Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

He hates Trump but he just couldn’t quit him

Michelle Goldberg read the new Michael Wolfe book about the malevolent Rupert Murdoch which was perfectly timed to coincide with Rupert’s retirement:

In his tortured enabling of Trump, Murdoch seems the ultimate symbol of a feckless and craven conservative establishment, overmatched by the jingoist forces it encouraged and either capitulating to the ex-president or shuffling pitifully off the public stage. “Murdoch was as passionate in his Trump revulsion as any helpless liberal,” writes Wolff. The difference is that Murdoch’s helplessness was a choice.

Few people bear more responsibility for Trump than Murdoch. Fox News gave Trump a regular platform for his racist lies about Barack Obama’s birthplace. It immersed its audience in a febrile fantasy world in which all mainstream sources of information are suspect, a precondition for Trump’s rise. (Many people have described losing loved ones to Fox’s all-consuming alternative reality.) After Trump lost in 2020, Fox helped spread the defeated president’s falsehoods about a stolen election, which both contributed to the Jan. 6 insurrection and cost Fox nearly $800 million in its settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. (It was as part of that settlement, Wolff writes, that Fox fired its biggest star, the demagogic troll Tucker Carlson.)

In Wolff’s telling, Murdoch is a sort of hapless Frankenstein, abominating the monster he set loose on the world but unsure how to fight him. This waffling, however, is a product of the same venality that has always undergirded Murdoch’s old-fashioned right-wing politics. In his farewell letter, Murdoch, the Oxford-educated son of a wealthy Australian media executive, poses as a populist, decrying a media that’s in “cahoots” with elites, “peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.” This is pure projection: Fox exists to peddle self-serving political narratives, deceiving its audience under the guise of respecting it. In “The Fall” — a book that isn’t for anyone who doesn’t want to encounter casual slurs — Murdoch says of the celebrity anchor Sean Hannity, “He’s retarded, like most Americans.” The last thing Murdoch wants to do is risk lower ratings by leveling with the audience he looks down on.

Yes, Trump was briefly banished from Fox’s airwaves, and Murdoch championed Trump’s putative rival, Ron DeSantis. But with DeSantis’s star falling, Fox has slavishly defended Trump each time he’s been indicted, while ignoring or minimizing news putting Trump in a bad light. As of May 4, the liberal group Media Matters found, Fox had devoted a mere 13 minutes of airtime to Trump’s civil trial on charges of sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll. “It was clear how much antipathy Murdoch had personally built up toward Trump,” writes Wolff. “But at the same time there was no change in his expectations as the owner of the country’s ratings-leading news channel.”

Though “The Fall” is peppered with references to HBO’s “Succession,” Murdoch comes off as the anti-Logan Roy, desperate for the approval of his mostly liberal children, with the hateful Fox News standing between them. “He just wants his kids to love him,” Roger Ailes is quoted saying. “And they don’t.” In a chapter set in the winter of 2022, Wolff describes Murdoch fantasizing about giving up Fox, which his friends urge him to do. They emphasize “how much better his relationship with his children would be without the curse of Fox News.”

But breaking that curse would have meant turning Fox over to his son James, who feels the stain of Fox especially acutely and longs to remake it into a “force for good,” a phrase Wolff repeats with contempt. “James had become the avenging Murdoch — avenging what his family had wrought,” writes Wolff. “It was not enough to save himself and his family and the Murdoch brand from Fox. He had to save the nation.” Wolff sneers at James’s grandiosity, but if Rupert Murdoch truly wanted a redemptive final act, his younger son was probably the only one who could have given it to him.

Instead, Murdoch has done the predictable thing and handed Fox to his son Lachlan, chief executive of the Fox Corporation, widely seen as the only true conservative among the Murdoch heirs. Wolff challenges the common perception of Lachlan as a right-wing ideologue, painting him instead as essentially apolitical and mostly interested in spear fishing. Nevertheless, of the Murdoch children, Lachlan is the one most likely to let Fox continue in its current groove. The network may keep boosting Trump’s Republican primary opponents, but once the primaries are over, we can expect it to once again be the lucrative propaganda arm of Trump’s presidential campaign.

