If Republicans are flailing on abortion messaging heading into 2024 (they are), the Biden White House is doing the exact opposite.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: WH Seizes On GOP’s Abortion Flailing To Mark Dobbs Anniversary”Moms For Liberty Chapter Apologizes After Using Hitler Quote In Newsletter That Argued They Are Not An Extremist Group
An Indiana chapter of the group Moms For Liberty, which was labeled an “extremist group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center earlier this month, posted an apology on Thursday morning after publishing a newsletter fronted with a quote from Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
Continue reading “Moms For Liberty Chapter Apologizes After Using Hitler Quote In Newsletter That Argued They Are Not An Extremist Group”House Ethics Committee Expands Investigation Into Santos, Won’t Pause Inquiry Amid DOJ Case
The House Ethics Committee announced on Thursday that the panel has ramped up its investigation into embattled Rep. George Santos (R-NY), issuing more than 30 subpoenas and expanding the scope of its inquiry after the Justice Department charged him with 13 criminal counts last month.
Continue reading “House Ethics Committee Expands Investigation Into Santos, Won’t Pause Inquiry Amid DOJ Case “Are You Having Fun Yet, Josh?
Some of you are probably asking, does Josh really like doing all of these posts about the TPM Journalism Fund? Well, not particularly. But I’m happy to do it because these contributions directly impact the quality and depth of the journalism we will be able to bring you for the rest of this year and into the next. And that’s important enough to me that I’m happy to harp on this maybe more than I otherwise would.
One recurring feature of our organization and readers’ perception of it is that people think we are a much larger organization than we are. So a single additional hire or a relatively small amount of additional budget can have a big impact. It can also allow us to make investments that won’t show fruit until many months later. Remember, we’re not a subsidiary of some bigger company let alone a mega-corporation. So our business practices have to be very small-c conservative. There’s no net or larger entity in the background bankrolling us or injecting additional money if things don’t go according to plan.
That can make running this operation a bit anxiety provoking. But the plus side of that is that there’s no big diversified corporation making the big decisions for reasons unconnected with journalism. There’s no boss uninvolved in our daily work telling us what to do. Every decision that affects TPM gets made by someone whose byline you see every day or someone on the publishing team you can see right down there on the masthead.
Here’s the link.
A Testimonial!
From TPM Reader SH …
Those who can’t seem to get around to contributing should know that once they finally do, the next time it will take longer to sneeze than to donate. You guys have a very efficient system.
Keep up the great work! You guys have been keeping me sane for 15+ years.
It’s really that easy. Just click right here.
Late Update: I just checked the numbers. We might actually get to $350,000 today. We’re currently at $334,196.
Listen To This: Sam, His Fish and His Billionaire
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss Samuel Alito’s pricey fishing trip, the looming specter of a third-party candidate in 2024 and the newest antics of rogue House Republicans.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
Despite Repeated Vows Not To, House GOPers Are Again Proposing Social Security And Medicare Cuts
Over the past couple of months, Republicans claimed — over and over again — that they will not propose cuts to Social Security and Medicare. But despite the promises, a new budget proposal, released last week by the Republican Study Committee, details the changes and cuts they would make to the entitlement programs some of the nation’s most vulnerable depend on.
Continue reading “Despite Repeated Vows Not To, House GOPers Are Again Proposing Social Security And Medicare Cuts”Learning to Love Impeachment
As you’ve seen, House Republicans are now falling out amongst themselves not over whether to impeach President Biden but over which of the two reality-show-style contestant reps (see Boebert-Greene cage match) gets credit and pride of place to be the first to impeach him, or rather the first to introduce the motion to do so. And really, who copied who?
This comes after months of threats that House Republicans will impeach DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and perhaps various other secretaries, deputy secretaries or other appointees. It appears that the first vote to impeach President Biden may come not for his various other imagined crimes but because the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney in Delaware (left in place for more than two years) did not come up with more charges against the President’s son, Hunter.
We all of course know that impeachment is not removal from office. Indeed, the symbolic sanction has been significantly devalued in recent decades. Still many of us still feel that it crosses a psychic line, an unmerited but woeful hammer a rogue majority can bring down on a President who has not only not acted in a way that merits impeachment but not even in a way that merits criticism.
In a word, it hurts.
Continue reading “Learning to Love Impeachment”The House GOP Clown Show Rolls Right Off The Cliff
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Craziest House Majority Evah?
It’s been a while since we checked in on the goings-on with the House GOP majority and … what in the holy hell, y’all?
- Voted to censure Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) for his role in investigating Donald Trump;
- Embroiled in internal fight over impeaching President Joe Biden;
- Rep. Marjorie Tayor Greene (R-GA) called Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) a “bitch” or a “little bitch” (accounts vary) on the House floor; and
- Ripped into corrupt Special Counsel John Durham for not being corrupt enough.
And that was just another Wednesday on the House side of the Hill.
Let’s break it down.
House GOP Gets Its Schiff Revenge
The GOP-controlled House voted Wednesday to censure Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) – a top-tier candidate in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in California – for his role in investigating President Donald Trump. It also referred Schiff to the Ethics Committee for investigation. The final vote was 213-209, with Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) and the five GOP members of the House ethics panel voting “present.”
The censure resolution was sponsored by freshman Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL).
