Bloomberg News is reporting that Biden and McCarthy have a deal.

The Texas State House impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton by an overwhelming vote of 121-23. Under Texas state law Paxton is immediately suspended from office pending his Senate trial.

Having watched some of today’s debate I was surprised that the vote was so lopsided. At the end of the day he’s a notorious crook. I don’t know enough about the internal politics of the Texas House GOP caucus to know how much factionalism played a role. But as I said, he’s a notorious crook and it’s shocking he managed to remain as long as he did as the state’s highest law enforcement officer. Maybe that’s what it came down to.

If you want to fully nerd out, here’s the link to the live feed of the Ken Paxton impeachment. This is the guy who is the head of the investigating committee, Andrew Murr.

TPM Reader JF flags for our attention that the establishment Republican who was considered a possible contender for next year’s Senate race, Karrin Taylor Robson, has announced she’s not running. The guy Republicans really, really wanted is popular former Gov. Doug Ducey but he seems to have made clear he’s not interested. So far gubernatorial pretender Kari Lake is considered the top contender for the GOP nomination. There are a few other possible GOP entrants but they’re all in the Lake/Blake Masters type candidate category.

This means Ruben Gallego is the only candidate in the race. Meanwhile, Kyrsten Sinema has filed paperwork for a potential candidacy. And she certainly may run. But it seems increasingly questionable that she will.

In the two posts below I’m providing a lot of analysis on the assumption that something like this deal gets finalized. That might not even happen. So keep that in mind. But if it does the big political questions that comes to mind is this: Does the House Freedom Caucus whine a bit, vote no on the deal and then move on to Hunter Biden, or do they get stuck on the fact that Biden and McCarthy essentially got together to sideline them and stiff them on most of their demands? The politics of the next two years turns a lot on the answer to that question.

A key for thinking about which path they go in is understanding the relative roles of dominance politics and policy in Freedom Caucus thinking. These folks don’t really care much about spending levels or policy. The Trump years make that clear. They care about gutting a Democratic President. To paraphrase Adam Serwer, the humiliation is the point.

Late Update: David Dayen has a much more pessimistic view of the potential deal in his X Date newsletter. But I note that on things like the duration of the caps he’s saying it could be anywhere between 2 and 6 years. The reports I’ve seen say 2. Anything’s possible since there’s no actual deal yet. I note that because the difference between two and six years would be vast as far as these caps go

Politico adds some additional information to the outlines of a possible deal we discussed in a post last night. Their outline basically matches. As I assumed, though it was not stated explicitly in the Times’ account, clawing back unused COVID relief money is part of the deal. What comes out a bit more clearly is work requirement are the remaining issue. It really appears that the rest is basically agreed to. That is a very big deal. So it’s hard to evaluate the merits of any overall agreement while that remains outstanding.