As long as Murdoch is alive, the future of Fox is unwritten. Once he dies, his four oldest children will determine who controls it, and James may yet prevail. But Murdoch’s legacy is decided. We are hurtling toward another government shutdown, egged on by Hannity. The electorate that Fox helped shape, and the politicians it indulges, have made this country ungovernable. An unbound Trump may well become president again, bringing liberal democracy in America to a grotesque end. If so, it will be in large part Murdoch’s fault. “The Murdochs feel bad, about Tucker, about Trump, about themselves,” writes Wolff. Just not bad enough.

I doubt they actually feel “bad.” I suspect they may feel slightly embarrassed because they have to defend what they’ve done when dealing with people around the world. But that’s about it.

As soon as Rupert kicks the bucket, the fight will begin and I think the smart money is on the kids selling it off. Then, who knows what will happen? I would say it might be worse but it’s hard to imagine how that’s possible. When it comes to destructive capitalism, nobody puts Rupert in the corner.

Or can it?

What’s the most important issue in all of Washington right now? You just won’t believe it:

While the House struggles to fund the government, the Senate has spent the week bitterly debating John Fetterman’s cargo shorts. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s decision to loosen the dress code, which allowed the Pennsylvania senator to preside over the chamber in a short-sleeved work shirt, has prompted a wave of criticism from Republicans, nonstop coverage at Fox News, and now internal caucus divisions as well.

“I can’t understand exactly what he was thinking at that point,” Schumer’s top deputy Dick Durbin, D-Ill. said on SiriusXM. “I want to give him the benefit of the doubt until I speak to him, but I think the Senate needs to act on this.” They could get their chance soon: Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. is filing a bipartisan resolution next week to “ensure the Senate dress code remains consistent with previous expectations,” a spokesman told NBC News. As for Fetterman, he’s happily selling campaign merch with conservative criticism of his “disgusting” hoodies printed on it.

Sometimes I think they’re just doing this stuff to troll us. It just can’t be real.

When someone denies that the right wing sets the agenda point them to this.

(And WTF has happened to Dick Durbin?)

ProPublica is back with more

The deck on ProPublica’s latest expose on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas:

Thomas has attended at least two Koch donor summits, putting him in the extraordinary position of having helped a political network that has brought multiple cases before the Supreme Court.

Thomas flew into the weekend 2018 Koch summit in Palm Springs aboard a Gulfstream G200 jet. “A Koch network spokesperson said the network did not pay for the private jet.” Since Thomas never disclosed the trip, ProPublica cannot say who did.

Pay. To. Play. https://t.co/6n9z1AHsHM

— Dahlia Lithwick (@Dahlialithwick) September 22, 2023

“I can’t imagine — it takes my breath away, frankly — that he would go to a Koch network event for donors,” said John E. Jones III, a retired federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush. Jones said that if he had gone to a Koch summit as a district court judge, “I’d have gotten a letter that would’ve commenced a disciplinary proceeding.”

“What you’re seeing is a slow creep toward unethical behavior. Do it if you can get away with it,” Jones said.

It’s not clear how to read that last sentence, but U.S. Supreme Court Justices police their own behavior and do not have to abide by the code of conduct others in the federal judiciary must.

And, yes, the libertarian Koch has a case working its way to Thomas:

The Koch network is among the largest and most influential political organizations of the last half century, and it’s underwritten a far-reaching campaign to influence the course of American law. In a case the Supreme Court will hear this coming term, the justices could give the network a historic victory: limiting federal agencies’ power to issue regulations in areas ranging from the environment to labor rights to consumer protection. After shepherding the case to the court, Koch network staff attorneys are now asking the justices to overturn a decades-old precedent. (Thomas used to support the precedent but flipped his position in recent years.)

