According to a report in Bloomberg News, there’s an increasing push among House Republicans to pass some kind of short-term “clean” debt ceiling bill. It would likely be a “suspension” of the debt ceiling rather than raising it. For these purposes, however, same difference. As we noted yesterday, the governing idea seems to be to time a debt-ceiling crisis to Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. This would combine both a debt default cliff and a government shut down cliff on one big fiscal Armageddon day.

There are two goals to this. One is to add pressure by bundling all the bad, scary things into a single day (though I’m not sure that actually places more pressure on the White House) and also to make it a date certain. Currently, the Treasury is doing all these accounting tricks, juggling things in the air, also dealing with the uncertainty of just when tax revenues come in. It’s very hard to know just when the big moment comes and the Treasury doesn’t necessarily have a strong interest in telling the House just when that happens. If you’re planning a showdown you want to know exactly when showdown day is. This would provide that certainty for House Republicans. It would definitely come exactly on Sept. 30.

Under court order, San Francisco police have just released video of the assault on Paul Pelosi and the arrest of his attacker David DePape. I’d suggest a soft content warning. It’s not gory but you do see DePape in one quick moment slam the hammer down on to Pelosi’s head, though Pelosi is slightly out of the picture at that point. Video under the fold.

Thursday The New York Times published a retrospective and analysis of the “Durham investigation,” the probe Bill Barr stood up to discredit the earlier Trump/Russia probes and which long served as the shining hope of Trump partisans, the vehicle of a promised vengeance that never arrived. Indeed, Durham’s investigation has lasted almost four years, far longer than any of the various probes it purported to scrutinize. The picture the Times story paints is stark if unsurprising: a politicized, instinctively unethical and deeply corrupt effort which managed to embody in almost cartoonish fashion the story it sought to tell about the original Russia investigation. The one thing a criminal investigation is never supposed to be is one that starts knowing the conclusion it wants to arrive at, brings a heavy dose of political motivation and bends rules and cuts corner to get where it wants to go. That caricature describes the Durham probe to a T. The two cases Durham managed to bring to trial were mainly vehicles for airing tendentious conspiracy theories he couldn’t prove and had no real evidence for. The actual cases were laughed out of court with speedy acquittals. 

Would love to be a fly on the wall for this bro-fest.

The one attention-seeker who debased himself on the House floor for an entire week in order to get his new job wanted to show the other attention-seeker, who pretended to want to buy Twitter to own the libs and then actually had to buy it, his new office.

According to several reports from the Hill it seems that Elon Musk met with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) today. McCarthy claims that the meeting was just a couple of old pals broing out on his birthday.

Today in Republicans, we find that there seems to be at least signs of a real race for RNC chair, a contest that three-term incumbent Ronna McDaniel has seemed to have locked up. I suspect McDaniel still has the votes. But today Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, most recently seen with his poll numbers falling against ex-President Trump, has told far-right luminary Charlie Kirk that he’s backing Harmeet Dhillon, McDaniel’s top opponent.

“I think we need a change … I think we need to get some new blood in the RNC.”