Month: November 2022

Who will win?

Here is an interesting analysis of a possible non-Trump path to the ’24 GOP nomination. You be the judge:

Trump’s … rise in 2016 showed that the party’s voters, not its elites, decide who lead it. While pundits rightly note that the elites were fatally split among many contenders, it’s notable that virtually none endorsed Trump even as the race narrowed to its final stages. Trump’s triumph demonstrated that messaging and marketing are more important in presidential primaries than money and maneuvering.

A sensible analysis of 2024, then, must begin with an overview of where the party’s voters stand. American parties contain many factions that roughly organize themselves around questions essential to the party’s identification. Knowing what those questions are and how many people are arrayed into which factions is crucial to grasping what could unfold.

The GOP’s central question for decades had been the extent to which the party should be a vehicle for movement conservatism. That factional breakdown, which I outlined in a book co-written by University of New Hampshire professor Dante Scala, showed that the party’s central and largest faction was the “somewhat conservatives.” These people’s ideals were tempered by pragmatism and focused on business issues. They were the sort who preferred House Speaker John Boehner to the tea party, and it was their large numbers rather than their representation in the party elite that guaranteed their choice was always the party’s nominee.

Trump’s rise replaced that old question with a new one: To what extent should the Republican Party be the personal vehicle for Trump?

The new Republican Party breaks down into four rough factions in response to this query, and none has a clear plurality. Instead, the party has three factions of nearly equal size and a fourth tiny one whose votes might be decisive.

The three lions are Mega MAGA, the Old Guard and the MAGA Adjacent. I estimate each are about 30 percent of the party’s voters and are numerous in virtually every state. The minnow is the Never Trump group, which constitutes about 10 percent of GOP voters. They are strongest in wealthy suburbs and major metropolitan areas such as New York and D.C.

Mega MAGA is Trump’s base. They want Trump because they love his combative style. They want to “own the libs” and never tire of his antics. Indeed, as my colleague Megan McArdle recently observed, they view his high jinks as proof that he is sincere in his opposition to their political enemies. He captured their hearts over the past six years, and they will remain faithful till death or defeat do them part.

The Old Guard is composed of traditional Reagan conservatives. They prefer a less combative style and liked Trump’s presidency mainly when he governed according to their wishes. They want a restoration of the old party in substance and style, with as few deviations to accommodate the Trumpian interlude as possible. These are the people who look longingly at leaders such as former vice president Mike Pence, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

The third group, the MAGA Adjacent, is the one that’s hardest for most observers to pin down. That’s because these people like Trump for both his style and substance but are not eternally devoted to him personally. They won’t look first to leaders favored by the Old Guard for that reason, although they might consider one if that person adopts a more aggressive posture. For now, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is their man of the hour, and that’s why polls show he is emerging as Trump’s biggest competitor.

Note how finely these forces are balanced. If DeSantis sours and some MAGA Adjacent voters go back to Trump, then the final two candidates will be Trump and whichever Old Guard candidate can solidify his or her position. But if DeSantis stays strong and the Old Guard remains split, then DeSantis will make it to the final round and the Old Guard voters have to decide who the nominee will be.

This could put the Never Trumpers in the driver’s seat. They might prefer someone such as outgoing Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan or Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), but they should quickly realize their first choice has no hope of winning the nomination. Will they instead get behind an Old Guarder, propelling that person to the final two even if that means MAGA Adjacent voters might later coalesce around Trump? Will they back DeSantis as the lesser of two evils to send Trump packing, even if their hearts are elsewhere? Or will they effectively abstain in the early stages and let the crucial choice of the final two competitors take place without their input?

One can see from this that all Republican contenders, even Trump, must perform an intricate dance to prevail. The person who pirouettes to the winners’ platform will have to be skillful indeed.

And then there is the question of what Trump will do if it looks like he’s losing or if he does. Is there any example anywhere in his life in which he does the right thing for the greater good? No, I didn’t think so.

Everything depends on how many Mega-MAGAs there are and if they stick with him. That is his power. I suspect there are more than we would like to admit. Ask yourself what they would do in a general election after Trump says the nomination was stolen from them? Again.

I’m sure everyone’s already got their favorite charities already but I thought I would throw out these two which someone just alerted me to. They help women obtain the abortion pill, and I can’t think of anything more necessary:

https://womenhelp.org/

https://aidaccess.org/en/

If you want to see just how necessary this is, read this harrowing story from Texas about a 17 year old who had to appeal to some 73 year old judge for permission to get an abortion and was told she wasn’t mature enough to make that decision. Seriously.

He feels like it’s all closing in:

And that’s the tip of the iceberg. I don’t think I have to elaborate for anyone to see just how freaked out this man is. But also keep in mind that he’s dancing as fast as he can to take people’s minds off of his latest scandal, the Kanye, Fuentes mess and he’s priming his 35% to go after Smith. I expect that the House Republicans will be more than happy to help with that.

