I wouldn’t be so quick to assume Democrats got taken by working with Senate Republicans to put together this bipartisan border deal. There are a number of provisions in this deal which many Democrats won’t like at all just on the merits. That is an important question. But here I’m talking about the politics. It’s House Republicans who are in an awkward position now.

House Republicans are now clearly refusing to support provisions they’ve been demanding for years. Now they claim that they are refusing to support or even allow a vote on the deal because it doesn’t go far enough. But it’s a bit late for that since they were already pretty open about simply refusing to vote for anything until Trump becomes President again.

I want to flag to your attention two interesting articles on the the shape of the 2024 election. The first one is from Nate Cohn of the Times and it is is on a topic that requires some background explanation.

There’s been a debate for the last year or so about two potential sources of insight into who has the advantage going into 2024. Camp one looks at polls which show Trump and Biden either roughly tied or Trump with a small but significant lead. But a lengthy list of special election outcomes tells a different story. It shows Democrats significantly and fairly consistently exceeding historical benchmarks and, often, polls. There are a lot more polls than special elections. But special elections aren’t estimates of election results. They are actual election results.

Last night I brought you news of Indiana State Rep. Jim Lucas (R) who was meeting in a corridor of the state capitol with some high school students who came to talk about out of control gun violence and their fears of being gunned down while in algebra class. The video I linked in that post shows the moment he flashed them his loaded pistol to convince them that guns are actually totally awesome. His point seemed to be: guns aren’t scary. You don’t think I’m gonna shoot you right now, do you?

I’ve taken a crash course in Lucasian studies overnight and from what I’ve learned it’s hard to believe Lucas hasn’t yet made the jump to Congress to join the House GOP conference.

As you might expect, Lucas appears to have a long history of posting what a local NBC affiliate in 2020 rather charitably called “racially controversial social media posts.” In that case it was a new meme he’d made with a photo of black children over the text “We gon’ get free money!”

In the wake of that controversy he explained that he “was bored last night and made several memes on imgflip.com, essentially mocking our government and it’s overstepping it’s (sic) authority.”

For some time I’ve wanted to take up a question that David Kurtz took up recently in Morning Memo. In short, the federal judiciary has failed the country in allowing a renegade ex-president to nullify federal law by means of a more or less open policy of endless delay by means of frivolous motions, appeals and more. As the old adage has it, justice delayed is justice denied. This hasn’t simply been during his criminal prosecutions, which I will discuss in a moment. It stretched over the time of his presidency as well. We know that during his presidency President Trump filled the federal judiciary with a slew of right-wing judges, many of them out-and-out corrupt. He also corrupted the Supreme Court with his unprecedented three appointments in a single term. But here I’m not even talking about right-wing Republican judges who often appear partial to Donald Trump’s ideological aims and frequently his narrower electoral ones as well. We know for instance that Judge Aileen Cannon, a corrupt and transparently partisan Trump appointee, has more or less single-handedly sabotaged the classified documents prosecution. Set that all aside. What I’m talking about are the fair-minded judges who allow a mix of institutional courtesy, established practice and inertia to allow Trump to make a mockery of the criminal justice system

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Moms for Liberty and Moms for Liberty-adjacent, right-wing school board moms like Bridget Ziegler and Clarice Schillinger, it’s that they know how to party. You’ll remember that late last year Schillinger, a one-time candidate for Lt. Gov of Pennsylvania and the head of a major anti-woke school board group in the state, was charged with a mix of offenses related to allegedly assaulting and boozing up minors at her daughter’s 17th birthday party. After a preliminary hearing on Monday, Magisterial District Judge Stacy Wertman held Schillinger over for trial on the same charges after hearing reality TV-style testimony about Schillinger’s, her mom’s and her then-boyfriend’s feral behavior corrupting the youth of Bucks County Pennsylvania — and in some cases just beating the crap out of the youth of Bucks County when they simply tried to escape her house.

