You’ve probably heard that GOP congresswoman Elise Stefanik has announced she is not running for re-election. As far as I’ve heard, she does plan to serve out her term. But even more surprising, she’s dropped her plans to run for New York governor next year. I understand she was polling way ahead of the only other Republican in the race. Although I think her chances for getting elected were remote. Gov. Hochul is not wildly popular, but I don’t think any Republican has a prayer in a statewide race in New York right now.

What’s more interesting to me is what happened just before this decision. It has to do with the recent shooting at Brown University. The Usual Bleepheads on the Right (led by Laura Loomer and Jack Posobiec) had made up their minds that the shooter was a particular Brown U. Palestinian undergrad whose name I will not repeat because it’s been spread around the Web enough already. According to rightie rumors, the perp had stormed into the classroom screaming  “Allahu Akbar” before shooting. Variations of this rumor insisted that the primary target was not the physics professor who was slain but Ella Cook, a sophomore from Alabama, who was vice president of the campus Republican Club. WaPo:

“She was a Republican leader in the Republican Party at Brown University,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) said Tuesday during an appearance on conservative influencer Benny Johnson’s podcast. “You can’t tell me she wasn’t targeted. I would hate to miss that opportunity to say that because the consequences here are very, very fishy. But at the end of the day … nobody really pays a price for this.”

Cook was one of the two students who died. The other student who died was Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a freshman who had hoped to become a brain surgeon. For some reason the Right didn’t generate any rumors about why he was targeted, too.

Now, what does this have to do with Stefanik? First off, her gubernatorial campaign manager, Alex de Grasse, was all over X attacking the innocent Palestinian student and repeating the rumors. He and others also accused the president of Brown U. of “protecting” the Palestinian student (that part is probably true). And then Stefanik herself got in on it. 

“It seems very clear to me that the president of @BrownUniversity will need to be hauled in front of Congress for a hearing under oath,” Stefanik posted on X on December 17. She got a book deal the last time she interrogated Ivy League presidents under oath.

And then law enforcement identified the alleged shooter as Claudio Neves Valente, originally of Portugal and a former Brown U. physics student. The motive for the shooting appears to have been an an entirely personal one to Valente, who was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Did Stefanik feel a twinge of remorse, or at least embarrassment? Maybe. It’s also the case that a poll came out recently showing Stefanik ten points behind Gov. Hochul. Stefanik’s district is way up north, bordering Canada, and is mostly rural. She’s been in the House since 2015 and has won all her re-election campaigns easily. In 2024 the district went for Trump by 60%. I’ve read that Stefanik, a Harvard grad, originally positioned herself as a moderate. And then she moved Right. Now she is the fourth-ranking Republican in the House and considered a loyal Trump minion, although people who know her personally say she’s not necessarily a MAGA True Believer.

You may remember that Trump had appointed her to be ambassador to the UN, and then after she’d said her goodbyes to the House he un-appointed her. She accepted this with good grace. She was promised something else big later on. But recently, the New York Times reports, Trump refused to endorse her for governor over her most likely primary opponent, who hadn’t even formally entered the race yet. That may have been the final straw, the Times said. And it illustrates once again that with Trump, loyalty goes only one way. Stefanik is planning to spend more time with her family now.

I’ve not been to Stefanik’s district and can’t say how politics works there. Whether any Democrat has a chance of taking her seat next year I do not know.

There’s one other factor that might have discouraged Stefanik. The few Republican women in Congress seem to be bailing at a faster rate than men. Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) has just announced she is retiring after a single term. Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa is retiring. Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee is running for governor. Rep Nancy Mace of South Carolina is running for governor. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia isn’t even staying for her full term. There are a few others.  I’ve heard that part of the problem is that these women are tired of being treated as second-class legislators by Republican men, who are not exactly woke.

In other news: Trump plans to meet with health insurance executives soon, and he will tell them they have to lower their premium prices.