A Never Trumper lays out his requirements

It’s not just Trump. There is a larger lesson and The Bulwark’s Tim Miller spells it out.

In 2024, the chosen one will be Gov. Ron DeSantis. It has thus been decreed by the old-guard members of Conservative Inc. Or at least the ones calculating enough to have survived the MAGA takeover.

Rupert has dubbed him DeFuture. Republican hedge fund donors have taken their Trump tax cut and run.  National Review is indistinguishable from a DeSantis Fanzine, lavishly extolling his virtues and wagging their finger at anyone who dares challenge their precious. Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire is not any less effusive and is already cashing in on the new bell cow.

To be honest, I understand this calculation. DeSantis is the golden ticket. He’s the one weird trick that will make all their Trump Troubles go away without their having to suffer any additional political pain or consequences from having made a deal with the devil. DeSantis 2024 will let them be members in good standing on the team again. He will eradicate any nagging doubts about whether they were empowering a man who might bring the constitutional republic they claim to love to its knees.

For most of them, the desire for this trick to succeed is a refreshing change from the last 7 years, because it’s completely authentic. It’s in their bones. The sight and sound of a cherubic, nasal-voiced Ivy Leaguer giving local journalist “elites” the what-for gives them a Matthewsian thrill up the leg. For them, the highlight of 2022 was seeing the triggered libs complain about how Ron had tricked desperate Andres into getting on a plane to Massachusetts as part of an Andover-style prep school prank at the expense of the haughty Martha’s Vineyard librarian who canceled Alan Dershowitz.

That is their shit. Reagan’s revolutionaries had the air traffic controllers, Ron controls his human trafficking by air.

And, hey, who am I to deny them their fun. Might not be my cup o’ joe. Give me a shot of Larry or Liz instead. But we can agree to disagree. Fan-girling for a politician is every content-creating American’s birthright.

The issue for me arises when the DeSantis propagandists turn their fire and start issuing Principled Never Trump purity tests on the OGs. Making demands of those of us who did not spend the last seven years trying to titrate precisely how much lib-owning we needed to do to balance out a few precisely worded tip-toes away from Mr. Trump.

What these folks are trying to do is set up shit-tests in which True Never Trumpers must accede to the DeSantis Dominion—or else they are tarred as being just as hack-ish and disingenuous and grift-y as the anti-antis have been.

Over at the Dispatch, the man formerly known as Allahpundit addressed the psychology of this tete-a-tete quite deftly, explaining the disdain that those of us who have been stalwart on the Trump matter feel for the cowards who danced around it and their loathing of us for our purity tests.

But I wanted to be a bit more forward looking and prescriptive. Offer the “Ron johns” (their stan name is still a work in progress) a guide to how I will treat his campaign against Trump should he pursue one. This way, if they have any doubt about whether I am adhering to Muh Never Trump Principles, they can check back in on it from time to time.

Here goes.

Dear Residents of DeSantistan,

It’s nice to hear from you. I notice you have had some harsh words for Mr. Trump of late. You might even think he’s a Bad Orange Man? Concur! So lucky for you to have been awoken from your torpor on this matter at the most convenient time imaginable.

Before we get to the meat of my correspondence, I do have to mention that we missed having you on board these past few annums: During the 2016 general election, Impeachment One, the 2020 Republican primary, the 2020 general election, the alarming interregnum, the 2021 Georgia run-off, Impeachment Two, opposing the Trump election deniers in the 2022 midterms, and the recent FBI raid on the former president’s home.

Better late than never.

It’s especially nice to hear that your candidate plans to challenge and defeat Mr. Trump once and for-all. Though you might forgive a bit of tepidness in our anticipation for this event given that he hasn’t actually done anything yet and we’ve been disappointed by your ilk so many times before (see above).

You also might forgive those of us who have spent seven years fighting Trump if we are not super thrilled to jump on board with someone described by Rich Lowry as being not just from the “Trump Wing” of the party but the “Trump fuselage, wing and landing gear.” (This was intended, I believe, as a compliment).

Bearing all that in mind, I want to put forth what I, as a charter Never Trumper, will do and not do in order to provide the aid and comfort you are demanding for your chosen candidate’s campaign against the former president.

We’ll start with the will nots (natch).

-I will not be a human shield for Ron to protect him from all the hard (and not so hard) questions about Donald Trump. For example, you might feel like it is not strategic for him to state clearly that it’s bad for the man he supported for president twice to have had dinner with one of the nation’s leading white supremacists. I, for one, am not certain that this convenient silence is good strategy. Maybe it’s true he might need the votes of anti-semites, maybe it’s not. But I am sure that it’s not too much to ask a prospective president what they think about it.