Schillinger was released on her own recognizance pending trial.

Let’s go to the video (metaphorically speaking)…!

You’ve probably seen the stories about the UN Agency which allegedly had amongst its employees Hamas operatives who directly participated in the October 7th massacres in southern Israel. The story is both more and less than it seems. The background helps illuminate this as well as much of what we’ve seen over the last three months.

United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was founded in 1949 to administer refugee camps for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had either fled the fighting or were driven out by the Israeli military during both phases of the Israeli War of Independence, what Palestinians call The Nakba. (Most of this happened during the first phase of the war.) There were camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Those camps are still there 75 years later. “Camps” is a misnomer. Over time permanent buildings replaced temporary structures and tents. Schools, hospitals, civic buildings and businesses grew up. They are more like towns, or districts of towns. The vast majority of residents of the camps are third and fourth generation descendants of the original refugees of 1947-48. Under UNRWA’s framework they are also refugees. UNRWA still plays a central role administering these communities — running schools, hospitals, various civil services.

In the lead up to the 2022 midterm, I tried in vain to argue that Democrats needed to frame the election around a concrete promise to pass a law codifying Roe v Wade. Keep the House and the Senate and Democrats would pass a Roe law on a simple majority vote in the Senate. One of my takeaways from the 2022 election ended up being that voters to a great extent didn’t need politicians to spell it out for them. Voters understood the stakes well enough on their own and saw that abortion bans and presidential coups were all part of the same story of MAGA Republican extremism. But I have little question that making the promise more concrete and specific would have had an additional impact.

Yesterday President Biden on Twitter (and presumably via other channels) came pretty close to making that promise for the 2024 election.

This should absolutely be a centerpiece of the 2024 campaign.

Conventional wisdom can evolve in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Conventional wisdom isn’t necessarily valid, of course. The “conventional” label hints that it’s probably not, or at least that it’s incomplete. But conventional wisdom, regardless of its merits, can shape how real world events are perceived and thus the reality of how they unfold. I say all this as preface to note that the day-after reactions to the New Hampshire primary results seemed a bit different from what we heard and saw that night.

Kate Riga mentioned this in the podcast episode we recorded yesterday. We heard all these wild things on Tuesday night about Trump’s resounding victory, how the nomination race is essentially over. And of course it is over if we’re talking about whether or not Trump is going to be the nominee. But I’m seeing more and more comment from the insider commentators and newsletters finally getting around to the idea that while these results almost certainly lock down the nomination, they show general election weakness rather than strength.

Let’s come back to last night’s result. We’ve now had two contests on the Republican side. Donald Trump won 51% of the vote in Iowa (on the GOP side it’s not actually a caucus, just a straight vote) and 54% in New Hampshire. These are at best a thin showing for a former president who remains head of his party. David Kurtz is right that it’s hard to know just what the standard should be when the whole situation is so unprecedented and absurd. The rule in modern American politics is that when you lose a presidential election your career in politics is over. Add to that trying to overthrow the government and facing about a hundred felony indictments and you’d think that would be enough. But that’s obviously not the case. This is the world we’re living in.

Tonight is the night of the first and very likely the last meaningful primary of the 2024 primary calendar. Polls suggest a similar outcome to what we saw last week in Iowa: a bare majority for Trump, which in a normal contest would be a big win but is less clearly so when the candidate is the party leader and de facto incumbent. The difference is that unlike in Iowa where most of the remaining vote was split between Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, now most will go to Haley.

People will be talking all day about just where we should place the thresholds over which Haley overperforms and keeps some semblance of a faux primary campaign going or Trump does the same and gets everyone to finally admit that this thing is completely absolutely done.

I’d put the number for Haley somewhere between 35% and 40%. For Trump, maybe if he goes over 60%. The truth is I have no idea. By any reasonable calculus, if she can’t win in New Hampshire she can’t win anywhere. And really … it doesn’t matter. We’re talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin when there actually is no pin.