Two years ago, one of the network’s groups was the plaintiff in another Supreme Court case, which was about nonprofits’ ability to keep their donors secret. In that case, Thomas sided with the 6-3 conservative majority in the Koch group’s favor.

Charles Koch did not respond to detailed questions for this story. David Koch died in 2019.

Thomas has appeared at at least one dinner for top-tier donors, those who donate “in the millions” each year to the Koch network.

“These donors found it fascinating,” said another former senior employee, recounting a Thomas appearance at one summit where the justice discussed his judicial philosophy. “Donors want to feel special. They want to feel on the inside.”

It’s hard to be more inside than First of Nine. Unless it’s elite members of the Bohemian Grove, “an all-male retreat that attracts some of the nation’s most influential corporate and political figures. Thomas has been a regular at the Grove for 25 years as Harlan Crow’s guest, according to internal documents and interviews with dozens of members, other guests and workers at the retreat.”

Here’s another by-now familiar name associated with the Koch summits:

Thomas’ appearances were arranged with the help of Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society leader, according to the former senior network employee. “Leonard was the conduit who would get him,” the former employee said. During one summit, Thomas gave a talk with Leo in an interview format, the donor recalled.

“Justice Thomas attends events all over the country, as do all the Justices, and I was privileged to join him,” Leo said in a statement in response to questions about the Koch donor events. “All the necessary due diligence was performed to ensure the Justice’s attendance at the events was compliant with all ethics requirements.”

The network’s plans in 2018 were to “buy advertisements to push senators to vote for President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees.”

Thomas will just keep his head down and try to weather yet another round of unwanted scrutiny.

Biden preps for a rematch with the GOP’s might-be candidate

The New York Times informs readers that Team Biden is already assuming “Scranton Joe” Biden will face a rematch with Don “The Con” Trump. Cue the “Rocky” training music:

The sharpened focus on Mr. Trump isn’t happening only behind the scenes. Facing waves of polls showing soft support for his re-election among Democrats, Mr. Biden and his advisers signaled this week that they were beginning to turn their full attention to his old rival, seeking to re-energize the party’s base and activate donors ahead of what is expected to be a long and grueling sequel.

Team Biden wants to nudge Democrats past their handwringing phase, David Axelrod says, “into a shared sense of mission.” Because “We can’t live like this!” as Adrian told Rocky on the beach.

“Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy,” the president said. “And I will always defend, protect and fight for our democracy. That’s why I’m running.”

Mr. Biden is planning to follow up those off-camera remarks with what he has billed as a “major speech” about democracy. The White House said the speech, in the Phoenix area the day after the next Republican debate, would be about “honoring the legacy of Senator John McCain and the work we must do together to strengthen our democracy.”

Real real America (not the proto-fascist movement backing Trump) gets that democracy is at stake, not anodyne kitchen table issues. Former GOP strategist Rick Wilson gets that democracy and liberty are at stake. “[A]lmost 600 retired Generals, Admirals, Ambassadors, cabinet and service secretaries, appointed leaders, elected officials, and Senior Executive Service leaders” understand that “Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy.” Voters knew it in 2018, 2020, and 2022. Those are the only polls that matter and will again in 2024.

What’s in question is whether Trump actually will be on the ballot next year. Even his critics are waffling on the 14th Amendment:

A little more than a month ago, a law professor who helped found the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, enthusiastically endorsed a new law review article arguing that Donald J. Trump was ineligible to be president.

Citing a Wall Street Journal opinion article by Michael B. Mukasey, Steven G. Calabresi has since had a change of heart.

I won’t bother you with Mukasey’s position on the 14th Amendment. Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale, on his podcast called it “a genuinely stupid argument.”

Adam Liptak of the Times:

Professor Calabresi is, of course, entitled to change his mind. As Justice Felix Frankfurter put it in a 1949 dissent, “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.”