-I will not give him a pass when he refuses to provide an answer, any answer, about whether or not he thinks Donald Trump’s coup attempt was a good thing or a bad thing. Given that his only comments to date were supportive of the coup, it feels like his updated views on the matter are something we should hear about before we give him the keys to the kingdom.

-I will not practice strategic silence while he exhibits every single behavior of enablement and collaboration with the crazy that got us to Donald Trump in the first place. Here is a good book about the dangers of this approach that I would recommend you check out if you disagree on this point.

-I will not pretend that he isn’t anti-vaxcurious, didn’t hire an anti-vax surgeon general, and didn’t oversee a spike in COVID deaths after a life-saving vaccine was available. I am sorry that these facts make you uncomfortable. But perhaps your support of DeSantis would be even more convincing to us if you granted them and said that you still preferred him to Trump?

-I will not pretend that his decision to sign and champion a bill that would bar teachers from giving students a word problem that describes my nuclear family is needed to counterbalance the “woke” school system; or a no big deal effort to desexualize schools; or actually an anti-grooming bill; or whatever the latest spin is.

-I while not shine his turds when he enacts despicably cruel public policy stunts that serve zero purpose for his constituents, such as tricking Venezuelan asylees into getting on planes from Texas to Massachusetts just so he can earn plaudits from Fox & Friends and the speakers at Kari Lake rallies.

-I will not demand that popular and viable Republican governors who have classically conservative principles and acted with a modicum of integrity during the Trump era should stand aside because their presence might hypothetically hurt the candidacy of someone who showed no such courage or fortitude.

-And, finally, being Never Trump does not require I participate in your efforts to prop up a man who cut the single most obsequious ad in service to our nation’s worst president. If you haven’t watched that ad in a while, please take a moment to do so now.

Ron DeSantis has released an ad indoctrinating his children into Trumpism

Yikes. Speaking of grooming, I wouldn’t let the person in that video coach my kid, for fear she might be groomed into this creepy cult.

That type of ostentatious service to the irredeemable monster who wanted to turn this great country into an autocracy shows a lack of judgment so extreme that for me—and I suspect many other Never Trumpers—it is forever disqualifying.

But even in spite of alllllll that. Despite his use of state-power to go after people and companies whose politics he doesn’t like. Despite his targeting of families like mine with needlessly spiteful anti-gay legislation. Despite his status as Mr. Trump’s number one ball fluffer. Here are the things I will do when commenting on Ron DeSantis’ primary campaign against a man I still believe is an existential threat to the country:.

Number one: If a hypothetical primary campaign between Trump and DeSantis remains competitive 15 days before the California primary and Ron/Don are the only viable options, I will suck it up, re-register as a Republican, and vote for your man in my states’ nominating contest. I will cast this vote despite his myriad transgressions against decency and Never Trump orthodoxy outlined above (and cut for space). I will write about this vote publicly to explain why it is important to support Trump’s opponents, however imperfect they may be. I will do this before the election, not weeks after the fact when it makes no difference. (Caveats: (1) If there is a competitive Democratic primary in which I have a strong preference, that may change the calculus. (2) If Ron runs a campaign where he pledges to Muslim Ban even harder than Trump did, or some noxious equivalent.)

Not only will I do that, but . . .

Number two: I am willing to go a step further and offer you another olive branch. If your candidate ever shows even the vague outline of a pair of balls and stands up to the man you now agree is a grave threat, I will compliment him for it.

That is right. I will praise Ron DeSantis!

For example, maybe this week DeSantis might consider following in a few of his prospective competitors’ footsteps and saying something to the effect of: “You know, I don’t appreciate that Donald had dinner with two anti-semites, one of whom is the most despicable nazi scum in our entire nation, and if I was president, racist douche canoes such as that would get no hearing from my White House.”

Should DeSantis try something like that on for size, I will provide the heartiest of atta boys. (And if DeSantis doesn’t say something like that, then maybe you should ask yourselves who and what DeSantis thinks his base is?)

I’m not holding my breath, but hey, who doesn’t love being pleasantly surprised?

So that’s it, that’s the best you’re gonna get from a Never Trumper. If I were you, I would take that deal and run!

But if these terms aren’t amenable because you’d rather have us as foils to curry favor with your MAGA pals—well that’s fine, too. I understand that you have to preserve your viability in case the DeSantis thing doesn’t work out. So in the meantime, good luck with the fanzine, hope Ron makes the maneuvering easy for ya out there on the trail.

Tim

Nuh-uh, kids! GOP almost suppressed those home for Thanksgiving

Dante Atkins points up a likely explanation for Georgia’s attempt to stomp out U.S. Senate runoff voting last Saturday.

