McCarthy now seems to say Social Security and Medicare are “off the table” in debt ceiling hostage negotiations.

According to a report in Bloomberg News, there’s an increasing push among House Republicans to pass some kind of short-term “clean” debt ceiling bill. It would likely be a “suspension” of the debt ceiling rather than raising it. For these purposes, however, same difference. As we noted yesterday, the governing idea seems to be to time a debt-ceiling crisis to Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. This would combine both a debt default cliff and a government shut down cliff on one big fiscal Armageddon day.

There are two goals to this. One is to add pressure by bundling all the bad, scary things into a single day (though I’m not sure that actually places more pressure on the White House) and also to make it a date certain. Currently, the Treasury is doing all these accounting tricks, juggling things in the air, also dealing with the uncertainty of just when tax revenues come in. It’s very hard to know just when the big moment comes and the Treasury doesn’t necessarily have a strong interest in telling the House just when that happens. If you’re planning a showdown you want to know exactly when showdown day is. This would provide that certainty for House Republicans. It would definitely come exactly on Sept. 30.

Under court order, San Francisco police have just released video of the assault on Paul Pelosi and the arrest of his attacker David DePape. I’d suggest a soft content warning. It’s not gory but you do see DePape in one quick moment slam the hammer down on to Pelosi’s head, though Pelosi is slightly out of the picture at that point. Video under the fold.

Thursday The New York Times published a retrospective and analysis of the “Durham investigation,” the probe Bill Barr stood up to discredit the earlier Trump/Russia probes and which long served as the shining hope of Trump partisans, the vehicle of a promised vengeance that never arrived. Indeed, Durham’s investigation has lasted almost four years, far longer than any of the various probes it purported to scrutinize. The picture the Times story paints is stark if unsurprising: a politicized, instinctively unethical and deeply corrupt effort which managed to embody in almost cartoonish fashion the story it sought to tell about the original Russia investigation. The one thing a criminal investigation is never supposed to be is one that starts knowing the conclusion it wants to arrive at, brings a heavy dose of political motivation and bends rules and cuts corner to get where it wants to go. That caricature describes the Durham probe to a T. The two cases Durham managed to bring to trial were mainly vehicles for airing tendentious conspiracy theories he couldn’t prove and had no real evidence for. The actual cases were laughed out of court with speedy acquittals. 

Today in Republicans, we find that there seems to be at least signs of a real race for RNC chair, a contest that three-term incumbent Ronna McDaniel has seemed to have locked up. I suspect McDaniel still has the votes. But today Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, most recently seen with his poll numbers falling against ex-President Trump, has told far-right luminary Charlie Kirk that he’s backing Harmeet Dhillon, McDaniel’s top opponent.

“I think we need a change … I think we need to get some new blood in the RNC.”

In general, I’m of the mind that it’s not really “wasting” money to spend a lot in one place when the money is better spent elsewhere. If Dems are burning money on a hopeless race in Kentucky just because they despise Mitch McConnell it doesn’t mean that money was really on offer for a sleeper race in another part of the country. I also think campaign dollars are fairly elastic. That person who’s given candidate A $100 probably has another $100 they can give to candidate B if that other candidate catches their fancy. But TPM Reader HS makes a decent point about a possible bonfire of Dem campaign dollars about to be spent in California.

I don’t think it’s too soon to warn TPM readers away from picking a candidate for the Feinstein seat.  Democratic Party activists are about to waste tens of millions of dollars (hundreds of millions?) on the Porter/Lee/Schiff race that really doesn’t matter, they all would be more than adequate. 

Here’s a tweet thread by Tim Snyder, the Yale history professor whose expertise both on the borderlands between Russia and Germany (Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania et al.) and democracy and authoritarianism have put him at the center of numerous public discussions over the last half dozen years. The thread basically looks at The Long Trump-Russia Story in the context of the arrest of Charles McGonigal, the high-ranking FBI counterintelligence agent.

Are House Republicans going wobbly on debt-ceiling hostage taking?

Roll Call reports that House Republicans are now considering passing a series of short-term “clean” debt-limit suspensions in order to create more time for negotiations with the White House over the debt limit and all the spending cuts House Republicans are demanding.

There’s a lot of jargon here. So let me explain what this means.

The House would pass a series of short term laws “suspending” the debt limit. It wouldn’t create a higher debt ceiling but empower the Treasury to simply ignore the debt limit for a period of time. The point is that the crisis seems to be coming sooner than House Republicans want. Generally, the side that wants to free up more time for “negotiations” isn’t on the winning side of the engagement.

Ginni Thomas’ testimony before the Jan. 6 Committee kind of got buried in the avalanche of material the committee released before the end of the last Congress. But it deserves a closer look and Frank Wilkinson takes that deep dive right here. Fascinating stuff. Check it out.

There’s always been a strong Wile E. Coyote vibe to George Santos’s arc across the American political landscape. If he just keeps pretending everything’s fine and nothing matters maybe he’ll never fall off the cliff? But on Tuesday he appears to have taken a step toward falling off the cliff.

At the center of the Santos story from the beginning has been the question of how he went from being a chronic deadbeat making $50,000 a year in 2020 to making millions just two years later from his company, The Devolder Organization. He made so much that he could loan his own campaign almost three-quarters of a million dollars. Now finally we may have an answer. That money he loaned his campaign? Well, it wasn’t actually his money.