Democrats on Capitol Hill are strongly condemning Republicans’ reported interest in making cuts to federal safety net programs in the next Congress, especially ones that low-income families are most reliant on.
“It would be devastating to all the people who rely on these programs — many of them are Trump voters,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) told TPM on her way to a Wednesday floor vote. “There’s even a move to eliminate SNAP completely — which I will oppose — and it’s bad for the children who rely on SNAP but it’s also bad for our farmers. Our (agriculture) sector will suffer significantly if they were to eliminate programs or significantly cut programs like SNAP.”
Does Pete Hegseth continue to twist in the wind or does Trump pull the plug and let Ron DeSantis or whoever the replacement is jump-start their own confirmation efforts over the weekend?
In a normal transition with a reasonable president-elect, a nomination sitting this low in the water with no prospect of being bailed out would have already been scuttled. But of course if we’re positing a normal scenario, Hegseth would never have been nominated in the first place. The skeletons in his closet have skeletons in their closets.
The Senate is gone today, but before it left town for the weekend it got another dose of Hegseth making the rounds. It did not go well enough to matter. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), herself a possible replacement for Hegseth, said on Fox News that she is not ready to vote for Hegseth. Other reporting quoted GOP senators as signaling the nomination is DOA: “It’s on the death watch,” on Republican senator told The Hill. In another sign the writing is on the wall, Trump is not calling senators on Hegseth’s behalf.
The Trump track record makes it clear that Hegseth was going to come out on the other end of any run as defense secretary without his dignity intact. He’s just lost it sooner than most Trump appointees and looks unlikely to have the resume item to show for it.
President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health wants to take on campus culture at elite universities, wielding the power of tens of billions of dollars in scientific grants.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist, is considering a plan to link a university’s likelihood of receiving research grants to some ranking or measure of academic freedom on campus, people familiar with his thinking said.
LOL
An associate of former Ambassador Ric Grennel approached conservative social media influencers with offers of five-figure contracts to boost Grennel’s prospects for being named secretary of state, Politico reports: “One such contract, obtained by POLITICO and not previously reported, outlined that the influencer would do so during ‘peak posting times,’ that ‘content must appear genuine,’ and it could not ‘appear as an overt advertisement or promotional message.’” Sen. Marco Rubio (R), not Grennel, got Trump’s nod for secretary of state.
For The Record …
I goofed in yesterday’s Morning Memo by not making it clear that in picking former Rep. Billy Long (R-MO) to be his nominee for IRS commissioner, Donald Trump is promising to fire the current commissioner before the end of his term.
The IRS commissioner’s five-year term, like the FBI director’s 10-year term, is intended to insulate the position from politicization. Trump is running roughshod over those protections and making it worse by naming a partisan to the post.
When A Right-Wing Extremist Sits In The White House
“Based on campaign promises and Trump’s first-term record, analysts foresee a rollback of initiatives aimed at curbing violent extremism, especially among right-wing movements. Among the predictions: a slashing of domestic terrorism resources, White House pressure to investigate what Trump terms “the radical left” and cuts to programs aimed at the prevention of radicalization.”–WaPo
Sign Of The Times
The NYT follows up Politico with more reporting on the internal White House discussions about issuing blanket pardons to protect potential targets of Trump II lawlessness:
Among those whose names have been floated are former Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, who was vice chair of the bipartisan committee that investigated Mr. Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol; Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the former top infectious disease expert for the government whose advice on Covid-19 made him a target of far-right attacks; Jack Smith, the outgoing special counsel who prosecuted Mr. Trump; and Senator-elect Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, who was a lead House prosecutor at Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial.
Oligarch Watch
New federal campaign finance filings reveal the full extent of Elon Musk’s 2024 election-related spending:
It turns out Musk was behind the mysterious pro-Trump super PAC that invoked Ruth Bader Ginsburg and falsely portrayed Trump the late justice as aligned on abortion. Musk’s $20.5 million contribution came on Oct. 24, which meant it did not have to be reported on filings until after the election.
In total, Musk contributed more than $250 million to getting Trump elected, making him probably the largest individual contributor in the 2024 election.
