TGIF ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Tick Tock:  Just about everything has happened this week but hold on because the week’s not over yet and things tend to happen on Fridays. Staring with the mundane, at least mundane for this House, Speaker for the moment Mike Johnson is considering reneging on the budget deal he agreed to at the start of the week.  He’s facing serious pushback from the MAGA wing of his caucus, the same crowd that toppled Kevin McCarthy’s speakership so that one vote motion to vacate looms. That’s not just a problem for Johnson, it’s a problem for everyone because absent an agreement and another continuing funding resolution parts of the government will be forced into shutdown mode at the end of next week. To avoid that pending shutdown, Chuck Schumer is pushing a continuing funding resolution through the Senate but it’s not clear if Johnson will be able to get enough of his clowns on board to bring it to the House floor for a vote even though that vote would pass with a lift from the Democrats. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is.

Presidential Politics:  On Wednesday, Chris Christie suspended his campaign, but he didn’t go down quietly, instead, he delivered a blistering speech.  He trashed Trump, saying that he’s unfit to return to the presidency because, among other things. he’s a self-centered criminal who will continue to put his own interests way ahead of the country’s.  Christie went on to dash Nikki Haley’s hope for an endorsement by saying that he couldn’t, or at the least wouldn’t right now, throw his support to anyone who wasn’t man or woman enough to publicly call Trump unfit to serve. The expectation is that Christie’s New Hampshire voters, many of them independents and most more moderate than Trump and DeSantis’ supporters, will probably shift their votes to Haley. It’s not clear whether their support will result in Haley winning the state’s primary, but it might and at the very least it will place her in a tight second.  That’s good news for Haley but does little to change what’s likely to happen in Iowa or in any of the other early states that matter because most of the rest of the Republican primary voters are MAGA and solidly in Trump’s camp.  The bottom line, Trump, warts and all, is still likely to be the Republican’s 2024 candidate.  As to Christie, his phone is ringing off the hook, the No Labels party would love him to be their candidate and Biden and the Democrats would love for him to join their team.  Christie, who criticized Biden and the Democrats in his sayonara speech didn’t trash them as much as he trashed Trump and the other Republican candidates so anything’s possible, especially if a cabinet position is dangled so who knows.  As to No Labels, it’s hard to see how joining with them would do anything other than throw the election to Trump but then again, Christie’s got a big ego, and as anyone who tried to cross the George Washington Bridge on September 9, 2013, knows, his early Trump endorsement is only one of the stupid things that he’s done in the past.

Trump Dump:  Trump who gets away with saying lots of dumb things out loud because he’s who he is and his base either agrees with him, doesn’t care, or doesn’t pay attention told a conservative interviewer this week that he hopes the economy crashes this year.  Obviously, that’s because a crashing economy, rather one that’s actually improving, would be good for his candidacy and as Christie said in New Hampshire, Trump is far more concerned about himself than the country. He’s also all over the place on abortion and still calling for the end of Obamacare, which has grown increasingly more popular.  On the one hand he’s been trying to distance himself from onerous abortion bans, painting himself as more moderate on the issue than 6-week ban advocates like Ron DeSantis but on the other hand he knows that a lot of his fundamentalist supporters love that Roe has been overturned so this week while DeSantis and Haley were engaged in a pointless debate on CNN, he was participating in a Fox townhall where he gave Democrats some more fodder for their ads by bragging about how he delivered the three Justices who spelled Roe’s demise.  He then went on to say that he’s okay with certain life-saving exceptions, as if women across the country haven’t been learning how well those so-called exceptions work in places like Texas and other states with onerous abortion laws. On the legal front, Judge Engoron the NY Civil Court judge overseeing Trump’s NY trial whose home was “swatted” on Wednesday night ended up allowing Trump to deliver closing remarks yesterday, a surprise because as of Wednesday the judge said he would only allow Trump to speak if he promised not to go into campaign speech mode.  Needless to say, Trump did do his usual thing within the court and afterwards outside to the press, calling the NY case a political witch hunt instigated by “corrupt” AG Letitia James.  Everyone expects Engoron to rule against Trump, the only question relates to the severity of the penalties he imposes and since Trump will appeal, the case won’t end with Engoron’s ruling.     

Fog of War:  Last night the US and the UK, with the backing of Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands, launched airstrikes against Iran-backed Houthi rebel targets in Yemen in retaliation for Houthi attack on ships transiting through Red Sea shipping lanes.  The Houthis, long at war with Saudi Arabia, initially were attacking only Israeli owned ships, or ships they thought were owned by Israeli entities, to show their and Iran’s support for Hamas but had expanded their targets beyond Israeli owned ships.  The US/UK strikes weren’t surprising because keeping those shipping lanes open is important and because allowing Iran’s surrogates to act with impunity only encourages Iran to keep at it, think Hezbollah in Lebanon. Meantime, spurred on by South Africa, the World Court at the Hague is pursuing charges of genocide against Israel, not against any of the other countries who routinely slaughter people because anything Israel does is bad but not so much if it’s Hamas calling for Israel’s destruction, killing its residents or raping its people.   

And: To further liven the week, Hunter Biden and his lawyers staged a surprise visit to the House Oversight Committee part of their effort to point out the hypocrisy of the committee’s Republicans going after Hunter for contempt over his refusal to testify in private when he’s willing to testify in public.  Hunter has a point because it’s not like a whole bunch of Republican characters haven’t also refused to honor Congressional subpoenas but it’s not clear that his shenanigans are all that helpful to his father who as much as he loves his son probably wishes he and his problems would go away. Yesterday, Hunter pleaded not guilty to federal tax charges in Los Angeles.  Just a reminder that while Hunter didn’t pay his taxes when they were due, he has since paid them in full and were he not Joe’s son, it’s more than fair to assume that his case would have been plead out.       

#BringThemAllHomeNow

Evan Gershkovich too.