You gotta remember that Warnock "won" the general by 36,000 votes. 8,300 new Gen Z and younger millennial voters is a big deal, and those numbers will only go up from there.

— 🕷Dante Atkins🕷 (@DanteAtkins) November 29, 2022

If you (like me) had not followed the push-pull over whether Georgians could vote last Saturday, Marc Elias, Democrats’ premier election attorney, sketches it out in this morning’s Democracy Docket newsletter:

At the center of this dispute was the application of a 2016 Georgia law that prohibits counties from offering early voting in primary and general elections on certain Saturdays that follow holidays. On its face, the law is unclear whether a runoff election qualifies as a “primary” or “general” election and thus is open to interpretation.  

Tipping the scale in favor of allowing early voting is a newer law that requires counties to begin advance voting — Georgia’s term for early voting — for this rapidly approaching runoff election “as soon as possible” to maximize the number of days on which Georgians can vote.

Also supporting allowing early voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving is the fact that in 2020, several Georgia counties held in-person early voting on Saturday, Dec. 26, 2020 — the day after Christmas. 

Immediately following Election Day on Nov. 8, 2022, the Georgia secretary of state and his chief deputy adopted this more permissive view. On Nov. 9, both of them told national television audiences that counties could offer in-person early voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving — Nov. 26. Three days later, without further public explanation, the secretary changed his position. In a written guidance document sent to Georgia counties on Saturday, Nov. 12, the secretary’s office stated flatly that voting on Saturday, Nov. 26 was prohibited.

Why the change? We don’t know. What we do know is that the new interpretation was incorrect.

As is so often the case, the job of rectifying this wrong — of holding election officials accountable — fell to the courts. Days after the incorrect guidance was given, the Democratic Party and Warnock’s campaign filed a lawsuit in state court. Predictably, the Republican National Committee (RNC), National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and Georgia Republican Party intervened to support the secretary’s wobbly position.

The court process was a rout from start to finish. First, the trial court struck down the secretary’s guidance and repudiated his incorrect interpretation. Both the secretary and GOP appealed, which was then denied. At this point, the secretary could see the writing on the wall, later announcing he would appeal no further, but that did not stop the Republican Party. The RNC, NRSC and Georgia Republican Party filed a last-ditch appeal with the conservative Georgia Supreme Court. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the court unanimously denied this final appeal. 

All told, 13 judges — the majority of whom were appointed by Republican governors — rejected Republicans’ effort to restrict voting. Not a single judge who heard the case or any of its appeals agreed with the secretary or Republican committees.

The result was that 27 counties — both Democratic- and Republican-controlled — held early voting on Saturday, Nov. 26. Over 70,000 voters took advantage of the opportunity, close to the 93,000 vote margin by which Warnock won his 2021 runoff election. In what is expected to be another close election, the ability of counties to have early voting on this Saturday may prove pivotal to the outcome. 

My jaundiced eye reads that as I suspect yours does.

Ron DeSantis is next

A googolplex of pixels already has documented the former president’s dinner last week with Ye (formerly Kanye West) and antisemite-white-supremacist freak show Nick Fuentes. No one is surprised that Trump would entertain such illuminaries at Mar-a-Lago. Nor is anyone convinced by Donald Trump spokespersons’ denials that TFG knew who Fuentes is. Nor by Republican pooh-bahs’ dissembling.

But consider what the hoo-ha says about the Republican Party, says Karen Tumulty. The party that purged Birchers in the 1960s cannot quit Trump. For all their per forma condemnation of his dinner guests’ opinions, Republicans remain loathe to criticize the 76-year-old boy-king himself. Save perhaps for retiring Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R).

The ranks of the GOP’s rank in Congress will be larger come January, Tumulty writes (Washington Post):

And those who have followed Trump’s example in associating themselves with extremists and their ideas will have more clout within the institution. Earlier this year, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) spoke at a conference organized by Fuentes, later claiming (as Trump has about last week’s dinner) that she didn’t know who he was; House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy has promised, if he becomes speaker, to restore her committee assignments, which the Democratic-controlled House stripped the Georgia congresswoman of in 2021 because of her incendiary comments.

Meanwhile, don’t expect much by way of correctives to be offered as the GOP gets ready to elect its next party chair in January. McDaniel, who was handpicked by Trump to run the party after the 2016 election and who has been a model of obeisance to him since, has indicated she plans to run for another term.

pic.twitter.com/77gYkwZwkN

— mike luckovich (@mluckovichajc) November 28, 2022

As for GOP critics of Ye and Fuentes, have they “been in a coma since 2015? [Trump has] been keeping company with extremists, bigots, and charlatans for a long time—since before he entered politics, in fact,” writes David Frum (The Atlantic):

In 2017, Trump was necessary, and so he had to be defended. In 2022, Trump is inconvenient, and so he can be condemned.

