Look, I get it, the recess bell hasn’t rang in 10 weeks. The tryptophan nap in your dad’s Lazy Boy and the football pickup game down the street is calling your name.
But keep it together for a few more days, boys.
Continue reading “Are The Republican Men Okay?”The House passed a two-step stopgap Tuesday, which will keep the government funded until mid-winter. The continuing resolution passed with more Democratic votes than Republican ones. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) lost 93 Republican votes, spelling trouble ahead when the CRs — and his honeymoon period — run out in January and February.
While many on the right flank of the party are unhappy, they’re not ready to punish Johnson yet, figuring that he’s still new to the job. The impending holiday has also lessened the thirst for speaker punishment.
So Johnson took a page from McCarthy’s book — keeping the government open with mostly Democratic support, and promising the right flank some red meat down the road (when none of these dynamics will have changed).
The House of Representatives passed a clean continuing resolution Tuesday with hefty bipartisan support, averting the shutdown that would have followed the expiration of the last stopgap, which cost former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) his job.
How did Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) pull off such a feat? He did essentially the exact same thing McCarthy did, avoiding a similar fate by dint of such incidentals as his newness in the post and members’ eagerness to get home for Thanksgiving.
Continue reading “Johnson Does Virtually Exactly What McCarthy Did To Keep Government Open “A Michigan judge on Tuesday ruled that Donald Trump can stay on the ballot at least through the 2024 presidential primaries in the state, deciding a batch of three separate cases addressing the Constitution’s Disqualification Clause.
Continue reading “Michigan Judge Allows Trump To Stay On Ballot Through Primaries”Just a heads up that, as most of you are likely aware, we’ve been having site issues for most of the day. In addition to the site not being available episodically we’re also having issues with AF subscribers seeing ads. These are all part of, or knock on effects of, the same core issue our techs are currently working on. Hang tight, our team is doing our best to get everything ironed out. We greatly appreciate your patience.
This may seem like old news to some people. But I wanted to go back and reread some of the initial reactions to the massacres in southern Israel on October 7th. They are notable in themselves. And I read at least some versions of them in real time. But I felt the need to reread them now to understand the progression of events in North America over the last 5 weeks if not necessarily in Israel/Palestine.
National Students for Justice in Palestine is the national umbrella group which supports and coordinates messaging for over 200 Students for Justice in Palestine campus groups across North America.
On the day after the October 7th attacks, the organization issued this statement as either their first or one of their first statements on the massacres in southern Israel.
Continue reading “History from the River to the Sea and Across the Ocean”Connoisseurs of Trump attorney Ken Chesebro – cheeseheads, if you will – may remember that his work for the former president went beyond the fake electors scheme. Emails and memos from December 2020 and January 2021 showed that Chesebro also pitched an uncanny plan: that on Jan. 6 then-Vice President Mike Pence should “mak[e] judgements” about which electoral votes he was constitutionally obligated to open and count.
Continue reading “Is Chesebro Throwing Eastman Under The Bus?”Kate Riga is giving us the play by play on Speaker Mike Johnson’s attempt to do exactly what Kevin McCarthy did while not paying the price McCarthy did for doing it. As we’re seeing, he’ll almost certainly pull it off. The House Freedom Caucus guys know he’s one of them, at least genetically related if not identical. That’s helping. They also realize they need to give him some time to get his footing before tossing him overboard. But what stands out most is House Republicans’ great reluctance to shut the government down – more reluctance than I expected. New boss, old boss, the same dynamics govern in the spring, the fall and now in the winter.
Continue reading “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Shutdown?”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Portions of the video recordings of the proffer sessions by the four defendants who have pleaded guilty in the Georgia RICO case were leaked to news media, providing a vivid, unexpected – and I can’t emphasize this enough – incomplete glimpse of their potential testimony at trial.
This gets a little confusing so let’s break it down into manageable bites.
In working out a plea agreement, especially when cooperation is an element of the deal, prosecutors want to know exactly what the defendant/future witness has to say. So the defendant and their lawyer will sit down with prosecutors, and the defendant is supposed to spill their guts.
In this instance, Atlanta District Attorney Fani Willis held proffer sessions with each of the RICO defendants around the time each entered their guilty pleas. Those sessions were recorded on camera.
It’s not clear who leaked. There doesn’t seem much reason for Willis to leak it. All of the remaining defendants would be given access to the recordings in discovery, so the list of potential leakers isn’t short.
As for why they leaked and whose interest it was to leak them, it’s hard to make that assessment without know what portions of the recording were not leaked. That’s why I emphasize that these are incomplete recordings. With only a portion of them, it’s difficult to tell what impressions were sought to be created and why.
ABC News was first out of the gate with a portion of the proffer sessions of Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell.
WaPo soon followed with Ellis, Powell, Kenneth Chesebro and Georgia bail bondsman Scott Hall.
Let me throw up a bit of caution sign here and offer a way to process this information. For legal types, including the former prosecutors who populate cable news, there’s a tendency these days to look at new developments like this one through the prism of the prosecutions of Trump. Which is to say, a very narrow criminal procedure prism, with things like admissibility, reliability, and probative value.