“I’m going to call in the insurance companies that are making so much money, and they have to make less, a lot less,” Trump said during an Oval Office announcement on drug pricing. “I’m going to see if they get their price down, to put it very bluntly. And I think that is a very big statement.” 

Trump said the meeting could take place in Florida, where he will spend the next two weeks, or at the White House the first week of 2026. He said he came up with the idea on the spot. 

Shares of major health insurers like UnitedHealth Group Inc., Cigna Group and Humana Inc. plummeted after Trump’s remarks.  

At the same event, Trump heaped praise on the drug company CEOs who have made deals with the administration to lower costs for Medicare recipients.  

In the face of tariff threats from the White House, 14 drug companies have publicly reached agreements with the White House in exchange for tariff reprieve. 

The tariff threat won’t work on the insurance guys, of course,  And who else remembers that Medicare drug price negotiation was made possible by Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act? Thanks, Joe Biden!

I didn’t expect the DoJ to fully comply with the deadline set by Congress to release all the Epstein files. I did expect them to have a better excuse than “we aren’t ready.” Trump’s girl Pam seems to have interpreted the deadline as a suggestion to maybe begin releasing a few things, and the rest will follow whenever. She even admitted in her press release that what was released today was mostly stuff that had already been leaked.

Pam says it’s Kash Patel’s fault she isn’t releasing more stuff.

Attorney General Bondi requested the full and complete files related to Jeffrey Epstein. In response, the Department received approximately 200 pages of documents, however, the Attorney General was later informed of thousands of pages of documents related to the investigation and indictment of Epstein that were not previously disclosed. The Attorney General has requested the FBI deliver the remaining documents to the Department by 8:00 AM on February 28 and has tasked FBI Director Kash Patel with investigating why the request for all documents was not followed.

Sure, Pam, whatever. This FBI page — the link came up in a news feed — contains links to what seem to be random Epstein-related records and documents, but the few I glanced at were redacted up the wazoo. Here’s a random sample:

This appears to be about somebody making a chart. it’s hard to tell.

Dems in Congress have vowed to pursue all legal options to force the DoJ to comply with the law, but there may not be any legal options. They can file a lawsuit, and a court may order the DoJ to comply, and then what?

You’ve probably heard that Trump has arranged to have the Kennedy Center renamed the Trump Kennedy Center, and that name has already been added to the center facade. The Kennedy family minus RFK the Lesser is not happy. See also Bill Kristol, who compares Trump to Caligula.

Perhaps the oddest thing about Trump’s televised address last night is how little splash it’s making this morning. Usually after some political event of any significance, media will be bursting with commentary about it within just a few hours. There is some commentary, of course, but the headlines are still mostly pointing to other news — Susie Wiles, Jack Smith, Venezuela. It’s as if much of the political press watched the speech, thought, “Well, that sucked,” and went back to what they’d been talking about before.

Right-wing media are dutifully taking the speech seriously, of course. This is an actual, unaltered screen grab from the Breitbart page this morning:

Should someone explain math to them? Or do we just let them live with their delusions?

I confess I probably watched less than three minutes before I bailed. I didn’t need to hear the same old lies all over again.

Of what commentary there is, the best I’ve seen is by Zack Beauchamp at Vox, courtesy of Yahoo News: The revealing pointlessness of Trump’s primetime speech.

President Donald Trump’s speech on Wednesday night had no grave significance. In fact, there didn’t seem to be much of a point at all.

The speech was a jumble of his usual false or even impossible claims — like a promise to reduce prescription drug costs by an impossible 400 percent — smashed together in no particular order. The speech began with a discussion of the cost of living, a subject he would drop and then return to as if just remembering that it was the number one reason his polls were low. Even the delivery was weird: Seemingly under network time constraints, the president read off the teleprompter angrily and quickly, speaking with the motormouth intensity of a 20-something banker who just discovered cocaine and now has a really great idea for a new restaurant.

So why am I writing about it at all?

Because the fact that it happened at all tells us something much more important: that the Trump administration is sinking, and his White House has no idea what to do about it.

