Good morning! For the next few months (at least), I’m going to be posting a few stories every morning that TPM is tracking. We’ll still be doing Morning Memo, too. We hope to make the yet-to-be-named thing you’re reading available as an email at some point in August. For now we’re doing a kind of soft launch.
I’ll try to keep it relatively light, as is befitting of the morning. But given everything, I’ll just emphasize — I’m going to try.
Let me know what you think of these little dispatches. I’m very curious if they’re useful for TPM members — or for anyone else. (But hey, if you’re not a member, please become a member! We need those memberships to keep doing what we do.)
Johnson Sends Trump the Housing Bill He Tried to Take Hostage
For months now, Donald Trump’s fixation on the SAVE America Act, a voter suppression bill that he seems to think will help Republicans win the midterms, has made it far harder than it has to be for Republicans in the Senate to legislate. It’s the only legislation that the president truly cares about, and he sporadically attempts to ham-handedly take other bills hostage, refusing to cooperate with whatever Republicans want or need to get done until they pass the SAVE America Act — which, without radically changing how the Senate functions, remains impossible. They simply don’t have the votes.
The latest bill to fall victim to Trump’s SAVE monomania is a bipartisan housing bill, the passage of which will let members of both parties campaign in the midterms on having taken action to bring down costs for Americans. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) will send the housing bill to Trump this week, he says, giving the president 10 days to either veto it or let it become law. A veto would be a dramatic escalation of Trump’s pressure campaign against his own party.
His SAVE fixation has inspired a bone-headed and half-hearted discourse about how, exactly, Trump might be appeased, and how the bill might be passed without nuking the filibuster, which Republican senators remain extremely reluctant to do.
“Just because the Parliamentarian says no, you have to keep taking her feedback and massaging, and there are some really big legal brains out there in the world that can help us,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), insisting that the Senate parliamentarian would let Republicans bend the rules to circumvent the filibuster and pass the legislation through budget reconciliation (with 60, not 50, votes), if only she better understood Republican “messaging,” or had adequate “feedback,” as if she was a problem employee.
The Summer of SAVE
Still, given how subservient we’ve seen Republicans be throughout Trump II, I’ve been reticent to say we’ll never see movement on the bill, which is a truly authoritarian measure: it would require ID to vote, effectively end mail-in voting, and impose significant new hurdles on voter registration, including for women who have changed their names after getting married.
Fortunately, it seems this latest pressure campaign — underscored by a meeting on the Hill last week during which Trump castigated senators — is continuing to hurt as much as help.
“I am concerned that we’re going to continue to cast doubt on elections in November and erode what has been a 250-year tradition of a peaceful transition of power,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) said on CNN Sunday. “Why do I, over the next four months, have to try to pursue the impossible task of implementing a bill that simply can’t be implemented in that time frame?” he added later.
Though Tillis is far from a reliable Trump antagonist — during the same interview, he sounded like he was eager to get to “yes” on confirming Todd Blanche, Trump’s comically subservient nominee for attorney general — his comments on the SAVE Act suggest Senate Majority Leader John Thune still needs more than a few “really big legal brains” to get the bill through.
Supreme Court Often Saves the Worst for Last
The Supreme Court has said it will release more decisions this morning. This is likely to be the last week of decisions, and among the few remaining are some massive ones.
One, of course, will see the justices rule on the Trump administration’s effort to do away with birthright citizenship.
Others will deal with Trump’s control over executive branch agencies — including his ability to fire independent agency officials at will, including, in one case, a member of the Federal Reserve board of governors.
In another case — one that has received relatively little attention given the impact it could have — Republicans seek to bar states from accepting mail-in ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive after, potentially producing a ruling that could have a widespread impact on how voting works in America ahead of the midterms.
The Supreme Court has an unfortunate habit of often, though not always, saving the worst decisions for the last day of the term. (The immunity decision, to pick one example came on July 1, 2024, the capstone of a particularly bad term.)
Join us at 10 a.m. ET to see what happens.
Man of the Hour
It’s Lance Schroyer, a former officer at the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety who, apparently thanks to a gig on Markwayne Mullin’s security detail, got Trump’s nomination to be the first Senate-confirmed head of ICE since the Obama administration.
Tabs
New York Post seemingly accidentally makes Dem centrist Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) sound cool.
Are We at War Right Now?
Not as I write this. But perhaps as you read it.
GOP stop talking like a sex predator challenge, difficulty: impossible.
I’d like to wake up and find it’s all been a late life, surreal nightmare.
The usual morning news, i.e. fascism continues its forward, unrepentant march.
This guy really really really doesn’t want to be subject to the law.