As you could see from my comments here and some occasional comments on Bluesky, I felt pretty confident for most of the day that Senate Dems were in the process of caving. Then I had to go offline for a couple hours in the late afternoon. I was a bit stunned and more than pleasantly surprised when I saw clips of Chuck Schumer’s floor speech saying that Senate Dems had the votes to block cloture. Wow, I thought: things were turning out better than I realized. I mean, if you have the votes to block cloture, you block cloture, right? Pretty quickly I heard from multiple sources what was actually happening. This was a deal between Schumer and Thune to allow a brief performative episode to throw Democratic voters off the scent while the Democratic caucus allowed the bill to pass. The deal is this: Democrats agree to give up the 60-vote threshold in exchange for being allowed to offer amendments to the House bill. The “amendment” or “amendments” will likely be some version of Sen. Murray’s 30-day CR. It doesn’t even matter what they are. But this is all for show. Once you give up the 60-vote threshold the whole thing is over.

Senator Kaine put it with great clarity: “Democrats had nothing to do with this bill. And we want an opportunity to get an amendment vote or two. So that’s what we are insisting on to vote for cloture.” Again you’re giving up “cloture,” the 60-vote threshold, in exchange for the ability to offer amendments that will certainly fail.

I feel pretty certain that today is the last day to have any impact on what Democratic senators will do on the upcoming vote on the House-produced “continuing resolution.” There was apparently a pretty intense argument yesterday in a caucus meeting about what to do. (I’ll say more about that shortly). But I think Democratic senators have made a collective decision to keep their constituents in the dark about what they plan to do. That is part of a larger culture of opacity that has seemed to me to be an increasingly consequential part of the failure of civic governance in the country as the drama has played out. If you’re able to get any answers from your senator, please let me know.

Over the last week a few TPM Readers have written in with contrary arguments about how to deal with the “continuing resolution” that just passed the House and will soon be voted on in the Senate. These weren’t critical or acrimonious letters but frank constructive counters, which I appreciate. I wanted to discuss them because they line up pretty closely with the arguments that seem to have strong advocates in the Senate Democratic caucus.

Let me summarize them briefly.

We’re now one week into our Annual TPM Membership Drive, which we do every year in March. Memberships are our life blood. Revenues directly from TPM Readers make up over 90% of our revenue. They keep our operation going and they also make us beholden to you. No one else. If you’ve already heard enough and you’re not already a member, please click here and join us.

If not, let me share a few other details with you.

This year, we felt it was necessary to set what was really an absurdly high sign-up goal: 2,500 new members, more than twice the goal we set last year. It fit with our unfolding 25th anniversary celebrations. But the key was that we believe the need for what we do, amidst this harrowing climate of political predation and fear, is greater than it’s ever been during our 25 years. That means expanding our reach, both by expanding our reporting resources and bringing what we do to more people. Your memberships do that. They make that possible. To my great surprise, we’ve made it 50% of the way toward that goal in the drive’s first week. That’s stunning. The appetite is meeting the need.

I’ve written many times over the years about the importance of our independence. In normal times the importance of the kind of independence we have is more muted, less visibility. But these aren’t normal times. Publications owned by big diversified corporations are trimming their sails because their other businesses are so vulnerable to political assaults and regulatory harassment. Billionaire ownership, which once seemed rooted in noblesse oblige, now displays the most naked oligarchic interest. We’re very small. But we don’t have those vulnerabilities. There’s no outside ownership. There’s no corporation that’s going to lose interest in journalism, which is mostly a break-even proposition in the first place, and simply shut us down. We answer to our readers. Literally and figuratively. As long as you are satisfied with what we produce, as long as you think we’re worth the price of a subscription, nothing else can touch us. We work for you and we’re accountable to you. Right now that’s irreplaceable. As long as we have your subscription, the chaos of the publishing and news economies are meaningless to us, the pall of fear that blankets the political world doesn’t matter to us.

We think this is important and we hope you agree. If you’re ready to join us, just click right here. For the length of the drive you also get 25% off your membership.

Thank you.

A very odd query went out today through NIH: a “short turnaround call” from the office of the director looking for “every NIH investment in South Africa.” The query aims to collect a list of all “intramural projects, contracts or other projects” by tomorrow (Wednesday, March 11th, 2025).

The document went out today.

In the era that I studied when I was still part of the academic world, one recurrent topic was that of “over-mighty subjects.” This was more a reality of the 15th and 16th centuries, just before my period, the eras of the Yorkists and Lancastrians and the Tudors. But the fear hung over the British Isles and thus over their American colonies well into the 17th and 18th centuries. The term referred to subjects of the Crown who were themselves so powerful that they threatened the sovereign power of the Crown itself. They might command more wealth, hold castles and walled cities. They might command retinues that verged on private armies notwithstanding their notional obedience to the King. (The problem resurfaced in the late 18th century in the different, commercialized form of the British East Indian Company, which used its geyser of cash to quite effectively corrupt the House of Commons.) In the U.S. we have no sovereign; or, more specifically, we have no sovereign head of state. But there is a sovereign, the American people. This architectonic fact of the American order is written into every document that undergirds the Republic, from the founding charters to the simplest phrasings that permeate judicial proceedings where prosecutors appear in court representing “the people.”

Kevin Drum died on Friday. Many of you knew Kevin’s blog. For those who didn’t, he was one of the first well-known politics bloggers, dating back to early in the first George W. Bush administration, and he never stopped. His last post was three days before he died. He began as “Calpundit” and then took his blog in-house at a series of publications before again going independent. His passing was not a great surprise. Kevin was first diagnosed with cancer a number of years ago and recently shared with readers that as part of that ongoing battle his health had grown acutely precarious.

I never knew Kevin terribly well. As I thought about it today, I’m not sure we ever met in person. But we would exchange notes, tips, even career advice on a couple of occasions. He was one of the few people to whom I could say, figuratively if not literally, I understand what you do. Because I do it too. And it’s a very weird, idiosyncratic and personal enterprise.

In this post, I am collecting reports about where Democratic senators are telling constituents they stand on the Trump/Elon continuing resolution bill. If you haven’t, please read the piece immediately below this one (or click here) about the choice Dems now face.

(Ed. Note: I go into a lot of detail below. The bottom line is Democrats have about 48 hours to convince D senators to clip Elon’s wings. It’s still totally doable. But it has to happen in the next 48 hours.)

We’re now down to the wire with the so-called “continuing resolution” fight. And just to take this out of Congress-speak, this is a temporary spending bill that will keep the government running, such as it is, until Republicans can pass their full budget in the early fall — that’s the one that will slash health care coverage and other safety net spending to give the Elon crowd a massive tax cut. After almost two months of a criminal wilding spree on the republic, interspersed with lots of “cry more!”s and “sucks to be you”s, Republicans now come to Democrats and say: hey, now we need your help to keep going. The bill is essentially a license for Elon to keep the party going right through the fall.

The bill is being billed as a “clean CR” — in other words, just a continuation of the Biden budget. That’s not true. It’s the Biden-era stuff plus new money for a bunch of Trump priorities. What it doesn’t do is lock in the Musk-illegal cuts. What that also means is that it appropriates a bunch of money for stuff Elon has already shut down. So where’s that money go exactly?

I usually go many years between writing anywhere else but TPM. But I got tempted by the opportunity to write a short item about the hows and the whys of hand tool woodworking. It’s in Playboy of all places (don’t start). It’s part of a package called 25 Things To Do Before the End of the World. You can read it here.