ICYMI, Republicans’ irritation with Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-AL) months-long military promotion blockade blew up on the Senate floor last night, as a handful of Senate Republicans tried to hold a series of individual votes on nominees to bypass him.
He blocked each one.
Continue reading “Tuberville Shoves Staffer Into Moving Traffic (Rhetorically)”Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-IL) confirmed Thursday that the committee will vote next week to authorize subpoenas for a few powerful right-wing players known to have intimate, monetary relationships with Supreme Court justices.
Continue reading “Republicans Threaten To Filibuster Subpoena Enforcement And Quash SCOTUS Oversight”Justices on the Minnesota Supreme Court greeted arguments to disqualify President Trump from the ballot with a mixture of skepticism and interest at a Thursday hearing, leaving the path forward for the effort an open question.
Continue reading “Minnesota Justices Stay Coy On Whether They Can DQ Trump”In August of 2023, Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants were indicted in Georgia in a sweeping RICO case arising from various attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Since then, several defendants have reached plea agreements. We’ve noted them here and will continue to update this list.
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss Mike Johnson’s early days on the job and major upcoming elections in Ohio and Virginia.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
A series of developments in the Mar-a-Lago case over the last 24 hours don’t bode well for the rule of law in general or the prosecution of Donald Trump for blatant mishandling of classified information in particular.
In a hearing on Trump’s request for a trial delay, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon signaled that she was open to pushing back the trial date from May 2024. She promised to issue a revised schedule as soon as possible. As of this morning, she hasn’t ruled yet. Delay until he can win re-election and make all this go away is the core of Trump’s defense strategy, which isn’t a legal strategy at all but rather a political one.
But fresh off that apparent victory, Trump may have gotten too cute by half. In the afternoon hearing, he argued to Cannon that she should delay the Mar-a-Lago trial because the Jan. 6 case against him in DC scheduled for March 2024 posed a schedule conflict. But later in the day, he filed a new motion in the DC case seeking to put it entirely on pause until his claims of absolute presidential immunity are resolved.
Get it? He told one judge that he can’t possibly go to trial in Florida in May because he has a trial in DC in March, then turned around and tried to delay the DC trial, too.
Special Counsel Jack Smith seized on Trump’s rope-a-dope and flagged it to Cannon in a filing early this morning, urging her not to allow herself “to be manipulated in this fashion.”
Aaron Blake debunks Donald Trump’s go-to claim that prosecutors timed their indictments of him to interfere with his presidential campaign, the comical implication being that Trump would have been fiiine with the prosecutions if they had come sooner.
Circling back on the implications of Jenna Ellis pleading guilty last week in the Georgia RICO case:
Asked if Giuliani, who is charged with RICO and 12 other counts, should be worried, Hogue said, “I think he should be.”
But not necessarily because of Ellis, Hogue said. “I think there’s enough for Mayor Giuliani to worry about that wouldn’t have anything to do with Jenna Ellis. I mean, she wouldn’t be a help to him, I don’t think, if she was to be called as a witness. But I think his troubles extend far beyond her.”
Will Saletan looks at what the GOP presidential candidates told the Republican Jewish Coalition over the weekend:
What the Republican candidates are advocating, in sum, is an abandonment of morals. They’re rationalizing bigotry and cruelty—withholding humanitarian aid, barring child refugees, bombing Gaza without limits—and they’re grounding America’s loyalty to Israel in Jewish and Christian scripture. This isn’t the way to build an alliance against terrorism. It’s the way to feed a religious war.
It’s not just the GOP’s presidential candidates. Here’s Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) on the House floor:
Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s long-running and unprecedented blockade of President Biden’s military nominees over abortion politics finally hit the limit for Senate Republicans Wednesday night.
Using antiquated Senate rules (for which the Senate has itself to blame), Tuberville has blocked hundreds of military promotions since February to protest the Pentagon policy that reimburses service members for travel expenses where abortions are difficult to obtain.
