Politics

Despite all the precautions and double-checks, at some level everything ends up a matter of trust. And in the case of Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, much of that trust was violated. Why couldn't the military trust him? Why do we have to trust him? The documents against Jack Teixeira, the twenty-one-year-old airman first class who is accused of leaking classified documents, indicate that he was granted a top secret security clearance in 2021, which was required for his job as a computer network technician in the Massachusetts Air National Guard. While that may sound like an exceptional degree of access for such a junior service member, having top secret/SCI (sensitive compartmentalized information) clearance in that kind of job is standard.

Why everyone lacks credibility on the debt ceiling Time to cough up, America. Tomorrow is Tax Day and, fittingly, Congress returns this week with negotiations over the debt limit at the top of the agenda in Washington. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy set out his stall this morning with a speech in Manhattan. With the summer deadline on the fiscal cliff fast approaching, McCarthy today vowed that “in the coming weeks, the House will vote on a bill to lift the debt ceiling into next year,” adding that the legislation would also “save taxpayers trillions of dollars, make us less dependent on China, and curb high inflation, all without touching Social Security or Medicare.

Why Feinstein’s intransigence will worry the White House I’m not quitting! Dianne Feinstein was channeling her inner Jordan Belfort this week when she refused to cave to calls from fellow Democrats to retire. The eighty-nine-year-old senator has been a headache for her party for some time now, with colleagues seemingly convinced that she is no longer mentally capable of executing her duties as senator and hoping for a speedy, low-key and dignified departure. The Democrats’ Feinstein problem looked like it was solved when, in February, she announced her retirement at the end of her term in 2024. But in early March Feinstein announced she had contracted shingles. Her staff said she’d only be away from the Senate for a few weeks.

Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell has been out of the public eye for weeks, following a serious fall that hospitalized him. Now multiple sources confirm that Senators John Barrasso of Wyoming, John Cornyn of Texas and John Thune of South Dakota are actively reaching out to fellow Republican senators in efforts to prepare for an anticipated leadership vote — a vote that would occur upon announcement that McConnell would be retiring from his duties as leader, and presumably the Senate itself. One source says that Cornyn has been particularly active in his preparations, taking fellow senators with whom he has little in common to lunch in attempts to court them.

Everywhere she goes, Representative Katie Porter leaves chaos in her wake. From her home to her office to her local police department, the California congresswoman leaves no one unscarred. The protégé of Senator Elizabeth Warren, who went as far as to name one of her children “Elizabeth” after the senator, is currently rolling out a new book, titled I Swear: Politics is Messier Than My Minivan, and aiming for an open US Senate seat. But her long-rumored divorce filings are getting Congresswoman Porter the wrong sort of publicity. They contain accusations from her ex-husband that she would scream “get out of my face and leave me alone!” to her children and would take a “ceramic bowl of steaming hot potatoes and dump[] it on [her husband’s] head, burning [his] scalp.

South Carolina Tim Scott is set to announce his bid for the presidency as soon as this week, Cockburn has heard from three sources. Scott has been doing the pre-announcement ritual of touring early voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire — as well as his home state of South Carolina. Per one of Cockburn's sources, Scott will announce at an event in South Carolina. No surprises there. Scott is set to throw his hat in the ring after former president Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner, was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury, and as Florida governor Ron DeSantis, thought to be the party’s top alternative to Trump, falters in the polls. DeSantis himself is also yet to announce.

A few weeks before Easter, a staffer for Republican senator Rand Paul was randomly and brutally attacked in downtown Washington, DC. The staffer, Phillip Todd, was leaving dinner with his friend when an assailant stabbed him four times in the abdomen, skull, brain and lungs. He suffered a punctured lung and potential brain bleeding. Todd was rushed to hospital, where he was operated on and ultimately survived the attack.   The man who stabbed Todd is a forty-two-year-old named Glynn Neal. Like many of DC’s violent criminals, Neal has a lengthy rap sheet. Virginians for Safe Communities, a nonprofit organization, detailed the man’s long history of criminal behavior.

North Carolina sparked some hope for the GOP future this week, after the “historic” defection of a longtime Democratic legislator handed Republicans a veto-proof supermajority in the state’s House of Representatives. State representative Tricia Cotham, a moderate now-former Democrat, was joined at a press conference by her new colleagues in the state House’s Republican conference and US House representative Dan Bishop, who was on crutches after injuring himself playing pickleball. “I didn’t care if I had to have the leg amputated, I was going to be standing next to Tricia,” he told me.

Could abortion be a vote-winner for Democrats nationally? Former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is concerned for the future of the GOP. Walker is an authority here: he’s one of the few elected officials to have ever won three elections in four years, after Democrats mounted a boneheaded attempt to recall him from office back in 2012. What worries Walker now, per comments he made to Fox News Thursday, is the result of this week’s election for his own state’s Supreme Court that saw liberals secure a judicial majority for the first time since 2008. That election centered largely on abortion — the soon-to-be justice who won, Janet Protasiewicz, made very clear that she was pro-choice.

From top to bottom, the Chicago Teachers Union — one of the shadiest unions in America — now runs the Windy City. Brandon Johnson will succeed scandal-plagued Mayor Lori Lightfoot and hand his former colleagues in CTU the keys to the city. Johnson made hundreds of thousands of dollars as a CTU executive, while failing to pay thousands of dollars to Chicago in fees in water and sewage bills. When all is said and done, Johnson will have defeated his fellow Democrat Paul Vallas in the runoff by about 4 percent. In contrast with Johnson’s platitude-heavy offering, Vallas ran a campaign laser-focused on crime, pledging to boost the city’s police force numbers at a time when crime is surging once again in America’s third largest city.