Folks! Welcome back to the Surge, Slate’s weekly newsletter about the most relevant figures in the wild and woolly world of Washington. (As well as, sometimes, the woolly world of the other cities where United States politics also occur.) I’m Ben Mathis-Lilley, filling in for Jim Newell.
This week we’ve got a mayor dealing with an old-fashioned municipal mess, a primary surge with a giant asterisk attached to it, and the usual trickle of upsetting news regarding the attempted coup from a few years back. But first: Oklahoma versus Boston in the halls of the Senate.
By Ben Mathis-Lilley
Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, who is in fact named that because his parents couldn’t decide between Mark and Wayne, used to own a sizable plumbing business. In March, at a hearing of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, he and Teamsters union president Sean O’Brien—a well-built bald man with a thick, Teamsters-like Boston accent—got into a back-and-forth over whether Mullin had, as a plumbing CEO, ripped off his employees and used accounting tricks to understate his own income. Some time afterward, O’Brien sent a tweet mockingly referring to the senator as “cowboy” and inviting him to meet him “anytime” and “anyplace” for, presumably, fisticuffs. On Tuesday, O’Brien was back at HELP to testify again, and Mullin opened his remarks by challenging O’Brien to fight in the committee room. Truly: While taking off his wedding ring, Mullin said, quote, “You want to run your mouth? We can be two consenting adults. We can finish it here,” before telling O’Brien: “Stand your butt up.” O’Brien indicated a willingness to engage, telling Mullin to stand his butt up, but Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the committee chair, intervened before any punches, kicks, or chokeholds were thrown, kicked, or held. And then—hey, credit to everyone involved for doing their job!—they went ahead and held the rest of the hearing. Mullin later said that while he understands that he is a member of a chamber that follows certain rules of decorum, O’Brien had insulted him grievously and he is “still a guy.” Just to be safe, the Surge does not plan to mess with Oklahoma or the Teamsters going forward.
Nikki Haley has been the consensus winner of the Republican primary debates that Donald Trump has skipped, and this fall, she’s risen almost 10 points in polling in Iowa and 15 points in New Hampshire. (She also maintains a strong position in South Carolina, where she served as governor.) This week, reports continued to emerge that she’s flipping donors who initially supported Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and polls continued to show that she would run very competitively against Joe Biden. And, uh, she … also had to immediately walk back a newly proposed plan, which would seemingly run quite afoul of the Bill of Rights, to require that everyone who posts content on the internet be required to do so under their real name. (Even when you’re surging, not everything you touch turns to gold.) Up next for Haley, according to the Associated Press, is a concerted effort to continue kicking DeSantis while he’s down by launching $10 million worth of ads in Iowa and New Hampshire, aka the states in which DeSantis absolutely must finish competitively in order to maintain enough momentum to stay in the race. It may sound funny for someone like Haley, who’s still running in at best a far-off second, to be attacking someone besides the race’s front-runner, but Trump is still so popular with GOP voters that going after him would likely backfire. On that front, though …
The most obvious way that Donald Trump could fail to win the presidency in 2024 is that his upcoming criminal trials could remind Republicans and independents who are only tentatively committed to supporting him that they did not care for his deadly effort to stop Congress from certifying the results of the election in 2020. And while Jan. 6 is to some extent “baked into” his poll numbers already—see, for example, how much worse Trump does against Biden than Haley does—a lot of voters have short memories that could be jogged by new evidence. This week, for example, the Washington Post reported on a videotaped interview that erstwhile Trump election attorney Jenna Ellis recorded with prosecutors as part of her plea agreement in the 2020-related case brought by Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis. In the video, Ellis says that during one pre–Jan. 6 conversation, longtime Trump aide Dan Scavino told her that Trump and his top advisers “didn’t care” whether he won any of his legal challenges to election results because they didn’t plan on leaving the White House under any circumstances. (Scavino has not commented on the claim.) Stuff like this—and its relation to the ongoing refusal to even acknowledge, in retrospect, that there is no evidence that Joe Biden won the 2020 election because of ballot fraud—is why MAGA candidates underperformed in 2022. Biden has to like the idea of a series of similar revelations leading right up to the eve of voting next November.