In an interview on Saturday, Professor Calabresi said his revised position was the product of study and reflection.

“I carefully reread the materials on whether Section 3 of the 14th Amendment applies to Trump,” he said, “and concluded that it most likely does not.”

He added that politics had not figured in his thinking. “I will support,” he said, “any Republican or Joe Biden over Trump in the 2024 election.”

Or perhaps Calabresi woke up with a horse head in his bed.

For now, Team Biden is training as if Trump will somehow manage to appear atop the GOP’s ticket in all 50 states. Best not to underestimate that slippery character.

Let’s not pretend otherwise

🚨 BREAKING: Our video has now been seen by over 1.8 million people.

We must stop MAGA fascism. Share this and chip in to help this ad get on air at the next GOP debate: https://t.co/8dvjb4tsxC pic.twitter.com/yEC8WdL9pk

— Mission: Democracy (@MissnDemocracy) September 20, 2023

Look what’s going on:

A Republican candidate for Missouri governor on Monday vowed to burn books if elected after he was criticized for a video showing him burning cardboard boxes with a flamethrower.

The video, which has gone viral on social media, shows state Sen. Bill Eigel, a Weldon Spring Republican who is running for governor in 2024, and state Sen. Nick Schroer, a St. Charles Republican, using flamethrowers to torch a stack of boxes at a fundraising event in Defiance in St. Charles County on Friday.

“In the video, I am taking a flame thrower to cardboard boxes representing what I am going to do to the leftist policies and RINO corruption of the Jeff City swamp,” Eigel said in a statement to The Star on Monday. “But let’s be clear, you bring those woke pornographic books to Missouri schools to try to brainwash our kids, and I’ll burn those too – on the front lawn of the governor’s mansion.”

Eigel’s remarkable comment promising to burn books comes as he embarks on a campaign for governor attempting to appeal to the staunch right wing of the Missouri Republican Party.

Public book burnings typically illustrate extreme censorship related to political, cultural and religious materials. They often invoke historic atrocities such as burning of Jewish texts in Nazi Germany or racist bonfires by the Ku Klux Klan. Eigel will face a primary that features two of the state’s top Republicans, Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe.

Photos and video of Eigel and Schroer using the flamethrowers have been shared hundreds of times on social media over the past two days. House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, a Springfield Democrat who is running for governor, in a statement criticized Eigel saying that he and his “extremist allies’ idea of campaigning for governor is using a flamethrower to burn whatever he doesn’t agree with.” “Watching lawmakers use flamethrowers to intimidate folks they disagree with is a jarring reminder of how they view their jobs as a joke, while real people suffer from their cruelty,” Quade said. “We deserve a government that’s going to work to solve real problems, not make political stunts.”

Schroer, reached by phone on Monday, said the video was taken during an event called Freedom Fest hosted by the St. Charles County Republican Central Committee. He and Eigel were burning empty boxes to help the committee raffle off a flamethrower, he said. The Republican state senator criticized those who said he was burning books, saying that they were spreading false information. Schroer on Friday shared a photo of himself using the flamethrower, saying he was “Burning down the swamp!”

Democrats and liberal activists on the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, also quickly condemned the video, accusing the Republicans of simulating the burning of books. Some incorrectly said the two lawmakers were actively burning books. “Next time, don’t forget your hoods…inhaling fumes from burning books and crosses is noxious business,” Jess Piper, the executive director of Blue Missouri, a group that fundraises for Democrats, wrote in response to one of the videos, drawing a comparison to burnings by the Ku Klux Klan.

Debbie McFarland, a committee member and organizer of the event, told The Star that the two Republican senators were burning empty boxes, including trash and empty wine boxes. She painted criticism of the video as a “liberal leftist narrative.” While the boxes that Eigel and Schroer burned were empty, criticism of the video comes as some Missouri Republicans have targeted book content. This year, House Republicans agreed to cut from the state budget $4.5 million for libraries in retaliation for a lawsuit on behalf of two library groups challenging a new state law that bans certain materials in school libraries. Those funds were later restored in the Senate this year. Eigel on Monday posted another angle of the video on social media, calling on people to visit his campaign’s website “to fight back against these woke radicals.”