‘A Trans Case Before A Very Not Trans Court’
Chris Geidner: From appellants to lawyers to reporters, trans people centered themselves this week at the Supreme Court
Casey Parks: L.W., a trans teen from Tennessee, has her day at the Supreme Court
Shortly before allowing reporters into the main chamber of the Supreme Court for oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, a court employee asked us all if we needed to use a bathroom. The men’s room was right next door, the staff member said, and the women’s room down the hall.
“Where should nonbinary people go?” one of the reporters asked.
An uncomfortable back-and-forth followed. The staff person seemed not to understand the question. In the end, there was no answer. It just didn’t seem to compute.
Under Public Pressure, Gorsuch Recuses
“Justice Gorsuch’s recusal is particularly significant for two reasons. During his 2017 confirmation to the Supreme Court, his web of ties to Mr. Anschutz attracted attention, raising questions over whether he would step aside in cases involving the billionaire’s business interests. He appeared to leave that door open, despite having systematically sought to recuse himself from such cases as an appeals court judge.”–Charlie Savage
Mass Deportation Watch
“Immigrants without legal status or in mixed-status families are avoiding going out in public, scrambling to apply for asylum and attending legal workshops ahead of Donald Trump’s return to power, fearful they will be swept up in the president-elect’s promised mass-deportation campaign.–WSJ
House GOP Still Covering For Matt Gaetz
Two new developments Thursday on the House Ethics Committee report on recently resigned Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL):
The House Ethics Committee met but did not divulge whether it took another vote on releasing the Gaetz report. Republicans on the evenly divided committee have so far resisted releasing the report.
The Backdrop To Our Current Politics
“After 2023 ended up the warmest year in human history by far, 2024 is almost certain to be even warmer. Now, some scientists say this could indicate fundamental changes are happening to the global climate that are raising temperatures faster than anticipated.”–WaPo
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Kevin Kiley (R-CA) on Thursday officially introduced federal anti-SLAPP legislation, meant to protect journalists and other critics from frivolous lawsuits, particularly of the sort that are expected under the new Trump regime.
It seems all but certain that Pete Hesgeth’s nomination to lead the Pentagon is doomed. Yesterday he was reduced to promising not to drink on the job if he’s confirmed for Defense Secretary. You may not like him, but don’t deny him this: he’s going to have the best story ever when he introduces himself at his first meeting and explains what brought him to AA. It’s probably best to refer to Hegseth on Thursday afternoon as one of the “post-nominated.” Trump is already sounding out Ron DeSantis for the job. But he’s happy to let Hesgeth twist in the wind a bit longer. And in a paradoxical kind of way I appreciate his doing that. This of course will be Trump’s second top-tier nominee to go down in flames, and the third overall.
Has this gone well for Hesgeth? I don’t mean in terms of getting the job. I mean in the general sense of reputation, dignity, etc. I’d say it’s gone … well, pretty badly? Kind of the fate of everyone and everything who locks up with Trump.
DeSantis is much like Marco Rubio, a generally clownish figure, if somewhat more malevolent, but in the overall ballpark of the kinds of people who get these jobs. He’s served in Congress. He’s been governor of the one the country’s most populous states. Given the type of people Trump often hires for these jobs, the country could do so much worse.
So does it matter that Hesgeth goes down the tubes?
This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
One month after Missouri voters approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion, Republican lawmakers in the deeply red state are already working to overturn it — or at least undermine it.
One measure would ask voters to amend the state constitution to define life as beginning at conception, declaring that embryos are people with rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The result would be to classify abortion as an unlawful killing.
Another proposal, aimed at repealing the abortion rights amendment, would ask voters to ban gender transition procedures for minors, tying the two issues together, despite the fact that the amendment did not address gender surgery and gender-affirming care for transgender children is already illegal in Missouri.
Other proposed amendments include stricter abortion limits, such as restricting access to cases of rape, incest, medical emergencies and fetal anomalies. These measures would impose additional requirements, such as mandating that rape survivors file police reports to obtain an abortion.
GOP lawmakers have also introduced a measure to raise the threshold for amending the state constitution through voter initiatives, which could make it harder to pass similar measures in the future.
The legislative moves follow the Nov. 5 election, in which the amendment to put abortion rights in the state constitution won by a 51.6%-48.4% margin. Starting Thursday, the right to abortion will be constitutionally guaranteed up to the point of fetal viability, while restrictions on post-viability abortions will remain in place.
