A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the Fox News settlement, Ron DeSantis’ lackluster foray to Washington D.C. and the Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) debacle.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) unveiled his long-previewed ransom note to free the debt ceiling hostage Wednesday, a maximal list of far-right proposals that he knows are nonstarters with Democrats.
Continue reading “House GOP: Give Us Everything We’ve Ever Wanted And We’ll Extend The Debt Ceiling … ‘Til March”Tallahassee lawmakers are frustrated with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) as he tries to use this year’s legislative session to score political points with MAGA voters ahead of his expected presidential run, Politico first reported.
Continue reading “Florida GOP ‘Fed Up’ With DeSantis’ Pre-2024 Agenda: ‘We’re Not The Party of Cancel Culture’”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Two days ago, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) didn’t have a debt-ceiling plan or the votes. Now he has a “bill.” It remains to be seen whether he has the votes.
I put “bill” in quotes because this is a non-starter and McCarthy knows it.
It is a laundry list of far-right aspirations to rip the federal government out by its roots. The worst of the worst fringe GOP objectives – many of which Senate Republicans won’t accept – are piled together into a draft bill that will never pass the Senate or overcome a Biden veto. It might not even pass the House.
As the WaPo snarkily notes, McCarthy’s bill manages to avoid detailing the draconian spending cuts the bill calls for:
The bill would make $130 billion in cuts to discretionary spending next year — but it doesn’t lay out exactly what programs would be axed, leaving the appropriations committees to hash them out if they were to become law. (It won’t.)
Unfortunately, most of the press is going to try to shoehorn this development into the kind of normal coverage trope of legislative back and forth soon to be followed by plaintive “why can’t they all just compromise” stories. It’s not normal, ya’ll.
House Republicans, as we all know, have boxed themselves into a corner with their own supporters. Democrats are evil, and so to compromise with them is itself evil. Government is the problem, and so governing is also anathema. And so we end up with take-it-or-leave-it proposals like this one, where Republicans’ only possible position is the maximal one.
It’s a poorly camouflaged version of the burn-it-all-down rage that Trump foments, that animates GOP primary races, and that leads to things like riots at the Capitol and couping.
So here we are once again, with American politics and the world economy held hostage to the ravings of the right where the raving is the point.
Speaking of raving, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) lost it in a hearing in which the House GOP was cravenly trying to tee up DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for impeachment.
Committee Democrats, led by freshman Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY), succeeded in getting her words taken down and using the rules to cut off the rest of her time in the hearing.
Watch Homeland Security Chairman Rep. Mark Green (R-TN) squirm:
And yet more raving …
A factional dispute inside the Michigan Republican Party turned into a physical confrontation at a patio bar Friday night on the eve of a state central committee meeting. It was captured on video:
A rough day in federal court for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is trying to block a subpoena from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, who remains intent on using his office to protect Donald Trump from criminal prosecution.
Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil ripped Bragg counsel Theodore Boutrous during a caustic hearing and then swiftly issued a written order denying Bragg’s request for a temporary injunction to block Jordan from deposing former special assistant district attorney Mark Pomerantz, who was involved in the Trump investigation before resigning last year.
Pomerantz is scheduled to be deposed this morning, so Bragg quickly appealed to the Second Circuit. Stay tuned for developments today.
Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn is scheduled to be “interviewed” by Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team today, the NYT reports.
Former Trump Org CFO Allen Weisselberg was released from Rikers Wednesday after serving about four months for his role in the company’s tax fraud scheme. He never did turn on Trump personally.
The political media pack is going through one of its cyclical swings, now swiftly turning against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign:
NYT: DeSantis’s Electability Pitch Wobbles, Despite G.O.P. Losses Under Trump
WaPo: After high-flying start, DeSantis hits stumbling blocks on road to 2024
There’s no doubt some entertainment value in watching this implosion in the DeSantis coverage, but these are the kinds of easy sweeping conclusions that gave rise to the earlier DeSantis bandwagon coverage, too.
Proceed to enjoy with caution.
Here’s another example of how political reporting “takes” have short shelf lives:
Tuesday in the Washington Post: “DeSantis is rapidly advancing a legislative agenda that capitalizes on a Republican supermajority to cement some of his most controversial proposals into law and remake the state to his vision.”
Thursday in Politico: “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ iron-clad grip on the Republican-controlled Legislature may be slipping amid growing frustration among GOP legislators.”
It’s all in the framing.
Judge orders arrest of extremist Ammon Bundy for civil contempt of court.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court angrily sanctioned a rogue conspiracy-minded county for violating its order limiting outside access to the county’s Dominion voting machines.
This is smart and worth a few minutes of your time:
A salve for those bummed out by the Dominion settlement:
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President Joe Biden this afternoon skewered House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who finally released an actual list of proposals after months of yelling about amorphous “CUTS” and disingenuously tying the debt limit to spending cuts. The bill primarily targets Biden’s agenda and legislative victories.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: Biden Shreds McCarthy’s Performative Debt Limit Bill”There’s currently a flood of members of Congress from Florida endorsing Donald Trump and not Ron DeSantis. I’m trying to keep up with how many are just from the last couple days. I think it’s five new Trump endorsements either officially announced in the couple days or reported as on the way. It all comes right after DeSantis visited DC to round up endorsements or at least get former House colleagues not to endorse Trump. Not yet at least.
It’s a rebuke and a humiliation, almost certainly choreographed by Trump. It’s all part of the story of DeSantis’s collapsing campaign, a story much of the press still won’t quite accept. But there’s a specific part of this I want to highlight for you.
Continue reading “The Lonesome Tale of Meatball Ron”GenBioPro, the maker of generic mifepristone, made a bid to establish a backstop Wednesday, should the Supreme Court decide to restrict one of its primary products.
Continue reading “Mifepristone Maker Tries To Establish Safety Net In Case Supreme Court Restricts The Drug”A county commissioner in Oklahoma has resigned after he was caught on tape alongside other local officials joking about killing local newspaper reporters and lynching Black people, the governor announced Wednesday.
Continue reading “Oklahoma Commissioner Resigns After Getting Caught Discussing Attacking Black People”The Supreme Court extended its stay on lower court rulings on mifepristone until Friday just before midnight, meaning that the drug will remain accessible and available at least until then.
Continue reading “Supreme Court Extends Pause On Mifepristone Rulings”I wanted to address a separate issue about the Fox settlement. Through this process what we might call the glitz media press was quite skeptical both of the strength of Dominion’s suit and what it meant for press freedoms generally. I noted some of this last month from the two media reporters from Puck News, Dylan Byers and Eriq Gardner. But they’re extreme examples of a general phenomenon.
The general point is that media reporters don’t seem terribly well versed on media law. There was some pretty basic lack of knowledge about the key elements of defamation law. The general reason for that is that most glitz media journalism focuses on a mix of personalities and the business of journalism. And in this case by the business of journalism I mean acquisitions and mergers of the big conglomerates, market fluctuations and so forth. There are lots of media reporters who know the legal stuff cold. But they don’t tend to be the category of reporters I’m talking about here. They’re writing in the digital equivalent of what were once called the ‘small magazines’ or in the niche media press.
In those pieces I noted above Byers and Gardner treated reports that Fox was in a dire situation as a sort of liberal fanfic, untethered to the reality of the situation. But what struck me more than the poor legal analysis was the general sense that those who hoped for Fox to gets comeuppance were either naive about or indifferent to press freedom generally.
Continue reading “The Fox Suit in the Media Press”