I don’t know if that freak will actually burn books on the lawn of the Governor’s mansion. Lets hope he doesn’t win that election. But the sentiment is common on the right right now and it’s disgusting.

It’s been years since I raged at Joe Klein, mostly because I blessedly never come across anything by him anymore. Unfortunately, he has a substack and it came to my attention today. Nothing has changed. He’s still the hippie bashing piece of work he always was.

Get a load of this:

A metaphor that applies to my current political dismay: I am annoyed by Joe Biden but I am appalled by Donald Trump.

Why is that a metaphor? Because I am annoyed, chronically, by the Democratic Party but appalled, mortally, by the Republicans.

Which raises a question: I haven’t toted up the word count, but I suspect that I spend a lot more space criticizing Dems than GOPs. Why is that?

Well, because it seems in these DysTrumpian times, the Democrats are the only hope of saving our democracy, despite their idiot array of indulgences. They are misguided, but not fundamentally irrational. They believe in our institutions, even those—like the Supreme Court and the electoral college—that are weighted against them; even those—like the military—that they really don’t believe in. There is always the hope that a compelling argument made by the Sanity Caucus (which includes members of both parties) will have an impact on rational Dems. But rational Republicans I’ve known—I’m looking at you Lamar Alexander and Rob Portman—have been struck dumb, utter cowards in the face of Trump, even though they’ve retired from politics and have nothing to lose.

Why the silence in the face of an authoritarian who threatens our freedom? Their mute buttons are still turned on, impenetrable and irresponsible. They are a lost cause. So, I tend to write about Biden’s age more than Trump’s sociopathy, and about the Dems’ identity and woke obsessions more than the Republicans’ fundamental corruption. Because the Dems have to find a way to 51%, lest we lapse into Hungary or Russia.

That’s awfully helpful, don’t you think? Let’s pound the Democrats and make regular people hate them — so they will beat Donald Trump. How’s that supposed to work?

You know, if you can’t penetrate the right wing bubble then maybe just shut the fuck up.

I swear to God, this drivel is almost as responsible for how we ended up on the precipice of democratic catastrophe as the Republican descent into madness. Centrist jackasses like Klein’s annoyance at liberals is so bothersome to them they just have no choice but to help fascism by pushing “both sides” tropes suggesting that liberals are equally threatening. And then they blame the liberals for failing to stop the fascists.

This was once the dominant strain of thinking among the mainstream media and the Democratic party. Luckily most of them have wised up in the last few years. But Klein carries on, thankfully no longer as a star pundit on every cable news show as he once was, if only for the sake of my blood pressure.

Although supporters stood in the rain for hours to enter, Trump’s rally in Dubuque is not as well attended as past rallies have been. The venue can hold 3,000 people. From my vantage point in the back, accounting for the large press area, I would guess the room is about half full pic.twitter.com/bFWvG6ws8n

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) September 20, 2023

Trump has been speaking for over an hour. His supporters are beginning to leave.

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) September 20, 2023

CNN reports on what he’s selling in Iowa this year:

Trump largely focused his Dubuque speech on immigration and the border. While he did at times call out Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump largely focused on attacking President Joe Biden over what he referred to as the “nation-wrecking catastrophe” on the southern border, describing it as “an invasion.”

The former president also lauded his immigration policies while in office, saying he replaced “catch-and-release” with “detain and deport.” He also argued that Mexico paid for the wall because they supplied the US with soldiers at the border for free.

Trump said that if reelected, his administration would follow “the Eisenhower Model” and carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history, invoking the Alien Enemies Act to remove all known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members from the US.

Trump said his administration would bring back his travel ban, expanding it further, and, without explaining how, he said it would deny “communists and Marxists” from entering the US.