There was no legitimate basis for the censure or the Ethics Committee referral. This was pure political payback for Schiff’s role in the first Trump impeachment and other investigations.
“Adam Schiff launched an all-out political campaign built on baseless distortions against a sitting U.S. president,” Luna said.
Democrats rallied to Schiff’s defense, and House Republicans were an easy mark:
For his part, Schiff took the political vengeance in stride:
Schiff was required to stand in the well of the House chamber and receive a verbal rebuke, whereupon Democratic members surrounded him in support and started chanting “SHAME!”
Biden Impeachment Push Foiled
Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) reached a deal with Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) that avoids a House floor vote today on impeaching President Biden on a bogus claim of “high crimes and misdemeanors” for failing to control the Southern border.
The deal, such as it is, kicks the impeachment resolution to Judiciary and Homeland Security committees and pushes off any floor vote.
McCarthy had been whipping against the resolution, which was not expected to pass anyway.
Bitch Or Little Bitch?
The tensions over the Biden impeachment resolution spilled out on the House floor where its sponsor, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), was seen in a vigorous exchange with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA):
The Daily Beast reported some of the details of the kindergarten-level exchange, in which Boebert confronted Greene over mean things she said about her and Greene accused Boebert of copying her articles of impeachment against Biden:
All three of the sources said Greene called Boebert a “bitch.” One of the sources said Greene called her “a little bitch.”
Neither member denied the substance of the exchange when asked about it later by reporters:
Gaetz Goes After Durham For Not Doing Enough
While the GOP majority’s antics played out on the House floor, things weren’t much better over in committee.
Special Counsel John Durham, dispatched by then-Attorney General Bill Barr to do his dirty work in investigating the Mueller investigation, was confronted by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), himself only recently out from under a federal sex trafficking investigation, for not going far enough in his poisonous mission to protect Trump:
Durham Gets Grilled By Democrats
Special Counsel John Durham, whose bogus investigation of the Mueller investigators yielded two acquittals at trial, came off as prickly, defensive, sullen, and poorly versed in the details when confronted by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee about the substance of his probe.
Here’s a representative sample of Durham’s hard slog through his testimony:
And There’s Still George Santos …
We could learn as early as this afternoon the identities of the guarantors of the surety bond that is keeping Rep. George Santos (R-NY) out of jail pending his trial on federal fraud charges. Santos has fought to keep the names from becoming public, even vowing to go to jail rather than have them be disclosed.
Jacob Testifies Against Eastman
Greg Jacob, then-Vice President Mike Pence’s chief counsel on Jan. 6, was the star witness Wednesday in the California disbarment proceedings against Trump coup architect John Eastman.
Eastman was emailing with Jacob even as the Capitol was under attack with Pence inside, exhorting them to execute his plan to delay the Electoral College certification, to which Jacob famously responded: “Thanks to your bullshit we are now under siege.”
Jan. 6 Defendant Goes Down Hard
The Jan. 6 rioter who used a stun gun on DC police officer Michael Fanone received one of the stiffest sentences meted out so far, but not before one last hurrah:
A Donald Trump supporter who drove a stun gun into the neck of a Washington police officer who was abducted by the mob during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol shouted “Trump won” after he was sentenced to 12½ years in prison Wednesday, multiple people present in the courtroom said.
The Bedminster Mystery
The suspicion that Trump travelled with classified documents between Mar-a-Lago, his winter residence, and Bedminster, his summer residence, started early in the criminal investigation that intensified after the FBI search and culminated in Trump being accused of violating the Espionage Act.
Must Read
TPM’s Josh Kovensky went back and reviewed the representations that Trump and his attorneys made to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon during his ill-fated civil lawsuit to block the criminal investigation of his retention of government documents at Mar-a-Lago. It’s a helluva read with the benefit of hindsight.
Jack Smith Is Hustling In MAL Case
Legal experts took note of how quickly Special Counsel Jack Smith is turning over pre-trial materials, including grand jury witness testimony, to Trump, another sign that Smith is determined to try to get this case to trial before the 2024 election.
Worth A Read
A FBI analyst was sentenced yesterday to nearly four years in prison for taking home classified documents in a case with eery parallels to the Trump Mar-a-Lago case, including stashing documents in the bathroom. A good thread on the case and the parallels:
Freemans Cleared In Georgia Probe
Georgia’s State Election Board dismissed its yearslong investigation into alleged election fraud at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta, more than two years after conspiracy theorists — and then-President Donald Trump — claimed that Freeman and her daughter had committed election fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
The fraud claims were “unsubstantiated and found to have no merit,” the investigation concluded, reporting on the work of the FBI, the Georgia Bureau of Investigations and investigators from the Secretary of State’s office vetting the alleged fraud.
Two years is a long time.
Like Morning Memo? Let us know!
We’re In a Mad Dash for $350k
The first week of these drives is always the biggest. We’re now coming to the end of week two. To keep on track we really, really, really want to get to $350,000 by the end of two weeks. Right now we’re at $320,665. I’ve emailed with a number of you who’ve told me you haven’t had a convenient moment yet but plan to contribute. If that’s you, can you take literally less than two minutes right now and make a contribution of any amount? It truly just takes a moment. If you’re a member you don’t even have to take out your credit card. It’s that simple. Just take a moment literally right now. You can just click here.