He really did seem angry at Americans for not appreciating his greatness. But his administration is sinking, and he honestly doesn’t understand why or what to do about it.

In Trump’s mind everything must be going just fine because he’s in charge, even if he hasn’t actually done anything to address the issues facing us. As Jamelle Bouie, wrote yesterday, “Trump is a ubiquitous cultural presence, but there is no outward sign that he is an active participant in running the national government.” I mean, he got elected, right? And he enacted tariffs and got his Big Ugly Bill passed, and now everything is supposed to be great. Why are people bothering him with details? Why doesn’t everybody love him?

Trump’s pathological need for approval and recognition of his innate superiority was on display earlier yesterday. He has hung portraits of former presidents along a corridor in the White House with plaques beneath giving us Trump’s opinions of them. Many of the captions in the plaques were written by Trump himself and are dripping with ridicule. Joe Biden’s portrait is actually a photograph of an autopen. He seems to think that tearing down his opponents illuminates him in greater greatness, or something. Of course, it just illuminates how immature and petty he is.

There are several fact checks of the speech — here’s one from CNN — and it appears he said very little that was verifiably true. And it was nearly all stuff he’s said before, many times, and there’s not a lot of point in reviewing it. Which may be why there isn’t that much commentary. But the speech overall made him look desperate, angry, and even more pathetic.

I read the first part of the Susie Wiles interview at Vanity Fair. The second part is behind a paywall. I’m going to hazard a guess that Wiles will keep her job. My impression, from part one, is that Wiles is the White House Mommy. In a staff of people in various stages of arrested development, somebody’s got to be Mommy to make it work. And there she is. She’s clearly loyal to big baby Trump and probably very good at managing the adolescent personalities around him. But she’s intellectually dim enough to buy into whatever they’re selling. It would be difficult to replace her, in other words. And without Mommy the White House would be in Lord of the Flies territory in no time.

She did pretty much clarify that the boat bombings are mostly about regime change in Venezuela. But there’s another angle to Venezuela I hadn’t thought of. See Josh Kovensky at TPM, Is Trump About to Unleash the Kraken on Venezuela? Kovensky reminds us that Venezuela ties in to the 2020 “Stop the Steal” campaign.

Attorney Sidney Powell unleashed the Kraken in the form of a Nov. 19, 2020, press conference and lawsuit, filed days after. Unfortunately for the outgoing president, they were more comic relief than anything else. But they contained a claim that’s survived in the MAGA mind over the intervening five years and which, growing evidence suggests, may be playing a bizarrely significant role as the Trump administration wages a pressure campaign on Venezuela. 

Powell and Rudy Giuliani, during that mid-November presser, accused Venezuela of interfering with the 2020 election, using software from a voting machine company to swing the election to Biden. It was, they said, part of an international communist conspiracy with none other than Hugo Chavez as its long-dead mastermind. 

We all had a good laugh at the time, but Trump and MAGA haven’t let this go.

Now, the Kraken has returned. María Corina Machado, a key opposition figure who has asked the Trump administration to remove Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from power, told Bloomberg in October that Maduro and others “are the masterminds of a system that has rigged elections in many countries, including the U.S.” 

Trump himself acknowledged the connection late last month. In a Truth Social post that boosted an interview between CBS reporter-turned-right-wing influencer Lara Logan and two men who have spread claims that Venezuela interfered in the 2020 election and that the Tren de Aragua gang is controlled by military officials in Caracas, the President wrote: “We must focus all of our energy and might on ELECTION FRAUD!!”

Machado, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize Winner, for months has been feeding Trump the story that the Tren de Argua gang is controlled by Maduro, Kovensky says. Is she trying to goad Trump into bringing down Maduro?

Trump is speaking to the nation tonight. Keeping in mind that the Epstein files deadline is Friday, who wants to bet Trump is about to declare war (which he can’t do, constitutionally) on Venezuela? Anybody?

