Hello! You’re reading the Surge, Slate’s Saturday roundup of the week’s most noteworthy movers and shakers in the world of politics. So much moving and shaking down there in Washington! Sheesh! Try holding still for a few seconds sometime, guys!
I’m Ben Mathis-Lilley, filling in for Jim Newell, and this week we’ve got a Tuberville situation, a shoe situation, and a … gooey situation for the mayor of New York City. First up, though? Some freakin’ labor news.
By Ben Mathis-Lilley
Earlier this year, onetime Indiana auto-plant electrician Shawn Fain took office as the president of the United Auto Workers after winning the union’s first-ever election in which leaders were selected by a direct vote of members rather than by delegates to a convention. In September, he launched a national series of pop-up strikes against the Big Three automakers—Ford, General Motors, and the company that is now for some reason called Stellantis but is basically the one you remember as Chrysler—while engaging in what, for the union, was an unusually public and rabble-rousing campaign of class warfare rhetoric. It was a bold strategy, particularly when paired with UAW’s central demand for a 40 percent pay increase and the perennial reality that North American vehicle manufacturing operations can always be moved to Mexico. But … it pretty much worked! As of this week, tentative agreements for 25 percent raises have been reached with the Big Three, and Toyota is raising its own U.S. wages, even though its plants aren’t unionized. Next up, potentially, is a fight to organize Elon Musk’s Tesla, which I think we can safely say would be one of the least predictable worker versus management confrontations to occur since Karl Marx and FDR invented unions in 1932. (The Surge majored in history, but not labor history.) Today, America’s ongoing revival of unapologetic leftism is spelled S-H-A-W-N.
New York Rep. George Santos has been accused of a vast number of campaign finance–related crimes. One of them is outright theft, and several involve a former campaign treasurer who has already pleaded guilty. It’s not looking good for our George, legally speaking. But he maintains his innocence, as is his right, and has refused to resign his seat in Congress. This week, though, five other New York Republicans—i.e., the people who have the most reason to be concerned that their association with Santos will hurt them in 2024—convinced new speaker Mike Johnson to bring a Santos expulsion vote to the floor. It failed on the strength of 31 “no” votes from Democrats who were reportedly concerned that it would set an undesirable precedent, given that Santos has not been convicted of a crime—his trial is scheduled for next September—and the House Ethics Committee has not finished its investigation of him. Santos called the vote “a victory for due process” and has said he will not be dropping out of the primary race to win the Republican nomination for his seat in April 2024. That’s a race he will almost certainly lose, but hey, for now, he’s still here. And really, isn’t that all that any of us can ask for?
In the same way that George Santos is still technically a member of Congress, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the subject of the Surge’s worst recent political take, is technically still running for president. He’s fallen to being tied with or behind Nikki Haley in early-state polls, and both of them trail Donald Trump by a trillion billion points, but he is still out there on the trail nonetheless. In fact, this week, he was the subject of a long Politico article! Unfortunately for DeSantis, though, the purpose of the article was to investigate whether various viral images of DeSantis walking and standing awkwardly do in fact suggest, as his rivals’ supporters and other online critics have claimed, that he’s wearing lifts in his shoes because he feels insecure about his height. The verdict of the expert shoemakers Politico consulted: He is probably wearing lifts, yes. (His campaign denies it, and DeSantis promised to wear a boot on his head at the Republican primary debate next week if Donald Trump shows up to it, which he will not.) Elsewhere, the New York Times reported that the governor has been hitting the subject of “vaccine skepticism” more often at recent events in an effort to “energize” his campaign. To which we can only say: Sounds fun, but it’s probably not going to work!
Former college football coach Tommy Tuberville won election to the Senate in Alabama in 2020, and since then, has mostly been good for the occasional news cycle in which he makes comments in an interview that betray a lack of basic knowledge of U.S. history. This year, though, he’s begun to throw his weight around on an issue of real consequence: preventing the confirmation of hundreds of senior military promotions by objecting to voting on them in blocs rather than individually. (Apparently, doing them one by one would take about 700 hours.) He has said he will continue to do this until the Pentagon agrees to stop paying travel expenses for service members who need to cross state lines to obtain a legal abortion. While many of Tuberville’s GOP colleagues are sympathetic to him on this issue, they also have political and personal interests in being perceived as supportive of the military. This tension came to a head this week, as four Republican senators confronted Tuberville on the Senate floor over his refusal to OK votes on even a limited number of purportedly critical appointments. Despite the intraparty heat, not to mention the increasing volatility of a Middle Eastern region in which 30,000 U.S. troops are still stationed, Tuberville says he’s not backing down.
