The Texas State House impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton by an overwhelming vote of 121-23. Under Texas state law Paxton is immediately suspended from office pending his Senate trial.

Having watched some of today’s debate I was surprised that the vote was so lopsided. At the end of the day he’s a notorious crook. I don’t know enough about the internal politics of the Texas House GOP caucus to know how much factionalism played a role. But as I said, he’s a notorious crook and it’s shocking he managed to remain as long as he did as the state’s highest law enforcement officer. Maybe that’s what it came down to.

If you want to fully nerd out, here’s the link to the live feed of the Ken Paxton impeachment. This is the guy who is the head of the investigating committee, Andrew Murr.

As I’ve noted in running posts over the last day or so, there’s still no deal. So we need to be tentative in any analysis of how this “deal” happened since it hasn’t happened. But assuming it does come together, how did we get here? How did Biden get this deal?

Big picture: I don’t have a terribly good answer. But my best guess is that some combination of the following two things got us here.

TPM Reader JF flags for our attention that the establishment Republican who was considered a possible contender for next year’s Senate race, Karrin Taylor Robson, has announced she’s not running. The guy Republicans really, really wanted is popular former Gov. Doug Ducey but he seems to have made clear he’s not interested. So far gubernatorial pretender Kari Lake is considered the top contender for the GOP nomination. There are a few other possible GOP entrants but they’re all in the Lake/Blake Masters type candidate category.

This means Ruben Gallego is the only candidate in the race. Meanwhile, Kyrsten Sinema has filed paperwork for a potential candidacy. And she certainly may run. But it seems increasingly questionable that she will.

In the two posts below I’m providing a lot of analysis on the assumption that something like this deal gets finalized. That might not even happen. So keep that in mind. But if it does the big political questions that comes to mind is this: Does the House Freedom Caucus whine a bit, vote no on the deal and then move on to Hunter Biden, or do they get stuck on the fact that Biden and McCarthy essentially got together to sideline them and stiff them on most of their demands? The politics of the next two years turns a lot on the answer to that question.

A key for thinking about which path they go in is understanding the relative roles of dominance politics and policy in Freedom Caucus thinking. These folks don’t really care much about spending levels or policy. The Trump years make that clear. They care about gutting a Democratic President. To paraphrase Adam Serwer, the humiliation is the point.

Late Update: David Dayen has a much more pessimistic view of the potential deal in his X Date newsletter. But I note that on things like the duration of the caps he’s saying it could be anywhere between 2 and 6 years. The reports I’ve seen say 2. Anything’s possible since there’s no actual deal yet. I note that because the difference between two and six years would be vast as far as these caps go

Politico adds some additional information to the outlines of a possible deal we discussed in a post last night. Their outline basically matches. As I assumed, though it was not stated explicitly in the Times’ account, clawing back unused COVID relief money is part of the deal. What comes out a bit more clearly is work requirement are the remaining issue. It really appears that the rest is basically agreed to. That is a very big deal. So it’s hard to evaluate the merits of any overall agreement while that remains outstanding.

One thing that has had me very concerned over recent days is that the White House would be forced to take a rough deal with House Republicans and then also have to whip Democratic votes to get it passed. So the Freedom Caucus forces a ruinous deal and then doesn’t even vote for it. Democrats have to make up those votes. That’s not worth doing. Despite the danger, force McCarthy to pass it entirely with Republican votes. If he can’t get the votes for his own demands, let’s just go over the cliff.

But news out tonight from the Times, now also confirmed by the Post, points to the outlines of a deal that actually looks fairly good for the Dems.

Caveats: You’ll know there’s a deal when it’s official. Maybe this falls apart. Also, let’s remember that we shouldn’t be in this negotiation at all. But we are in the negotiation and we’re days from a crisis. Here are the outlines of a deal as I understand them from the Times article.

Here’s my quick take on the DeSantis-Musk campaign launch.

As you must know by now, the thing kicked up with a grandly humiliating tech glitch in which the whole “Twitter Space” crashed. After 20 minutes or so (I didn’t time it) they started a new one — now hosted on Musk’s crony David Sacks’s account as opposed to Musk’s — and that one mostly worked. Huge fail. And that will probably be the headline takeaway for most news organizations. Then DeSantis read a rushed and canned campaign announcement which was basically a mess. But once they got down to talking, DeSantis is fairly good at talking about the issues that matter to him.

The problem is the issues that matter to him. This is a way, way, WAY online-minded campaign. Extremely online, as the cool kids say. The whole conversation is geared to the keyboard warrior world of the far right.

If we didn’t have enough high-stakes drama on our plates we might be all over this. But I wanted to make sure it was on your radar. It started yesterday when notorious reprobate Texas AG Ken Paxton put out a statement calling on the Texas Speaker of the House to resign over a video clip from the House floor which appeared to many to show him drunk. (His speech was at least slurred at one point. Here’s a breakdown of the video.)

As many of you know Paxton is both hard right and ludicrous and has seemingly for years been under investigation, indictment, sued by various people including his staff … and yet somehow still manages to remain permanently in office.

That was where things stood as of yesterday when I first heard about this.

Let me note something technical but important. While the White House has not yet shown any inclination to argue that the President has legal or constitutional authority to disregard the debt limit law, a union, National Association of Government Employees (NAGE), has. Indeed, they’re arguing in federal court that he is constitutionally obligated to do so. (On the legal and constitutional merits, I think there’s little question they’re right.) This case has been underway for a while. David Dayen, at the Prospect, notes the DOJ has now responded to the union’s request for a preliminary injunction.