Life Goes On

A quick update while I'm away

Jan 26

So it’s been one week since our new addition to the household arrived!

We were all very happy to meet Clover last week, including big sister Liberty.

As with the last birth, when Liberty arrived, I’ve been taking a few days off to adjust to the new morning/evening schedule. But I’m no Mayor Pete, so it’ll be closer to two weeks than two months until I’m back on your TV and writing consistently again. In the meantime, we appreciate the prayers and support from all our friends. My podcast will keep going uninterrupted as we banked a few things ahead of time — the latest is with Mike Pompeo, which you can find below.

Meanwhile, the world spins on:

Biden’s Classified Headache

Senators are frustrated they still don’t know what documents were had, by whom, and where, and why.

Members of the Senate intelligence committee said Wednesday that they should have access to classified documents that were discovered in the homes of President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence, arguing that Biden’s administration is stonewalling them over the matter.
Senators reacted with swift, bipartisan anger after a classified meeting with National Intelligence Director Avril Haines, insisting they need to see for themselves what documents the three men were holding.
“It is our responsibility to make sure that we, in the role of the intelligence oversight, know if there’s been any intelligence compromised,” said Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat. Warner and the panel’s vice chairman, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, held a joint news conference after they walked out of the meeting.
Members of Congress have sought access to the materials, or at least a risk assessment detailing what was within them, since the discovery of documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida last summer. But they say the administration has objected, arguing they can’t provide that access as two special counsels at the Justice Department are investigating Trump and Biden’s mishandlings of the documents.

Amber Athey argues that Biden’s in a much worse position than Trump:

First, while there are competing arguments as to the extent of a vice president’s power to declassify documents, there is no world in which a US senator would be able to declassify them. The DoJ recovered documents from Biden’s time as a senator, which raises serious questions as to how they ended up in his personal possession. Several Democratic senators, including Tim Kaine and Dick Durbin, outlined the procedures they would have to go through to even review such materials. Kaine explained that he is only shown classified material in a SCIF (a sensitive compartmented information facility), while Durbin said he would sometimes be able to review it behind a locked door in his office with a handler present. They were never allowed to take these documents with them. How was Biden able to do so? Did he steal them?
Comparatively, Trump claimed he had a standing order to declassify all documents that were moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago at the end of his first term as president. There is a dispute over whether he went through the appropriate procedure to declassify documents — and if there is any evidence of this “standing order” — but there is no question as to whether he had the authority to do it.
Second, Biden’s documents were found scattered across several locations, had apparently been moved multiple times and were not held securely. Biden left the vice presidency in 2017, but the Penn Biden Center was not built until 2018, meaning any documents found there must have been held somewhere else in the meantime. In addition to the “locked closet” at the Penn Biden Center, documents were also found in Biden’s garage next to this Corvette, in his “personal library” and in another yet unnamed location at the Wilmington residence.
An old video shows Biden backing his Corvette into the open garage next to a stack of boxes, while photos pulled from Hunter Biden’s laptop reveal that the president’s son has also taken the vintage muscle car for a spin. Another photo from the laptop shows a box marked “Important Doc’s + Photos” [sic] left ajar on a table during a child’s birthday party. These documents were hardly stored properly. In addition, Hunter Biden was a frequent guest at the Wilmington home while the classified documents were there. The idea that Hunter may have had access to classified materials while collecting paychecks from businesses in deeply corrupt foreign countries is extremely concerning.
Trump’s documents were mostly held in a storage locker at Mar-a-Lago that was reinforced with a second lock upon the DoJ’s request. Two other classified documents were found at another storage facility outside of the Mar-a-Lago resort. There does not seem to be any question of where the documents were at any particular point in time.
Biden initially claimed that the classified documents must have inadvertently ended up at his DC office; he did not know how they got there. The discovery of additional documents littered across his personal residence makes this defense incredibly suspect. Biden’s aides may have immediately cooperated with the DoJ upon finding a document with classified markings at the Penn Biden Center. But Biden has apparently been squirreling away classified material for years — and even after being busted, has refused to come clean. Is that what the media calls “cooperating”?

GOP’s Unclear Debt Ceiling Plans

House GOP mulls passing a temporary “clean” debt limit suspension to buy time.

House Republicans are mulling an attempt to buy time for further negotiations on federal spending and deficits by passing one or more short-term suspensions of the statutory debt ceiling this summer, including potentially lining up the deadline with the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30.
No decisions on a cutoff date have been made, and it's not yet clear when the Treasury Department will run out of cash to meet all U.S. financial obligations. But most analysts agree Congress will need to act at some point between early June and September, and lawmakers likely won't want to leave the matter unaddressed before the August recess.
Any such short-term measure would likely be "clean" of any strings attached or specific spending cuts, and be designed as a suspension of the borrowing cap, which had been done repeatedly over the past decade until 2021, rather than a dollar increase in the debt limit. That would presumably make it easier for Republicans to swallow voting for it after pledging to only back a debt limit increase if paired with spending cuts.
Sources familiar with the talks described them as preliminary and subject to change after discussing with the House GOP rank and file. But there has been support within the conference for the basic idea of tying the two deadlines together — the debt limit "x date" and the end of the fiscal year —to create more pressure for a deal.
Ultimately, the only way House Republicans say they'll vote for a longer-term debt limit fix is by tying it to spending cuts, and the current focus is on discretionary funds within the Appropriations committees' purview, although other pots of money could be looked at.

