Can Kevin McCarthy possibly avoid the fate of John Boehner and Paul Ryan?
To the extent things have changed, they’ve changed for the worse.
The Freedom Caucus is more amped on its own supply than ever before; the MAGA-infused GOP conference now has members like Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) in addition to the old reliables like Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Louie Gohmert (R-TX); and McCarthy is stuck with a majority so narrow that GOP control of the House isn’t even official yet.
All of those dynamics brought us to today’s scheduled vote on the House GOP leadership for the new Congress.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) shot out a snarky statement Tuesday accusing the Warnock campaign of “muddying the water and pressuring counties to ignore Georgia law” just after the election official reversed himself on a critical day of early voting in the runoff.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
But What About Her Phone Records?
Kelli Ward will have to cough up her phone records to the House Jan. 6 committee after the Supreme Court turned back her effort to rein in the subpoena against T-Mobile.
Ward, the chair of the Arizona Republican Party, was a key figure in the run-up to Jan. 6. She was one of the slate of fake electors the Trump team assembled as part of its election subversion plan. She previously took the Fifth when questioned by the Jan. 6 committee.
Notably, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito broke from the rest of the justices. Not only would they have had the court take up the matter, they would have gone so far as to actually block the subpoena (on what possible grounds is not clear). It should also be mentioned that Thomas did not recuse himself from the case even those his wife Ginni Thomas was in communications with Arizona lawmakers in advance of Jan. 6, urging them to name fake electors.
Ward, who first came to fame as Chemtrail Kelli, was also part of the pressure campaign against Mike Pence ahead of Jan. 6.
Your Daily Mar-a-Lago Update
There were a flurry of news stories yesterday about the Mar-a-Lago investigation after two recent filings in the case by the Justice Department and Trump were unsealed. The filings revealed more about Trump’s inane legal positions on various issues the special master will soon weigh in on.
Here’s the TPM rundown: DOJ Knocks Trump ‘Shell Game’ Over Classified Docs
NYT: Justice Department and Trump Lawyers Clash Over Status of Seized Documents
CNN: Trump tells Mar-a-Lago special master that he got to decide which White House documents were his to keep
Then there was this weird story from the Washington Post, headlined “Investigators see ego, not money, as Trump’s motive on classified papers.” Read it for yourself. Are ego and money really the only two potential motives? What about … power?
Kari Lake Loses In Arizona
The worst of the MAGA candidates (Vance and DeSantis win honorable mention) went down to defeat Tuesday night, as the networks called the Arizona governor’s race for Democrat Katie Hobbs. No concession yet from Kari Lake, true to form.
With Kari Lake losing, none of the election deniers running for governor or secretary of state in key swing states won their races.
A bipartisan group of secretaries of state met yesterday for an election postmortem, as TPM’s Kaila Philo reported. There was relief, but also awareness that election denialism isn’t over. Here’s Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson:
We are really just at the halfway point of what is a multi-year, multifaceted effort to delegitimize democracy in our country,” said Benson. “We still have a presidential election now under two years away, in which we anticipate a lot of the same challenges that Brad [Raffensperger] and I encountered in 2020, regardless of what candidate is on or off the ballot.
Trump’s Bigly Announcement
The preview pieces for Trump’s expected announcement later today that he’s running again in 2024 largely frame it up in terms of Republican dismay. I remain deeply skeptical of this newfound “anti-Trumpism” among some Republicans, but let’s watch it closely as it plays out.
How Desperate Is Kevin McCarthy?
At one level this is just smart politics. But at another level it’s revealing of how narrow the GOP’s House majority is going to be if, as expected, they take control.
Allies of McCarthy spent the weekend trying to woo Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), the last remaining House Democrat who opposes abortion rights, into switching parties.
Cuellar reportedly rebuffed the party-switch gambit.
McCarthy’s office denied the entreaties were made at his request: “Anyone suggesting this is simply exercising in fan fiction.”
Coming Up
This morning: Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) is set to testify before the Fulton County grand jury investigation into 2020 election interference by Trump. Kemp succeeded in delaying his testimony until after the midterms. Time’s up!
Midday: House GOP to hold leadership elections, where we’ll get our first taste of what a colossally weak and simpering speaker Kevin McCarthy will be.
This evening: Trump makes his bigly announcement from Mar-a-Lago at 9 p.m. ET.
Also today: DOJ has a deadline to object in federal court in DC to the unsealing cases involving the Jan 6 grand jury.
Wednesday, Nov. 16: The first of the procedural votes is expected in the Senate on the Respect for Marriage Act, which would attempt to codify same-sex marriage at the federal level.
The F.B.I. had as many as eight informants inside the far-right Proud Boys in the months surrounding the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, recent court papers indicate, raising questions about how much federal investigators were able to learn from them about the violent mob attack both before and after it took place.
