House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) officially launched his disinfo campaign/Trump retribution crusade guised as an impeachment inquiry today. TPM isn’t really covering it, at least for now, because it’s not a serious matter. It’s a concession Comer and other hardliners squeezed out of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) in exchange for some sort of shutdown averting cooperation — a deal far-right members did not keep to a cartoonish degree.
Continue reading “Majority Of Americans Don’t Support This Sideshow”Jayapal: Progressive Caucus Wants Power-Sharing Agreement For Jeffries If McCarthy Comes Knocking For Their Votes
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) told TPM Thursday that a sizable chunk of the House Democratic caucus plans to demand power-sharing concessions from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) if he ultimately needs their votes to save his speakership or keep the government open.
Continue reading “Jayapal: Progressive Caucus Wants Power-Sharing Agreement For Jeffries If McCarthy Comes Knocking For Their Votes”Fetterman Calls For Menendez Ouster Feet Away From Indicted Senator Appealing To Colleagues
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), clothed in his much ballyhooed hoodie and shorts, held court with reporters just feet away from the room where the indicted Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) was appealing to his colleagues to stand with him.
“I was very clear that unless the only thing he has to say is that he’s going to resign, that I’m not interested in some kind of explanation on why he has gold bars in his mattress or anything like that,” he said.
Continue reading “Fetterman Calls For Menendez Ouster Feet Away From Indicted Senator Appealing To Colleagues”A Blackout on The Phony “Union Members” At Trump’s Event?
Let me ask you: what coverage have you seen of ex-President Trump’s event in Michigan Wednesday night? The speech was billed as a message to union autoworkers and comes amidst the on-going UAW strike. It was meant both to counter-program last night’s GOP presidential debate and also to contest President Biden’s relationship with unionized auto workers. Biden showed up to walk on a UAW picket line on Tuesday, making history as the first time a sitting president has ever so explicitly backed not just the right to bargain generally, but a specific strike.
A lot of coverage noted that Trump’s visit wasn’t really “at the strike,” as a number of reports had it, but at a non-union auto parts manufacturer, Drake Enterprises. What’s gotten much less attention is that a substantial number of the “auto workers” and “union members” in the audience appear to have been phonies produced by the Trump campaign. The Detroit News found at least one actual, self-identified auto worker in the crowd, 55 year old Doug King, who works for Stellantis. The paper also reported that a retired auto worker named Brian Pannebecker said he helped recruit people to come to the event. But the paper seemed to have a hard time finding real auto workers or union members in the crowd of between 400 and 500 people.
From The Detroit News …
Continue reading “A Blackout on The Phony “Union Members” At Trump’s Event?”Remember: The Saudis Are The Problem
At the frontier of political and economics journalism there’s a long running dialogue looking for that key development that will finally tip the post-COVID U.S. economy into recession. Think of it as a part of “soft landing” discourse, now mixing together analyses of inflation, Fed rate hike policy, the end of loan forbearance and post-COVID savings running dry. In recent weeks it’s focused on the price of oil and thus gas creeping back up towards $100 a barrel. Yesterday saw the biggest one day rise since the Spring.
The drivers of oil prices are complex. Part of the rise is fueled by the very strength of the U.S. and global economy, which is driving up demand. But the big driver is supply and particularly the policy to restrict supply and drive up prices, a policy headquartered in Saudi Arabia. Rising oil prices help keep inflation high. They also increase pressure on the Fed to maintain or increase interest rates. Both have bad effects on the U.S. (and global) economy, as well as knock-on political impacts on Joe Biden’s reelection effort.
Continue reading “Remember: The Saudis Are The Problem”Minnesota SoS Won’t Get In The Way Of Disqualification Clause Case Against Trump
Minnesota’s top election official will remain neutral and not oppose a Disqualification Clause case against Donald Trump that is pending before the state’s Supreme Court.