In other news — it’s a bit too late for a lot of people, but this morning four Republicans in the House have jumped ship and signed a discharge petition to force a floor vote on continuing ACA subsidies. And that gave the petition enough votes to go into effect. The vote won’t happen until next year, though. And, of course, the chances this would pass in the Senate and get signed by Trump are, um, tiny. The four are Brian Fitzpatrick, Robert Bresnahan and Ryan Mackenzie, all from Pennsylvania, and Mike Lawler of New York. Lawler is my rep and will be significantly challenged to win re-election next year, I believe.

On the plus side, today the Senate passed a defense bill that includes a provision to force Pete Hegseth to give them unedited videos of all of the boat bombings, including the infamous “double tap” incident.

Jack Smith testified to a closed-door hearing of the  House Judiciary Committee today that he had Trump dead to rights. PBS:

Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith told lawmakers in a closed-door interview on Wednesday that his team of investigators “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that President Donald Trump had criminally conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to portions of his opening statement obtained by The Associated Press.

He also said investigators had accrued “powerful evidence” that Trump broke the law by hoarding classified documents from his first term as president at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and by obstructing government efforts to recover the records.

In Stuff to Read — do see Jamelle Bouie, The White House Is a Lost Cause. Sample sentence: “Trump is a ubiquitous cultural presence, but there is no outward sign that he is an active participant in running the national government.” See also Justin Glawe, Public Notice, 2025 was a political disaster for MAGA.

Hearing that Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle were murdered last night was just too much. He was a good-hearted man who enhanced popular culture with his writing, acting, and directing. I’m not going to discuss suspects or motivations here; it’s too soon. Let the criminal justice system sort things out first.

But guess who couldn’t keep his thoughts to himself? This is from Rolling Stone:

As the film world and people of good taste around the world mourn the sudden death of legendary director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer, President Donald Trump jumped to make the apparent double homicide about himself. 

In an early morning Truth Social post, the president wrote that the couple had “passed away,” due to “the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.” 

“He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before,” Trump added. “May Rob and Michele rest in peace.” 

He can’t even fake being human. This is ghastly.

In other inappropriate responses news: After the Brown University shooting yesterday Trump  “truthed” that a suspect was in custody. Except, when he wrote that, there wasn’t. Authorities frantically contacted Brown students to tell them to say sheltered. Then someone was taken into custody, but no information about this person was released for several hours. MAGA had a meltdown; they wanted to know whether the perp was an Islamic jihadist or Antifa, so they could know who to hate on.

Most appear to have settled on “Islamic jihadist.” The “person of interest” was then identified as a 24-year-old named Benjamin Erickson from Wisconsin. Even then, far-right sites like Gateway Pundit (to which I do not link) insisted Erickson had  barged into the classroom of a Jewish professor yelling something in Arabic and began shooting. But lo; Erickson has been released. Apparently whatever evidence they had on him didn’t hold up. He wasn’t the guy. And as of this writing there are no new suspects.

Trump, ever an asshole, then offered solace to the students and faculty at Brown by saying “Things can happen.”

Shortly after the terrible shooting in Australia, authorities in Australia said they were going to tighten gun laws. The U.S. Right — who finally had some real Islamtic terrorists to hate on — were outraged (example). They appear to be angrier about Australian gun control than about the deaths of fifteen people.

But speaking of inappropriate, asshole responses, Benjamin Netanyahu had to flap his lips and blame Australia for the shooting. In particular, he blamed Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese brushed this off.

See also GOP Lawmakers Call for Purge of Muslims After Bondi Beach Shooting. Because more bigotry is just what we all need, right?

There were a number of other injustices in the world today. But one I want to mention is at ProPublica, Trump Officials Celebrated With Cake After Slashing Aid. Then People Died of Cholera.

On the one-month anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier this year, a group of his appointed aides gathered to celebrate.

For four weeks, they had been working overtime to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, freezing thousands of programs, including ones that provided food, water and medicine around the world. They’d culled USAID’s staff and abandoned its former headquarters in the stately Ronald Reagan Building, shunting the remnants of the agency to what was once an overflow space in a glass-walled commercial office above Nordstrom Rack and a bank.