But only Trump. There’s going to be no condemnation of Kevin McCarthy for basing his power in the House on the political circle associated with Trump’s dinner guests. McCarthy is necessary, and so he has to be defended.

Necessary as in for maintaining and wielding the power to dominate people they believe their inferiors. The GOP’s moral compass points to power, whatever its blathering about stolen elections, children’s safety, socialism/communism, immigrants, and anyone non-gender-conforming. And its magnetic pole is not simply preserving power for the GOP donor class and white Christian nationalists, but power for power itself. All else is provisional, including preserving our constitutional republic.

The acid test for the GOP base will be Trump’s performance in the first 2024 primaries.

One thing is certain: If Trump does repeat that primary performance, if he can rally GOP voters in 2024 and oppose the big money, if all those Trump loyalists who took control of state party organizations in the 2010s stay loyal in the 2020s, then Trump can be sure that the condemnation by rich and connected Republicans of his dinner with Fuentes will vanish—poof! The condemnation is a ploy, not a principle.

If Trump proves he still has the juice in 2024, the GOP rank-and-file will, compasses in hand, go along to get along. And should Trump falter, the principled flock will pivot to follow Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) as swiftly as a murmuration of starlings.

“Richard Nixon once instructed a new staffer, Richard Whalen,” historian Rick Perlstein wrote in 2005, “‘Flexibility is the first principle of politics.'” 

It’s complicated

The NY Times looks at the inside story on the DOJ’s decision to name a Special Counsel in the Trump probes:

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, a stoic former federal judge intent on restoring rule-of-law order at the Justice Department, gradually came to accept that he would need to appoint a special counsel to investigate Donald J. Trump if the former president ran for the White House again.

But that did not mean he liked doing it.

Mr. Garland made it clear from the start that he was not inclined to tap outsiders to run investigations and indicated that the department was perfectly capable of functioning as an impartial arbiter in the two criminal inquiries involving Mr. Trump, according to several people familiar with the situation.

But the appointment of a special counsel, Jack Smith, on Nov. 18, and a painstakingly planned rollout of the announcement, signaled a significant, if subtle, shift in that approach. Mr. Garland has shown a growing willingness to operate outside his comfort zone — within the confines of the rule book — in response to the extraordinary circumstance he now finds himself in: investigating Mr. Trump, a top contender for the 2024 nomination of a party that is increasingly rallying around the charge that Mr. Garland has weaponized the Justice Department against Republicans.

“There is a political dimension that can’t be ignored — this is an investigation that is being used by the target and his allies as a mobilization moment in a political campaign,” said Daniel C. Richman, a former federal prosecutor and a law professor at Columbia University. “That’s why you are seeing the department leaning forward in making these moves, and getting as much detailed information about an ongoing investigation out there as it can.”

In studying how to proceed, Mr. Garland has tried to steer clear of issuing the unusual public statements favored by the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey during the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails, believing that those actions, and political meddling during the Trump administration, violated department protocols.

The department’s leaders have, however, tried to counter Mr. Trump’s claims that they are engaged in a partisan witch hunt intended to destroy him.

Top officials, led by Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco, have leveraged Mr. Trump’s court challenges in the investigation into his handling of sensitive government documents as an opportunity to broadcast previously hidden details, while adhering to department policy.

The Justice Department did not officially support the effort to unseal the affidavit used to obtain the warrant for the search of Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club and residence in August. But when Mr. Trump’s lawyers did not oppose that bid, department officials seized the moment, and used the filing to offer a detailed timeline of Mr. Trump’s actions that established the public narrative of the case.

After Mr. Trump sought an independent review of documents retrieved from Mar-a-Lago, department lawyers discussed sharing several photographs of the seized records to provide visual proof that Mr. Trump had not fully complied with a subpoena in May that required the documents’ return, according to people familiar with the situation.

Mr. Garland signed off on the decision to release a single picture of the files, some bearing high-level classification markings, arrayed on the floor of Mr. Trump’s office — now the defining image of the investigation.

He cast the appointment of Mr. Smith as voluntary, but compulsory, dictated by the section of the law that allows an attorney general to install a special counsel under “extraordinary circumstances.”

Mr. Garland appears to view Mr. Smith as more of an internal decision maker than a public buffer: The attorney general intends to follow the letter of the statute, and will most likely accept Mr. Smith’s findings unless his conclusions are “inappropriate or unwarranted” under the department’s precedents, a person familiar with his thinking said.

Already, Mr. Garland is dealing with two comparable cases, both inherited from the Trump administration, and in each he has appeared inclined to abide by the decisions of the special counsels overseeing the investigations.

