Prime

There’s a simple way to avoid being forced to resign: Don’t resign. It’s really that simple. It always has been. Just don’t resign. George Santos seems to understand that. But I’ve never thought shaming or lack of support at home or on the Hill would drive him out. Lawsuits and prosecutions are what will bring him down. And likely sooner rather than later. Just which it will be I’m not sure. There are so many routes to criminal and civil liability.

The mystery of that three-page document continues and even seems to be picking up steam. I mentioned the gist in this earlier post here. The question is just what concessions Kevin McCarthy made to the Freedom Caucus to become speaker? It came up at a GOP conference meeting today. And apparently some details were revealed but not others. Indeed, there seemed to be some disagreement about whether it’s actually written down at all. Or, rather, there was disagreement about whether there is a mystery three-page document and then yet other commitments that weren’t even included in the three-page document. These latest details come from Axios’s afternoon email.

Brazil’s Supreme Court has ordered the arrest of Anderson Torres, who until Sunday served as chief of security in the country’s capital Brasilia, according to the English-language Brazilian Report. Torres is a former justice minister under ex-President Bolsonaro. At the moment he is on “vacation” in the United States. Torres is at the center of suspicions that pro-Bolsonaro authorities were negligent or worse in security preparations for Sunday’s demonstrations.

The House GOP has passed its rules package and now the 118th Congress in the House is off to the races. But the rules package was never where McCarthy’s real concessions resided. The rules package wasn’t what signed control of the House over to the Freedom Caucus. That was contained in informal promises where McCarthy agreed to cede control over the committee that schedules votes, where he committed to backing the Freedom Caucus’s debt default plans and more.

I had assumed these were verbal agreements over hand shakes. But apparently not. According to the insider sheet Punchbowl News, in addition to the 55-page rules package hashed out between McCarthy’s supporters and the Freedom Caucus, there was an additional, secret three-page document spelling out the real agreement.

From Punchbowl …

The Post’s Ishaan Tharoor has an interesting rundown of differences and similarities between the events of Jan. 8 in Brazil and Jan. 6 two years ago. The fundamental difference, which any expert would have told you in advance, is the role of the Brazilian military and security services. Less than 40 years ago, Brazil was under military rule. Military rule is not some fantastical dystopia there. It’s the reality that most of the country’s political class grew up in.

Brazil’s insurrectionists had studied Jan. 6 closely. You can see that in so many of the visuals. But there was a key difference. The focus of the insurrectionists’ plan, in advance and on the day of, was to build support within the military. They camped out around military bases. They tried to build links to military factions. Nor was this some vain hope. It’s generally agreed that the military and security services were and are sympathetic to Bolsonaro. But political sympathy is not the same as a willingness to intervene to overthrow the political order. Tom Shannon, a former U.S. Ambassador to Brazil, told Tharoor: “The Bolsonaro people had really studied January 6 and the conclusion that they came to was that Trump failed because he relied on a mob and that he had no institutional support.” Institutional support, in this case, being the army and the police.

A number of you have asked me via email just how it is that Jair Bolsonaro is in the U.S. at all? He may be informally on the lam or trying to stay out of the reach of Brazilian authorities. But he didn’t come seeking asylum. I told these readers I figured former heads of state and rich people and just VIPs generally don’t have much problem making extended visits to the United States. But really, I had no idea. But this Reuters story has what seems like the real story. It’s much more interesting and suggests more planning.

There’s such a thing as an A-1 visa which the U.S. reserves for heads of state and high-ranking government officials. Bolsonaro entered the U.S. on his second-to-last day as president. (He pulled a Trump, refusing to participate in the inauguration of his successor.) There’s no way to know specifically without more information from U.S. consular authorities. But according to consular officials and outside experts, Bolsonaro almost certainly entered the U.S. on his A-1 visa.

I’m going to resist commenting too directly on yesterday’s events in Brazil because it is far outside any expertise of mine. But allow me a few observations. The parallels to the January 6 insurrection in the U.S. are obvious and uncanny. To some degree that seems to have been intentional. But there is at least one key difference. On January 6, 2021, the American insurrectionists were trying to disrupt a specific constitutional process essential to the transition of power to the new president. That doesn’t seem to have been the case here. Lula is already president. The Brazilian Congress wasn’t in session. And Lula was in another part of the country.

Even in Brazil there seems to be some real question about just what the plan was and just how far into the military and state security services support for the insurrection went. Watching press reports yesterday there were a number of key governmental officials who are suspected of either being part of the insurrection or passively supporting it who then made showy efforts to arrest perpetrators once things got out of hand. From a distance it looked like something went wrong, like it became clear that whatever was intended wasn’t working and then players who had been taking a wait-and-see approach made hasty efforts to distance themselves from violence. All this said, Brazil is a different country with internal politics I have little understanding of and a very different history from the United States.

Supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro have stormed the seat of the Brazilian Congress after breaking through armed forces cordons. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has already been sworn in as president several days ago and Bolsonaro himself left the country for Florida. The Brazilian Congress is not currently in session. For those reasons it’s not immediately clear to me the aim of the invasion. It’s not clear to me if there is anything happening today in the Brazilian Capital that makes control of the congressional building particularly relevant. Is there something specific they are trying to accomplish as was the case two years ago in Washington, D.C.? Or is it a general show of force? I don’t know. At least the symbolism is clear enough.

Covering the ongoing implosion of George Santos is, in a way, mostly fun and games. But we saw over the last four days how it will soon be something rather different. If you watched TV and photographic coverage of the speakership drama, Rep. Santos spent a lot of time on the floor with Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. Indeed, he seemed glued to them increasingly over the course of the four days. I doubt that is a coincidence. If there are any GOP reps you want in a foxhole with you against the “fake news” media and the GOP’s RINO establishment, it’s these three. This cannot be an accident.

Right now there are 212 Democrats and 222 Republicans. That will move to 213 to 222 after the special election in Virginia next month. If Santos were to resign he would be replaced in a special election and Democrats would be solid, if not strong, favorites to win that race. If a Democrat was elected, that would move the numbers to 214 to 221. In that scenario Republicans can only lose three members on any vote.

Not surprising. But now that McCarthy is zeroing in on the speakership, it comes out: McCarthy agreed to back the Freedom Caucus on the next debt ceiling hostage crisis.