There, the crew of newly minted political figures told the office manager to create a moat of 90 empty desks around them so no one could hear them talk. They ignored questions and advice from career staff with decades of experience in the field.

Despite the steps to insulate themselves, dire warnings poured in from diplomats and government experts around the world. The cuts would cost countless lives, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the other Trump officials were told repeatedly. The team of aides pressed on, galvanized by two men who did little to hide their disdain for the agency: first Peter Marocco, a blunt-spoken Marine veteran, and then 28-year-old Jeremy Lewin, who, despite having no government or aid experience, often personally decided which programs should be axed. 

By the third week in February, they were on track to wipe out 90% of USAID’s work. Created in 1961 to foster global stability and help advance American interests, USAID was the largest humanitarian donor in the world. In just a month’s time, the small band of appointees had set in motion its destruction.

In a corner conference room, it was time to party. They traded congratulatory speeches and cut into a sheet cake.

“Cholera” is a word that doesn’t mean much to most Americans these days, but massive cholera epidemics were common in the 19th century. The disease came on quickly and was nearly always fatal. Communities struck by cholera were decimated in short order. I’ve been in old cemeteries in which entire sections were victims of cholera epidemics. And it was a nasty death. Cholera causes diarrhea so intense that people die of dehydration and electrolyte imbalances within a few hours. A handful of people in the U.S. still die of it every year, but it’s unusual. The bacteria that causes cholera is spread through poor sanitation, usually sewage getting into drinking water. So now it’s mostly a third world disease.  Probably most Americans have no idea what it is.

Please do read the entire ProPublica story. It’s a testament to the callous indifference and irresponsibility of the entire Trump team. One could argue that other people should be taking more responsibility in the Sudan, and of course they should. But cutting off aid suddenly, with no warning or time to look for new funding for their programs, was a death sentence to a lot of people. And officials including Marco Rubio have been lying about it,

Two soldiers and a civilian interpreter were killed in Syria, the New York Times reports. Trump blamed ISIS and vowed to retaliate. But right now he’s at the Army-Navy college football game, so maybe he won’t screw up for a few more hours. Hegseth is probably planning World War III already, though. Note that the Times is reporting the assailant was a lone gunman.

In Trump’s first term 65 U.S. troops were killed, mostly in Afghanistan, so maybe he’ll fall back on pretending today’s deaths didn’t happen, as before. But back then Trump had people around him who reigned in him a tad. For most of Trump’s first term Jim Mattis was SecDef, although the last year there was a revolving door of five different acting SecDefs. A mess.

Fingers crossed Trump and Hegseth don’t start something stupid in Syria.

When I saw a headline this morning saying that a judge had blocked ICE from re-detaining Abrego Garcia, I thought I was seeing something left over from yesterday. But no, this happened very early this morning. U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered Abrego Garcia to be released yesterday. And he was. But then ICE directed him to report to its Baltimore office at 8 am this morning. Fearing that ICE planned to re-detain him, his lawyer went to Judge Xinis and got a restraining order against ICE. And, it turns out that ICE really did intend to re-detain the poor guy. Get this:

The basis of Xinis’ order to release Abrego Garcia was that ICE had never issued an order of removal against him — itself an extraordinary development because his wrongful deportation in March to El Salvador and his subsequent detention since he was returned to the United States were entirely predicated on the supposed issuance of an order of removal in 2019.

After Xinis ruled Thursday morning that no such order of removal existed, Philip P. Taylor, the acting regional deputy chief immigration judge in Baltimore, rushed out a new order around 7 p.m. ET that purported to fix the “scrivener’s error” in ICE’s records on Abrego Garcia and retroactively create an order of removal. Taylor’s order was comically subtitled: “Immigration Court’s Sua Sponte Order Correcting Scrivener’s Error.”

