Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
Much to the base’s chagrin, a handful of Senate Democrats voted to advance the House Republican continuing resolution to passage Friday — which Republicans could not have done without Democratic support.
The vote ended a turbulent week, with Democrats tense and tight-lipped as they fought intense, internecine battles over what to do. Many described the choice as two evils: either oppose the GOP CR and let the government shut down, risking that President Trump and Elon Musk may never reopen wide swaths of it, or vote for the right-wing legislation, which would cut domestic spending and give Musk what many described as a “slush fund.”
Ultimately, 10 Democrats — including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and members of his leadership team — voted to help pass the GOP CR.
The base is apoplectic, with some prominent Democrats calling for a change in leadership. House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who kept all but one of his members from voting for the GOP CR in the House, would not answer when asked about his confidence in Schumer’s leadership.
In a surprising twist, the Senate was able to pass a standalone bill unanimously on a voice vote to shield Washington D.C. from the massive budget slash written into the House GOP CR. The House would also need to pass the bill upon its return.
Senate Democrats now brace for backlash. The episode has even cast a gloomy pall on September, when the CR expires and Democrats, theoretically at least, have leverage again.
“Lots of us are worried that once you give in the first time, it’s hard to fight back the second time,” Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO), who voted against the GOP CR, told us.
— Kate Riga
Here’s what else TPM has on tap this weekend:
- Kate Riga describes a small but important detail that TPM was first to pin down during the chaos of Friday’s votes.
- Josh Kovensky reflects on a bizarre parallel between the present-day U.S. and post-Soviet Ukraine and Russia.
- Khaya Himmelman writes about the Democratic representative trying to rein in acting DC U.S. Attorney Ed Martin.
- Hunter Walker describes an icon of a long-gone era of Washington who he knew, and who passed away this week.
Let’s dig in.
A TPM Scoop
In the frantic hours before a package of government funding legislation came to a vote late yesterday afternoon, TPM got a scoop: Senate Democrats were no longer demanding a vote on a clean, four-week continuing resolution as an amendment to the GOP CR, two Senate sources told us.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) had been calling for passage of a CR that would fund the government for an additional 28 days. Some Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), had floated demanding a vote on the bill as an amendment to the GOP CR — but, per a source familiar, Murray wanted the vote to be called off since it would fail, only serve a theatrical purpose and not affect the outcome of the vote on the GOP CR.
Murray kept separately pushing for her short-term CR as a standalone bill, the source told us.
In other words: Murray, who voted “no” on advancing the GOP-written funding bill, wasn’t interested in participating in Schumer’s gambit, where Democrats vote for her sure-to-fail CR as a purely messaging move en route to passage of the Republican CR. If Democrats were hoping the amendment vote would give them a talking point to take back to their angry constituents, they’ll be disappointed.
— Kate Riga
Cynical Vibes
The specter of the grant-eaters has come to America.
In the original Russian, it’s grantoyedy: grant-eaters, grant-ibals, depending on how negative you want the connotation to be. Either way, it’s a term that exists to denigrate people involved in political life who weren’t sponsored by oligarch or government money. Instead of a news outlet or advocacy group being indirectly on the Kremlin payroll or on the payroll of some business interest, Russian and Ukrainian cynics instead accused these relatively independent people of subsisting on “grants.”
This view sanded down the moral landscape in which an important question in politics develops: who works for and belongs to who? And, it would sometimes lead to an inversion: fighting graft made you the bad guy — or, at least, kind of pathetic. I remember speaking with one attorney in Kyiv who was aligned with the then-administration, the government that preceded Volodymyr Zelensky’s. That government had lost popularity after a series of corruption scandals, and in the face of day-to-day graft that had only become more visible and obstructive in people’s lives. But this lawyer expressed a view to me that might now appear on Elon Musk’s Twitter feed: the most profitable job in Kyiv these days, she said, was that of a corruption fighter.
It’s a brand of pervasive cynicism mixed with outright nihilism that, to channel the man himself, you’re seeing and hearing about more and more these days in the United States. The idea has existed on the right for a while: that involvement in political life must mean that you’re either on the take or naive beyond belief. But it’s appeared on the left, lately, too. Some figures that once expressed a vision of a more aggressive, potentially progressive Democratic Party have abandoned that in recent years in favor of a similar brand of moribund “realism”: that trying to respect others is “virtue signaling;” that any belief that things are uniquely bad or corrupt now is itself either naive, disconnected from reality, or just another attempt to shill.