But you are not a judge or a juror. In making your own judgment, you need not concern yourself with the high standard of beyond a reasonable doubt. Journalists, historians, and politicians also don’t need to use such a narrow prism.
A lot of what comes out at the trials is going to be things we already knew. We may learn new things in other venues that don’t come out at trial. All of that can go in the hopper as we make a collective judgment about Trump, Jan. 6, and the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.
The WaPo story zeroes in on this never-before-reported meeting between Trump and Kenneth Chesebro:
Chesebro disclosed in his recorded statement that at a previously unreported White House meeting, he briefed Trump on election challenges in Arizona and summarized a memo in which he offered advice on assembling alternate slates of electors in key battlegrounds to cast ballots for Trump despite Biden’s victories in those states.
Chesebro’s recollection could provide evidence that Trump was aware of the elector plan.
The juiciest morsel in the recordings comes from Jenna Ellis:
This would be a reference to Mark Meadows:
Harry Litman: Trump could try to blame his lawyers for Jan. 6. But it just got a lot more difficult
Former President Trump’s allies are pre-screening the ideologies of thousands of potential foot soldiers, as part of an unprecedented operation to centralize and expand his power at every level of the U.S. government if he wins in 2024, officials involved in the effort tell Axios.
Hundreds of people are spending tens of millions of dollars to install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents.
In response to a WaPo story titled “Trump calls political enemies ‘vermin,’ echoing dictators Hitler, Mussolini,” a Trump spokesperson went full dictator:
[T]hose who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung
Cheung later clarified that he meant to say their “sad, miserable existence” instead of their “entire existence,” the WaPo noted.
The Jan. 6 defendant who was the subject of a manhunt in New Jersey last week has been charged with various crimes in connection with the Capitol attack.
Former Fox News producer and reporter Jason Donner has sued the network claiming his termination was retaliation for speaking out against its bogus coverage of the 2020 election. The most striking part of the lawsuit describes Donner’s reaction to the Fox News coverage on Jan. 6:
When Donner heard Fox News’ false reporting of the insurrection at the Capitol, he called the Fox News’ control room and stated, “I’m your Capitol Hill Producer inside the Capitol where tear gas is going off on the second floor in the Ohio clock corridor, rioters are storming the building, reports of shots fired outside the House Chamb4r. I don’t want to hear any of this fucking shit on our air ever again because you’re gonna get us all killed.
Joan Walsh has a deeeeeep dive on the ex-wife of Barry Weisselberg, the son of the Trump Org CFO Allen Weisselberg. Jennifer Weisselberg turned against Trump World and has paid a heavy price.
Welp, the public pressure and hard-edged reporting from ProPublica about Justice Clarence Thomas’ ethics scandal finally forced the Supreme Court to come up with an ethics code for itself. But it contains no enforcement mechanism, no consequences for violating it, or any other accountability features.
University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck, who is very smart and level-headed on this stuff, responded:
Nothing in the 14-page document, or the one-page cover note, addresses the elephant in the room: *Whatever* rules the justices *say* they are bound to follow, *who* is going to enforce those rules—and how?
The House Ethics Committee has said it would announce its next steps in the investigation of Rep. George Santos (R-NY) on or before Nov. 17. Stay tuned …
The husband of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) testified in the federal criminal trial of the alleged assailant who hit him in the head with a hammer in their San Francisco home last year.
Like so many of his brethren, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) started out in 2015 as anti-Trump before starting to sip the Kool-Aid: “The thing about Donald Trump is that he lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House.”
The Daily Beast’s Roger Sollenberger tries to piece together the story of Speaker Mike Johnson’s finances: “However, his financial history, as reviewed by The Daily Beast, is evasive, confusing, and anything but forthright. It’s difficult for any American to understand Johnson’s financial situation—let alone relate to it—because Johnson has provided very little information.”
The 5th National Climate Assessment is out today. As these types of public-facing reports often do, it tries to balance sounding the alarm with optimism that policy action can still help mitigate the worst effects of climate change. But perhaps the most salient point of the report for those of us who don’t need our feelings coddled lest we fall into hopelessness and despair is that climate change is not some future hypothetical but a clear, present and rapidly unfolding danger right now:
For more in-depth coverage of the new National Climate Assessment:
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
I hope you can take a moment to read this. We’re trying to hire a reporter for an open reporter position at TPM. (You can see the listing here.) If you think you might be a good candidate, I hope you’ll apply. But I’m mostly posting this because I suspect some of our many readers and members might know good candidates they might encourage to apply. We would really love your help spreading the word. Hiring is always a vexing process for us since we’re a small outfit and the process of hiring pulls editors away from … well, editing and writing and all the other stuff. So all help is appreciated.
As you can see in the listing, we’re looking for someone with 3-5 years of reporting experience. Good writing and reporting skills, hungry to break news, etc. Women and minority candidates are strongly encouraged to apply.
Here’s the listing. We’d greatly appreciate your sharing it through your networks.