The Surge has previously celebrated the tension between Democratic New York Mayor Eric Adams’ “tough on crime” self-presentation and his ongoing personal and professional relationships with a number of people who have been suspected or convicted of committing numerous crimes. On Thursday, the issue was highlighted again as the FBI raided the Brooklyn home of Adams’ “chief fundraiser,” Brianna Suggs. According to the New York Times, a representative of the agency’s public corruption unit was on hand; the paper later reported that the warrant issued for Suggs’ apartment sought information relevant to the question of whether Adams’ mayoral campaign had received illegal donations from entities connected to the country of Turkey. (Of course! Turkey. We all knew it would be Turkey.) For his part, Adams canceled several meetings in Washington when the news broke, returning to New York to, in the indelible words of a mayoral spokesman, “deal with a matter.” As to the matter of Eric Adams’ political viability, he’s up for reelection in 2025—and while New York magazine reported earlier in the week that there was “significant skepticism” among city progressives that they will be able to find a candidate who could defeat him in a Democratic primary, the raid does suggest the possibility that the feds might eventually fill that role themselves. (Neither Adams nor Suggs, to be clear, have been charged with a crime.)
Elsewhere in the Big Apple this week, former crypto king and Man About the Bahamas Sam Bankman-Fried was getting convicted on seven charges of fraud. Why are we putting this in our politics newsletter? For one, because we’re gearing up for the launch of Surgecoin, the world’s first cryptocurrency tethered to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s tweets. (Credit where it’s due, giving the nickname “Colonel Sanders” to a fellow Republican who plays up a Texas identity despite being born in Bethesda is pretty good.) But it’s also because Bankman-Fried was the sixth-largest donor of the 2022 election cycle, funneling nearly $40 million into various races, almost all on behalf of Democrats, and at one point, he even said he would spend a billion dollars in 2024. (Post-arrest, he claimed to have given a roughly equal amount to Republicans through dark-money groups, but that assertion can’t be verified.) The Democratic Party, veritably salivating about the possibility of landing a long-term superdonor, took the unusual step of intervening in a House primary in Oregon to support a candidate who knew Bankman-Fried’s brother. That candidate lost. Then Bankman-Fried got arrested, and now he’s going to jail. Presumably both major parties have learned their lesson and will never make dubious compromises in order to secure donations from rich people with borderline-criminal hidden agendas ever again.
The political ecosystem did a pretty good job not freaking out this week about the most nominally bonkers poll of the presidential election cycle so far, a Quinnipiac survey which found independent anti-vaccine candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. polling at an enormous 22 percent, with Joe Biden at 39 and Donald Trump at 36. Partly this is because there are more important things happening in the world right now than speculation about an election which is still a year away; partly it’s because RFK Jr. enjoyed a similarly intriguing poll bounce when he initially started running for president as a Democrat, only to quickly fade as Democrats learned that he is, to put it simply, a crank. The same thing seems like it’s probably happening now that he’s declared himself an independent, with unaffiliated voters who are feeling extremely zzzzzzzzz about a rematch between 2020 candidates expressing some interest in a third-party option with a last name that carries positive associations. Which is to say: While this doesn’t mean RFK Jr. is a serious threat to become president, it does go to show yet again that voters as a whole really wish there were going to be a candidate in the 2024 presidential general election who was viable, qualified, and not named Joe Biden or Donald Trump. Because of the way our parties and elections are organized, though, there probably won’t be. Have a good weekend!
The UAW’s Class Warrior Took It to the Big Three. Is Elon Next?
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04.11.2023
Hello! You’re reading the Surge, Slate’s Saturday roundup of the week’s most noteworthy movers and shakers in the world of politics. So much moving and shaking down there in Washington! Sheesh! Try holding still for a few seconds sometime, guys!
I’m Ben Mathis-Lilley, filling in for Jim Newell, and this week we’ve got a Tuberville situation, a shoe situation, and a … gooey situation for the mayor of New York City. First up, though? Some freakin’ labor news.
By Ben Mathis-Lilley
Earlier this year, onetime Indiana auto-plant electrician Shawn Fain took office as the president of the United Auto Workers after winning the union’s first-ever election in which leaders were selected by a direct vote of members rather than by delegates to a convention. In September, he launched a national series of pop-up strikes against the Big Three automakers—Ford, General Motors, and the company that is now for some reason called Stellantis but is basically the one you remember as Chrysler—while engaging in what, for the union, was an unusually public and rabble-rousing campaign of class warfare rhetoric. It was a bold strategy, particularly when paired with UAW’s central demand for a 40 percent pay increase and the perennial reality that North American vehicle manufacturing operations can always be moved to Mexico. But … it pretty much worked! As of this week, tentative agreements for 25 percent raises have been reached with the Big Three, and Toyota is raising its own U.S. wages, even though its plants aren’t unionized. Next up, potentially, is a fight to organize Elon Musk’s Tesla, which I think we can safely say would be one of the least predictable worker versus management confrontations to occur since Karl Marx and FDR invented unions in 1932. (The Surge majored in history, but not labor history.) Today, America’s ongoing revival of unapologetic leftism is spelled S-H-A-W-N.
New York Rep. George Santos has been accused of a vast number of campaign finance–related crimes. One of them is outright theft, and several involve a former campaign treasurer who has already pleaded guilty. It’s not looking good for our George, legally speaking. But he maintains his innocence, as is his right, and has refused to resign his seat in Congress. This week, though, five other New York Republicans—i.e., the people who have the most reason to be concerned that their association with Santos will hurt them in 2024—convinced new speaker Mike Johnson to........
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