Matt Yglesias with the Democratic Centrist CW on things:

This is just to say that Republicans are trying to hold a negotiation about this, but they don’t actually have a negotiating position. Everyone has agreed amongst themselves that passing a clean debt limit would be a kind of cuck move and they don’t want to do it. But they don’t really know why they don’t want to do it other than that nobody wants to surrender, and I think they have a vague sense that “bad stuff happening” would be bad for Joe Biden. I think the belief that a debt ceiling crisis is damaging to the incumbent president is how Republicans got some leverage over Obama. But today — with a deeper public understanding of the issue, a clearer position from the White House on what they want, better elite comprehension of the available options, and a GOP whose stance on the issue is completely unclear — I don’t really think that leverage exists. We’re hurtling toward a very chaotic legal and constitutional situation for no real reason.
The weird thing about the Mace/Vance/Trump position is that if they want to reduce appropriations for the discretionary budget, there’s an established process for that.
The fiscal year 2022 appropriations expired last year on October 1, and Congress passed what’s called a continuing resolution extending the old appropriations levels forward for three more months. Then at the very end of the year, a bipartisan majority reached an agreement on an omnibus appropriations bill for fiscal year 2023 and passed it. As you can see courtesy of this chart from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, this bill offered an unusually large increase in nominal spending. Some of that is inflation, but the pace of spending grew in inflation-adjusted terms — though with considerable variance across departments…
If Republicans want to write appropriations bills that set spending at a lower level and have the House pass them, nothing is stopping them from doing that. Democrats, presumably, would not agree to those cuts and there then might be a government shutdown and we’d see who the public sides with. Or Republicans could pass appropriations bills containing the cuts they prefer but also avoid a shutdown by agreeing to a continuing resolution. A CR that maintains current spending levels would be a cut in real terms, and the longer you’re able to hold out on the basis, the deeper the cut. The fact that Republicans didn’t cut discretionary spending when they held a trifecta in 2017-2018 is, I think, a little bit telling as to their level of commitment to this issue, but the point is there is a clear venue in which to fight about discretionary spending if that’s what they want to do. It even comes with a dramatic crisis moment in the form of a possible shutdown. There’s no need to do this debt ceiling bit.

Federal Watchdog Slams Fauci’s Agency

Luke Rosiak.

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s federal science agency and EcoHealth Alliance, which took a U.S. grant for bat virus research and paid part of it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, made serious missteps, government investigators said Tuesday.
EcoHealth Alliance did not properly disclose its subgrant recipients—which included the Chinese lab which may have been the origin of COVID—and was two years late in filing a report that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) concluded may have revealed “gain of function,” or experiments which make a virus more dangerous to humans, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Inspector General said in a 72-page report. Fauci headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which oversaw the grant and is part of NIH.
“Our audit found that NIH’s own evaluation of the Year 5 progress report concluded that the research was of a type that should have been reported immediately to NIH,” it said. The Year 5 report was filed two years late, but the IG said NIH “did not effectively monitor or take timely action” despite knowing about potential risks.
“This oversight failure is particularly concerning because NIH had previously raised concerns with EcoHealth about the nature of the research being performed. Once NIH received and reviewed the late progress report, NIH concluded the research resulted in a virus with enhanced growth,” it said.
EcoHealth Alliance, for its part, said that NIH had never followed up to ask for the late report or information about its subgrantees, and that it seemed to be on good terms with the agency given that it continued to give it funding. After the coronavirus pandemic, NIH terminated EcoHealth’s grant, and EcoHealth successfully appealed the termination—though NIH nonetheless “suspended” it.

China Woos Washington Wizards

Matthew Foldi.

China’s new foreign minister issued his first public statement at a Washington Wizards game this weekend. “Happy Chinese New Year to DC family,” Qin Gang said, in a video blasted on the giant screens across Capital One Arena and shared by news outlets controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
It was a continuation of China using American sporting events as a means of exerting its soft power, and yet another stark example of the existential challenge that the United States faces in its struggle to outmaneuver the Chinese Communist Party — even in its own capital city.
China’s increased presence in American sports is raising eyebrows on Capitol Hill, located just a few miles away from where the Wizards play.
For some Wizards fans, visits from Qin are becoming a regular part of the viewing experience. Last Chinese New Year, he appeared on the stadium’s Jumbotron, touting the fact that the Wizards were the first NBA team to visit China back in 1979. He even shot hoops from the court last month, back when he was China’s ambassador to the US.
During the timeouts in the game, the Chinese Embassy boasted that “the staff tossed many Chinese zodiac rabbits to the audience and triggered a ‘scramble’… The panda mascots, played by Chinese diplomats’ children, made an impressive appearance on the court, winning loud applause and cheers from the audience.”