Republican Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett is not a member of the House Freedom Caucus, whose members were all but openly out to get Rep. Kevin McCarthy from the day he became speaker. But he did join some of those extremist colleagues in voting to end McCarthy’s tenure last month; according to Burchett, he did so because of McCarthy’s failure to take the budget deficit seriously. That’s the context for the bizarre confrontation between the two this Tuesday—which, yes, took place at almost exactly the same time that Markwayne Mullin was itching to KO the president of the Teamsters. Per Burchett and an NPR reporter who was speaking with him in a Capitol hallway, McCarthy passed by and bumped Burchett hard enough that he stumbled in the direction of the reporter. Burchett, in fact, says McCarthy elbowed him in the kidney—and while McCarthy denies having done so, CNN’s Manu Raju noted that former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger wrote in his own book that McCarthy did basically the same thing to him, twice, after Kinzinger broke from the party over its reaction to Jan. 6. Saying that this is the kind of thing you’d expect to happen in a high school cafeteria rather than Congress is the absolute most obvious observation in the world, but … obnoxious “accidental” bumping is really actually the exact kind of thing that happens in high school cafeterias. You win this round, clichés!
In a development that you’re probably already abundantly aware of if you live in Southern California, an elevated stretch of the I-10 freeway that passes through downtown Los Angeles was shut down, causing mass rerouting, after a number of the columns holding it up were damaged in a fire on Saturday. That fire, according to the Los Angeles Times, is believed to have been set intentionally, and was fueled by wooden pallets that were being stored under the road. And before you start asking questions like Why were there piles of kindling being stored under a crucial transportation artery?, consider that the site was also reportedly being used to store unsold hand sanitizer, which, being made in large part from alcohol, also appears to have fueled the catastrophic blaze. Whoops! And as the Times points out, the person who got to deal with the political fallout from this situation, despite having had nothing to do with loading the area with every possible kind of flammable material, was new Mayor Karen Bass. Her response included informational briefings, numerous interviews (including one with Ryan Seacrest), and “a freeway-focused Instagram live with actor and comedian Yvette Nicole Brown.” You’ve gotta reach the people where they are, right? It was certainly a better approach than getting caught multiple times, like former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg did, flying a private plane to Bermuda during bad weather. And, as if to reward Bass for being proactive, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced late in the week that repairs should be finished, well ahead of what was initially expected, by Tuesday.
Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy, most recently seen being referred to as “Colonel Sanders” by Marjorie Taylor Greene during an intraparty dispute, went modestly viral this week for an emotional, hourlong floor speech in which he rhetorically challenged listeners to name “one thing” that his party had accomplished while holding the chamber’s majority. “I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing—one—that I can go campaign on and say we did,” Roy said. “Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me one meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done besides, ‘Well, I guess it’s not as bad as the Democrats.’ ” As others have observed, the rant will fit nicely in Democratic television ads pointing out that the GOP’s tenure in charge of the House has been dysfunctional. But Roy didn’t actually frame his remarks in relation to the upcoming election. Instead, he said, he was upset because he believes that Republican inactivity is an insult to the Americans who have fought and died in the country’s wars; the “freedoms” these people sought to protect, he says, are at risk of being destroyed by the “political correctness” which the GOP has failed to check because it is afraid of doing things like shutting down the government on a national holiday. The Surge notes all this not to dismiss the merits of Roy’s argument—indeed, we cherish the image of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, seated at Appomattox Court House, accepting the unconditional surrender of the P.C. police—but to observe that, in this big country of ours, there are a lot of people who feel very strongly about things that others don’t feel strongly about at all, or understand in any way, and that those people have representatives in Congress, too, and that in this context, perhaps it’s a Thanksgiving miracle that the government ever gets funded at all. Enjoy your turkey!
For political journalists, 100-percent-full-of-baloney New York Rep. George Santos has been a reliable source of mirth and reader interest during a year in which not a whole lot was always happening. (When the White House and the House of Representatives are held by different parties and neither presidential primary is competitive, times are tough for us.) It’s thus as a sign of respect and appreciation that we’re giving him the valedictory spot in this week’s Surge, after his announcement, at very long last, that he will not be running for reelection next year. He’d previously insisted that he would stay in the race despite being indicted on nearly two dozen counts of fraud related to his 2022 campaign; he faces trial on those charges next September. What changed this week was the release of a House Ethics Committee report which echoed many of the allegations in the federal charges against Santos—but also added new, embarrassing details, such as the allegation that he had spent campaign funds on Botox and the OnlyFans platform, which can be used to stream, uh, adult content. (In a statement, Santos called the report a “smear” but did not dispute its specific allegations.) The House is currently not in session, but it appears that it will vote to expel Santos when it meets again on Nov. 28. Even if he gets the boot, though, it seems fair to say that he will likely remain in the public eye in some way, given the following that he’s earned for perpetrating such a fabulously bizarre brand of alleged grift-itude. And could an eventual return to politics be in his future—perhaps at an even higher level? It seems far-fetched, but so did the presidential campaign of another New York tabloid subject who was frequently accused of fraud …
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