Why The GOP Debacle On The Hill Is Like Pro Wrestling

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

We Are In the Dumbest Timeline

The GOP chaos on the Hill isn’t about policy disputes or even strictly ideological differences. That makes covering which version of which bill contains which provisions a bit of a fool’s errand. This isn’t about spending or budget priorities or the debt limit or any of the other ostensible negotiating points that Republicans themselves can’t agree on or resolve amongst themselves in any meaningful way.

This week’s debacle is not your grandpappy’s horse-trading in a smoke-filled room or LBJ dishing out the Johnson Treatment. The only arm-twisting going on is the kind you see in pro wrestling, which is probably the best parallel for what the GOP’s performative politics amounts to. Spending bills, speakership elections, and other real and pressing matters of government put the GOP’s kayfabe under extreme duress. When that happens, we get eruptions like this one that periodically pull the curtain back on what is really up.

We’re are more than a decade now into the GOP’s performative politics of destruction. It gains power by touting its aim to break stuff and then runs into a brick wall when it’s forced to make the hard choices that come with holding power. Any GOP effort to govern at least temporarily is susceptible to being undermined by its many bombthrowers, who can exert leverage by striking a purer “blow it all” posture.

It’s why the details of the negotiations, such as they are, barely matter. It’s why what’s on or off the table isn’t very illuminating about the underlying politics. I’d call it a disaster for Republicans, but they’ve done this over and over for more than decade and not paid nearly the political price you’d expect.

Does This Really Convey What Is Happening?

I police word choice with some trepidation because rather than forcing hard thinking about precision it often gets turned into a new bright-line rule that is just as lazy as the bad practice it replaced. With that caveat, observe some of the headlines over the last day or two about the GOP chaos on the Hill. Do these really accurately describe what is happening, especially in a world in which the GOP has spent decades invested in making the broader public think government is inept, unreliable, and incompetent?

WaPo: Government shutdown looms as House rejects GOP funding bill
Politico: Shutdown blame game engulfs Capitol as hopes to avert shutdown fade
WSJ: House Rejects GOP Plan Backed by Trump as Government Barrels Toward Shutdown
NYT: Government Lurches Toward Shutdown After House Tanks Trump’s Spending Plan

Those are literally true, but they fail to capture the true dynamic. Not all headlines were this opaque, and other stories from the same outlets had sharper headlines that reflected what is actually happening. The worst of all though was this laugher: “Biden is AWOL as Washington spirals into shutdown chaos”

Trump Insists He’s Still BMOC

Elon Musk’s outsized role in bullying the House GOP into abandoning the bipartisan deal on CR had Trump scrambling Thursday to assert that he’s still in charge. Trump himself did hastily scheduled phone interviews with reporters at ABC, CBS and NBC. The pushback was not subtle, as exemplified by this cheesy spin given to Politico:

It Musk is a “pawn in Trump’s chessboard, like everybody else,” said a person close to Trump who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to speak frankly. The media “really wants to paint Elon as this independent character. If it were a chessboard, [Musk would] be a bishop.”

Trump’s own spokesperson issued a clunky statement that belied Trump’s strength: “As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view. President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.”

Oligarch Watch

“President-elect Donald Trump had dinner Wednesday with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (who owns The Washington Post) at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, and the two were joined by billionaire Elon Musk, a Trump transition team spokesperson confirmed.”–WaPo

For Your Radar …

More than 30 House Republicans have sent a letter to President-elect Trump urging him to have his new attorney general call for the resignations of all 94 U.S. attorneys and handpick their acting successors rather than allowing the existing first assistant U.S. attorneys to ascend to the acting roles, Semafor was the first to report.

The sweeping resignations of all the U.S. attorneys would not be unusual or uncommon with a change in administrations, but handpicking each of the acting U.S. attorneys to make sure they are not an “ideological protégé” of their predecessor is out of the ordinary.

Here’s what caught my eye from the letter:

We believe your interim appointments ought to be current federal prosecutors. Your transition team, incoming Attorney General, and like-minded allies in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House should identify individuals within each office to elevate to Interim U.S. Attorney until your nominations for U.S. Attorneys are confirmed by the Senate.

That sounds an awful lot like a mechanism to identify loyalists – and by implication everyone who isn’t a loyalist – throughout the Justice Department. Stay tuned.

Speaking Of Loyalty Tests …

This is very inside baseball but it gives you a taste of the loyalty dynamic operating within the Republican Party right now: A MAGA power play roils Senate GOP campaign groups. I know it’s tempting to write this off as something the GOP brought on itself, but this is your occasional reminder that everything Trump does to America he first does to the Republican Party.

Quote Of The Day

“When the media decides to start hedging, or not telling the full story, combined with people being reluctant to engage in political opposition because they fear they will land in jail, that’s just not a democracy any longer. And it’s not like we’re six months away from that. It feels like we might be a month away from a world in which people start to retreat from politics for fear of criminal prosecution, and the media just uses kid gloves in dealing with the regime. I don’t think this is hypothetical two years from now; we may be living in a very restricted democratic space in January.”–Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), speaking on Greg Sargent’s podcast The Daily Blast

Appeals Court DQs Fani Willis In Trump RICO Case

A major setback in the RICIO case in Georgia as an intermediate appeals court found the trial judge erred in not disqualifying District Attorney Fani Willis once he found that her conduct had created a “significant appearance of impropriety.” That means Willis is off the case unless she succeeds in her appeal to the state Supreme Court.

Important

Politico: Judges increasingly alarmed as Trump’s Jan. 6 clemency decision nears

100% This …

Sherrilyn Ifill, on the Roberts Court: “More and more, the conservative majority’s approach has put the rules and norms that govern our system of litigation in the crosshairs as much as the substantive rights of marginalized groups.”

Number Of U.S. Troops Double What Was Previously Disclosed

The Pentagon has maintained for months that there are 900 U.S. troops deployed in Syria, but yesterday revealed that the actual number is 2,000.

Fuck It, We’ll Do It Live!

The Josh Marshall Podcast featuring Kate Riga will be recorded in front of a live audience for the first time on Jan. 15 in Washington, D.C.

Want to join us? Tickets are on sale here. If you are a TPM Prime member, you should have already received an invitation with a discount code. If not, reach out to us and we’ll get you one.

We’ll do a brief Q&A and a cocktail hour after the podcast. I’ll be there. I hope to see you there, too.

Tickets are limited and they’re going fast, so don’t wait. Buy now.