Welcome to this edition of the Surge, Slate’s weekly political newsletter. And if you think things are nice and cheap in Russia, then buddy, let us get you some brochures about Sudan.
No joke, the Surge had 15 competitive possibilities for entries this week, and that was before Donald Trump was fined $350-plus million and barred from doing business in New York for three years. (There, squeezed it in.) The bad news is that Russia wants to nuke outer space; the good news is that they aren’t ready to do that just yet. Democrats are getting more and more optimistic about taking control of the House, which Republicans do not enjoy controlling. You know that thing Joe Manchin was not thinking about doing? He’s not doing it.
Let us begin with an exciting Georgia legal thriller.
By Jim Newell
This week, it’s the team prosecuting Donald Trump and his alleged co-conspirators who have been on the stand in Georgia, as a judge is determining whether there’s a conflict of interest that prevents Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from continuing to prosecute the case. At the root of it is a romantic relationship between Willis and Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor whom Willis assigned to the Trump case. While Willis and Wade have denied that their relationship began before she appointed Wade (and, allegedly, benefited financially from the arrangement), a former friend and colleague of Willis’ testified that it began beforehand. Among those taking the stand were Wade, a defiant Willis, Willis’ father, a former governor, and others. The Surge does not know whether the judge will allow Willis to continue working the case when all is said and done, or when the romantic relationship began. But it is mind-blowing that this happened. It is a hell of a thing to prosecute a former president for crimes as substantial as these and then risk biffing the whole thing like this. Trump is running for president again and doing all he can to discredit these cases, and then boom—an intraprosecutorial affair! Come on! Don’t know what else to say here, folks!
America, you can finally take a breath: Former Rep. Tom Suozzi, a mediocrity’s mediocrity, is returning to the United States Congress after winning a special election in New York this week. We can think of no further reforms needed in this country. How did Suozzi do it in this swing district? Being a well-recognized name, spending a lot more than GOP opponent Mazi Pilip, and running for a seat previously occupied by a disgraced, expelled Republican may have helped. May have helped. But in terms of messaging, Democrats believe that Suozzi was a successful test case for the party’s new strategy on immigration, which was the party’s worst issue this cycle. Suozzi distanced himself from the president’s poorly viewed handling of immigration, then pounced on Pilip for rejecting the Senate’s (short-lived) bipartisan border deal, arguing that she was putting politics ahead of solutions. Democrats’ lead negotiator on that bill, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, urged vulnerable Democrats to follow Suozzi’s lead. Suozzi “flipped the script on his Republican opponent, successfully painting her as unserious about border security because of her opposition to the bipartisan border bill,” Murphy said, “and turned what could have been a devastating political liability into an advantage.” We’re skeptical that Democrats can turn border issues into an advantage, but Republicans’ rejection of legislation to address the situation could provide some level of inoculation.
The House Intel chair caused a midweek panic when he publicly requested that President Joe Biden declassify information relating to a “serious national security threat.” Did he think that the Travis Kelce/Taylor Swift plan to rig the election was still a secret? Unclear, but it turns out it was something else that didn’t remain a secret too long, after Turner put some blood in the water for national security reporters. We first learned that it was related to Russia … and then that it was related to space … and then that the threat was related to nukes. Doggone it: Space is trying to nuke Russia! No: Russia wants nukes in space! To put nukes in space—which Russia has not done yet—would be a violation of an international treaty, but Russia’s record on obeying international accords has been poor for the past however-many years. Turner’s prodding, though, has not endeared him to much of the political spectrum. The administration is irritated that he spilled the beans on something that wasn’t ready for public consumption. Right-wingers in Congress, meanwhile, believe that Turner, a steadfast ally of defending Ukraine, was trying to scare the House into passing Ukraine aid and a reauthorization of warrantless wiretapping powers. Lastly, the nukes consider this a personal matter and have requested privacy.
Congrats to the speaker of the House, who finally got the attendance count correct and was able to impeach Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. The impeachment will now head to the Senate, where it could be dismissed pretrial, but hey—at least Johnson was able to set a new precedent where it’s cool to impeach someone over policy disagreements. Johnson also signaled that he wouldn’t take up the Senate’s hard-won deal to pass Ukraine aid, so the adults will have to find a backdoor method to take care of that for him. He tried to put a small tax bill on the floor, and it went down; and he pulled the surveillance reauthorization bill from consideration because it was going to fail. Oh, and his infinitesimally small majority shrunk by another vote (Suozzi Nation stand up). We regret to say that the most dreaded of all Congress-newsletter words is being tossed around to describe his leadership: rudderless. Just typing it gives us the willies. Guys! There’s no rudder here!