Mr. Garland did not, for instance, overrule John H. Durham, appointed under Attorney General William P. Barr to investigate the F.B.I.’s inquiry into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia, when he brought two criminal cases, now widely seen as flimsy, that resulted in acquittals. He has also kept an arm’s length from the investigation of President Biden’s son Hunter by a Trump appointee, David C. Weiss, the top federal prosecutor in Delaware, even though he rejected the idea of appointing a special counsel.

Mr. Smith, who once led the department’s public integrity unit, will oversee the day-to-day operations of the documents investigation, and of the investigation into Mr. Trump’s bid to cling to power after his electoral defeat in 2020. He will decide whether to prosecute, but Mr. Garland has the power to overrule the decision. He could also produce a report, which the attorney general could choose to make public.

Appointing a special counsel was briefly considered under a menu of options by prosecutors handling the case in the fall of 2021, when the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington began examining Mr. Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6 attack, according to people familiar with the situation.

It was taken up more seriously after F.B.I. agents searched Mr. Trump’s residence on Aug. 8, but Mr. Garland and his aides intensively discussed the option as the midterm elections neared. The final decision was prompted by Mr. Trump’s announcement this month that he planned to run again, and Mr. Biden’s suggestion that he would seek re-election.

Mr. Smith has been on the Justice Department’s radar for a while. One former official described him as a “golden unicorn” — a former prosecutor with three decades of experience investigating politicians and war criminals who is registered as an independent.

Another selling point: Mr. Smith’s time abroad during most of Mr. Trump’s administration. Since 2018, he has worked as a war crimes prosecutor in The Hague and can credibly claim to be approaching the investigations with an outsider’s perspective.

The appointment also merged two sprawling investigations, involving dozens of prosecutors operating on separate tracks, under a single supervisor, Mr. Smith.

Department officials emphasized that Mr. Smith would not start from scratch but would bring existing investigations to their conclusion and develop potential links between the two lines of inquiry.

The documents case appears to be proceeding more quickly than the Jan. 6 investigation. Public filings and interactions between law enforcement officials and defense lawyers indicate that a lot of work remains, and law enforcement officials with knowledge of the investigation emphasized that the department was unlikely to sign off on charges unless it was convinced that it would prevail in court.

Evidence made public points to a case based on a section of the Espionage Act, which makes it a crime to mishandle closely held national defense information — and a potential obstruction of justice charge stemming from the former president’s refusal to comply with the subpoena in May.

“The obstruction charge looks more and more to be the most compelling charge for the government to bring,” said David H. Laufman, the former chief of the counterintelligence unit of the Justice Department, which is leading the Mar-a-Lago investigation.

One of the biggest questions Mr. Smith is likely to face is whether prosecutors would consider bringing only an obstruction case without addressing the underlying possibility of an Espionage Act violation. Some prosecutors see that as the most straightforward path to a prosecution. Mr. Garland’s announcement of a special counsel referred to obstruction three times.

If Mr. Smith’s appointment shifted operational responsibility for the investigation, it did little to take the pressure off Mr. Garland.

The appointment is likely to offer limited protection from a coming partisan siege. The new Republican majority in the House has pledged to investigate what it has described as the “politicization” of the Justice Department, including “the department’s unprecedented raid on President Trump’s residence.”

Mr. Trump wasted little time trying to undermine confidence in Mr. Smith’s impartiality after it was disclosed that his wife served as a producer on a Michelle Obama documentary and donated $2,000 to Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign.

[…]

In public, Mr. Garland has forcefully rejected suggestions that external political forces have influenced any of his decisions, and he has gone to extremes to avoid the slightest appearance of partisanship.

In October, he initially pulled out of a convention of police chiefs in Dallas when his staff flagged concerns that it could be interpreted as a violation of his ban on political speech in an election year, according to a person involved in organizing the event. He eventually attended, but only after his aides reconsidered the decision.

Mr. Garland’s critics on the left have also expressed concerns about Mr. Smith’s appointment, contending it would delay a decision on the cases until after the 2024 campaign.

Mr. Garland resisted that characterization, and Mr. Smith, who is recovering from a knee injury in the Netherlands, issued an even more emphatic statement, saying that the “pace of the investigations will not pause or flag under my watch.”

If the rollout seemed to outsiders like a typically scripted statement, it was seen by the attorney general’s allies as a sign, albeit a modest one, that he is willing to make adjustments to confront the challenges ahead.

Mr. Garland waited three days before delivering a brief public explanation for the search of Mr. Trump’s Florida estate in August, giving the former president’s supporters time to spread vitriol and conspiracy theories.

When he appeared before cameras to announce Mr. Smith’s appointment three months later, he seemed determined not to repeat the delay, offering a far more expansive statement an hour after he had signed the order.