On Wednesday night, a remarkable scene unfolded on the Senate floor as several Republicans, including Sens. Dan Sullivan (Alaska), Joni Ernst (Iowa) Todd C. Young (Ind.) and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) confronted Tuberville, imploring him to lift his hold for the sake of national security and proposing votes on individual officers whose promotions have been delayed. Tuberville rebuffed them one by one, blocking each proposed nominee as his colleagues’ frustration continued to rise.
Republican senators angrily challenged Sen. Tommy Tuberville on his blockade of almost 400 military officers Wednesday evening, taking over the Senate floor for more than four hours to call for individual confirmation votes after a monthslong stalemate.
Republican defense hawks unleashed their fury on Tuberville. They spent four-plus hours haranguing him as they tried to confirm dozens of the more than 300 military promotions the Alabama GOP senator has been blocking over his opposition to the Pentagon’s abortion policy.
Speaker Mike Johnson has hired disgraced Fox executive Raj Shah to be his spokesperson and run messaging for the House GOP.
Poverty is not a vice, and Speaker Mike Johnson wouldn’t be the first member of Congress living paycheck to paycheck, but it’s pretty unusual for a financial disclosure report to show zero assets, not even a bank account:
Over the course of seven years, Johnson has never reported a checking or savings account in his name, nor in the name of his wife or any of his children, disclosures show. In fact, he doesn’t appear to have money stashed in any investments, with his latest filing—covering 2022—showing no assets whatsoever.
WSJ: The U.S. rate is double that of many developed countries.
Sean Hannity interviews Speaker Mike Johnson with the House GOP conference as a backdrop:
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Two House Republicans who voted against Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) multiple failed bids for the speakership announced their retirements on Wednesday, with one specifically citing the last several weeks and the Republican Party “lying to America” as rationale.
Continue reading “Speakership Circus Was Too Much For Some House Republicans To Stomach”After pushing back deadlines in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago prosecution, and leaving room for more delays, the judge in the case is complaining that the former president doesn’t have enough time to prepare for trial.
Continue reading “Judge Cannon Signals More Delay In MAL Case”Recently I’ve been thinking about a story I first read decades ago. In his mid-50s Winston Churchill wrote an autobiography covering his life through his mid-20s: “My Early Life, A Roving Commission.” Churchill was born well past third base. He was the nephew of Lord Marlborough, one of the most exalted British noblemen, and ended up a commoner only by a small accident of birth. But in his own world he was something of a reject. And that gives his account a sympathetic or emotional approachability it might otherwise not have.
Churchill’s father found him a disappointment, not bright enough for anything but a career in the army. It was a judgment he took little trouble to hide. When Randolph Churchill sent his eldest son to the Sandhurst military academy, the young Churchill thought his father had great expectations for him as a heroic warrior. He only later realized his father doubted he had any ability for anything else. Churchill’s mother, an American heiress, also had little time for him and spent much of her life in serial affairs. Only later did she take much interest in him, using her accumulated friendships with powerful men to give him critical assists in his improbable ascent. So Churchill is packed off to military school and ends up in India on his first deployment.
In India, he’s generally bored. He begins reading a lot and gets it in his head to be a journalist. Over the next few years, in large part through his mother’s connections and their deepening relationship, he gets a mix of military leaves, postings and journalistic assignments that lead him on a kind of grand tour of the conflict zones of the world. Over a couple years he’s in Cuba for the Cuban war of independence; he’s in Africa for the reconquest of the Sudan after the Mahdi rebellion; he catches one military expedition on what is now the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Continue reading “When Your Country Has Its Back Against the Wall”In a Shyamalanian twist no one – by which I mean everyone – could have predicted, the CBO estimated Wednesday that House Republicans taking an ax to the IRS would both add to the deficit and decrease revenue.
Continue reading “In Massive Shock, Republicans’ IRS-Slashing ‘Offset’ Adds To Deficit And Loses Revenue”
