Senate Democrats physically couldn’t contain themselves Thursday when TPM asked about the Republican insistence that their bill to extend the debt ceiling — which also repeals huge swaths of the Inflation Reduction Act, adds onerous work requirements to benefit programs and slashes agency power — is a good faith effort to negotiate.
Continue reading “Democrats Scoff At Republican Insistence That Poison Pill Debt Limit Bill Is Good-Faith Negotiation”You Have A Moment?
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Trump Leans Into Globalist Conspiracy Theories With New ‘Make America Great For Us Again’ Ad
Former President Donald Trump debuted a new web ad on Wednesday night that is chock full of allusions to globalist conspiracy theories and a modified version of his famous slogan. The video is the first ad Trump has shared on his Truth Social platform since President Joe Biden officially kicked off his re-election campaign on Tuesday.
Continue reading “Trump Leans Into Globalist Conspiracy Theories With New ‘Make America Great For Us Again’ Ad”Jack Teixeira Allegedly Fantasized About Mass Shootings
The airman accused of leaking classified information about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and other foreign policy topics researched mass shootings, was suspended from high school for remarks about weapons, and was denied a gun permit before joining the military, prosecutors said in a Wednesday court filing.
Continue reading “Jack Teixeira Allegedly Fantasized About Mass Shootings”McCarthy Flexes His Historic Weakness As Speaker
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) squeaked his $4.8 trillion grab bag of a debt-ceiling bill through the House Wednesday. The final vote was 217-215.
The prize: The House GOP seized the debt ceiling as a hostage in negotiations with the Senate and White House.
Last week, McCarthy didn’t have a plan or the votes. He cobbled together a plan that threw nearly every far-right wish list item into a bill that didn’t go through the regular committee process and then vowed to take it to the floor before he had the votes.
Along the way, despite repeatedly vowing he wouldn’t, McCarthy once again bent to the pressure from extremists in his caucus and was forced to make changes to the bill to get it through the House Rules Committee.
With only a handful of votes to spare, McCarthy got the final holdouts to fall in line Wednesday morning.
The House-passed bill is DOA in the Democratic-controlled Senate, and President Biden has promised a veto. But passing something – anything really – was the barest minimum bar McCarthy, a historically weak speaker, had to overcome. He barely did so.
Mass Shooter in the Making
There’s a new filing out in the Jack Teixeira case, written up here by the Times. It’s a government motion to keep Teixeira locked up while awaiting trial. The government argues, unsurprisingly, that Teixeira is a major flight risk and that he still knows lots of information that could cause grave damage if shared with hostile foreign powers. But what is new and newsworthy if not entirely surprising is that Teixeira’s record suggests he was carrying most of the red flags we’d expect for a future mass shooter. You can see the filing here.
As the government filing explains, Teixeira was suspended from high school in 2018 when a classmate “overheard him make remarks about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school and racial threats.” Later that year he was denied a firearms identification card because of the local police department’s concerns about his threats and suspension at the high school.
Continue reading “Mass Shooter in the Making”DOJ Sues Tennessee For Banning Gender-Affirming Care For Minors
The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging Tennessee’s recently passed law that bans gender-affirming care for minors, emphasizing it “denies necessary medical care to youth based solely on who they are.”
Continue reading “DOJ Sues Tennessee For Banning Gender-Affirming Care For Minors”Trump Loses His Bid To Block Pence Grand Jury Testimony
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Time For Pence To Testify
The DC Circuit Court of Appeals has denied former President Trump’s emergency effort to block his vice president from testifying to the DC grand jury investigating the conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election.
The sealed ruling came down late Wednesday. The earlier district court ruling against Trump also remains under seal. Both rulings remain secret because they are a part of grand jury proceedings.
While we don’t know the precise arguments being made by Trump or Special Counsel Jack Smith – or the reasoning of the trial and appeals courts – it has been widely reported that Trump was invoking executive privilege to shield himself from Pence’s testimony.
The exact significance of Pence’s testimony to the case against Trump remains unknown. Pence has waffled between forthcoming and coy, transparent and hedged, critical of Trump and enabling of him. But the public accounts Pence has given, including in his book, hardly paint Trump in a flattering light – and of course Trump wouldn’t be trying to block Pence from testifying unless it were damaging.
As for the legal significance of a prosecutor successfully piercing executive privilege à la U.S. v. Nixon, we’ll have to wait until the rulings are unsealed to make that assessment. Trump could still appeal to the full appeals court or to the Supreme Court.
Deeply Distressing
E. Jean Carroll’s wrenching testimony in the trial of her rape and defamation claims against Donald Trump is slated to continue today, with what is shaping up to be a brutal cross examination.
Her testimony yesterday, based on accounts from those in the courtroom, was compelling and heart-rending. Carroll, now 79, testified that she has not had a romantic relationship or sex since the alleged rape by Trump when Carroll was in her early 50s.
Carroll held up through most of her direct testimony, but did break down eventually:
Ferrara then asked, “Do you regret coming forward?” Carroll said, “I’ve regretted it 100 times,” and then wept, noting emphatically, “Being able to get my day in court, finally, is everything to me.” 9/
— Lisa Rubin (@lawofruby) April 26, 2023
Without Trump’s testimony, his legal team has few options other than to seek to undermine Carroll’s credibility. Today will not be pretty.