“Appointing a special counsel here is the right thing to do,” Mr. Garland said.

I guess I can understand why they felt the need to do this. But if they think it actually insulates them from the right wing attacks they are fooling themselves. I have to assume they know that.

Right?

In the words of your friends and neighbors

I couldn’t agree with these people more. WTF???

And get ready for a wild Lame Duck session

The agenda is massive:

After Democrats lost the House in 2010, Congress passed a slew of major legislation before Democrats ceded the chamber to Republicans: a bipartisan tax deal, a bill aiding 9/11 first responders and legislation repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

The agenda as lawmakers return to Washington after the Thanksgiving break is almost as ambitious.

But Congress also needs to pass more routine legislation in coming months, which could consume enough time and energy to keep Democrats from taking up other priorities during their final months in control of the House.

Lawmakers’ most important task is to pass a spending bill — either an omnibus or a continuing resolution — to keep the government running. This would be the last such bill hashed out in part by retiring Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), both of whom are veteran appropriators.

President Biden has also asked for nearly $40 billion in aid for Ukraine and $9 billion worth of covid funding. The Ukraine aid is a priority for most lawmakers, but Republicans have been opposed to coughing up more coronavirus aid money and have blocked it for months.

Congress also needs to pass the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the annual military funding bill that has been passed every year for more than six decades. Lawmakers are way behind this year. The Senate hasn’t voted on its version of the bill yet, and the conference committee tends to be a lengthy process.

But Democrats (and some Republicans) are also eyeing more ambitious targets in the four-week lame-duck session. Here’s a look at what could happen:

Protecting same-sex marriage rights: This is the easiest lift. The Senate voted 62 to 37 before heading home for Thanksgiving to advance legislation to codify the right to same-sex marriage, months after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization suggested it could be at risk. The chamber is expected to pass it this week, sending it back to the House and then to Biden’s desk.

Revising the Electoral Count Act: Nearly 40 senators — including 16 Republicans — have signed on to a bill introduced in July by Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) to revise the Electoral Count Act, the 1887 law whose ambiguities Donald Trump tried to exploit to overturn the 2020 election results. In theory, that should give the measure enough support to overcome a Republican filibuster. In practice, the Senate is running out of time.

The House also passed its own version of the bill in September drafted by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), so the two chambers would need to reconcile the bills — or the House could just pass the Senate bill. In a “Dear Colleague” letter on Sunday, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) wrote that House Democrats “ought to take swift action to ensure that we secure reforms to our electoral count system” if the Senate passes its bill.

Given the time constraints, one way to pass the measure would be to attach it to a must-pass bill like the government funding legislation or the NDAA. (Attaching it to a larger bill would also avoid a messy amendment process.)

The House also passed its own version of the bill in September drafted by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), so the two chambers would need to reconcile the bills — or the House could just pass the Senate bill. In a “Dear Colleague” letter on Sunday, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) wrote that House Democrats “ought to take swift action to ensure that we secure reforms to our electoral count system” if the Senate passes its bill.

Given the time constraints, one way to pass the measure would be to attach it to a must-pass bill like the government funding legislation or the NDAA. (Attaching it to a larger bill would also avoid a messy amendment process.)

Raising the debt limit: The debt limit won’t need to be raised until next year. But with Republicans warning they plan to use it as leverage for spending cuts or other policy demands, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and other Democrats are calling for it to be dealt with now while the party still controls Congress. While such a move would deprive House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who’s in line to be speaker, of a potential weapon, it would also remove the burden of raising the debt limit next year with Democratic votes.

Dealing with a potential rail strike: One threat to Congress’s productivity over the next four weeks: the possibility that lawmakers will need to intervene to prevent a crippling railroad strike ahead of the holiday. Negotiations between railroad unions and companies are ongoing, but Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) vowed on “Fox News Sunday” that Congress wouldn’t let a strike happen. Passing legislation to prevent a strike would eat up precious time, though. “I think the whole ballgame right now is the rail strike to be honest,” said Rich Gold, the leader of Holland & Knight’s public policy and regulation group. “That’s going to determine how everything else goes, in terms of how much time that sucks out of the air.”

Extending tax breaks: Tax extenders — which prevent certain tax breaks from expiring on the books — are traditional lame-duck fare. One of the big ones up for extension this year is known as research-and-development amortization. The 2018 Republican tax law required companies to amortize their expenses over five years as a way to help pay for the costs of the bill’s tax cuts — starting Jan. 1, 2022. Much of corporate America is pushing to delay this change until 2026 (when it can presumably be delayed again).