The similarity between this new, nihilistic vibe in the USA and what I saw in Russia and Ukraine has bothered me for the past year or two. This essay by the writer Evgenia Kovda helped me think through it a little. It’s complicated, and I’m still unsure in exactly what American and post-Soviet cynicism share in their causes: in both cases, it feels like there’s a deep sense of disappointment at the core. In the former Soviet Union, the answer is more straightforward, because it was clearer what was lost: the future promised by the idealism of a decades-earlier communist revolution and, later, independence from communism, was replaced instead by brutal authoritarianism and decades of horrific misrule.
We have serious problems in the U.S., but nothing on that scale. People sometimes ascribe this nihilism to disappointment from the blows dealt by the invasion of Iraq or the 2008 financial crisis, the failure of political elites to enact positive change or provide a sense of hope, in the million-plus deaths wrought by COVID. But I don’t think any of these explanations come close to the mark. Rather, the similarity may lie in something deeper and more disturbing: in these former Soviet states, entire political systems collapsed. Here, it’s prospective. It’s what people worry about openly, and what has produced a deep sense of disillusionment in so many: that the institutions of American democracy could produce the situation we’re in today.
— Josh Kovensky
Raskin Asks DOJ IG To Check Trump’s DC US Attorney
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, is calling for a DOJ Inspector General investigation into acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, who has in his first several weeks on the job made a particular point of probing perceived enemies of President Donald Trump.
The nine-page letter, first obtained by the Washington Post, details a series of recent actions taken by Martin that Raskin argues “appear to violate the Constitution, federal statutes, DOJ regulations, and rules of legal ethics.”
In particular, he notes that Martin has tried to illegally freeze $20 billion worth of climate funding, tied to the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, that was allocated to environmental non-profit organizations for various climate projects during the Biden administration.
“…since taking office, Mr. Martin has used his office to illegally attack critics and perceived enemies of the Trump Administration while endangering the public safety of the citizens of and visitors to our nation’s capital,” Raskin wrote in the March 12 letter to Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
— Khaya Himmelman
Goodbye To All That
Ron Nessen, who served as President Gerald Ford’s press secretary from 1974 to 1977, passed away on Wednesday at the age of 90.
I had the privilege of sharing a lunch with him in 2017 in the early months after President Trump first took office. Nessen was incredibly generous with his time and offered his insights on the White House and its relationship with the press. His stories were a reminder of how much has been lost in recent years.
Nessen lived one of those extraordinary Washington lives. Before coming into the White House he had a lengthy career as a journalist, including a stint for NBC, where he had five tours covering the Vietnam War and was wounded by a grenade.
During his conversation with me, he reflected on how the media itself has changed. The numbers of full-fledged war correspondents like Nessen once was are dwindling. And, as the press contracts, it has also faced an unprecedented assault from the president and his allies.
Nessen became the White House spokesman at a fraught moment. His predecessor, Jerald terHorst, resigned in protest of Ford’s decision to pardon President Nixon for the crimes of Watergate. Nessen vowed to restore trust.
In his conversation with me, which occured during Sean Spicer’s tenure in the job, Nessen admitted that he sometimes tried to dodge questions on matters the White House felt “shouldn’t be publicized quite yet.” However, he stressed that he believed the press secretary needed to own up to any mistakes or factual errors, and he was adamant that Ford never asked him to lie.
“I don’t have any recollection of him asking me to say anything that wasn’t true,” said Nessen. “Part of that was just, that’s who Jerry Ford was.”
Nessen pressed Ford to make himself available to reporters and also joined the president in taping a self-deprecating appearance on “Saturday Night Live.” Despite this engagement, he also frustrated the White House press corps, which felt he sometimes offered spin from the White House podium.
All of this seems beyond quaint now, as Trump and his team lie at an unprecedented rate. In its second term, the Trump White House has also seized control of the White House press pool and replaced major news organizations with hyperpartisan operations.
Nessen, who presciently predicted Trump (like Ford) would face an assassination attempt, seemed to see some of this coming in Trump’s first term. He told me the White House’s relationship with the press was reaching Nixonian levels. It has only deteriorated from there.
His death is a reminder that, along with losing a past generation of political figures, we are losing the norms that once defined Washington. The expectation that the press secretary won’t lie or that legitimate press will even have access to the president is among the many things being trampled by Trump.
Nessen seems to have started a White House press office tradition where press secretaries left their successor a bulletproof vest and a note. In his case, after Ford was voted out in favor of President Carter, Nessen left the vest in his office along with a note that said, “I hope you won’t need this. Good luck, Ron.”
That kind of cheerful bipartisanship is another one of those things that seems to have been lost. TPM dropped a line to President Biden’s last press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, to see if she continued the tradition and left anything behind for the incoming Trump team earlier this year. Jean-Pierre did not respond.
— Hunter Walker
Source link