Meanwhile, the judge admonished Trump and warned of potential legal jeopardy for comments he made on social media immediately before the trial began Wednesday. The judge seemed to be suggesting Trump was flirting with obstruction of justice for trying to tamper the jury with his out-of-court conduct.
“Here’s all I can tell you: I will speak to my client and ask him to refrain from any further posts regarding this case,” Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina told the judge. “I will do the best I can do, your honor. That’s all I can say.”
Bizarre And Troubling
In an extraordinary, unprecedented, and bordering on lawless move, lawyers for Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation are lobbying Republicans in Congress to somehow intervene in the case and implausibly block the Justice Department from pursuing a prosecution.
Laying out a partial defense of Trump that amounts to talking points for GOP lawmakers, the Trump lawyers in a letter to House Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH) seemed to be beseeching the former president’s congressional allies to help muddy the waters in the case. (Newsflash: Congress can’t order the Justice Department to stop an investigation.)
Notably their defense of Trump focused mainly on the period before he was subpoenaed by a DC grand jury to return all of the documents. They didn’t have much to offer on the period after the subpoena, when Trump’s greatest legal jeopardy may have attached.
Tucker Carlson Emerges In Twitter Video
Tucker Carlson made his first public comments since he was sacked by Fox News, posting a video to Twitter that seems to have been shot in his home studio in Maine:
Meanwhile, the NYT has more on the redacted internal messages Carlson sent that were apparently so damaging that they contributed to the decision to fire him. It’s still hard to know what to make of this. The Times story goes on and on about how bad the messages are:
- “Carlson Texts Set Off Crisis Atop Fox”
- “Private messages sent by Tucker Carlson … showed him making highly offensive remarks”
- “Private messages sent by Mr. Carlson … showed him making highly offensive and crude remarks”
- “one of the messages was particularly offensive”
In all, the Carlson texts are referenced some 13 times in the NYT story before, in the 20th paragraph of the story, we get this: “The Times has not seen the contents of the message.”
Okay then.
Disney Sues DeSantis
Disney is suing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and other state officials in federal court in Tallahassee over various actions he has taken against the company over the last year. This is actually a really interesting case because DeSantis has made it clear that his punitive actions toward Disney were in retaliation for Disney’s criticism of his “Don’t Say Gay” law. But Disney may not ultimately be looking to vindicate its underlying rights as much as get DeSantis off its back and enable it to get back to normal.
Montana House Ostracizes Its Only Transgender Member
Wow, just wow.
Rather than expelling or censuring state Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D), the first and only transgender member of the Montana House, the GOP majority banned her from the floor for the rest of the session. To cast votes, Zephyr will have to do so remotely.
This is in retaliation for her vocal opposition to legislation banning gender-affirming care.
The “othering” of Zephyr – so reminiscent of the recent expulsion effort against the Tennessee Three – is obviously punitive but it also spares House Republicans from having to endure her very presence. We can’t keep you from being one of us, but we can keep you from being around us.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department has sued Tennessee over its ban on gender-affirming care.
McCarthy Seizes His Debt-Ceiling Hostage
It was a low bar for Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to clear: Get a wish list of right-wing fever dreams attached to a raising of the debt ceiling through the House. Way to go, Kev!
Make no mistake: McCarthy has little to no negotiating authority from his conference. This is not going to go well. Buckle up for a debt-ceiling crisis this summer.
Brian Kolfage Sentenced In We Build The Wall Case
Brian Kolfage, the former associate of Steve Bannon, was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in federal prison for his role the We Build The Wall fraud. Kolfage had pleaded guilty.
Bannon, on the other hand, was pardoned by President Trump in one of the last acts of his presidency, but he now faces state charges in the matter in New York.
Supreme Court Ethics Watch
Politico: “The ‘Statement on Ethics Principles and Practices‘ seemed designed to quell rising calls for ethics reform at the high court. But it didn’t break much new ground, and it stopped well short of adopting an enforceable code of conduct that critics have been clamoring for.”
2024 Ephemera
- West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) is expected to announce today that he is running against Sen. Joe Machin (D) in 2024.
- WaPo: Biden embraces his ‘Dark Brandon’ alter ego in 2024 campaign
- The Guardian: DeSantis assembles senior staff for expected 2024 presidential campaign
MTG Doing MTG Things
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This Might Finally Be the Real Tucker Story
For the first time I’ve read an article that presents at least the outlines of a convincing account of why Fox fired Tucker Carlson. The Times account, published an hour ago, isn’t dramatically different from other accounts we’ve seen over the last three days, at least not at first glance. So it may seem odd that I’m putting it in a different category. But on my read at least it provides a degree of specificity about the precise chain of events and who did what, when, that is different from all the earlier stories.
Continue reading “This Might Finally Be the Real Tucker Story”Where Things Stand: Gianforte’s Own Son Is Lobbying Him To Stop With The Anti-Trans Bills
Republicans in the Montana state House just voted to formally punish a member of the legislature, Democratic Rep. Zooey Zephyr, a trans woman who has been blocked from speaking in chamber since last week. Her crime? Vocalizing the harms of the anti-trans legislation that the state House was considering at the time.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: Gianforte’s Own Son Is Lobbying Him To Stop With The Anti-Trans Bills”