Taylor’s sudden intervention is procedurally flawed in myriad ways, but that didn’t stop him from purporting to make a number of “corrections” to the record in Abrego Garcia’s 2019 case, waving it all away with a breezy: “These corrections are hereby issued nunc pro tunc to the Immigration Court’s written decision and order of October 10, 2019.”

Judge Xinis was not impressed. Seriously, read the whole thing. But this comes back to why are they so obsessed with this one man? If ICE had just retrieved him from detention when it was first ordered to, most of us would have moved on to more recent atrocities. It appears ICE — and the Trump Administration — simply cannot admit it made a mistake to arrest him in the first place. This is pathological.

Along these lines, see Greg Sargent at The New Republic. Black and Latino voters are shifting hard against Trump, Sargent writes, because they are turned off by his naked bigotry. Sargent is talking to William Saletan, who has a piece at The Bulwark documenting the uglier things Trump has said about immigrants in recent days. This is worth checking out. But for now I want to point to this one bit —

Trump and Stephen Miller really thought they could test-run this fascism with shock and awe against immigrants and that voters would actually rally to it. If you recall, Stephen Miller was doing all sorts of very ostentatious things for a while there, like lining the White House driveway with mug shots of Latinos and migrants and that sort of thing.

And it was very clear that they thought that they were going to rally a majority of the country behind the type of agenda you’re talking about: the fully ethnonationalist, openly fascist agenda. But, you know, I think at least politically we’re seeing a surprising backlash to that. 

I’ve been thinking this all along, that Miller and Trump both assumed that they could treat immigrants — and people who look to them like immigrants — like disposable garbage, and most (white, I presume) Americans would approve. I’m sure the hard-core MAGAts approve, but most Americans of all ethnicities and races do not. And I don’t think Trump and his people are yet admitting that the tough guy act is hurting them politically. The Trump/Miller immigration policy is nothing but a reflection of Trump’s and Miller’s sick, ignorant bigotries. They can’t even seem to have processed that they are losing the Latino voters that were critical to Trump’s win in 2024. A year ago people were talking about a permanent realignment of Latinos with the Republican party, but that’s already gone.

I have to mention Rep Seth Magaziner’s (D-Rhode Island) skewering of Kristi Noem in a House hearing yesterday. It was glorious.I understand Noem finally got so rattled she excused herself to go to another meeting that had already been cancelled.

Filed under — “more news that will have Trump posting all night in ALL CAPS” — the National Trust has sued to stop Trump’s ballroom construction. About time.

The lawsuit from the nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation, which was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, represents the first major legal challenge to Trump’s planned 90,000-square-foot addition and is poised to test the limits of his power. The organization argues that the administration failed to undergo legally required reviews or receive congressional authorization for the project, which Trump has rushed to launch in hopes of completing it before his term ends in 2029.

In other headline news, I see that House Democrats have released a bunch of photos showing Trump and a lot of other famous people — including Bill Clinton, Woody Allen, Larry Summers, Steve Bannon, Alan Dershowitz, the former Prince Andrew, etc. etc., with Epstein. I don’t know that any of it is incriminating.

If anything else significant happens today, I’ll tack it on to this.

Update: I forgot to mention that Trump seems to be even more confused than before about the state-federal thing. Yesterday he pardoned Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk who was convicted of election interference. The problem with that is that Peters was convicted by the state of Colorado, not a federal court, so Trump has no authority to pardon her.  He also issued an executive order to stop states from regulating AI. And states are fully within their rights to ignore his executive order.

Also, too, this afternoon the Department of Justice announced actions against people they think “stole” the 2020 election from Donald Trump. See DOJ sues Georgia county as Trump pushes debunked 2020 election fraud claims

This brings up something William Saletan said in the Greg Sargent piece linked above.

I mean, picture yourself in Donald Trump’s shoes at a Trump rally. You’re looking out over the podium. What are you seeing? You’re seeing mostly a sea of white people, and you’re seeing a sea of white people cheering you as you slur various ethnic minorities, in particular the Somalis lately, right?

