They'll sell you out and then ask for your money

Welcome to a Wednesday morning edition of Progress Report.

My wife is on a work trip this week, so from yesterday until Friday, it’s largely just me and our energetic eight-month-old son. At this point, two days into the temporary solo mission, I’m absolutely exhausted and in awe of people who do this all the time, to the point that I’m now fully convinced that governments should be controlled by middle-class single parents.

There would be no struggle to pass universal childcare; we’d have universal health care; our food would be healthier; and high-speed public transportation would be accessible to all. Compared to what we get out of DC’s current brigade of ghouls, lapdogs, and feckless cucks, it’d be a dream.

On the topic of ghouls: Ron DeSantis will begin his courting of the critical 4chan power user and Eastern European porn channel manager demographics today when he announces that he’s running for president during a conversation with Elon Musk on Twitter. The conversation will be streamed on Twitter to an audience of political journalists and crypto bots.

Once Ron has whined out the magic words, we’ll hit send on a relaunch of SWORD, a special newsletter dedicated to exposing DeSantis’s appalling record, prodigious corruption, and astonishing personality defects. He’s going to get fluffed by a media that desperately needs a competitive primary — it’s already happening! — and he’s got a PAC with $100 million to spend on harassing voters at their homes.

Our goal isn’t to stop DeSantis so that Donald Trump becomes the nominee — we loathe that guy too — but to end DeSantis’s political career. We want him to crashe and burns so hard that he not only has no future in national politics, but he takes the acquiescent Florida GOP down with him.

Lots to talk about today, both at the state and national levels, so I’m breaking it up into two newsletters. In this first newsletter, we’ll take a somewhat different angle at the slow-moving train crash happening in Washington. Later today, we’ll go deep into the big state and local news.

---

---

In Washington…

Sometimes it feels as if being a Democrat is like rooting for the BP pitcher in a home run derby.

White House will resume negotiations tomorrow with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on a deal to prevent the United States from hitting the national debt ceiling, an unconstitutional threshold that politicians have decided can send the world economy into freefall. McCarthy wants to light what’s left of our threadbare social safety net on fire; the White House, I can only assume based on its actions, just want to shred it up a little bit more.

The Republicans’ feigned concern over the national debt is as cynical and disingenuous as ever — the House GOP plans on introducing $3 trillion in tax cuts for mostly the wealthy within a month or so — but it shouldn’t actually matter. Once again, their hypocrisy is only relevant because Democratic leaders are playing along in this tired charade.

President Biden should have either minted a trillion-dollar coin to make the debt ceiling irrelevant or invoked the 14th amendment, which says that the US cannot default on its debt, and forced the Supreme Court to send the global economy plunging off a cliff. Instead, he’s proactively engaged in negotiations with Republican terrorists, offering them huge concessions — spending freezes, rescinding unused Covid aid, $1 trillion in cuts — that are still not enough for the far-right, who want to means test Medicaid and food stamps as well.

In an echo of his 2012 fiscal cliff debacle, Biden has blundered his way into snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, putting key programs at risk when all he had to do was literally do nothing.

The negotiations have become a feeding frenzy for Beltway political media, which is putting the talks through its patented play-by-play, ticking clock hype cycle and its false equivalence wringer. The effect is to portray Democrats and Republicans as equally legitimate and rational actors discussing a compromise that will have no real consequences for 300 million Americans. Unfortunately, Biden and his team, along with folks like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, have done nothing to suggest otherwise.

On Tuesday, Matt Gaetz referred to Democrats as the GOP’s “hostages” in these talks, which gives Republicans too much credit: Biden and his aides eagerly tied themselves to chairs, then invited McCarthy and his team over to the White House to extract as much as they can out of them.

If that seems harsh, note that the White House actually telegraphed its intention to file an objection to a lawsuit brought by government employees that was aimed at getting the sort of ridiculous pre-clearance from the courts that Biden claimed he needed in order to invoke the 14th Amendment.

