Today Marjorie Taylor Greene announced on Twitter that at her request Speaker Kevin McCarthy is providing unrestricted access to Jan. 6 surveillance tapes to discredited journalist John Solomon, a Jan. 6 conspiracy theorist named Julie Kelly and another unnamed party.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is seemingly trying to get a handful of far-right members of the Freedom Caucus to chill out and stop threatening to redo the speakership election. They’re not likely to successfully depose him, but no one is eager for a redo of the January spectacle as a few loud members seek to reassert their authority. And, so, in what is seemingly a half-hearted effort to throw them a bone, McCarthy went on Fox News and promised to create some vague “commission” that’ll review further cuts to next year’s budget.

The speaker then took it a step further. Instead of just promising that “this isn’t the end” and proposing some sort of additional amorphous cuts to quell a hardliner uprising, McCarthy doubled down, raising the possibility that this next step commission could look into gutting Social Security and Medicare. Music, in theory, to the ears of a salivating Freedom Caucus.

As we analyze and try to make sense of how this debt ceiling drama has worked out, there’s one important difference with the original crisis 12 years ago to keep in mind. Back in 2011, President Obama was very much bought into the idea of deficit reduction and “the grand bargain.” Some of this of course is the distinct matter of inoculating against Republican fiscal politics — nods to fiscal probity, deficit reduction and so forth. To really understand politics it’s critical to distinguish between true agendas and reactive, positioning politics of that sort. But, to a degree, he was actually bought into it.

Yesterday, Rep. Matt Gaetz (F-FL) said that a bright line Kevin McCarthy couldn’t go past without triggering a “motion to vacate” would be having a majority of the GOP caucus vote against his debt ceiling/budget deal with Joe Biden. This gives away the game. They might as well say that they’ll end McCarthy’s speakership the second he announces he’s identifying as non-binary. The couple dozen Freedom Caucus diehards are now setting the bar comically high because it’s suddenly clear the cudgel they’re allegedly holding over McCarthy has been vastly overstated.

As my colleague Josh Marshall spelled out earlier, there is one very loud voice that is notably absent from this conversation.

Donald Trump has remained largely silent on the debt ceiling ever since the Biden White House and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) settled a deal over the weekend to ransom the debt ceiling hostage in exchange for some GOP legislative priorities, most notably work requirements for SNAP recipients.