Going for Gold 🌻 🌻 🌻

Tick Tock 💣 💣 💣:  Despite earlier assertions that the debt ceiling negotiations were going well, they hit a major stumbling block on Friday after Republican negotiators called for a bigly PAUSE.  Republicans are seeking serious budget cuts, caps on future spending and work requirements for certain recipients of food subsidies that go far beyond what President Biden and his Democratic caucus are willing to accept. Unfortunately, the impasse isn’t all that surprising because Biden isn’t willing to throw his agenda to the wayside and McCarthy has no wiggle room, there’s little he can concede without losing the support of some members of his caucus who likely would revel in the disaster of the US defaulting of its obligations.  Given the rules McCarthy accepted to become speaker, any one Republican can trigger a vote to send him packing and there likely are a few who’d be happy to do that.  That’s not to say that he couldn’t survive a compromise, with the support of Democratic leadership, a deal could be worked out for a few Democrats to vote for him if his Speakership is put up for a vote again, but it doesn’t appear that McCarthy is ready to go that route yet.  Over the weekend Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin reiterated that she’s not being an alarmist, the debt ceiling really will be “hit” on or around June 1.  Confirming that she’s not crying wolf,  Goldman Sachs puts the disaster date at June 8, hardly a lot of wiggle room. Citing a clause in the 14^th Amendment that states that the “validity of the public debt, authorized by law …. Shall not be questioned” some, mostly on the left have suggested that Biden doesn’t need the debt limit raised to authorize the issuance of more debt.  However, that interpretation is not a certainty, any debt issuance that Biden does by fiat would be challenged in the courts and anyone purchasing the Treasury bills issued after the debt ceiling has been reached would demand a hefty premium in compensation for the added risk. The bottom line, our goose is cooked if an agreement isn’t reached soon.  The President is scheduled to meet with Speaker for the moment McCarthy today.   

2024: Anti-abortion, anti-free speech, anti- book, Mouse baiting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis isn’t the only Republican expected to make his run for the presidency official this week.  South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, the Republican’s only African American Senator, will also formally throw his hat into the ring.  Scott who is about as conservative as they come, is well liked by his Senate colleagues, and is expected to receive an endorsement from South Dakota Republican John Thune simultaneously with his formal announcement but it’s hard to see how being liked by some colleagues will be enough to propel him to the Republican candidacy. More realistically, Scott, like his fellow South Carolinian Nikki Haley, is probably seeking the VP nod or at the very least positioning himself for a 2028 run.  On the subject of Senators, the calls for Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein to resign continue to build.  She’s clearly frail, suffering from an unusually difficult bout with shingles on top of some pre-existing memory loss. She’s not the first and probably won’t be the last Senator to hold on too long and though she probably should step down, it’s worth noting that her continued tenure, as impaired as it is, is far superior to that of Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville, who thinks that white supremacism in the military and everywhere else is a good thing. Shifting to the House, 2002 Olympic figure skating gold medalist Sarah Hughes is running for Congress. Hughes, whose come from behind gold medal performance was one of the highlights of the Salt Lake City games, is the real deal, she received her undergraduate degree from Yale, her law degree from University of Pennsylvania, worked as a legal associate for Proskauer Rose and is currently working on her MBA at Stanford.  She was raised in Great Neck which is part of George Devolder “Kitara” Santos’s district but isn’t running to replace him, rather she’s challenging the Long Island seat held by Republican Anthony D’Esposito, another one of the newbie Republicans who won in 2022. In addition to her impressive resume, Hughes has a lot of name recognition particularly on Long island so she’s a good “get” for NY Democrats seeking to regain the seats they lost during the 2022 cycle.   

Trump Morass:  There’s more news on the Trump legal front, largely because there always is.  Last week Timothy Parlatore who had been representing Trump in the Mar a Lago purloined documents case, jumped ship.  Over the weekend in an interview with CNN he revealed that he left over “strategic disagreements” with other members of Trump’s team. He added that those disagreements were primarily with Boris Epshteyn who Parlatore accused of “doing everything he could to try to block us from doing what we could to defend” Trump, his way of saying that Boris stood in the way of searching for and turning over some of the documents that Trump took with him to Mar a Lago. To put it mildly, that’s a bad look for Boris and his boss Trump.  Moreover, it’s hardly normal for a lawyer to throw his former client under the bus unless of course that lawyer wants to distance himself from complicity in criminal activity.  If he hasn’t already, it’s likely that Parlatore will be spending some time with Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team.  In other legal news, Fulton County DA Fani Willis announced that her staff will be working remotely during the first three weeks of August.  She also asked judges in a downtown Atlanta courthouse not to schedule trials for part of that time. The tea leaf readers believe that these actions indicate that she’ll be bringing charges against those who tried to overturn the Georgia 2020 election during that time period.  It’s hard to believe that she’d be taking such extreme measures unless one of the people she’ll be indicting is Trump.