That “Eisenhower model” was called “Operation Wetback.” This is a retread from his 2016 campaign. It won’t be long before he’ll be talking about bullets sipped in pigs blood and cutting off people’s heads. That was the winning message in his first race. He knows he lost the seconds so he’s going back to what works.

It sure looks like they’re going to shutdown the government. What comes next should be very fun:

President Biden has steered clear of the chaos in the lower chamber, but his aides have instead urged McCarthy to stick to the spending deal he struck with Biden back in May. One such aide said, “We agreed to the budget deal…House GOP should abide by it,” and added that their “chaos is making the case that they are responsible if there is a shutdown.” Gaetz was all too ready to lay the blame at McCarthy’s feet should a shutdown occur. On Wednesday afternoon, he said, “We will have a government shutdown and it is absolutely Speaker McCarthy’s fault. We cannot blame Joe Biden for not having moved our individual spending bills. We cannot blame House Democrats. We can’t even blame Chuck Schumer in the Senate.” 

Does Gaetz think he’s going to be the speaker? I’m beginning to think he does. Which is ridiculous.

What does Gaetz want McCarthy to do? He wants him to defund the Jack Smith Special Counsel. He is only following orders:

I think there’s a typo. He meant “use the power of the purse to defund the country”

This is all absurd, of course. You can’t defund the special prosecutor and even if you could the Democratic Senate would not approve it and the president wouldn’t sign it. I assume Trump knows that (although I’m not sure, he learned nothing about how the government works even after four years as president) but he wants the government shut down for so long that the economy will crater and people will blame Biden and vote for him. It’s very stupid but that’s what we’re dealing with.

The mystery as to why a top prosecutor working on the Durham investigation abruptly resigned has been solved. It is exactly what we thought it was:

A former federal prosecutor who helped investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia probe said Wednesday she left the team because of concerns with then-Attorney General William Barr’s public comments about the case and because she strongly disagreed with a draft of an interim report he considered releasing before the election.

“I simply couldn’t be part of it. So I resigned,” Nora Dannehy told Connecticut state legislators during her confirmation hearing as a nominee to the state Supreme Court. It marked the first time Dannehy has spoken publicly about her sudden resignation from the probe overseen by former special counsel John Durham.

Durham, a former U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut, was appointed in the spring of 2019 by Barr to investigate potential wrongdoing by government officials and others in the early days of the FBI probe into ties between the Trump 2016 presidential campaign and Russia. Trump expected the investigation to expose what he and his supporters alleged was a “deep state” conspiracy to undermine his campaign, but the slow pace of the probe – and the lack of blockbuster findings – contributed to a deep wedge between the president and Barr by the time the attorney general resigned in December 2020.

The investigation concluded last May with underwhelming results: A single guilty plea from a little-known FBI lawyer, resulting in probation, and two acquittals at trial by juries.

Dannehy, who was the first woman to serve as U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut, told Connecticut lawmakers that politics had “never played a role” in how she was expected to carry out her job as a federal prosecutor and “that was the Justice Department I thought I was returning to” when she ultimately joined Durham’s team.

“I had been taught and spent my entire career at Department of Justice conducting any investigation in an objective and apolitical manner,” she said. “In the spring and summer of 2020, I had growing concerns that this Russia investigation was not being conducted in that way. Attorney General Barr began to speak more publicly and specifically about the ongoing criminal investigation. I thought these public comments violated DOJ guidelines.”

Dannehy said Barr’s comments were “certainly taken in a political way by reports. Whether he intended that or not, I don’t know.”

She declined to detail what happened during her time with the investigation because it involved highly classified information.

Bill Barr was the biggest partisan hack since Ed Meese in the Reagan administration — maybe John Mitchell, who spent 19 months in jail for his corruption. He’s now a Never Trumper but he was his top henchman for two years. This was an important resignation because it exposed not only Barr’s corruption but Durham’s as well. He had worked with Dannehy for years and when she refused to go along it was a sign that the investigation had gone terribly off the rails.