In other states where voters approved abortion rights measures last month, there were no signs yet that lawmakers would also try to counter those measures.
Even before votes in Missouri had been counted, proponents of Amendment 3, as the measure was called, had anticipated that a victory would be met with efforts to somehow undercut abortion rights.
“These people will continue to rail against abortion,” said state Rep. Deb Lavender, a Democrat from the St. Louis suburbs.
Although Missouri already has a law recognizing life as beginning at conception, stating that unborn children have “protectable interests in life, health, and well-being,” the proposed constitutional amendment would go further. It would effectively elevate this principle to the state constitution and potentially complicate not only abortion rights but the legality of in vitro fertilization and the handling of embryos.
Several states have laws recognizing fetal personhood, but Missouri would be the second — after Alabama — to enshrine it in its constitution. That could create legal and ideological confusion or even conflicts, experts say.
“You could see voters saying, ‘I support a right to abortion,’ but also saying, ‘Life begins at conception,’ without understanding that you can’t have both of those things at the same time,” said Jamille Fields Allsbrook, a professor at St. Louis University School of Law and a former policy analyst for Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
The author of one of the personhood measures, Rep. Justin Sparks, a Republican from the St. Louis suburbs, said he was emboldened by the narrow margin of the abortion rights vote.
“A clear mandate has not been achieved,” he said. While the amendment had strong support in metro St. Louis and Kansas City and in the county that’s home to the University of Missouri, “the vast majority of the rest of the state voted in a different direction,” he added. “So I think it’s fair to again bring the question up.”
But state Sen. Tracy McCreery, a Democrat also from the St. Louis suburbs, noted that Sparks was going against the will of voters in the St. Louis area. “I find that even more disrespectful of the voters,” she said. “It wasn’t just voters that tend to vote Democratic that voted yes on Amendment 3. It was also Republican voters and independent voters, and I think that’s getting lost in this discussion.”
The measure to link abortion and transgender rights reflects the campaign before the election, when abortion opponents conflated these topics. Critics said this strategy seeks to distract from abortion rights, which had strong voter support, by capitalizing on voter discomfort with transgender issues.
While GOP lawmakers push these measures, the legal landscape around abortion in Missouri is already shifting. On Wednesday, a Jackson County Circuit Court heard arguments in a lawsuit brought by Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri that seeks to strike down Missouri’s near-total abortion ban and other laws that regulate abortion. The lawsuit followed the passage of Amendment 3. Planned Parenthood said if it wins in court it plans to resume abortion services in St. Louis, Kansas City and Columbia on Friday.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has acknowledged that the amendment will legalize most abortions when it goes into effect, but he has said he intends to enforce remaining restrictions, such as a ban on abortions after fetal viability, a 72-hour waiting period and parental consent for minors.
Lawmakers are also pushing to raise the bar for passing constitutional amendments. Now, a simple majority is enough; that has allowed Missouri voters to bypass the legislature and pass progressive amendments that lawmakers oppose. A new bill would ask voters to pass a constitutional amendment requiring not just a statewide majority but also a majority of voters in five of the state’s eight congressional districts — a change critics argued would give disproportionate power to rural areas over urban voters. It would then be harder for voters to approve measures that don’t align with the priorities of the conservative politicians they tend to elect.
Sparks criticized the Republican leadership in the General Assembly for allowing the failure, pointing to a Republican supermajority in both houses that could have passed the measure.
“We hold all the power,” Sparks said. “We hold all the procedural levers of power, and we can shut down debate in both houses any time, any day, for any bill we choose to.”
Florida shows how a higher threshold for voter initiatives might play out. In 2006, the state raised the bar for constitutional amendments to 60%. This year, a majority of voters — 57% — supported an abortion rights amendment, an even bigger margin than in Missouri, but not sufficient in Florida.
It’s not clear yet, though, whether any of the measures have enough support in Missouri’s General Assembly.
Lavender said that the campaign supporting abortion rights significantly outraised its opposition during the election. “It’s going to be difficult to overturn,” she said. “You’ll have the same money that supported it now going up against you.”
Hegseth Denies Drinking Problem But Promises Not To Drink
As bad as I expected Trump nominees to be, I still can’t quite believe that Pete Hegseth is now promising GOP senators that he won’t drink if he’s confirmed as defense secretary.
