and out of the political world saying things like this: folks like Dick Durbin really need to retire. Yes, I’m talking about his Sunday show appearance yesterday and his commenting on the Biden classified documents. What I’m describing here isn’t only about Dick Durbin. But he is one of the prime offenders.

What is Dick Durbin doing in the Senate exactly? What I’ve seen from him, know of him mostly for years is appearances like that on the Sunday shows, ones which play to the D.C. press and establishment opinion. It’s of a piece with Durbin’s position or really non-position on “Roe and Reform.” Durbin was one of the prime holdouts. Well, he wasn’t even a holdout really — he simply wouldn’t discuss it at all. The best he could manage in mid-2022 were some vague comments about not being over-hasty about things.

Along with a categorical refusal to negotiate on raising the debt ceiling, Democrats need to start now making the affirmative case that the debt ceiling is itself unconstitutional. Back in 2011 President Obama said he had spoken to legal scholars and concluded this was not “a winning argument.”

This again is an example of Democrats playing to the elite legal academy, credentialed opinion.

Like more than a few Democrats, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) embarrassed himself this morning on the Biden documents case. He said President Biden is “diminished” by the situation. On Trump and Biden: “At its heart, the issue is the same. Those documents should not have been in the personal possession of either Joe Biden or Donald Trump,” he said. In each case, after whacking Biden around a bit, he went on to lamely distinguish between the two situations. Those distinctions, needless to say, will never be the headlines, never garner attention, never be what shapes news coverage. Manchin of course was worse, saying Biden “should have a lot of regrets” and questioning whether we know whether Biden’s or Trump’s actions are more egregious.

For those of you who remember the embarrassment of the Times coverage of the “Whitewater” scandal, it must seem like déjà vu all over again. It does to me. The paper’s editors are trying, and I mean really trying, to make the Biden classified documents issue a thing. And I mean a grave thing. The stage was ably set by the subject line of the email I received blasting out their latest deep dive on the story: “Inside Biden’s 68 days of silence.” It’s this like a Gabriel García Márquez homage? I mean good lord. Are we really doing this again? Of course we are. It’s how they roll.

I took the liberty of a short set of annotations.

Is the federal judiciary running out of patience with Donald Trump? Or, at least, one federal judge? Yesterday, as David noted this morning, federal judge Donald Middlebrooks hit Trump and his lawyers with almost $1 million in sanctions for their meritless and absurd lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and others. Trump has been notorious for decades for constantly threatening and sometimes filing predatory, frivolous and abusive lawsuits. But he’s mostly gotten away with it. That seemed to come to end with Judge Middlebrooks’ hefty sanctions.

Then this morning, Trump withdrew his case against New York Attorney General Tish James. What do the two cases have in common? They’re both before Judge Middlebrooks, a federal judge in Florida.

The glitch was only temporary, but, man, it’s gold. You really can’t make this stuff up (unless you are George Santos).

Long Island news outlet Newsday has the goods.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the classified document false equivalency and the newest adventures of George Santos.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.