Continue reading “Minnesota SoS Won’t Get In The Way Of Disqualification Clause Case Against Trump”We Are All Paying The Price For Kevin McCarthy’s Pathetic Weakness
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
GOP Shutdown Watch
Much of the coverage of the looming government shutdown is just terrible because it doesn’t accurately capture the power dynamic at play, obscures what’s really going on, and falls into lazy (yet breathless!) procedural play-by-play.
Here’s the real power dynamic to focus on: There is bipartisan support for a budget deal in the Senate and there are enough votes in the House for such a deal, but the holdup (or the stickup, to be more accurate) is that the Freedom Caucus is threatening Kevin McCarthy’s speakership so he won’t bring bipartisan deals to the floor. That is the rub here. Full stop.
Anything you read about the dynamic being Biden v. McCarthy or Senate v. House is simply wrong. It’s not even quite right to frame it as far-right House GOP v. rest of the House GOP. McCarthy is being extorted by the far-right and caving to the pressure by refusing to bring to the floor budget vehicles that would pass right now … today … in a heartbeat.
What Happens Next?
I’m getting questions about what will happen, and while I don’t like making predictions, it’s fair to say:
- With the House GOP’s right-wing circus wanting a shutdown, it’s more likely than not we get one starting Oct. 1. In lieu of a shutdown, they might take McCarthy’s speakership instead but that would be the dog catching the car, and for as crazy as the Freedom Caucus is they seem to realize that the current setup is perfect for them: They can keep McCarthy on a short leash, continue to hold a cartoon bomb (💣) and threaten to detonate it, and break institutions, processes, and norms with impunity.
- For those reasons, it’s hard for me to imagine a short, quickly resolved shutdown. It’s possible, but there’s no obvious forcing mechanism to get a deal done now or after the shutdown begins. Perhaps the end-of-year holidays create some additional pressure, but that would mean a record-long shutdown.
- Whatever the ultimate resolution, it’s going to be messy and convoluted and designed to save face and obscure the real underlying power dynamic. Unfortunately, part of why we’re in this morass is that the Freedom Caucus sees shutting the government down as a “win” no matter what concessions they make later.
McCarthy deserves everything he gets, but dragging the elderly, the poor, the most vulnerable with him into a needless shutdown is a product of his own political and characterological weakness.
The Man Can’t Drive A Hard Bargain
It looked for a time like McCarthy was greenlighting a Biden impeachment inquiry as a way to placate the Freedom Caucus: You give me a budget deal, and I’ll give you room to run on impeachment. But at this point, it looks like McCarthy once again made a concession and in return got … nothing.
The House GOP’s inane, baseless, evidence-free impeachment inquiry kicks off today. All you need to know: Among the witnesses (none of whom are fact witnesses) for the first impeachment hearing is the shameless Jonathan Turley.
This Is Gross
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a conservative white woman from Georgia, inserted a provision into the defense spending bill to slash the salary of Lloyd Austin, the first Black secretary of defense, to $1 per year. The bill passed the House (though it is DOA in the Senate).
Chutkan Refuses To Recuse
In a tight, solid, almost bulletproof ruling, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan denied Donald Trump’s motion to recuse herself from his Jan. 6 case.
Delay, Delay, Delay
You may have noticed that things have quieted a bit in the Trump prosecutions, at least publicly. Much pretrial wrangling is ahead, and there is prep behind the scenes for that and for the trials themselves. So a fierce level of activity behind closed doors, but a lot less public-facing movement – and notably a lot fewer new factual reveals, bombshells, or other newsy tidbits. Alas, this is what happens when the story shifts from the investigative and political realms into the criminal justice system.
Two new developments yesterday, though, that tell the story of Trump’s delay strategy:
- Special Counsel Jack Smith told the judge in the Mar-a-Lago case that Trump’s latest delay request “threatens to upend the entire schedule” and amounts to seeking a continuance without saying he’s seeking a continuance.
- Trump is now seeking a similar delay in a new filing in the Jan. 6 case.