So you live in this bubble where everybody agrees with you, and you generally are in denial of polls, although we just had an exception there. So yeah, you’re gonna think that people are voting your way.

And of course, the 2020 election denial itself is about Donald Trump’s inability to accept that outside his bubble, people voted against him, right? That can’t be true. So he thinks this issue is a winner for him. I gotta underscore, Greg, that I am kind of dismayed that there isn’t more of a backlash against this.

It’s hard to know with Trump. He may genuinely believe he rightfully won in 2020. Or, on some fuzzy, subconscious level he may know that Joe Biden got more votes, but he thinks he was entitled to those votes and if he just throws a big enough tantrum the votes will be given to him. And he’s not going to give up as long as he’s breathing.

Here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting. “A bipartisan bill to extend enhanced Obamacare subsidies has attracted 16 Republican co-sponsors, according to an official list obtained first by POLITICO.” The group is threatening to use a discharge petition to force a vote on the measure if Moses Mike doesn’t allow it.

The Kiggans-Gottheimer bill would extend enhanced premium tax credits for one year with new income caps and guardrails to crack down on fraud. The bill would also require a vote by July 2026 on other policies designed to reduce Americans’ health insurance premiums.

The bill currently counts the support of a total of 38 members, including Kiggans and Gottheimer. The Republican co-sponsors so far are Reps. Mike Lawler and Nick LaLota of New York; Rob Bresnahan, Ryan Mackenzie and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania; María Elvira Salazar and Carlos Gimenez of Florida; Jeff Van Drew and Tom Kean of New Jersey; David Valadao and Kevin Kiley of California; Juan Ciscomani of Arizona; Jeff Hurd of Colorado; Don Bacon of Nebraska; and Monica De La Cruz of Texas.

I see my rep, Mike Lawler, on the list. I’m sure he realizes he doesn’t have a prayer of being re-elected next year if Medicaid tanks. He promised for months he would protect Medicaid, and then he voted for the Big Ugly Bill. People noticed.

The Senate is supposed to vote on two bills today to “fix” the subsidy problem. Neither is expected to pass.

The bill from the Democrats would extend the current subsidies for three years. The Republican bill is the one I wrote about yesterday, in which people under 50 who are losing the subsidy will instead get a whole $1,000 they can put in a Health Savings Account  to help them with out-of-pocket expenses for a whole year, provided they pay for a high-deductible “bronze” account that has thousands of dollars in deductibles. Those from age 50 t0 Medicare age get $1,500.  This will work for people who don’t need medical care, but if you do, you’re screwed. But as I said, neither is expected to pass.

I suppose we can have faint hope that the House bill will get voted on and the Senate will pass the House bill and that Trump would sign it.

See also The Senate is set to vote on 2 rival health plans. Here’s what’s at stake for Americans from the Associated Press. Good backgrounder.

Update: I understand neither bill made it past cloture. So they’re nixed.

In other news — a federal judge has ordered the long-suffering Kilmar Abrego Garcia to be released from ICE custody. See this very good explanation of what’s going on by David Kurtz at TPM — The Cruelest Irony of the Abrego Garcia Case.

Stuff to read — see John Roberts’s Dream Is Finally Coming True by David Daley at The Atlantic. It begins,

In 1982, when the Voting Rights Act was up for reauthorization, the Reagan Justice Department had a goal: preserve the VRA in name only, while rendering it unenforceable in practice. A young John Roberts was the architect of that campaign. He may soon get to finish what he started.

Update update: This just in — Justice Department again fails to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James.  This was the third attempt. I say they’ve struck out. Will Trump make them try again?

Before getting into Trump’s weird speech from last night, I want to note that Democrats pulled off a couple more election upsets yesterday. Miami elected a Democratic mayor for the first time in nearly 30 years. And Georgia Democrats picked up a state House seat yesterday. “That’s 25 pickups for Democrats nationwide this year—and zero for Republicans” it says here.

