Oliver Wiseman

The curious case of Mark Meadows What to make of the curious case of Mark Meadows? Donald Trump’s former chief of staff raised eyebrows — and whetted appetites — last month when he agreed to cooperate with the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot. A week later, Meadows broke the agreement he had reached with House investigators, refused to cooperate any further and sued the committee to override a subpoena on his phone records. But Meadows seems to have cooperated for long enough to hand over nearly 10,000 pages of evidence to the committee. Some of the evidence in these pages, including messages sent to the president’s right hand man as the Capitol was under attack, was revealed yesterday ahead of a vote to hold Meadows in criminal contempt.

Why won’t the White House take inflation seriously? As has been clear for some time now, the fortunes of Joe Biden’s Build Back Better legislation and the state of the US economy are inextricably linked. With every bit of economic bad news, such as the worse-in-40-years inflation figures announced on Friday, the chances of the president securing fifty votes for his monster spending bill seem to fade. Today, Biden will meet Joe Manchin and try to win the West Virginia holdout round. But one suspects nothing the president says to Manchin would be as persuasive as some good economic news — in particular, an easing of the price rises that Manchin has long said are a major reason why he cannot support the bill.

Bad news for Build Back Better Most economists expected this morning’s inflation news to be bad. And it was. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, US consumer prices have soared by 6.8 percent over the past twelve months, the biggest spike since 1982. This is bad news for American households, bad news for the Biden administration and especially bad news for those Democratic lawmakers tasked with getting Build Back Better onto the books. Senate leader Chuck Schumer is, slowly but surely, ticking items off his December to do list. The National Defense Authorization Act has passed. The debt limit deadlock has been broken. But this legislative Santa and his big-spending elves have left the trickiest job 'til last.

Have vax mandates jumped the shark? Last night, the Senate dealt a major blow to Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for large employers, albeit a largely symbolic one. Fifty Republicans were joined by two Democrats, Joe Manchin and John Tester, in the vote to repeal the administration’s vaccine regulations, which have already encountered major legal problems in courts across the country. Given that the measure is not going to be picked up by the House, the Senate vote will not change the law. Not so long ago, vaccine mandates were assumed by the White House to be good policy and good politics. The fact that more and more judges agree that the administration’s regulations happen to be unconstitutional somewhat undercuts the first claim.

Omarova and out Saule Omarova, Joe Biden’s pick to be one of America’s top banking regulators, has withdrawn from the nomination process. You may remember Omarova — as I explained in the DC Diary a few weeks ago, she is the shoplifting radical with a track record of dicey economic thinking. Why is Omarova backing out of her bid to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency? According to the president, it’s because “from the very beginning, Saule was subjected to inappropriate personal attacks that were far beyond the pale.” According to the New York Times, “Bank lobbyists and Republicans painted [Omarova] as a communist because she was born in the Soviet Union.” It might be true that a few Republican lawmakers took their red-baiting too far.

Will Biden meet this perilous moment? William Burns was honest about what he didn’t know but clear about what was possible. In an interview Monday, the CIA director said that US intelligence agencies have not concluded that Russia will invade Ukraine but that the army assembled by Vladimir Putin close to the border “could act in a very sweeping way.” Burns widened the lens to argue that we are at a “rare moment of transformation.” It’s hard to disagree. From Ukraine to Taiwan, from Iran’s nuclear proliferation to a burgeoning shadow war in space, the nature of threats to America are changing. And one cannot but feel that all of this is approaching an uncomfortable pinch point.

Bob Dole, RIP An epic American life came to an end when Bob Dole died at ninety-eight in his sleep on Sunday morning. Reading Dole’s obituaries, it’s hard not to be moved by his journey from the small Kansas town of Russell to the top of American politics, via near fatal injury in the Second World War. As the Wall Street Journal account of Dole’s life puts it, “Bob Dole went from the plains of Kansas to the battlefields of Italy, where he was left for dead with grievous wounds, before a dogged recovery enabled him to become a widely respected leader of the Senate and Republican nominee for both president and vice president.” In a piece for National Review, Craig Shirley salutes Dole for being “the first and best compassionate conservative.

There’s no going back after Dobbs “Consensus” isn’t a word that tends to be associated with the abortion debate. But after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization this week, the most direct challenge to the law on abortion in a generation, plenty of people on both sides of the issue seem to think that Roe v. Wade is on the chopping block. “The Supreme Court looks ready to overturn Roe v. Wade,” speculates the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson Sorkin. Many other observers of this week’s proceedings agree. I’ll leave such speculation to others, including my Spectator colleagues who discuss the case in the latest episode of The District.

Rubio's anti-slavery stand Last night, Chuck Schumer hit another bump in the road on the way to passing the National Defense Authorization Act, the must-pass legislation that was supposed to be the most straightforward item on the Democrats’ December legislative to-do list. A bipartisan attempt to move things along via unanimous consent on the bill, which would mean votes on 20 amendments, was scuppered by Marco Rubio. Rubio had proposed an amendment to the legislation that would ban imports from Xinjiang, where, according to the US government and others, the Chinese government is carrying out a genocide against the Uighurs. Earlier on Wednesday, the amendment had been included on the list of measures that would be voted on.

A vote on Putin’s pipeline The rush to keep the lights on in government comes with a geopolitical headache. An amendment attached to the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act by Senator Jim Risch would introduce sanctions on the operator of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. This leaves many Democratic senators in a bind. The initial sanctions were a bipartisan effort. Opposition to Nord Stream 2, a direct pipeline from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea, on the grounds that it would increase European dependency on Russian gas has long been a point of consensus in Washington. But the Biden administration has waived sanctions and accepted the pipeline as, to quote Antony Blinken, “a fait accompli.

