The Goldfish Reaction

Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕

When President Joe Biden brought up Republicans’ desire to cut Medicare and Social Security, they erupted.

A fur-clad Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) called the President a “liar”; Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) — who once pledged to pull up social security “by the roots” — sat with his mouth agape in feigned incredulity.

Journalists and the White House alike produced a flurry of documentation proving that a whole bunch of Republicans have, very recently, floated their interest in cutting the programs. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), who, like his conference, is pretending that he never even dreamed of laying a finger on them and seems to want to fight Biden in Florida, published a plan that would open the programs up to being sunsetted altogether.

But this fact checking is hardly necessary. Trying to cut Medicare and Social Security has been part of Republicans’ DNA for decades. They’ve always couched it — “reform” for “cut,” fear mongering that the programs will go bankrupt tomorrow — but have pursued cuts at various, high-profile times in the last two decades.

From George W. Bush’s attempts to partially privatize Social Security dying a brutal death in 2005, to Barack Obama’s negotiating with debt-ceiling terrorists in the early 2010s, to Republicans half-heartedly trying to address the huge deficit increase from the 2017 Donald Trump tax cuts, it’s always there.

Keep an eye on TPM this weekend for my deep dive into Republicans’ perennial interest in gutting these two programs, no matter how loudly they protest.

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

— Kate Riga

Fake Electors In The Crosshairs

I wrote this week about the fake electors, and how central they are to Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election — and, consequently, to the state and federal criminal investigations into those efforts.

Pick your metaphor. The fake electors are a keystone in the arch of the election reversal attempt, holding all the various schemes in place. As I wrote in this piece, one of the schemes could have worked without the fake electors, which gave state legislators a potential slate of pro-Trump electors to “reappoint” over the Biden ones, state officials something to certify, and, potentially, Mike Pence something to select over the Biden electors. It could also be a rusty lever, a mechanism that Trump pushed and pushed — either until it worked, and assured his hold on power, or snapped.

— Josh Kovensky

Weaponization! 

The powerful force that is conservative media has a new platform: the United States Congress. Thanks to the new Republican House majority, combined with concessions extracted from Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) last month, the House Judiciary Committee will now be running regular hearings of the Weaponization Committee.

The panel’s stated purpose is to examine supposed abuses of government power that took place under the Democrats for the past several years. The reality of the Committee is twofold: it repeats the same old allegations about the delegitimization of the FBI and DOJ, but now with the imprimatur of Congress. And, secondly, it will go after at least some of those currently investigating key members of the GOP’s House majority. It was, after all, Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), under investigation for his role in Jan. 6, who pushed McCarthy to create the panel, and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), fresh off a federal sex trafficking probe that ended inconclusively, who sits on it.

— Josh Kovensky

• Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) tried to get some good press and score points with Donald Trump supporters when he arrested 20 people accused of voter fraud last year, but the stunt hasn’t led to any real convictions. Last week, Republicans in the state legislature introduced a bill to change that.
• The newly Republican-dominated North Carolina Supreme Court will rehear a major redistricting case at the heart of one of the biggest Supreme Court decisions expected this year. The state court could render the case moot, after the Supreme Court heard it in early December. The justices’ decision was expected this summer. Read more here. 
• The Koch Network Has A New Plan For 2024: Any (Republican) Candidate But Trump.
• Thanks to Republicans’ own outcry, the section of the speech in which Biden levied those critiques will almost certainly be pulled out as the biggest moment of the night. Read more of Kate Riga’s coverage of Biden’s State of the Union speech here. 
• The 2024 GOP primary race has long been predicted to be a showdown between former president Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. On Tuesday, it seems Trump cast the first stone, giving us a taste of the mess to come.

“Do you actually understand that science, or did you just memorize that?”

That’s Nevada Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo barking at Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, after she made an announcement — filled with technical terms on the process of battery recycling — that a Nevada-based battery recycling company will be receiving a $2 billion loan to produce battery materials that will enable the production of more than a million electric vehicles a year.

The crowd was silent following Lombardo’s gratuitous question.

But shortly after, Granholm, who is a Harvard University Law School graduate, tweeted: “Big words can be intimidating, I understand. All the Governor needs to know is that $2 BILLION and thousands of good-paying jobs are coming to Nevada thanks to @POTUS.”

— Emine Yücel 

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