Here’s the latest on maneuverings to out-maneuver the MAGA crazies:

The long-shot idea that Democrats could bail out the beleaguered Speaker Kevin McCarthy is suddenly getting real.

Small groups of centrist Democrats are holding secret talks with several of McCarthy’s close GOP allies about a last-ditch deal to fund the government, according to more than a half-dozen people familiar with the discussions. The McCarthy allies engaging in those conversations are doing so out of serious concern that their party can’t stop an impending shutdown on its own, given the intransigence of a handful of conservatives.

Lawmakers involved in the talks — who mostly belong to the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, the Republican Governance Group or the centrist New Democrat Coalition — have labored to keep their work quiet. Many Republicans involved are incredibly worried about revealing their backup plan, wanting to wait until every other tool in McCarthy’s arsenal has failed.

That moment may not be until next week, just ahead of the Sept. 30 shutdown deadline.

“It’s got to be bipartisan anyway, at some point,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said of a solution to the shutdown crisis. Referring to the conservative holdouts, he added: “So why negotiate with these five or 10 people who move the goalposts?”

Generally, the bipartisan group is focusing on two major ideas: a procedural maneuver to force a vote on a compromise spending plan — or somehow crafting a bill so popular that McCarthy can pass it and survive any challenge from the right. That bill would likely be a bipartisan short-term patch with some disaster money, Ukraine aid and small-scale border policies, according to multiple people briefed on the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Problem Solvers began showing their framework to members Wednesday, with plans to formally vote on endorsing it by the evening, according to two people familiar with the plans who were granted anonymity to discuss them. Another group, which included top aides for both the New Democrat Coalition and Republican Governance Group, met earlier Wednesday to discuss their own stopgap funding plan, according to three other aides familiar with the situation.

While the talks were borne out of the spending crisis, they have by necessity had to address another glaring problem for the speaker: Whether Democrats are also willing to protect his gavel from a vote to strip it if he ultimately does seek support across the aisle.

Privately, many Democrats say they’re willing to help the Californian with both problems, though they’ll demand concessions — and they’ll need their leader, Hakeem Jeffries, to be on board.

To be clear, any plan devised by these rank-and-file members would face serious hurdles before it got to any possible vote. But the bipartisan McCarthy-bailout conversations have only gained traction as his antagonists keep derailing his other option — a GOP-only spending patch that’s packed with conservative border policies and funding cuts.

Even if the speaker can resuscitate that proposal, Republicans have long known it wouldn’t pass the Senate. Eventually, they’d need to work with Democrats.

Exactly what Democrats could or would demand for their cooperation is unclear. The ultimate decision, they say, will rest with Jeffries, who’s stayed mum about how he’d handle a possible bipartisan compromise. Any questions Jeffries gets about the possibility of a GOP bid to toss the speaker, he bats aside as hypothetical.

(Asked about the possibility by POLITICO on Tuesday, Jeffries said: “House Democrats are focused on making life better for everyday Americans — solving problems on their behalf. House Republicans are focused on fighting each other.”)

Jeffries did huddle privately midday Wednesday with one of the groups involved in the cross-aisle talks: the roughly 60-member Problem Solvers Caucus.

Inside the room, Jeffries signaled he’d be willing to look at the centrist bloc’s various ideas for a solution — including a procedural gambit to pass a stopgap bill if it came to that, according to four people familiar with the situation. He said any short-term plan would need to reflect the bipartisan budget deal reached this spring.

“You’ll be part of the solution, and I’ve been supportive of your efforts in the past,” Jeffries told the group, according to two people familiar with his remarks.

McCarthy’s broken rules of thumb

One day earlier, the Problem Solvers’ two leaders — Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) — were seen entering the office of the House parliamentarian alongside Bacon, a stalwart McCarthy ally.