Other K Street priorities: There are only so many must-pass bills to which lobbyists can try to attach their clients’ priorities, so each one is an opportunity. The Coalition for 1099-K Fairness, for instance — members include Airbnb, eBay and Etsy — is pressing for Congress to change a provision in the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that Biden signed last year. The bill would send a 1099-K tax form to people who have sold as little as $600 of goods online in a year, down from a previous threshold of $20,000 and 200 sales. “Unless Congress acts, this is going to be a significant burden on individual taxpayers and start-ups” said Arshi Siddiqui, a lobbyist for the coalition.

Confirming more judges: Confirming as many of Biden’s judicial nominees as possible isn’t as urgent a priority as it would have been if Democrats had lost the Senate, but Democratic senators are still under pressure to move some nominees, in part, because they would have to be renominated in the new Congress.

There are about two dozen nominees who have already received Senate Judiciary Committee votes. “We believe the nominees who have been waiting the longest should be prioritized, and it might be possible to confirm all 24 of them, especially since seven even have the support of their Republican home-state senators,” Christopher Kang, the chief counsel for Demand Justice, a liberal judicial advocacy group, wrote in an email to The Early.

There are about two dozen nominees who have already received Senate Judiciary Committee votes. “We believe the nominees who have been waiting the longest should be prioritized, and it might be possible to confirm all 24 of them, especially since seven even have the support of their Republican home-state senators,” Christopher Kang, the chief counsel for Demand Justice, a liberal judicial advocacy group, wrote in an email to The Early.

Other Democratic priorities: There are other bills Democrats would love to pass before they lose control of the House, such as potential deals to revive the expanded child tax credit and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to allow undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children to remain. Biden also said on Thanksgiving that he would try again to pass an assault weapons ban, although the House passed such a bill in July and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that it probably doesn’t have 60 votes in the Senate. All these efforts are long shots.

They need to eliminate the debt ceiling or at least raise it for several years.The Republicans will happily bring down the world economy to own the libs if they get the chance.

The nuts are in charge

Good luck:

Democrats just spent two harrowing years navigating one of the tiniest majorities in House history. Now it’s the GOP’s turn — and things could get even worse.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and his team are set to take over in January with the kind of margins that vexed Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but lacking the two decades of experience she brought to the task.

And the House GOP will have to steer legislation through with as few as four votes to spare while its leaders deal with an emboldened Freedom Caucus, internal finger-pointing over a disappointing midterm cycle, and a looming brawl over a 2024 presidential primary that features Donald Trump back in the mix.

“I don’t lie awake at night worrying about the bad legislation they are going to pass. Because I don’t think they’re going to pass it,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.).

Awaiting the outcome of just one true toss-up race, Republicans will have a majority of either four or five — giving McCarthy the sparest of margins of any other Congress at the start of its term since 1931. Not to mention that he’s already vowed to do away with Pelosi-era proxy voting, making every potential absence a new challenge.

That means governing will be a 24/7 obstacle course for House Republicans who are already facing big questions about their agenda next year, from abortion policy to Ukraine aid to impeaching President Joe Biden and some Cabinet members. As Democrats prepare their retreat into the minority, many are less-than-fondly recalling their own two years of vote-wrangling and floor delays while wishing their GOP colleagues luck.

“It was wonderful,” quipped Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.), a member of Pelosi’s whip team who remembered countless after-midnight phone calls this Congress to lock down votes for many of his party’s huge bills. “That was a regular routine, as a matter of fact.”

Democrats say if there’s anything they learned over the past two years, when they, too, navigated a historically minuscule majority, it’s just how fragile those numbers can be. While Pelosi and her caucus started out with a 10-seat margin in January 2021, it was whittled down to as few as three votes during those two years.

Some Democrats said they’re unconvinced the GOP conference can exhibit the same exacting discipline that it took their party to pass everything from a policing package to Pentagon funding to even their own Democratic budget. Thanks to Pelosi, her party ultimately passed several huge bills, including President Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar health, tax and climate package, with less than a handful of votes to spare.

“They’re going to be fraught with fractures and friction and challenges and apostates. I wish them well in trying to manage that crowd,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.).

And Connolly, who served in the minority under previous GOP leadership struggles, cautioned that McCarthy could have even more problems managing the conference over the next two years than his most recent predecessors, both of whom struggled with Freedom Caucus rebellions: “Paul Ryan and John Boehner both had a bigger majority, and they couldn’t exercise control.”

They have nothing they even want to pass so that’s not an issue. The real issue is how far they will go with their inane investigations. I suspect that Kevin will defer to Trump and put Marjorie Taylor Green in charge of that and they will go all the way. I don’t think the Dems will be completely unscathed but it’s likely the Republicans will hurt themselves more in the process.

My guess is that McCarthy isn’t even going to try to contain them. So buckle up.

And think about this ….

A swing of 3,340 votes from GOP to Dem in the 5 closest House races would have allowed Dems to hold the House.

— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) November 27, 2022

Ayayayayay….