Mitch’s Many Headaches

Hello! It’s the weekend, this is The Weekender. ☕

This week, it became clear that Mitch McConnell has three big problems: Donald Trump, Peter Thiel and Rick Scott. 

Since as far back as April, the Senate minority leader has been lightly warning the public that his party may eventually be in the position that it is, in fact, currently in. In April, McConnell suggested that a few “unacceptable” candidates can sometimes spoil the entire Republican batch during a dicey midterm season. It has happened before, he said, and it could very well happen again. 

At the time he was of course responding to Donald Trump’s ego-driven endorsements in some key Senate races that McConnell very much needed the ex-president to stay out of. But just a few days later, Trump endorsed “Hillbilly Elegy” author-turned-Trump clone J.D. Vance in Ohio’s Republican Senate primaries. A few months after that, Trump announced his support for a Big Lie, far-right extremist in another key race the party can’t lose in the fall: Blake Masters in Arizona.

Underneath all of this irritating Trump stuff, was the cash cow that is billionaire Peter Thiel, who hand picked and mentored both candidates and infused big bucks into each of their campaigns  – $15 million each – making McConnell’s headache much worse. They, of course, won. Now news comes that Thiel’s decided to stop dumping enormous amounts of cash into their campaigns, just in time for the general election — a stance he reiterated to McConnell via phone this week. 

It’s Bad news for McConnell who is now stuck trying to deal with two Bad candidates during a time when polling in both candidates’ races is looking increasingly Bad. Masters has been polling behind Sen. Mark Kelly in Arizona for some time and the Vance-Tim Ryan race in Ohio is neck-and-neck at this point. 

Intertwined in all of this is a Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) who has gotten lots of heat from his party in recent months for poorly budgeting the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s cash – he’s released several ads featuring himself on camera and has faced criticism for using valuable party resources to release a GOP policy agenda that nobody asked for or agreed with. 

To deflect, Scott’s directing his ire at McConnell, claiming the minority leader’s “trash-talking” is the reason why party prospects in the fall are no longer looking super great. 

“Unfortunately, many of the very people responsible for losing the Senate last cycle are now trying to stop us from winning the majority this time by trash-talking our Republican candidates,” Scott wrote in a Washington Examiner op-ed this week. Without directly naming McConnell, he suggested that Republicans criticizing other Republicans is a “treasonous” offense at this point in the game. 

McConnell’s position as a GOP leader is looking increasingly lonely. But perhaps it’s an inevitable position for a guy who allowed his party to evolve into the den of extremists it is today. 

More on other news below. Let’s dig in. 

— Nicole Lafond

A Bomb On The Docket

There’s a sleeper case on the Supreme Court’s docket that could blow a hole in our social safety net and leave the most vulnerable people with no recourse if states just neglect/end their mandated care. As one expert told me: “This case is to Medicaid what Dobbs was to abortion.”

The case will give the conservative majority an opportunity to shut down the pathway beneficiaries of programs like Medicaid and SNAP have to sue, if states don’t provide the services they’re mandated to in order to get federal funding. It sounds wonky, but it’s potentially catastrophic. The federal government has very few tools to force states into compliance — its “strongest” is to pull the funding, which wouldn’t exactly help the people depending on these services.

What’s worse, many of the conservatives on the bench have explicitly articulated their dislike for this avenue to state accountability, and seem hungry to close it off. Imagine states just deciding, point blank, to stop providing Medicaid to its citizens. That would leave 90 million Americans without health care services and vulnerable people like seniors and low-income pregnant women with no support.

Experts lamented to me that the case has gotten little attention, due to some combination of the complicated nature of Medicaid law, and people’s feeling that Medicaid and similar federally-funded, state-administered programs are for people other than them.

But as Nicole Huberfeld, professor of health law, ethics and human rights at Boston University’s school of public health, told me: “Nearly half of all births are covered by Medicaid in the U.S. — if you are born here or live long enough, you or someone you know will rely on it.”

Read my piece on the case here.

— Kate Riga

Clothes, Books, Gifts, Top Secret Documents: Trump Mixed Them All Up At Mar-a-Lago

Press reports, clothing, a book and 21 secret government documents: Those were the contents of just one box among dozens that FBI investigators allegedly recovered from Mar-a-Lago in a raid last month. In all, a detailed list of 33 such recovered items, mostly boxes from Trump’s storage room and office at the resort, catalogued scores of classified documents, and thousands more government records that did not bear classification markings.

U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, on Friday authorized the release of the “detailed property inventory” of what investigators say they recovered from Trump’s Florida home.
But she hasn’t ruled one way or another on Trump’s desire for a special master, who Trump’s lawyers have said could sort through the documents for attorney-client or even executive branch-privileged information. (Also unclear: whether Trump understands he’s not currently president.) 

— Matt Shuham

• While she was not charged with conspiracy, an attorney for the Oath Keepers who was indicted this week was spotted before the insurrection with a bunch of the alleged conspiracists.
• In response to Biden’s recent remarks about Trump Republicans’ slip toward “semi-fascism,” and to his speech Thursday decrying the threat they pose to democracy, conservatives borrowed a style of argumentation favored by five-year-olds the world over: “No, you’re the fascist.”
• A Democrat’s surprise victory against Sarah Palin in a race to represent Alaska in Congress prompted Republicans to add a new bogeyman to their election conspiracy-theory cast of characters: Ranked-choice voting.
• A picture taken during the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago emerged this week, showing pages and pages of classified documents resting on the tackily carpeted floor of the former president’s beach resort. We spoke with a renowned expert on rugs to get his insights on what that carpet can tell us.

— John Light