Those members declined to say what they discussed regarding House rules. But behind the scenes, several options are on the table — including the unlikely choice to pursue a procedural move known as a discharge petition that would force a bill to the floor. (That avenue comes with a strict 30-day timeframe, so it has little chance of preventing a shutdown that’s just 11 days away.)

Bacon later recalled telling a group of roughly 30 Republicans, including members of leadership, during a closed-door meeting this week that he was “done” with GOP-only negotiations, arguing that the handful of holdouts in his party can’t be satisfied.

In a brief interview, McCarthy acknowledged the quiet efforts by centrists in both parties to team up on a spending solution. But he specifically dismissed the idea that any of his Republicans would back a discharge petition that needs a majority of the House to advance.

McCarthy said that his “rule of thumb” while in power has three components: Don’t oppose a rule to debate your party’s bill; support “whoever comes out of the conference for speaker” and do not sign onto a discharge petition.

Several Republicans have broken the first two items on his list, McCarthy added, “and so it has disrupted the entire conference. And people think they can do other things.”

‘If you are a nihilist’

Despite the low likelihood of a discharge petition to fund the government, it is still coming up in closed-door meetings as vulnerable Republicans make it particularly clear that they’re starting to lose patience with the conservative blockade.

Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), who has been involved in the GOP negotiations, alluded to the New York delegation as being “very candid” during internal talks that if Republicans can’t work out a short-term funding deal, “we’re going to sign a discharge petition.”

Two people familiar with those conversations pointed to New York Rep. Mike Lawler, who sits in one of the GOP’s toughest battleground seats, as especially vocal in private meetings about threats to sign a discharge petition.

Asked if he sees an increasing chance of centrists from both parties teaming up as the stalemate continues, Lawler said that “I would like to see the House Republican majority govern” by passing a short-term patch that can start further talks with the Senate.

“But until that happens,” he added, “we need to keep the government funded and operational. And my only comment to my colleagues is: If we want to govern, we need to do so expeditiously.”

The pushback from McCarthy on a possible discharge petition comes after he repeatedly failed to get his own members behind a GOP-only bill that would pair a stopgap funding patch with spending cuts and a Republican border bill. One Republican lawmaker involved in the talks acknowledged that the bipartisan maneuvering could help pressure conservatives to stop resisting any solution.

On the other hand, this lawmaker added, “If you are a nihilist and you want to burn the place down, you don’t care.”

But there are also risks for the Republicans involved in the bipartisan talks. Some conservative colleagues are already warning of political backlash from base voters, given that the very Democrats they are working with want to defeat them next year.

“I don’t relish the prospect that liberal members of the Republican caucus would decide to govern as Democrats with Democrats,” said Bishop, a McCarthy critic who helped sink a defense spending bill this week.

The biggest risk of all in the current cross-aisle conversations, though, is to McCarthy himself.

Helping advance a bipartisan deal would put him past a red line that his most vocal opponents have said could result in a vote to strip his gavel. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) is on record vowing to force that vote if McCarthy brings a “clean” funding bill to the floor.

Bacon urged the speaker to stand firm: “We should ignore it. You can’t kowtow to that.”

What a tangled web they weave. It makes sense to try to cut out Gaetz and his cronies because they just want to blow the place up which the majority of the GOP thinks might not be a great way to get re-elected. But if Democrats bail out McCarthy is there any way he could possibly lead the caucus? I keep saying that he’s the only game in town, which is true, but how can he function under these conditions? Of course, he really isn’t functioning now, is he?

Hopefully whatever deal they come up with mirrors the deal that was already hashed out last spring for the debt ceiling or the Democrats are going to have their own challenges. The centrist “problem solvers” may have their own agenda. If it’s that “bipartisan short-term patch with some disaster money, Ukraine aid and small-scale border policies” I doubt there will be a ton of objections.

Stay tuned. None of this may add up to much. There are so many moving parts that it’s hard to see how it might come together. If it does the repercussions are going to be something to behold. Imagine what Trump will say!