Trump’s Threats Against Judges
Another day, another threat from Donald Trump toward a judge:
Andrew Weissmann is exactly right when he says something awful is going to happen to someone targeted by Trump and we’re all going to sit around lamenting that we saw it coming from a million miles away:
Trump’s Threats Against The Military
ICYMI
I had missed this exchange from Cassidy Hutchison’s interview with Lawrence O’Donnell the other night. You’ll recall that O’Donnell connected Hutchinson with Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon White House figure who revealed the Oval Office taping system. She recalls crying when she saw the segment with Butterfield and the promise she later made to him when they talked:
About Last Night’s Debate Fiasco …
The GOP debates sans Trump are the most meaningless exercises in the six decades we’ve been doing the televised presidential debate schtick:
If you’re curious despite yourself about what went down last night, our team has you covered:
- TPM: Republicans Yell, Interrupt, Make Uncomfortable Sex Jokes At Second Debate
- Josh Marshall: “The two GOP debates have amounted to a kind of cosplay episode.”
Good Read
TPM’s Hunter Walker: Joe Kent Is The Most Extreme House Candidate You Haven’t Heard About
YOLO
Led by the sartorialists Joe Manchin and Mitt Romey, the Senate attended to the urgent business of formalizing a dress code for itself, to which John Fetterman responded:
And Sen Fetterman is out with this statement in response to the new dress code, which isn’t a statement at all, it’s just this picture: pic.twitter.com/1rzVdIUPuU
— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) September 27, 2023
Hoochie Coochie Man
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
Republicans Yell, Interrupt, Make Uncomfortable Sex Jokes At Second Debate
The Republican 2024 hopefuls gathered in Simi Valley, California Wednesday for a very combative second debate. While the moderators asked mostly substantive questions, they failed to control a group intent on getting in the punches the candidates didn’t land last time.
Competition for the most memorable moment in the debate is stiff between Chris Christie bawdily saying that President Biden is “sleeping with a member of the teachers union” — followed by Mike Pence making the most uncomfortable sex joke on record — and Nikki Haley telling Vivek Ramaswamy “every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber.”
Christie and Ron DeSantis took a few more whacks at Donald Trump than last time, mostly for his debate absenteeism. It was loud, it was long, it had me hiding my face in the collar of my sweater.
Catch up below:
Quick Debate Thoughts
I’ve said repeatedly going back almost a year that there’s virtually no way anyone can defeat Donald Trump in the GOP presidential primary. Certainly nothing has changed to alter that judgment. The two GOP debates have amounted to a kind of cosplay episode. Aside from the yelling, canned comments and embarrassing moments, the one thing that struck me about tonight’s debate is this: two or three of the contenders seem to be realizing, finally, that there’s zero point in doing this without attacking Donald Trump. Not in some vague wink wink way but directly. Is this a game changer? Of course not. But it was enough to give a hint of how this primary process might actually have been contested in some meaningful way, even if Trump likely still would have been the nominee.
Fundamentally it’s Trump’s party. So he’s the nominee. But in those few moments of attacks you could see how a different kind of contest could have unfolded. They really seem to have thought that Republicans might abandon Trump (to whom Republican voters have committed so much) without them even saying there was anything wrong with him. That’s a remarkable failure of imagination and personal character.
Cosplay Debate Live Blog
10:53 PM: Just a brutally stupid spectacle. Hard to know what to say beyond that.
9:56 PM: The most chilling thing about watching this debate is the commercials. I just saw an ad saying to oppose a new Biden FDA ban on menthol flavoring in cigarettes will empower the Mexican drug cartels.
9:40 PM: Chris Christie finally stood up and attacked Trump for once.
9:12 PM: It’s not Trump talking here. But there’s a big argument out there that the GOP is somehow increasingly pro-union. Not just Trump but the GOP. And yet here you see a pretty resoundingly anti-union message. Mass firings, making fun of wage demands support for right-to-work laws.
9:08 PM: The message here seems to be making fun of UAW and the strike.
9:01 PM: Ok, folks. Here we go.