The Backchannel

Yesterday, as he was trying to threaten and bark Senate Republicans out of sending the House a foreign-aid-only supplemental spending bill, Speaker Mike Johnson said that he would not allow a vote on the bill because the House had not yet “received any single border policy change from the Senate…”

Today we’re launching the first installment of a three-part series reporting never-before-published details on the failed Trump coup attempt which unfolded in the final days of 2020 and climaxed on January 6th, when a mob of feral Trumpers stormed the United States Capitol building. These stories are based on a trove of documents from co-conspirator Ken Chesebro. You can read our introduction to the series here, which outlines the overall findings, gives details about the document trove we worked with, and more. In the first installment, we report the plan to have January 6th essentially never end, or rather continue up to inauguration day, January 20th. The plan wasn’t so much to directly achieve the goal of installing Trump as President as to create so much spectacle and chaos with no end in sight that the Supreme Court would feel compelled to step in and, Trump’s lawyers hoped, install Donald Trump as President, much as it did 20 years earlier in the disputed election which ended with Bush v Gore.

Is it frustration? Something deeper, or more shallow? I woke up this morning to see that the front page of the Times has five stories above the virtual fold. All five were about Joe Biden’s memory, press conference, special counsel report. Full news day, I guess. Yesterday I noticed the Times’ Astead Herndon on this on Twitter. He is not some slightly younger version of David Broder. He’s a pretty new entrant to the upper echelon of elite DC news media. I think he graduated from college as Trump’s first campaign was getting underway. But the acculturation appears complete. After Hur’s report dropped he wrote that despite questions about Biden’s age being “the most impt non-Trump issue in this elec[tion]” the DC press corps has “a sorta gentleman’s agreement for the last year to pretend like it’s not. Maybe that ends now.”

Am I taking crazy pills here? Do I have dementia? I think it’s fair to say that at least a third of the political chatter about President Biden for the last year, and quite possibly half of it, is about the President’s age. But maybe the omertà is about to end? I’m still trying to process the idea that a top Washington reporter really thinks there’s been some kind of fix-is-in ban on discussing the President’s age.

I don’t know how or whether this has any relevance to today’s proceedings and ballot disqualification. But it’s one place where history provides some guidance as to why an amendment is written the way it is. First, I don’t think it makes sense at all that the disqualification clause doesn’t apply to the President. It’s a very over-clever semantic argument that is on par with the logic behind the “independent state legislature” theory: a hyper-literal focus on text without context which has the effect of producing an outcome no one could have intended. But — and this is a significant “but” — it is true that presidents were not what the authors of the language were most concerned about. And that matter of focus may have impacted how they structured the language.

A number of you asked me last night and this morning if we may be coming to the end of Mike Johnson’s speakership. After yesterday’s two big fails, is he almost done? In any normal universe the combined events of the last 72 hours would likely lead to Johnson resigning if not in disgrace then in some mix of humiliation and … well, resignation. But this isn’t a normal universe. It’s the 2024 House Republican caucus. So I don’t think he’s going anywhere. I’m not sure any of the key people even think there’s a problem.

The big, big news of the morning is of course the D.C. appellate decision that Donald Trump has no immunity as a former president. But I wanted to briefly revisit the half-day life of the Senate bipartisan border deal that collapsed last night in the face of Trump’s demands.

There’s a bit more to it that I wanted to walk you through. Not a lot more. But a bit more. And those bits have some significance.

After the bill was released, House GOP leaders repeatedly insisted it was absolutely positively dead in the House. The very transparent aim of these statements was that they wanted their Senate Republican colleagues to kill it in the Senate. Because the truth is that it’s not at all clear it was dead in the House if it was allowed to get a vote. So the thinking from the House GOP was: you’re going to put us in a very tough position if you pass the bill and send it to us. So kill it in the Senate first. At least for now, that’s just what their Senate colleagues did.

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