What’s It All Mean?

There are a few lessons to take away from this catastrophe.

First, Biden is doing serious harm to his chances of being re-elected.

Already regarded by the majority of the American public as too old and slow for the job, the fact that he’s getting played by Kevin McCarthy, who is widely regarded as one of the dumbest people in Congress, does not do much to suggest otherwise.

More importantly, he is actively pursuing an unwarranted austerity regime that will do significant damage to the economy next year, and by the looks of it, wants to cajole 100 or so Democratic members of the House into voting for the deep spending cuts and thus owning the slump that they will cause.

Second, this suicidal negotiation isn’t just a product of a sudden collapse in judgment, but instead an inevitable consequence of Democratic leadership’s inability to grasp this new era of cold civil war American politics. Their refusal to engage in the most urgent battles with immoral far-right ideologues is once again coming back to haunt them and hurt everyday Americans.

Many of the far-right legislative terrorists pushing McCarthy to extract devastating cuts to social spending are the same domestic terrorists who endorsed, enabled, and even helped plan the Jan. 6th insurrection but were spared any tangible consequences by the Biden Department of Justice.

The insurectionist defender is now being welcomed into the White House

At the same time, Biden says he feels unable to invoke the 14th amendment because he fears that the activist conservative Supreme Court would rule against his doing so. As much as traditionalists like Biden and Senate Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin don’t want to believe it, the Supreme Court is a fully politicized and self-conscious body that can be forced to react to context and incentives. If goblins like Clarence Thomas know that there will be no consequences for their rampant corruption and collusion, they will inflict the most hardened versions of their cruel dogma on the rest of us.

The rolling Thomas scandal is instructive because the preemptive meekness from the Democratic side is encouraging even further defiance. Harlan Crow, unbothered by any subpoena, continues his blockade of the Durbin’s toothless requests for even a list of gifts that the billionaire Nazi enthusiast has given Thomas over the past few decades.

The flatly idiotic reasoning laid out by his lawyers in the latest middle finger to the committee only accentuates how much Democrats are allowing themselves to get dunked on by not doing the job of holding people accountable.

I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I’ll accept that there are several possible reasons for the this utter failure. It could be the undying deference to bipartisan comity, or perhaps a mistaken belief that voters will respect Biden for getting a deal even though it makes their lives harder. Maybe it’s irrational faith in crumbling government institutions; then again, it may be permanent PTSD from their years of getting pummeled by Republicans.

It’s probably a bit of all of those things, but that’s not the whole story. As I wrote this weekend, my growing suspicion is that this is all part of an ongoing effort to hold on to power until they can ensure that there will be no true progressive shift in the Democratic Party.

If some prominent Democratic is thinking about mounting a primary challenge against Biden, now would be the time to hit the launch button. He’s saddled with horrible poll numbers, especially on the economy, and now he’s selling out his base and undermining the few arguments for his re-election. Caving here will mean that he doesn’t have what it takes to stand up to MAGA Republicans (which is to say all Republicans) and that he can no longer plausibly say that he’s got the backs of working people. Good luck with your 50-state fundraising plan, Joe.

None of the Democrats who are pushing this catastrophe have to worry about whether reductions in federal expenditures may cut off their essential food assistance or health care, and there’s no chance that defunding some government agency will lead to their firing. They are driven around, so they don’t depend on broken public transportation. If only there were some single parents in leadership.

---

Wait, Before You Leave!

Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, and delivers incisive analysis, and goes deep into the grassroots.

None of the money we’ve raised for candidates and causes goes to producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So, I need your help.

For just $5 a month, you can buy a premium subscription that includes:

• Premium member-only newsletters with original reporting

• Financing new projects and paying new reporters

• Access to upcoming chats and live notes

You can also make a one-time donation to Progress Report’s GoFundMe campaign — doing so will earn you a shout-out in the next weekend edition of the newsletter!