Much has been said in the Trump Age about Graham’s transformation from an often independent-minded senator into Trump’s personal Uber Eats courier. Even knowing that, the turnarounds he’s done the past couple of weeks on each component of the Senate’s (dead) border security bill and (passed) military aid are shocking. Graham has long supported comprehensive immigration reform—and the border bill wasn’t even comprehensive immigration reform; it was strictly an enforcement package. He and his staff helped negotiate it! And yet he described it as a “half-ass effort” ahead of his vote against it. Once the border provisions were gone, you’d have thought that Graham, one of the most hawkish voices in the body, would have joined the substantial number of Republican senators willing to approve Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan aid. Alas, he was a no on that, too. “The supplemental aid package should be a loan to the countries in question, as suggested by President Trump,” Graham said in a statement explaining his opposition. (A “loan”? We use “Ukraine aid” as shorthand for this legislation, but mostly it’s authority for the Pentagon to send Ukraine weapons paired with procurement money to restock its arsenal. Ukraine can’t return a used bomb.) “President Trump,” he added, “is right to insist that we think outside the box.” We understand why Graham has chosen to go along with Trump’s bullshit so often in the past. It’s gotten him in the room to argue his side when important decisions are made. We’re just losing track of what his side is.
The West Virginia senator announced on Friday that he would not seek the presidency in 2024. “I just don’t think it’s the right time,” Manchin said, adding that “democracy is at stake right now.” That sounds an awful lot like him not wanting Trump to become president again—maybe it was Trump inviting Russia to destroy NATO that finally did the trick?—something that a centrist third-party bid would have made likelier. What’s confusing to us is, since when was Manchin thinking about pursuing the presidency? Sure, he went to New Hampshire in January, immediately before the state’s first-in-the-nation primary, but he insisted he was “not here campaigning.” Our understanding was that he was just visiting to see the snow, as one does. And sure, he went to South Carolina after that, where he just wanted to chitchat “about political dysfunction” with citizens who happened to live in a critical early-primary state. So perhaps—perhaps—he wasn’t entirely being on the level there. In any event, may Manchin have a lovely retirement, sitting on the porch of his mountain home, snacking on freshly picked coal.
Republicans have a decent chance of winning the “trifecta”—House, Senate, and White House—in the 2024 elections, which would give them a shot at acting on their policy priorities. These are the uncommon calendar alignments that members of Congress wait for to actually do what they want after abiding years of stalemate. Which makes it unusual to see so many House Republican committee chairs leaving Congress recently. This week, Tennessee Rep. Mark Green, in just his first term as chair of the Homeland Security Committee, announced he wouldn’t run for reelection. Before him, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chair of the exceptionally powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, announced her exit; and Rep. Mike Gallagher, chair of the new select committee focused on competition with China, announced his. These are all members who could’ve, you know, done things under a trifecta, but they’re choosing to go home. What does that tell us about life in the House GOP? That it sucks now, sure, but also that it could suck even more if they have real ability to enact laws. It will be messy, dysfunctional, and almost certainly underproductive; plus, orders would be taken from one Donald Trump. We’ve never seen a party so miserable at the prospect of taking power.
This Whole Mess Could Have Been So Easily Avoided
7
1
17.02.2024
Welcome to this edition of the Surge, Slate’s weekly political newsletter. And if you think things are nice and cheap in Russia, then buddy, let us get you some brochures about Sudan.
No joke, the Surge had 15 competitive possibilities for entries this week, and that was before Donald Trump was fined $350-plus million and barred from doing business in New York for three years. (There, squeezed it in.) The bad news is that Russia wants to nuke outer space; the good news is that they aren’t ready to do that just yet. Democrats are getting more and more optimistic about taking control of the House, which Republicans do not enjoy controlling. You know that thing Joe Manchin was not thinking about doing? He’s not doing it.
Let us begin with an exciting Georgia legal thriller.
By Jim Newell
This week, it’s the team prosecuting Donald Trump and his alleged co-conspirators who have been on the stand in Georgia, as a judge is determining whether there’s a conflict of interest that prevents Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from continuing to prosecute the case. At the root of it is a romantic relationship between Willis and Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor whom Willis assigned to the Trump case. While Willis and Wade have denied that their relationship began before she appointed Wade (and, allegedly, benefited financially from the arrangement), a former friend and colleague of Willis’ testified that it began beforehand. Among those taking the stand were Wade, a defiant Willis, Willis’ father, a former governor, and others. The Surge does not know whether the judge will allow Willis to continue working the case when all is said and done, or when the romantic relationship began. But it is mind-blowing that this happened. It is a hell of a thing to prosecute a former president for crimes as substantial as these and then risk biffing the whole thing like this. Trump is running for president again and doing all he can to discredit these cases, and then boom—an intraprosecutorial affair! Come on! Don’t know what else to say here, folks!
America, you can finally take a breath: Former Rep. Tom Suozzi, a mediocrity’s mediocrity, is returning to the United States Congress after winning a special election in New York this week. We can think of no further reforms needed in this country. How did Suozzi do it in this swing district? Being a well-recognized name, spending a lot more than GOP opponent Mazi Pilip, and running for a........
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