Oh no, Cuomo Letitia James, the New York State attorney general, has released sworn testimony and private messages collected as part of the sexual harassment investigation that forced out disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo. The documents reveal behavior by Andrew’s brother, CNN primetime host Chris, that should lead to his resignation. We already knew that Chris had been advising his brother on his response to the allegations. Now we learn that the $6-million-a-year journalist hadn’t just been spinning for an elected official, but that he had been trying to dig up dirt on one of his brother’s accusers. In the past, Cuomo had insisted that his role in his brother’s defense had just been to “listen” and “offer my take.” The documents demonstrate that to be a lie.

Omicron omnishambles The scary charts are back. Rapidly rising case numbers in South Africa and the identification of a new coronavirus variant with an alarming number of mutations means the pandemic has returned to the top of the political agenda. Relatively little is known about Omicron at the moment. We do know that the variant is already in the United States and is likely to lead to a spike in case numbers. (We also know that the WHO skipped over the Greek letter “Nu” because it sounds the same as “new” and passed on “Xi” lest anyone get the right idea about who is to blame for the pandemic.

Are the Republicans getting complacent? As you may have noticed, this diary hasn’t exactly been heavy on celebration of the Biden presidency. Indeed, our first few months have coincided with a period of distressing mismanagement in the White House. But in a fit of holiday generosity, today’s pre-Thanksgiving offering is dedicated to a thought experiment: what is the strongest realistic case for being bullish on Joe Biden? After a miserable period for the president, Republican triumph in 2022, and even 2024, is all but taken for granted and question marks loom over whether Biden will even seek a second term. But is everyone getting ahead of themselves? Here’s the case for White House optimism.

A badly timed call for bail reform On Monday, three House Democrats sent a letter to New York’s district attorneys asking for answers on what they describe as the prosecutors’ use of “excessive” bail in the city’s court system as well as ways to deal with unsafe conditions at the infamous jail on Rikers Island. “We have grave concerns that excessive bail amounts are leading to unnecessary pretrial detention,” said Carolyn Maloney, Jamie Raskin and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a joint statement. The timing of the announcement could hardly have been worse.

Biden picks Powell After months of umm-ing and ahh-ing, Joe Biden this morning announced that he will nominate Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell to a second term at the helm of the central bank. The move is designed to reassure. At a time when prices, and economic anxiety, are on the rise, Biden has opted for a known quantity: the Trump appointee who has helped steer the US economy through an uncertain few years. Progressives had been pushing Biden to replace Powell with Lael Brainard, a Fed board member who had criticized some of Powell’s moves as governor. Among her most vocal supporters was Elizabeth Warren, who has called Powell a “dangerous man.

A magic minute and magic maths Why did House minority leader Kevin McCarthy deliver a speech that lasted a whopping eight and a half hours last night? After all, his filibuster will not stop the House from passing the Democrats’ $1.75 trillion social spending bill, which will be voted on shortly after lawmakers reconvene this morning. But in much the same way people don’t run marathons to get from A to B, McCarthy’s demonstration of rhetorical stamina was designed to prove a point. “I am a fighter” was the intended message and the GOP caucus was the intended audience. For McCarthy wants the Republicans to win back control of the House next year, and he wants to be the one handed the speaker’s gavel if they do.

Will Biden’s radical comptroller get the nod? You’ve probably never heard of Saule Omarova. A professor at Cornell Law School, she is hardly a household name. She is also Joe Biden’s pick for the job of Office of Comptroller of the Currency and her Senate Banking Committee hearing will be held today. OCC is one of those important jobs that doesn’t generally capture the headlines: its officeholder is the nation’s top banking regulator. Omarova is popular among progressives. Elizabeth Warren has called her “an excellent choice to oversee and regulate the activities of our nation’s largest banks.” But her nomination has earned outsized attention because of some eyebrow-raising details in Omarova’s backstory and her views on economics.

The White House thinks you’re stupid Whether things are going well or badly, presidents are almost always awarded too much credit or blame for the state of the economy. As the White House is eager to point out, Joe Biden cannot eradicate inflation or solve the supply chain crisis with the stroke of a pen. What he can do, though, is help. He and his advisors can listen, try to understand the struggles of American households and act accordingly. Faced with this option, however, the Biden administration has instead chosen to stick its fingers in its ears. On the massive spending bill that Congress is set to vote on soon, the Biden administration has not swerved. No recent events have persuaded senior Democrats that anything about the legislation needs to change.

The disinformation delusion This week sees the release of the Aspen Institute’s report on “Information Disorder.” The commission responsible for the publication assembled representatives of the great and the good, including noted Ginsburg censor Katie Couric and First Amendment hater Prince Harry. This latest blast in the war on “disinformation” trots out the usual arguments in favor of greater supervision over the news we all consume. “Merely elevating truthful content is not nearly enough to change our current course,” they argue. By now the double standards and missteps of those who want to “flag,” ban and de-platform their way to a healthier democracy are well established.

Rising to the China challenge This evening, Joe Biden and Xi Jinping will meet virtually in a bid to reduce rising tensions between the US and China. The remote tête-à-tête comes at an important time, after a Chinese Communist Party declaration that marks Xi as among the greatest figures in its history, with the outlines of the Biden administration’s China policy now visible, and with no shortage of contentious issues for the two leaders to discuss. Foremost among these issues is Taiwan, the pinch point where Chinese ambitions and the West’s defense commitments are most likely to collide.