The House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection has issued its first batch of subpoenas, homing in on further unearthing the White House’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on Congress.
The panel released the witness subpoenas last night, demanding documents from and interviews with Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Kash Patel, and Dan Scavino.
Continue reading “Meet The First Trump Cronies Subpoenaed By The Jan. 6 Committee”
After months of overdue ballot tallying and millions of dollars raised by right-wing influencers eager to prove that the 2020 election was stolen, the sham “audit” of Maricopa County, Arizona… asserted that Joe Biden earned more votes than the official result.
We are now down to the crunch time on the Biden agenda. And we don’t know how it will turn out. But there are two aspects of the story which have been quite damaging for the Democrats. They’re worth discussing.
The first is one we’ve discussed before but in a different context. It’s largely a press failure. But it’s one Democrats could do more to fix. For months we’ve had this intra-party debate presented as one between “progressives” and “moderates.” Often that gets personalized as AOC and Bernie versus Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema. This is demonstrably false. The overall package is supported overwhelmingly by Democrats in both chambers and pretty much across all factions. There are some quibbles about SALT taxes and the scope of the climate package. Some more middle-of-the-road Dems resist making some of the social programs permanent. Those are real and potentially consequential differences. But they’re all negotiable. The important point is that this package is the consensus position, supported by virtually everyone. It is after all the President’s agenda. Literally. And, as much as these labels confound more than they clarify, President Biden isn’t from AOC’s wing of the party.
Continue reading “Poisoning The Well”While reconciliation, the debt ceiling and a looming government shutdown suck all the oxygen out of the Senate chamber, a small group of Democrats continues trying to forge a path for their voting rights bill to become law.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) told TPM that they plan to vote on a motion to proceed to the bill next week.
“We are engaging in discussions with Republicans to see whether we can get some but once that vote is taken, you know, then we can start to talk about next steps,” he said.
The Freedom to Vote Act was introduced last week, a revamped version of Democrats’ previous voting legislation tweaked to satisfy Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). He had qualms with its predecessor, the For the People Act, and Democrats see a united front as necessary to pushing the next issue — eliminating the filibuster, or at least carving out a voting rights exception, to actually get it passed.
The days since the bill’s unveiling have been devoted to giving Manchin time to win over 10 Republican votes for the bill — something that he insists, despite all available evidence, is possible.
The bill’s cosponsors have indulged him, knowing that any chance of Manchin changing his mind on the filibuster starts with an inability to recruit 10 Republicans to the cause — an outcome, the theory goes, that would demonstrate the necessity to Manchin of Democrats going it alone on the legislation. The cosponsors have even participated in some of the conversations with Republicans.
“We just met yesterday and Senator Manchin is continuing to seek out Republicans and meeting with them — I’ve talked to a few of them,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) told TPM Thursday. “Our focus was always to give him that time to talk to Republicans with help from some of us, and after that, we’ll go from there.”
Unsurprisingly, the conversations have not borne fruit.
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) told TPM that while he’s tried, he has “yet to get a yes — a lot of talk, no action.”
“I’ve had some really good candid discussions with people who I would rank within that caucus as more likely to support it, but I’ve not yet had success,” Kaine said.
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) said that he’s “talking to everyone he can.” As TPM asked if he’d had any success in that endeavor while the elevator grilles in the Senate basement slid close, he smiled and shrugged.
The vast majority of the Democratic caucus and advocates alike have long hoped that a war of attrition-style approach would sway Manchin and fellow filibuster disciple Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) into changing their stance on the Senate rule. Both profess to be invested in voting rights legislation, so it’s become the tip of the anti-filibuster spear.
But as the months dragged on with no discernible change in their positions, the anti-filibuster contingent became panicky. Many are calling on President Joe Biden to get involved, the last untapped resource in changing the senators’ minds.
Kaine admitted that Democrats considered wrapping voting rights legislation into the sweeping reconciliation package, which would have let them sidestep the filibuster and avoid the need to recruit the mythical cooperative Republicans.
“We looked at it when we were writing the [budget] instruction,” Kaine sighed. “But we thought it’d be really hard to do.”
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things.
The House Jan. 6 select committee struck directly into the core of Trumpland yesterday with its first blast of subpoenas demanding documents and witness testimony from:
In letters to each of the four men released Thursday evening by the committee:
Naturally Trump was enraged by the “Harassment Subpoenas,” and swore via his Save America PAC he would fight them “on Executive Privilege and other grounds.”
The clownish hand recount of the Maricopa County 2020 election results led by Cyber Ninjas, the pro-Trump tech firm that state GOP senators contracted for the bogus “audit,” failed to find anything that would magically flip Arizona to Trump.
In its crucial deliberations over whether to give the House Jan. 6 investigation committee information on what Trump and his cronies were up to on the day of the Capitol insurrection, the White House is bending toward “yes,” unnamed sources told the Washington Post.
Those who relied on the ex-president and his task force for updates on COVID-19 in April 2020 are among the least likely to have gotten the vaccine, according to a very surprising Pew poll.
“What It’s Like at Rikers, According to People Who Just Got Out” – Curbed
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), 88, the Senate’s longest-serving Republican, announced with a GIF at 4 a.m. local time that he wasn’t retiring ahead of the 2022 midterms:
Okay but that look is actually kind of a serve. Where can I get that dress?
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I saw a few people questioning the Data for Progress poll I which I used as the basis for yesterday’s post about Kyrsten Sinema cratering at home among Democrats. So I decided to dig into some other polling data. Data for Progress is a progressive-aligned organization, as the name suggests. And some skepticism is always warranted when the pollster is in some way an interested party. But Data for Progress is a respected outfit. And my review of data from other pollsters over the last year bears that out. Their numbers are consistent with what other pollsters have found. But there were some more details that helped fill out the picture.
Back in March (March 8th-12th) an Arizona Public Opinion Pulse (AZPOP) poll found a similar picture to what we discussed yesterday. Sinema had very anemic support among Democrats – just 50% favorability – and she wasn’t doing well with independents either. Just 36% of independents viewed her favorably. This came just after Sinema had declared her support for the filibuster and helped tank a minimum wage increase. (Favorability is different from approval. This poll only had the former. But for these purposes it’s a close enough approximation.)
Continue reading “A Democrat Only Republicans Can Love”Mitch McConnell’s dangerous game with the debt ceiling seems to be playing out more or less as intended.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: But What If There Was No Debt Ceiling?”
President Joe Biden met with the moderate and progressive factions of his party on Wednesday in an attempt to settle the tensions between the two camps. Demands by a handful of centrists in the House and Senate have threatened to torpedo the $3.5 trillion reconciliation plan that is core to the president’s agenda.
Democrats told Politico that the discussions didn’t end the stalemate, but they were at least a positive step.
“The first step was to convene all of us, and get us to start acting like grown-ups again,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) said. “The next step is to develop a procedural pathway, and the final step is to negotiate all of the substance.”
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As legislative efforts to expand voting rights hit the brick wall of the filibuster in the Senate, and as conservative courts across the country side with state Republicans’ novel restrictions on the franchise, the third branch of government is preparing to fill in the gaps where it can. And for members of Joe Biden’s Cabinet, homework is due.
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the debt ceiling, impending government shutdown and fate of the two-track infrastructure plan.
Watch below and email us your questions for next week’s episode.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
