A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the debt ceiling crisis, Senate efforts to address judicial system rot and Ted Cruz’s shiny new 2024 challenger.

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

Did you see the latest Clarence Thomas bombshell? To head off any misunderstanding, let me state that I know with a perfect certainty that Thomas will never be removed from the Court. And while it is theoretically possible he could resign, the odds of that happening are roughly equivalent of finding sentient life on Mars. But that doesn’t take any of the punch away from the news that Thomas had a child (a grandnephew for whom the Thomases became legal guardians) at private school and Harlan Crow picked up the tab for the tuition.

I want to take a moment to chart the trajectory of these revelations.

Yesterday, the Times published an article reporting that Biden administration officials have an active discussion about whether the debt-ceiling law is unconstitutional and thus whether President Biden has the right and the duty to disregard it rather than default on the government’s debt and spending obligations. That along with Secretary Yellen’s June 1 announcement hit like a thunderclap against D.C.’s conventional wisdom about how this drama plays out. On a dime the insider newsletters decided that this probably isn’t going to be settled by a simple negotiation, or maybe any negotiation. The extraordinary measures a lot of us have been talking about for some time suddenly started to seem real to them too. The addition of the June 1 quasi-deadline signaled to still others that there probably isn’t time for a negotiated settlement even if the administration decided to negotiate.

Put that together and we seem to be in a new place on this just in the last day or so.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is crying, and pressing charges, over spilled milk.

Or wine, in this case.

As we hurtle toward the entirely House-GOP-created debt ceiling crisis, I wanted to address some issues which are technical but also really important to understanding how this story can play out and what’s involved.

What exactly happens when the debt limit is hit?

Good question. Indeed, that’s the question. The U.S. government brings in a ton of money every month. Just not enough to pay all the obligations that it is bound to pay by statute law. So really there’s no reason that the U.S. government can’t continue to cover the principal and interest on its debt obligations from now until the end of time without ever having to borrow more money. There’s plenty of money. But other things will have to go unpaid.

The fact that one or more of the Supreme Court Justices appear to be venally corrupt in a rather fulsome fashion is a new addition to the story of the early 21st century. But the heart of it remains this: The current corrupt majority wants to wholly remake American law with little attention to precedent or any coherent jurisprudence or theory of interpreting the constitution. They’ve got the power and they’re going to use it. If you don’t like it, too bad. Yet they also want the deference and respect accorded to thoroughly apolitical players guided by restraint and an approach to the work that is more than dressing up their own policy aims with whatever theory serves the needs of the moment.

We’ve been covering the Florida state legislature from this perspective for some time now, as the degree to which Florida Republicans are beholden to DeSantis’ political objectives became increasingly clear. Each and every one of bills introduced in the state legislature attacking “wokeness,” diversity initiatives in schools, voting rights and the LGBT community in the past year have appeared hand-made to capture the attention of the furthest-right members of the MAGA base on a national level as DeSantis weighs a 2024 bid.

As DeSantis gears up to finally announce he’s running at the end of his state’s legislative session this month, his Republican friends in the state house gave him one final treat: the legislature passed several sweeping new restrictions on voting rights, and a change to election law that allows DeSantis to run for president and remain governor.

Just out from the U.S. Treasury and Secretary Yellen …

“After reviewing recent federal tax receipts, our best estimate is that we will be unable to continue to satisfy all of the government’s obligations by early June, and potentially as early as June 1 …”

We’re now bearing down on crunch time in the debt-ceiling hostage-taking drama of 2023. Virtually all of the establishment press is playing to form and treating the situation as a more or less ordinary matter of legislative jockeying and negotiation. That’s a problem but not a surprise. We’ll discuss that in another post. But this morning I want to talk about something different, the story that most commentators aren’t grasping about where this situation is headed. It’s a set of assumptions that is leading most of D.C. — and, it would appear, most of Wall Street — to miss what’s coming.

We’re now at 628 642 new members on the last day of our annual drive. We made it to our goal of 500 and now passed the revised goal of 600. Huge thanks to everyone who has joined over the last 30 days. We don’t want to be greedy but we want to add as many more as we can on the final day.

The truth is, it’s not greedy. The 500 number was a plausible reach goal we thought put us in a position to have the ship not taking on water and moving in the right direction over the course of the year. Joe Ragazzo and I especially sighed a big sigh of relief when we saw that we’d probably hit that goal.

With the the wave of new media site closures and layoffs just over the last week there’s been a little mini-chorus in the media debate of, “well those TPM folks really had the secret sauce, knew how to make it work, yada yada.” Well, appreciate the congrats and f— yeah and thank you, media types. But it’s a serious slog every day, running out single after single, I assure you. So driving that number higher still makes a big difference for us. So thanks to everyone who’s joined and if you’re still thinking about it make today the day. Click here.