So naturally I’m also reading that Democrats may have a primary problem (some pesky progressives might try to run!) and that Democrats are seen as “too liberal” and “out of touch.” I acknowledge that there are Democratic politicians who are out of touch. But what does “too liberal” even mean? That Dems aren’t racist enough? That they should back off supporting the Bill of Rights? What?

People who are afraid of the word liberal tend to not know what it means. Maybe they need to be taught.  And while fingers are wagging at the Dems to not get too out of hand, the entire Republican Party has turned into a hyper-dystopian episode of The Outer Limits. So tired of this …

On to the weird speech. I didn’t watch the thing but saw bits and pieces. Here’s a sampler, if you can stand to watch it:

If it weren’t for his tariffs, we’d have no steel? Sure. Anyway, the box he’s in is that he can’t admit he is failing. So he simultaneously tells his supporters they’ve got the best economy they ever had and if they don’t like it they can just cut back on spending. Don’t buy your daughters so many dolls, for pity’s sake. Or pencils. You don’t need that many pencils. 

Weird on steroids. I don’t know if he honestly doesn’t understand the cost of living has gone up since he took office, or if he does know and cannot admit it. Either is plausible.

Paul Krugman:

Last night Donald Trump gave an important speech on the economy in Pennsylvania — supposedly in a working-class area, although the actual venue was a luxury casino resort. The event was initially touted as the start of an “affordability tour,” the first of a series of speeches intended to reverse Trump’s cratering approval on his handling of inflation and the economy. A number of news analyses suggested that he would use the occasion to blame Democrats for the economy’s troubles.

That was never going to happen. Trump did, of course, take many swipes at Joe Biden, as well as attacking immigrants, women and windmills. But to blame Democrats for the economy’s problems he would have to admit that the Trump economy has problems. And the speech was important because it revealed that he won’t make any such admission, and will continue to gaslight the public.

Trump spoke for 97 minutes last night, but according to news stories most of the speech was an anti-immigrant tirade — he is itching to deport Rep. Ilhan Omar — with a defense of the boat strikes on the side. Because he can’t talk about the economy. Really, he can’t. See also 10 Stupid Moments From Trump’s Pennsylvania Rally and Trump’s return to MAGA rallies is a flop.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress still haven’t settled on what they’re going to do to replace the ACA subsidies. The most effective thing they could do is just continue the subsidies, of course, but they won’t do that. Senate Republicans appear to have settled on a plan to let the ACA subsidies drop to pre-Covid levels. Instead, according to Reuters,

Their bill would authorize up to $1,500 for health savings accounts for individuals earning less than 700% of the federal poverty level. It also would bar the funds from being used for abortion or “gender transition services,” according to a summary released by the two senators. They said the measure also would lower insurance premiums by 11% in 2027 and reduce federal Medicaid funding to states that provide healthcare coverage to “illegal immigrants.”

I read elsewhere that this only goes to people who aren’t getting insurance through employee benefits; Reuters doesn’t make that clear. As I understand it, people under age 50 get $1,000. And yes, that’s that’s an annual payment, although if you don’t spend it all you can roll it over to next year. To receive the money one would then need to be enrolled in a high-deductible “bronze” plan and pay the premiums.

So if you don’t get sick or hit by a bus and can pay the bronze plan premiums, you should be okay. Otherwise …

House Republicans haven’t yet decided what they will do.

Update: This is twisted. See US Wants Five Years of Some Tourists’ Social Media to Enter the Country at Mother Jones.

Update Update: The U.S. has seized a Venezuelan oil tanker of the coast of Venezuela for reasons that are not clear to me. If anyone else understands this, feel free to explain it.

Remember the South Park Underpants Gomes?  Phase one, steal all the underpants. Phase three, profit! The problem is that nobody knows what phase two is supposed to be, or how collecting all the underpants leads to profit. They just have absolute faith it will work.

The Republican Party seems to have an Underpants Gnome problem. There are several news stories out today saying that congressional Republicans are panicking about rising health care and other costs, and they don’t know what to do about them. Politico: