Month: April 2024

Steve Benen >writes that Donald Trump’s payments to Stormy Daniels were unlike similar arrangements Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tiger Woods made with the National Enquirer, as well as just hush money schemes in general, because only Trump was running for president. And that’s a fair point, but it doesn’t go far enough.

Benen makes this argument in response to Sen. Lindsey Graham who ran against Trump in the 2016 presidential primaries and was a victim of the Enquirer’s diligent effort to help and shield Trump. In defending the disgraced ex-president, Graham used Schwarzenegger and Woods as examples because they came up in the hush money trial last week when David Pecker, who was in 2016 the CEO of American Media (AMI) which owns the Enquirer, testified that he made arrangements with those celebrities prior to working on Trump’s behalf.

Now, in Schwarzenegger’s case, he was running for governor of California at the time, and I’d argue that that’s one of the most important and influential elected offices in the country, but it’s true that it’s not the presidency. With Tiger Woods, Pecker testified that they made a deal in which Woods would do an interview for the Men’s Fitness magazine and Pecker would deep-six any mention of one of Woods’ many extramarital affairs. That kind of transaction undoubtedly happens from time to time, but it’s the apparently not routine of Pecker would have cited more examples from the last couple of decades. It’s also a fair trade. Pecker sold more Men’s Fitness articles because he was running an interview with Woods, and this compensated him for selling fewer tabloid magazines covering Woods’ infidelity. Woods’ interest in the deal is obvious.

In the deal with Schwarzenegger, the movie star and former bodybuilder was to take a position as executive editor of Muscle & Fitness and FLEX magazines, adding cache to those American Media publications. In exchange, Pecker would bury allegations of sexual harassment and affairs. So, again, there were two clear sides to the deal.

But in the Daniels example, Pecker would have gotten nothing for not publishing the story except the gratitude of Trump. There were no promised interviews or other offsets to help Pecker recoup his losses for not running a bombshell story in the days before a presidential election. It’s the same, essentially, with the story Pecker did buy and bury, which was about Trump’s affair with Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal. In a deal that ended in a breach of contract lawsuit, McDougal was compensated with a job as a columnist and hired “to do red carpet interviews with Radar Online, which was also owned by AMI.” But this was done purely to keep her quiet. She didn’t have the celebrity status to compensate Pecker for the lost opportunity of writing about her months-long affair with the Republican presidential nominee.

In the Daniels case, which Pecker ultimately left to Michael Cohen to handle, and the McDougal case, Pecker’s only compensation was in pleasing Trump and helping him get elected. His company and its investors got nothing concrete at all.

So, setting aside the media ethics of the whole sordid affair, the deals on Trump’s behalf stand aside and alone as corrupt.

This may be clearer when you consider it doesn’t seem Pecker had it in mind to get some kind of favorable treatment or legislative wins if Schwarzenegger were elected governor of California. But his experience protecting “The Terminator” troubled him because it all eventually came out, and there potential campaign finance violations involved. In truth, however, there was enough genuine reciprocity in the deal to make it hard to prosecute as an election interference scheme, even if it absolutely was intended to affect the election.

Mr. Pecker testified that he had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars killing such stories, mostly in small increments. Eventually, The Los Angeles Times reported on some of Mr. Pecker’s dealings involving Mr. Schwarzenegger, who denied knowledge of them.

State officials investigated his hiring of Mr. Schwarzenegger as an editor, who had to resign, Mr. Pecker said. He testified that the episode had alerted him to the possible dangers of violating election laws.

This is why Pecker ultimately didn’t seek reimbursement from Trump for buying McDougal’s story and why he bowed out of handling the Daniels matter. He felt these arrangements were legally too hot to handle, and he turned out to be correct about that. You couldn’t say that about the Tiger Woods deal.

I suppose I don’t know how else Sen. Graham can defend Trump, but his argument is even weaker than Benen suggests.

Polls will be the death of me this year. I have a visceral reaction to every bad poll I see, and I consider it a bad poll whenever Trump is leading nationally or in any swing state, but also when he’s getting more than the Alan Keyes Constant of twenty-eight percent.

It’s true that there’s some fear that arises, but it’s much more an enervating feeling, like falling into an abyss. It’s close to despair, not about President Joe Biden’s chances of reelection but about the moral and intellectual qualities of so many of my fellow Americans. Often my first reaction is simply to snap shut my laptop, or maybe to stop trying to think or write about politics by playing chess.

With complete honesty, I admit the fact that I find it deeply, deeply demoralizing that half the country prefers Trump to anyone. It makes me want to stop trying. It makes me want to crawl in bed and pull the covers over my head.

I don’t enjoy admitting this either, as I imagine it gives Trump supporters great satisfaction to see how their political opposition responds to their success in shaping public opinion. But I do it for others that feel as I do and maybe don’t see anyone openly expressing it. I think it’s okay to feel this way as long as you find a way to snap out of it, over and over again.

It’s not easy, though, because the problem is that what’s depressing me can’t be fixed. It’s written in indelible marker. It’s why I had a hard time celebrating the historically great midterm election results that defied polling and pundit predictions of a red wave. It’s good to win. It’s good to exceed expectations, but the margins didn’t change my mind about the depravity of so many of our countrymen.

I still have faith that Trump will lose in November and ultimately go to prison. Any other outcome will not be something I think I can personally recover from. But I admit that a lot of damage is already done, and no outcome can repair it.

Here are some facts about air travel. Forty-four percent of Americans fly commercially, while 12 percent of all air passengers are traveling for work. Every day, approximately 1.1 million passengers are flying for business reasons. Ninety percent of Americans have taken a commercial flight at some point in their life. So, even if only a minority of people are flying on planes in any given year, most people have experience with airports, delayed flights, lost baggage, promised services that aren’t provided, and hidden fees. So, it’s a pretty savvy political move for the White House to do something to protect consumers against these hassles. This week, the Biden administration did just that, issuing rules “that require airlines to provide automatic cash refunds to passengers when owed and protect consumers from costly surprise airline fees.”

More specifically, airlines will now be required “to promptly provide passengers with automatic cash refunds when owed because their flights are cancelled or significantly changed, their checked bags are significantly delayed, or the ancillary services, like Wi-Fi, they purchased are not provided.” The Department of Transportation will also require all airlines and ticket agents “to tell consumers upfront what fees they charge for checked bags, a carry-on bag, for changing a reservation, or cancelling a reservation.”

The Biden administration’s Department of Labor was busy helping workers this week, too. Most people are familiar with the idea of earning time-and-a-half wages but for more than 80 years “salaried workers earning less than a certain threshold have been entitled to time-and-a-half pay when they work more than 40 hours per week.”

However, the threshold that helps determine eligibility for overtime pay has risen far slower than wage growth, excluding many lower-paid salaried workers from overtime protections. DOL’s rule will raise the minimum salary threshold for the overtime exemption for executive, administrative, and professional employees in two stages, and provide for increases every 3 years to ensure the threshold keeps up with wage growth. This change will extend overtime protections to nearly 1 million workers based on an initial salary increase to $43,888 ($844 per week) on July 1, up from $35,568 ($684 per week). And it will extend protections to about 3 million more workers on January 1, 2025 based on a second increase to $58,656 per year ($1,128 per week).

This won’t affect my overworked spouse, but it will benefit almost a million workers before Election Day, and four million workers overall who are expected to work their asses off with no extra compensation just because they’re on salary. The Labor Department also issued a new rule to protect worker’s retirement fees against bad self-interested advice from “trusted investment advice providers,” which they estimate “will save tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per impacted middle-class saver.”

In another aggressive pro-worker move, Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) dropped a bomb this week.

In a ruling Tuesday afternoon, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said noncompete clauses would henceforth be illegal. The measure was necessary, it said, for “protecting the fundamental freedom of workers to change jobs, increasing innovation, and fostering new business formation.”

“Noncompete clauses keep wages low, suppress new ideas, and rob the American economy of dynamism,” said FTC chair Lina M. Khan in a statement. “The FTC’s final rule to ban noncompetes will ensure Americans have the freedom to pursue a new job, start a new business, or bring a new idea to market.”

We’ll have to see how this new rule fares in court, and I don’t imagine it will be favored by the conservative Supreme Court, but it’s a bold move that would not only add to Americans’ liberty to sell their labor but also assure they get a better price for it. Astonishingly, it’s estimated that one-in-five Americans have non-compete agreements.

Paul Krugman says Biden is arguably the most pro-union president since Harry Truman, but his record is broader. As you can see from example just from this week, he’s pro-worker and he’s pro-consumer.

These changes don’t get the attention they should, but just like with student-debt relief, there are a lot of people who will notice when they receive the benefits. In other cases, people won’t ever know they’ve received a benefit because some bad thing simply didn’t happen. For example, their retirement savings weren’t subjected to needless fees. It’s important the Biden gets credit for these types of reforms, so please spread the news.

After a little hiatus due to mutual scheduling and a few technical difficulties, Brendan and I are back to podcasting, or pondcasting as we call it in these watery parts. In our tenth episode, we recap Trump’s second day in court which the New York Times called “dismal.” It was dismal for Trump and equally dismal for his lead lawyer Todd Blanche, you must be privately seething at his client as a result.

We have amusing diversions on things like tattoos, Tennessee, and birtherism along the way, but we’re primarily focused on the hush money trial and the current state of the Republican Party? How did it get to this point? If you didn’t follow along with the gag order hearing and David Pecker’s testimony on Tuesday, the episode will catch you up and make you laugh at the same time, and there’s plenty to laugh at even if the overall picture for our country is pretty damn serious.

We talk about the circumstances that could land Trump in jail both during and after the Stormy Daniels trial, and also what to expect when Daniels takes the stand. You’ll definitely want to check it out. You can listen on Apple or Spotify.

Please like and subscribe and share with some friends.

The second day of Donald Trump’s hush money trial was glorious. It began with a hearing over eleven alleged violations of the judge’s gag order on talking shit about the jury or potential witnesses, and it could not have gone worse for Trump’s lead lawyer Todd Blanche, who was told he was “losing all credibility with the court” with his asinine arguments. The judge deferred making a ruling, and the prosecutors said they weren’t “yet seeking an incarceratory penalty,” adding that the “the defendant seems to be angling for that.” But whenever the ruling comes down, I suspect it will describe the next steps in incarceratory terms because Judge Merchon was clearly displeased and there’s simply no other way to stop Trump.

In Ann Althouse’s world this is all great news for Trump because “if Trump goes to jail” over gag order violations “the Trump movement will gain energy and ‘He’ll become Nelson Mandela.'” She added, “This is what Trump does. Whatever happens, he makes something of it. He’s a builder, and he will use the materials on hand.” It’s a point bolstered by Marc Caputo in The Bulwark who is focused on how Trump successfully fundraises over every legal setback. When this is your biggest fear or the best way to make yourself feel better about Trump’s chances, you’re just too committed to your position. Getting your ass kicked in court is never good news or a sign of strength even if you can find a way to get some compensation.

I’d also add that comparing your hero to Nelson Mandela isn’t good for much beyond trolling. I suppose the idea is that you can’t kill a movement simply by imprisoning its most articulate proponent, and that you can instead inadvertently give that movement strength and moral authority. But I’m probably being silly even trying to find a point. Trump will try to benefit by being incarcerated but no one thinks he’ll be a stronger candidate if he’s doing time. As for a movement beyond Trump, there is no MAGA movement without him. It doesn’t have enough ideological coherence to sustain itself.

I will only on the rarest occasions cite William Kristol in favor of an argument I am making, but he made an important point by noting that a slight majority of congressional Republicans just voted to give military aid to Ukraine in defiance of their presidential nominee and everything the MAGA movement stands for. That’s remarkable and unprecedented in a presidential year. If Trump had fought harder against the bill, he might have done somewhat better, but he apparently doesn’t want to get blamed for the fall of Kiev before Election Day. What the vote demonstrates is that on one of the most critical issues facing the U.S. Government, the Republicans aren’t taking the MAGA/Kremlin line, and that’s a true sign of Trump’s weakness within the GOP, and not Mandelaesque at all.

Tuesday was also the second day of testimony by David Pecker, the former top guy at the National Enquirer, and he detailed how the catch-and-kill practice from the 2016 campaign. The Enquirer worked hand in glove with the Trump campaign through Michael Cohen to identify threatening stories, buy the exclusive rights to them, and then not publish them so they would never see the light of day. They also ran made-up hit pieces on Trump’s primary opponents, particularly Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and then obviously Hillary Clinton in the general election. Pecker testified that it was the Enquirer’s editor-in-chief who came up with the story about Cruz’s father working with Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. Trump made sure to promote that story all over social media. Yet, Cruz and Rubio won’t see a peep about it because they long ago accepted Trump as their political daddy. In Cruz’s case, this is even more appalling when you remember that Trump attacked his wife’s looks. At the time, Cruz called Trump a “sniveling coward,” but he would have been more accurate talking about himself. He was among the 15 Republican senators who voted against aid to Ukraine.

Pecker’s testimony was helpful to the prosecution because he made clear that Trump had assigned Cohen to handle the catch-and-kill stories and was a micromanager about spending corporate money. Trump’s only defense in the case is that he had no idea that false business records were being created to hide the payments to Stormy Daniels, but Pecker’s descriptions made that seem highly implausible. Pecker also bolstered whatever Cohen will testify to in these respects, but did so in an affable, grandfatherly and Trump-friendly way.

All in all, it was, as the New York Times reported, “a dismal day in court” for the disgraced ex-president. And I was so there for it. I’ll be there for it on Thursday when Pecker presumably completes his testimony.

Tuesday marked the 48th anniversary of when the Ramones’ first album was released. Blitzkrieg Bop is a timeless classic, as are almost all the songs on that seminal 1970s punk album.

If you drop in, say hey. I’d love to hear from you all.

Cheers!

I’m indebted to the Washington Post’s Philip Bump for laying out precisely why Donald Trump is guilty of felonies in the Stormy Daniels hush money case rather than just misdemeanors. And he points to something Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche did in his opening statement on Monday that will make it easier for the prosecution to win its case.

To turn false business records charges into felonies, the prosecution needs to demonstrate that the intent was to further or conceal a different crime, and that could be either to avoid taxes or hide a campaign finance violation. Or, it could be what prosecutor Matthew Colangelo claimed in his opening remarks.

“The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election. Then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by lying in his New York business records over and over and over again,” prosecutor Matthew Colangelo told jurors.

Now, you might think that it’s not so easy to define what “corrupting” an election entails, but the Trump defense team acknowledged that Trump’s intent in entering a scheme with the National Enquirer to “Catch-and-Kill” negative stories was to “influence” the election.

“There’s nothing wrong with trying to influence an election,” Blanche told jurors Monday. “It’s called democracy.”

The rub is that the issue is filing false business records to cover up illegal or unreported campaign expenditures and Michael Cohen has already pleaded guilty to causing an illegal campaign contribution in the Stormy Daniels affair. The primary defense against this is that Trump wasn’t making a campaign expenditure at all and wasn’t seeking to influence the election but rather was trying to prevent personal embarrassment or problems in his marriage. Cohen didn’t even try that defense, and he went to prison.

So this is a bit of semantics, really, because it’s not a crime to try to “influence” an election, and it’s not a crime to enter into a nondisclosure agreement. It’s not even necessarily a crime to create a scheme whereby a publisher will buy unflattering stories about you and not publish them. But if you don’t do your campaign finance paperwork right, then all of it can become part of a criminal conspiracy. And Trump added not getting his New York State business records right to the mix, which is what makes it Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr.’s business.

So, it’s very much not in Trump’s interest to have his criminal defense attorney effectively concede that the National Enquirer scheme was intended to influence the election.

As Bump points out, there’s a second component the prosecution needs to prove, and that is that Trump directly caused the false business records to be filed. Maybe some reasonable doubt can be raised about that. I’m not privy to the evidence Bragg has developed in that area. Much of it is from Michael Cohen’s own account of events, and his credibility is close to zero even if his story makes perfect intuitive sense and is consistent with common sense. This is where the real meat of the battle will take place.

I don’t think Trump will have success arguing that he merely wanted to prevent marital strife, especially after the opening statements.

With opening statements due to begin on Monday, I suppose every news organization wants to publish a piece on what happens if Donald Trump is convicted on felony counts in the Stormy Daniels hush money case, and Julia Mueller provides that for The Hill. Most of the piece revolves around how a conviction will be perceived and how it affect Trump’s chances of winning the election, but in the twenty-fourth paragraph Mueller does finally get to the idea that Trump might actually go to prison.

Prison time is a sentencing possibility if the jury decides to convict, though experts suggest it would be an unlikely sentence for the judge to go for in this case. If it happens, it still wouldn’t bar Trump from running in 2024, but it would further hamper his efforts to get back to the White House.

“It is certainly true that being convicted or even being in prison doesn’t prevent you from running for president or even from being elected,” said Ilya Somin, professor of law at George Mason University and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. “Assuming the office, though, would be a difficult situation if the president were in prison.”

As I’ve written before, a prison sentence is only unlikely under these charges because Trump has no prior convictions. It’s really up to the judge, and one thing he’ll want to see in an acknowledgement of guilt and some genuine remorse. That’s setting aside that countless ways Trump and his lawyers have irritated this judge. Consider the amount of time Judge Merchon has to spend worrying about security for himself, his family, his coworkers at the courthouse, and for the jurors and spectators. Consider also the possibility, even likelihood, that he’ll have to slap sanctions on Trump for violating court orders, perhaps numerous times.

I don’t think it’s far-fetched to think that Trump will get some prison time if he’s convicted, and I know that will make his supporters go berserk, but I think it’s at least even money. The possibility shouldn’t be buried and largely dismissed in the twenty-fourth paragraph.

I don’t even want to contemplate him winning while he’s in prison, but I guess it could happen. So, what then?

 

As I write this, the U.S. House of Representatives is in the process of overwhelmingly passing the supplemental military and foreign aid bill to Israel, Ukraine, and the Far East despite vociferous opposition from the Putin-friendly far right. The bill, which includes substantial humanitarian aid for Gaza, is also opposed by many on the left who object to militarily supporting Israel at this time. There are principled reasons to oppose the bill, or to support two-thirds of it but not the rest. But the opposition is no more than a medium-sized bipartisan minority. There will be a much larger bipartisan majority in favor it, and in those terms this bill is historic.

It reached the floor with all the Democrats on the House Rules Committee ruling in favor of the rule, while three Republicans were opposed. The only other time I can think of something like this happening was over avoiding the debt ceiling. But that was a strictly performative opposition on Republicans’ part. They’ve done a lot of that recently, killing their own Speaker’s rules and forcing Mike Johnson to either withdraw proposed legislation or pass it with a two-thirds majority under a suspension of the rules. In this case, the Dems provided the needed votes in committee on a substantive policy bill, and that’s just completely abnormal.

Now that Johnson has crossed the Rubicon on this, he is no longer the leader of the Republicans in the House but rather the leader of a bipartisan coalition that will be required to save his job when Republicans opponents almost undoubtedly move to oust him from power with a motion to vacate the Speaker’s chair.

When asked whether he would save Johnson from such a motion, Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries sounded positive but didn’t make a commitment. Rather, he said that those discussions would come up soon. The Democrats could let Johnson fall just as they let McCarthy fall, but it seems clear that they will be willing to cut a deal with Johnson if Johnson is amenable to the idea.

“It does seem to me,” Mr. Jeffries said, “based on informal conversations, that were Speaker Johnson to do the right thing relative to meeting the significant national security needs of the American people by putting it on the floor for an up-or-down vote, there will be a reasonable number of people in the House Democratic Caucus who will take the position that he should not fall as a result.”

…“Speaker Mike Johnson is a deeply principled conservative, and members of the Democratic caucus strongly disagree with many of his positions. But to date, when he’s made a promise — publicly or privately — he’s kept it.”

But this would not come for free. The Democrats would want some kind of formal power-sharing agreement, I believe, although their demands could be modest. Democratic congressmen Jim Himes of Connecticut is already talking about the road ahead, “I’m delighted, because I never imagined that in the minority I might be part of a constructive, forward moving, bipartisan coalition.” Democrat Seth Moulton has been more explicit:

“We’re just not going to go and bail out one of the most conservative Republican speakers in American history. But what Kevin McCarthy failed to do is even entertain a conversation to try to make a deal. Democrats were ready to deal. Kevin McCarthy refused to,” said Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass. “If Speaker Johnson cares about doing the right thing as well as keeping his job, then he ought to make a deal with Democrats.”

Johnson is up against it. He absolutely cannot win a motion to vacate with just Republican votes, and while the Democrats are willing to save his job, allowing them to do so would probably be untenable if it means giving away some of the Republicans’ power. The problem is that he can’t really operate simultaneously as the leader of the House Republican caucus and the leader of a bipartisan coalition that includes Democratic committee chairs or leadership positions, and even lesser concessions would disrupt his role as top strategist for the Republicans. This seems especially true in an election year with Donald Trump on the ballot.  The House GOP simply can’t tolerate a situation where their leader is so far in cahoots with the House Democrats, Senate Democrats and the White House.

This is why I conclude Johnson will not offer what the Democrats demand, and he will either resign or be voted out.

But the Republicans don’t have any leverage. It’s not clear that any Republican in the House can win the Speaker’s gavel without Democratic votes, and if they can’t settle on a Speaker, pretty soon a bipartisan coalition will emerge to elect one of their own. I doubt that would be Jeffries. More likely it would be a Republican helped over the line by a handful of Republicans who aren’t willing to let the House go without a Speaker indefinitely. They might opt out of sheer desperation on a temporary Speaker, but it’s not obvious that a temporary Speaker will have the authority run the House for any period of time.

Maybe Johnson won’t face a motion to vacate in the end, but that’s hard to predict at the moment since the will and the votes to remove him appear present in the aftermath of the foreign aid bill passing with Democrats supporting the rule.

Should be interesting to watch. I told you it would come to this, beginning right after the 2022 midterm results were known.

As a rule, I don’t write about procedural things happening in Congress that I don’t understand. But this next snippet from Punchbowl News fits into something I was planning on writing about anyway, which is the status and future of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

With Johnson getting hefty opposition from the House Freedom Caucus and other conservatives over the foreign aid package, the GOP leadership is discussing embedding language in the rule for debating the legislation that would raise the threshold needed to file motions to vacate. Under former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, only the party leaders could file such motions. McCarthy agreed to lower it to one member back in January 2023, which ultimately cost him his job.

Johnson hasn’t made a decision whether he’ll pursue this change, we’re told. But he’s getting pressed by scores of members to raise the threshold now.

This comes as Johnson’s multi-part effort to move the foreign aid package — which includes $61 billion for Ukraine and $26 billion for Israel and the Gaza war — was stuck on Wednesday night. The Ukraine funding is causing huge problems with conservatives.

Now, I definitely do understand why “scores of members” would press Johnson to change the rule that allows a single member to introduce a motion to remove his as Speaker. I doubt that forty or more members are personally talking to Johnson about the matter, but I take the point. The rule, which Kevin McCarthy acquiesced to, is paralyzing for any Speaker and rescinding it may be the only way Johnson can keep his job.

But the mechanics here are confusing. The idea floated by Punchbowl is that the change would be effected by passing language in the rule over the foreign aid package for Israel, Ukraine and the Far East. But that rule would have to pass, and that gets to another concession McCarthy made to win the Speakership. He allowed the far right to put three members on the Rules Committee, which is the precise amount needed to kill rules if all the Democrats are opposed. As a mater of practice, the minority party does not votes for the majority’s rules in committee or on the floor. As a result, this 3-member far right group has repeatedly succeeded in killing Johnson’s rules, forcing him to go to a backup plan. Johnson can suspend the rules and bring a bill to floor without the approval of the Rules Committee, but doing so changes the threshold for passage from a mere majority to a two-thirds majority. When Johnson does this, he has to rely on Democrats for passage, and sometimes a higher percentage of Democrats than Republicans wind up voting in favor of the bill. Needless to say, this is upsetting to many Republicans who believe they should set the agenda since they have the most members.

So, I am just not certain that Johnson actually can change the rule. To do so, he’d almost definitely need Democrats on the Rules Committee to vote with him, but they might not be inclined to do him the favor.

And this gets me to something I began talking about before McCarthy became Speaker, which is that the functional majority in Congress is the bloc that passes our spending bills and pays our bills on time, and it was clear after the results of the 2022 midterms that that majority would be bipartisan and made up of mostly Democrats. This has proved to be the case, which is why both McCarthy and Johnson had to pass all the urgent bills under suspension of the rules, and it’s also why they both ran into trouble with their own members. We now have a situation where we need this bipartisan mostly Democratic majority to pass the foreign aid package. There seems to be no way that Johnson can do this in the standard way of bringing a bill to his Rules Committee. The far right members won’t pass the rule because the bill funds Ukraine and because it doesn’t include a tough immigration component.

To get an idea of what I’m talking about, consider that Johnson is trying to push a separate bill on immigration in an effort to mollify the far right, and how that’s going over.

But in signs of trouble late Wednesday, the House Rules Committee failed to approve the border security bill because three Republicans on the panel — Reps. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), and Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) — refused to support it, meaning the panel adjourned without action. Democrats have no interest in backing the GOP border proposal.

This is a bill that the far right is demanding, but they’re blocking it coming up for a vote because it’s not connected to the foreign aid bill and so the Senate could get its foreign aid without ever considering the separate border security bill.

Here’s a lengthier explanation from NPR:

The four bills related to foreign threats are being considered under one procedural “rule,” while the border bill will be considered under its own. Rep. Ralph Norman, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus and the House Rules Committee, said that the arrangement would mean the border bill was “set up to fail.”

“With Ukraine funding in there, then it’s got a shot,” said Norman, R-S.C. “The thing [Democrats] want is Ukraine.”

Norman suggested he would oppose the rule for the aid package if it did not include the border security bill. Republican Reps. Chip Roy of Texas and Thomas Massie of Kentucky also sit on the Rules Committee and have spoken out against the plan. The three met with Speaker Johnson Wednesday to discuss their concerns.

Three Republican “No’s” in committee could defeat the motion before it even comes to the floor. If the legislation does make it past the committee to the floor, Johnson has almost no wiggle room within his razor-thin majority there.

Roy, who opposes Ukraine funding, said he would vote against the rule because “the border ‘vote’ in this package is a watered-down dangerous cover vote,” he wrote on social media.

So now we get to the heart of the matter. I argued back when McCarthy was struggling go gain the Speakership that it was pointless because he’d never be able to keep the job. He’d be ousted for governing as the head of a mostly Democratic functional majority, and that’s precisely what happened. Why not, I wrote repeatedly, just acknowledge up front who runs Congress and elect a bipartisan Speaker?

Of course, such an arrangement is anathema to both parties, and especially the party with the technical majority, so I correctly predicted it wouldn’t happen until every other option had been exhausted. I wrote the same when the Republicans spent three weeks trying to replace McCarthy before settling on Johnson. To his credit, Johnson has acknowledged his situation and hasn’t needlessly antagonized the Democrats he needs to function (excepting the stupid impeachment of Alexjando Mayorkas), and so the Dems are not so disinclined to rescue him from a motion to vacate.

But here’s the thing. John Boehner, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy all faced internal threats to their leadership and all had the opportunity to survive by working with the Democrats as the leader of a bipartisan functional majority. Boehner and Ryan quit rather than make that choice, and McCarthy was ousted because he’d blown up any chance that the Dems might go for it.

The logic is pretty basic. While the Speaker of the House is elected by all members of the body, in practice he or she is still the leader of their own party. All the other leadership positions, like Majority Leader and Majority Whip, are elected only by members of the majority party. So the Speaker may be a different beast, but that’s not how the position is perceived. Can you be the Speaker and not be the leader of your party’s caucus in the House?

It’s never been done but Johnson is going to face that choice now. If he is going to survive, he’s going to need Democratic support, and if he gets it he is going to be not just indebted to them but absolutely reliant on them. There’s talk that some Democrats won’t make any demands beyond getting the foreign aid package passed, but even if that proves sufficient, it’s not sustainable for him. His own caucus will buck like crazy and he won’t be able to function as their leader.

All of this is the result of the basic functional majority math and has been baked in the cake since the 2022 midterms, and I predicted things would come to this. I really do think we’re nearing the point when all alternatives to a bipartisan Speaker have been exhausted. I predict Johnson will resign rather than get formally in bed with the Democrats, and then the GOP will not be able to replace him because any replacement would have to make unkeepable promises. Since the House cannot operate without a Speaker, we’ll either have some temporary Speaker as briefly happened in the interlude between McCarthy and Johnson, or some moderate Republicans will have to go to Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and make a deal on a Speaker acceptable to them both.

It’s what should have happened in January 2023, and as unthinkable as it was when I proposed it then, it’s much closer to reality now.