A number of you have asked me via email just how it is that Jair Bolsonaro is in the U.S. at all? He may be informally on the lam or trying to stay out of the reach of Brazilian authorities. But he didn’t come seeking asylum. I told these readers I figured former heads of state and rich people and just VIPs generally don’t have much problem making extended visits to the United States. But really, I had no idea. But this Reuters story has what seems like the real story. It’s much more interesting and suggests more planning.

There’s such a thing as an A-1 visa which the U.S. reserves for heads of state and high-ranking government officials. Bolsonaro entered the U.S. on his second-to-last day as president. (He pulled a Trump, refusing to participate in the inauguration of his successor.) There’s no way to know specifically without more information from U.S. consular authorities. But according to consular officials and outside experts, Bolsonaro almost certainly entered the U.S. on his A-1 visa.

I’m going to resist commenting too directly on yesterday’s events in Brazil because it is far outside any expertise of mine. But allow me a few observations. The parallels to the January 6 insurrection in the U.S. are obvious and uncanny. To some degree that seems to have been intentional. But there is at least one key difference. On January 6, 2021, the American insurrectionists were trying to disrupt a specific constitutional process essential to the transition of power to the new president. That doesn’t seem to have been the case here. Lula is already president. The Brazilian Congress wasn’t in session. And Lula was in another part of the country.

Even in Brazil there seems to be some real question about just what the plan was and just how far into the military and state security services support for the insurrection went. Watching press reports yesterday there were a number of key governmental officials who are suspected of either being part of the insurrection or passively supporting it who then made showy efforts to arrest perpetrators once things got out of hand. From a distance it looked like something went wrong, like it became clear that whatever was intended wasn’t working and then players who had been taking a wait-and-see approach made hasty efforts to distance themselves from violence. All this said, Brazil is a different country with internal politics I have little understanding of and a very different history from the United States.

Covering the ongoing implosion of George Santos is, in a way, mostly fun and games. But we saw over the last four days how it will soon be something rather different. If you watched TV and photographic coverage of the speakership drama, Rep. Santos spent a lot of time on the floor with Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. Indeed, he seemed glued to them increasingly over the course of the four days. I doubt that is a coincidence. If there are any GOP reps you want in a foxhole with you against the “fake news” media and the GOP’s RINO establishment, it’s these three. This cannot be an accident.

Right now there are 212 Democrats and 222 Republicans. That will move to 213 to 222 after the special election in Virginia next month. If Santos were to resign he would be replaced in a special election and Democrats would be solid, if not strong, favorites to win that race. If a Democrat was elected, that would move the numbers to 214 to 221. In that scenario Republicans can only lose three members on any vote.