Too Bad We Don’t Have An Emoluments Clause Or Anything
NPR: Foreign officials spent more than $750,000 at Trump’s D.C. hotel, new documents show
No Charges For Rudes!
Federal prosecutors revealed publicly that they do not intend to bring criminal charges against Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani as part of the investigation into foreign lobbying arising from Rudy’s Ukraine misadventures.
Monitor Named To Oversee Trump Org
Former federal judge Barbara Jones has been appointed as a monitor of the Trump Org during the New York attorney general’s civil lawsuit against the company. Jones job will be in part to make sure the Trump Org doesn’t begin to siphon off assets while the lawsuit is pending. Jones had previously served as a special master in cases involving Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani.
Russia Wants GOP Control Of Congress
In another sign that Russia is well aware that a GOP Congress will be more compliant and less supportive of Ukraine (it doesn’t take a genius to figure this out: House Republicans will happily say so publicly), the U.S. has intelligence that Russia waited to announce its withdrawal from Kherson until after the U.S. midterm election, CNN reports.
[T]he balance sheet that Sam Bankman-Fried’s failed crypto exchange FTX.com sent to potential investors last week before filing for bankruptcy on Friday is very bad. It’s an Excel file full of the howling of ghosts and the shrieking of tortured souls. If you look too long at that spreadsheet, you will go insane.
RIP
Virginia McLaurin of Washington, D.C, who was 106 when she so memorably danced with the Obamas at the White House, has died at 113.
NBC News and now all the other networks have called the Arizona Governor’s race for Democrat Katie Hobbs. Hobbs defeats arch-election-denier Republican Kari Lake.
This was a pretty close race, according to the polls. But Lake was expected to win this one. She had been consistently running two or three points ahead of Hobbs. There was also a lot of Democratic backbiting about Hobbs’ decision to refuse to debate. That can make sense to stigmatize and deny legitimacy to an opponent, to say this person is too outside the norm for me to validate them by agreeing to debate.
But that rings kind of hollow if that opponent who lacks legitimacy as a potential governor is actually beating you. Whatever the merits of that, Hobbs won. So either it was a good strategy or if it was a bad one then she got away with it. Democrats now hold the governorships in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona, four critical states going into 2024. Republicans hold them in Nevada and Georgia.
Kate Riga and I just did our TPM Newsmaker Briefing with Fetterman campaign manager Brendan McPhillips. We got a lot of fascinating details. One was that the idea that the race looked basically like a jump ball in the final week of the campaign wasn’t just an artifact of spending too much time refreshing 538. It looked really tight based on the internal polling and other data that the campaign had on the inside. Another was the difference between in-state media’s reaction to Fetterman’s debate performance and the national media’s. A fairly stark difference, as he described it. McPhillips also told us that focus group reactions to Fetterman’s stroke recovery tended to be pretty sympathetic, even to a degree which was perhaps a little surprising to his own campaign. So we got the sense that the Fetterman team was able to have relative confidence that Pennsylvania voters were seeing Fetterman’s stroke recovery through a more sympathetic prism than most in the national press assumed or shared.
If you’re a member and you didn’t get a chance to join us live, we’ll be published the video here tomorrow in the Editor’s Blog.
A bipartisan group of election chiefs have signed their names to an increasingly popular takeaway from Tuesday’s midterms: election denialism — at least, as a political strategy — loses. That doesn’t mean it’ll go away.
On Monday afternoon, the nonprofit States United Action convened five secretaries of state to conduct a post-mortem on the midterms. The panel featured seasoned vets like Michigan’s Jocelyn Benson (D), Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger (R), and Kentucky’s former secretary of state Trey Grayson (R), as well as newly elected officials including Arizona’s Adrian Fontes (D) and Nevada’s Cisco Aguilar (D), both of whom defeated election deniers in their states last Tuesday.
Gun-toting, Biden-heckling, MAGA fave Lauren Boebert continues to hold a razor-tight lead over Democratic challenger Adam Frisch. With 99% of the votes reported, the controversial Boebert is leading by less than a percentage point, according to the latest returns.
With just 1,122 votes between the candidates since Friday, Democrats are trying to close the vote gap but face an uphill climb.
One regular refrain of the last month of the 2022 midterm was that abortion and Dobbs had faded as a driving issue in the face of economic concerns. Another was that “democracy” was, for most voters, an abstraction without much relevance to more immediate concerns like inflation. That first bit of conventional wisdom always seemed overstated at best. But the election results point to something different that many observers missed in the narrow and perhaps over-literal way these issues were siloed in polls and election commentary: abortion, election denialism and other elements of GOP whackery melded together into a broader fear of Republican extremism that was larger than the sum of its parts.