The reports about what he’s actually promising vary a little bit from senator to senator. It’s not clear if that’s because he’s saying different things to different senators or if the specifics are being lost in translation.
At the less crazy end of the spectrum, Hegseth is telling senators that he no longer drinks. “He offered up to me, and I know he has with other senators too, that he’s not drinking, and that’s not something he’s going to do when confirmed here,” said Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO).
At the WTF-are-you-kidding-me end of the spectrum, he’s promising not to drink as long as he’s secretary of defense, which leaves the impression that he’s going to go stone-cold sober as soon as he’s confirmed by a pliant GOP Senate and then resume throwing ’em back once the Pentagon gig is over. “He said, ‘My commitment is to not touch alcohol while I have this position,'” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND).
For GOP senators concerned about confirming a Pentagon chief with a drinking problem, Hegseth offered this dubious reassurance Wednesday in an interview with Megyn Kelly: “First of all, I’ve never had a drinking problem.”
Hegseth denies he has a drinking problem but is promising senators he won’t drink if confirmed. Got it?
Drip, Drip, Drip
“At Fox News, Hegseth had a reputation as a heavy drinker, according to six former Fox News employees who worked directly with Hegseth and saw him drinking on the job or visibly drunk at work events and who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.”–WaPo
“More than once during his early years at the network, Mr. Hegseth’s heavy drinking and raucous behavior at Fox News-related events escalated into episodes that were addressed by company officials or co-workers.”–NYT
Hegseth’s Prospects: Dead Man Walking Edition
Pete Hegseth remained “defiant” and said that Trump had reiterated his support in a Wednesday morning phone call, but the overall trajectory of the nomination was still pointed downward:
Politico: Hegseth’s future as Defense secretary hangs by a thread
The Hill: Hegseth nomination sinking fast in the Senate
Philip Bump: Pete Hegseth’s strongest ally isn’t Trump. It’s Fox News.
Politico: Pete Hegseth’s mother defends him, pleads with senators to ‘listen to Pete’
Quote Of The Day
“If you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed.”–David Frum, speaking of Pete Hegseth during a Morning Joe segment Wednesday, after which Frum says he was scolded by a producer and removed from the air ahead of schedule. Co-host Mika Brzezinski then read an on-air apology for Frum’s remarks.
Trump’s Totally Normal Pick For FBI Director
NBC News: Trump’s pick for FBI director promoted bogus supplements to ‘reverse’ vaccines
Zack Beauchamp: I listened to hours of Trump’s FBI pick on Steve Bannon’s podcast. Oh boy.
NBC News: Kash Patel once said he would ‘come after’ journalists. It now hangs over his FBI candidacy.
Mediaite: Kash Patel Threatens to Sue Ex-Pence Aide For Saying On MSNBC He’s Unfit to Lead the FBI
Trump II Clown Show
Convicted former Trump White House official Peter Navarro: senior White House adviser on trade and manufacturing
Billionaire tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman: NASA administrator
Fiserve Inc. CEO Frank Bisignano: Social Security Administration commissioner
Perfectly Normal: Trump Reneges On White House Counsel
Bill McGinley is out as Trump’s new White House counsel, replaced by David Warrington.
Trump Takes Credit For Yanking DEA Nominee
In a Truth Social post, Donald Trump seemed to confirm that Florida Sheriff Chad Chronister’s nomination for DEA administrator was scuttled over his enforcement of COVID pandemic public health precautions: “Besides, he didn’t pull out, I pulled him out, because I did not like what he said to my pastors and other supporters.”
As the inauguration approaches, Eric Trump, Mr. Trump’s second son and the company’s de facto leader, is expected to forgo deals directly with foreign governments. But he is not planning to revive the promise the company made eight years ago to swear off all other foreign deals while his father occupies the White House.
Without that guardrail — the centerpiece of the Trump Organization’s 2017 ethics plan — the company would be free to profit from an array of business in countries essential to American foreign policy interests.
Trump Prosecutions Update
Georgia RICO case: “Attorneys for President-elect Donald Trump asked a Georgia appeals court Wednesday to dismiss the Fulton County racketeering case against him because a ‘sitting president is completely immune from indictment or any criminal process, state or federal.'”–NBC News
Georgia RICO case: Ken Chesebro filed a motion to invalidate his guilty plea on the grounds that the judge in the case later ruled the charged he pleaded to unconstitutional.
