Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has applied for a six month tourist visa to extend his stay in the United States, which began two days before he relinquished the presidency. The Financial Times reports that, according to Bolsonaro’s lawyer, the time to process the request could itself take “several months.” So it doesn’t sound like Bolsonaro is planning to return to Brazil any time soon.

Let me start by saying that I think Democrats are doing just the right thing on their flat policy of non-negotiation on the debt-ceiling extension or increase. As several articles have reminded us today, Obama and Biden (and really all Democrats with their eyes open) learned this lesson in 2011–2013. But I think there’s a slight clarification or additional elaboration that could help Democrats anticipate one line of attack from congressional Republicans.

No one — not the White House or any Democrats on Capitol Hill — is saying they won’t negotiate the federal budget or how much the country should be spending on this or that priority or how much debt the country should take on. Kevin McCarthy is right when he says, albeit disingenuously, you can’t say you won’t negotiate. That’s what democratic governance is. That’s true. In the last Congress, Democrats’ had a tenuous but complete control of Congress as well as the White House. Now Republicans hold the House by an equally tenuous but real margin. By definition, that means fiscal policy will move in the Republican direction during the next two years. That’s the democratic process. The extent of the shift is what negotiation is about. Each side has its own set of tools at its disposal.

McCarthy now seems to say Social Security and Medicare are “off the table” in debt ceiling hostage negotiations.

According to a report in Bloomberg News, there’s an increasing push among House Republicans to pass some kind of short-term “clean” debt ceiling bill. It would likely be a “suspension” of the debt ceiling rather than raising it. For these purposes, however, same difference. As we noted yesterday, the governing idea seems to be to time a debt-ceiling crisis to Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. This would combine both a debt default cliff and a government shut down cliff on one big fiscal Armageddon day.

There are two goals to this. One is to add pressure by bundling all the bad, scary things into a single day (though I’m not sure that actually places more pressure on the White House) and also to make it a date certain. Currently, the Treasury is doing all these accounting tricks, juggling things in the air, also dealing with the uncertainty of just when tax revenues come in. It’s very hard to know just when the big moment comes and the Treasury doesn’t necessarily have a strong interest in telling the House just when that happens. If you’re planning a showdown you want to know exactly when showdown day is. This would provide that certainty for House Republicans. It would definitely come exactly on Sept. 30.

Under court order, San Francisco police have just released video of the assault on Paul Pelosi and the arrest of his attacker David DePape. I’d suggest a soft content warning. It’s not gory but you do see DePape in one quick moment slam the hammer down on to Pelosi’s head, though Pelosi is slightly out of the picture at that point. Video under the fold.

Thursday The New York Times published a retrospective and analysis of the “Durham investigation,” the probe Bill Barr stood up to discredit the earlier Trump/Russia probes and which long served as the shining hope of Trump partisans, the vehicle of a promised vengeance that never arrived. Indeed, Durham’s investigation has lasted almost four years, far longer than any of the various probes it purported to scrutinize. The picture the Times story paints is stark if unsurprising: a politicized, instinctively unethical and deeply corrupt effort which managed to embody in almost cartoonish fashion the story it sought to tell about the original Russia investigation. The one thing a criminal investigation is never supposed to be is one that starts knowing the conclusion it wants to arrive at, brings a heavy dose of political motivation and bends rules and cuts corner to get where it wants to go. That caricature describes the Durham probe to a T. The two cases Durham managed to bring to trial were mainly vehicles for airing tendentious conspiracy theories he couldn’t prove and had no real evidence for. The actual cases were laughed out of court with speedy acquittals. 

Would love to be a fly on the wall for this bro-fest.

The one attention-seeker who debased himself on the House floor for an entire week in order to get his new job wanted to show the other attention-seeker, who pretended to want to buy Twitter to own the libs and then actually had to buy it, his new office.

According to several reports from the Hill it seems that Elon Musk met with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) today. McCarthy claims that the meeting was just a couple of old pals broing out on his birthday.

Today in Republicans, we find that there seems to be at least signs of a real race for RNC chair, a contest that three-term incumbent Ronna McDaniel has seemed to have locked up. I suspect McDaniel still has the votes. But today Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, most recently seen with his poll numbers falling against ex-President Trump, has told far-right luminary Charlie Kirk that he’s backing Harmeet Dhillon, McDaniel’s top opponent.

“I think we need a change … I think we need to get some new blood in the RNC.”

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss early 2024 Senate projections and the discovery of yet more classified documents, this time at the home of former Vice President Mike Pence.

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

In general, I’m of the mind that it’s not really “wasting” money to spend a lot in one place when the money is better spent elsewhere. If Dems are burning money on a hopeless race in Kentucky just because they despise Mitch McConnell it doesn’t mean that money was really on offer for a sleeper race in another part of the country. I also think campaign dollars are fairly elastic. That person who’s given candidate A $100 probably has another $100 they can give to candidate B if that other candidate catches their fancy. But TPM Reader HS makes a decent point about a possible bonfire of Dem campaign dollars about to be spent in California.

I don’t think it’s too soon to warn TPM readers away from picking a candidate for the Feinstein seat.  Democratic Party activists are about to waste tens of millions of dollars (hundreds of millions?) on the Porter/Lee/Schiff race that really doesn’t matter, they all would be more than adequate.