Hush money case: Trump has made a new bid to have his hush money conviction dismissed now that he has won the presidency.
Rudy G Still Flailing
Rudy Giuliani is still getting raked over the coals by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. Giuliani did not file his response when it was due Monday to their motion seeking to hold him in contempt of court. Two days after the deadline, representing himself, he asked for a 30-day extension in a letter that excoriated the judge in the case. The judge denied his request for an extension because he didn’t follow the local court rules, including not signing his own letter.
GOOD READ
The Texas Observer reveals the men behind four major neo-Nazi accounts on X.
EXCLUSIVE
“President Joe Biden’s senior aides are conducting a vigorous internal debate over whether to issue preemptive pardons to a range of current and former public officials who could be targeted with President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House, according to senior Democrats familiar with the discussions.”–Politico
SCOTUS Took Dim View Of Transgender Rights
The Supreme Court’s oral arguments Wednesday over Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, while not definitive, did not bode well for transgender rights or faithful adherence to the high court’s own equal protection jurisprudence, as TPM’s Kate Riga reported:
Justice Neil Gorsuch, who was the unexpected author of the majority opinion in an important 2020 transgender rights cases, was conspicuously silent in yesterday’s arguments.
Tiny GOP House Majority Is Gonna Give Speaker Johnson Fits
That 220-215 majority is so tight that it’s actually the second-smallest in history, percentage-wise. According to data from the Pew Research Center, the only smaller majority came more than a century ago, in the 1917-19 Congress, when Democrats had an effective 217-215 edge.
Changes Afoot For House Dems
House Democratic leadership isn’t getting in the way of challengers to senior committee members whose effectiveness come into question:
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) has withdrawn as ranking member of the Judiciary Committee in the face of a challenge from Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD).
Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), who is in poor health, has stepped down as ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee
Raskin’s committee switch opens up the ranking member position on the Oversight Committee.
Rep. David Scott (D-GA) is still fending off multiple challenges as ranking member of the Agriculture Committee.
A Closing Thought
Mark Joseph Stern, on the current bleakness and the importance of bearing witness to the truth:
If you look back at some of the most momentous or egregious injustices and illegal actions throughout our history, like segregation, slavery, Indian removal, the list goes on—you can always find people who were saying, “This is unlawful. It is wrong. It is shameful, and it violates the Constitution and the laws of this country.” And those people wound up being vindicated—even if they were in a minority at the time, even if they were censored and silenced at the time. It mattered to future generations and future movements that they were there laying down that marker. And so I guess when we are in our darkest moments, in the coming years, the best that we can probably do when we’re feeling totally useless is to hope that someday in the future, people will look back and say, “These guys were telling the truth. That mattered.”
David Frum just shared a disturbing anecdote from an appearance this morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. According to his short article at The Atlantic, he made a flippant reference to reporting that Pentagon nominee Pete Hegseth was known for drinking on the job at Fox News. The specific line was: “If you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed.”
He went on to compare the case to that of John Tower in 1989, a long-serving senator whose Secretary of Defense nomination (Dick Cheney got the nod after Tower bowed out) was torpedoed over claims of drinking and womanizing. According to David, after he said this, an MSNBC producer piped up in his ear objecting to his comments and warning him not to repeat them. Not long after, David was ushered off the set, apparently sooner than expected. Then Mika Brzezinski read out an apology for what he’d said.
It is a rich gift to those who want to blow up the justice system as we know it, and who claim the government is a self-dealing club for hypocritical elites. It is a promise-breaking act that subjects Biden’s allies to yet another humiliation in a year packed with Biden-inflicted injuries.
Republicans are like the weather. Destructive and unpredictable, perhaps capricious and sometimes dangerous. But who shouts at the rain? Those are the deeply carved grooves into which our elite media narratives all turn. How else do you explain the vastly bigger press uproar over Biden’s pardon than a notorious charlatan who’s promised to abuse his power at every opportunity being on a fast track to take over federal law enforcement?
The conservatives Wednesday were quick to argue that the trans health care case before them was completely unrelated to a landmark 2020 case where the majority ruled that employers cannot discriminate against employees on the basis of sexuality or gender identity.
