Oliver Wiseman

Republicans are losing the debt-limit standoff  Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy will meet on Wednesday for talks on the debt ceiling. Just don’t call this powwow a “negotiation.” Biden has said he will only sign a clean bill — i.e. a no-strings-attached increase to the limit on federal borrowing. And so, as far as the White House’s public position is concerned, there’s nothing to negotiate. A statement from the White House on Sunday described the meeting as “a discussion on a range of issues” and said that Biden “will ask what the Speaker’s plan is” and “if he intends to meet his Constitutional obligation to prevent a national default.” Biden took the same tough line last week, pledging to “veto everything they send me.

Trump hits the road  Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential bid has the feel of a band that, having hit a dead-end in the studio, hits the road in a bid to get the creative juices flowing. This weekend, the former president will hold rallies in South Carolina and New Hampshire, his first in a while, amidst a growing sense things aren’t quite going to plan. A quick recap of that campaign so far: the former president spent most of 2022 delighting in the will-he-won’t-he pantomime over whether he’d have another run at the White House. Then, with the midterms approaching and everyone expecting a red wave, he prepared to own the results, teasing a campaign launch for the week after Election Day.

The other governor A Republican governor who took a libertarian approach to the pandemic has been the subject of considerable Democratic fear-mongering, finds himself in Donald Trump’s crosshairs and has seen his stock in his home state soar to unimaginable highs. I am referring, of course, to Georgia governor Brian Kemp. Yes, for all that Florida’s Ron DeSantis has hogged the headlines as the big Republican winner of the last few years, his neighbor to the north has a similarly impressive story to tell. Like DeSantis, Kemp was sworn in for his second term as governor earlier this month. And, as with DeSantis, he went from a nail-biter in 2018 to a blowout win in 2022.

Ron Klain clocks off Two years after starting work as one of the most powerful chiefs of staff in modern American history, Ron Klain will be stepping down. The man some styled “Prime Minister Klain” in recognition of the latitude afforded to him by his octogenarian boss has embodied the Biden administration at its best and worst. An inveterate tweeter, Klain personified the way in which Team Biden went from a successful social-media-skeptical presidential campaign to a very-online White House staff. His frequently updated feed has at least been a helpful peek into how the White House sees things — and how they want you to see things. Through these posts, Klain revealed a high-handed disregard for Americans’ economic woes when he called it a “high-class problem.

Let the debt games begin Let the game of chicken begin. The US government bumped into its debt ceiling yesterday. Janet Yellen has begun “extraordinary cash management measures” to stave off default until June 5, setting the stage for a high-stakes, months-long, many-fronted battle in Washington. It will pit the two parties against each other, the president against Congress, GOP hardliners against leadership. For now, the president and his party insist that they will only contemplate a “clean” debt ceiling raise; in other words, no negotiations, no concessions. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists,” is the overblown Democratic line du jour. But how long can this approach last?

Washington’s crime bill is a disgrace Washington has experienced a notably deadly start to the year. Already there have been eleven homicides in the city (compared to six at the same stage in 2022). Over the first half of January, motor vehicle theft is up 74 percent on last year — and crime is up 25 percent in total. It’d be foolish to draw too many clear conclusions from a few weeks of data, but the spate of murders and carjackings make for a striking backdrop to the decision of the DC city council to override a veto from mayor Muriel Bowser and pass a new criminal code that promises to “improve” and “modernize” Washington’s approach to crime. By “improve” and “modernize” (the words of council member Charles Allen), they mean “soften” and “water down.

Reasons to be cheerful? Those White House officials not rifling through classified documents in a Delaware garage (more on that later) have been able to enjoy back-to-back weeks of good economic news to start 2023. Taken together, last week’s robust December jobs report and this week’s inflation report that shows slowing price rises have boosted optimism about the possibility of a so-called “soft landing,” in which the Fed manages to tame inflation without causing a recession. Just a few months ago, it was a question of when, not if, America would dive into negative growth. A soft landing was seen as a pie-in-the-sky delusion; in October, a Bloomberg model put the chance of a recession at 100 percent.

The elections to watch in 2023 Some days it feels like the 2024 presidential race is already underway. Donald Trump launched his campaign more than six weeks ago; his biggest primary rival Ron DeSantis is watched like a hawk; and Biden appears to be taking steps to rebuild the coalition of voters he assembled in 2020. But the long road to 2024 includes some important elections in 2023. They won’t decide whose in control in Washington, but they’ll count for a lot on a state level and help set the national political tone at the start of the 2024 cycle. Here are some of the races to keep an eye on this year. Chicago’s mayoral race It’d hard to call Lori Lightfoot’s time as mayor of Chicago a roaring success.

Biden’s pivot point When Biden went to El Paso yesterday, his first trip to the US border as president, he addressed a long-standing point of political embarrassment. Over the first two years of Biden’s presidency, with illegal crossings at crisis levels, the Republican complaint that the president hadn’t found the time to assess the situation on the ground was entirely reasonable. A quick pitstop on the way to the summit of North American leaders might not seem like much, and a cursory survey of the border in western Texas amounts to a president doing the bare minimum, but it’s nonetheless worth asking why Biden chose this moment to grasp the nettle. The timing is, above all, a sign of the unexpectedly comfortable position Biden finds himself in at the start of 2023.

House arrest What has changed? As the House reconvenes for a fourth day of wrangling over who will be speaker, the voting records would suggest: not much. Eleven times lawmakers have been asked to pick a speaker and the results have looked more or less the same each time. None of the holdouts have been persuaded by Kevin McCarthy, and neither has any serious alternative to McCarthy emerged. The so-called Never Kevin constituency (which numbers at least four and maybe more) seems as implacable as ever, while McCarthy seems no less determined to do whatever it takes to come out on top. But this morning brings leaks and gossip of progress in negotiations between McCarthy and those among the holdouts willing to contemplate a deal.

A clown show about nothing Did you have a bad first day back at work in 2023? If so, take solace from the fact that it could be worse: you could be Kevin McCarthy. The California Republican bounded through the Capitol promising a “good day” yesterday morning. What followed was a bad-tempered meeting of House Republicans and three rounds of voting on the floor in which McCarthy wasn’t even close to the tally he needs to secure the speakership. In other words, it was not a good day. In fact, McCarthy ended proceedings with fewer votes than he started. In Tuesday’s final vote, twenty House Republicans voted against him. This leaves, well, more or less everything in doubt.

Trump’s big reveal suggests he’s finished There was a flurry of excitement earlier this week when Donald Trump teased a “major announcement” for Thursday. “America needs a superhero,” he declared in a fifteen-second clip that featured an animated cartoon of the former president standing outside Trump Tower, ripping open his suit to reveal a superhero suit, lasers shooting out of his eyes. Very normal stuff for a former president. Trump’s supporters waited with bated breath. Was his somnambulant 2024 campaign about to kick into gear? Could he be making a bid for House speaker, wondered some, waving aside the obvious practical obstacles to him doing so. Maybe he’d start tweeting again in a bid to nudge Elon Musk out of the limelight, speculated others.

The Musk temptation Thanks to some complicated cocktail of educational sorting, communications technology changes and ideological realignment, so much of the day-to-day drama of contemporary politics seems to be defined by the relationship between an elite in-group and antagonistic outsider. In a complicated and messy world, the allure of superhero stories is understandable. And so more and more of our politics is forced into a simplistic narrative about, depending on your point of view, a villain or hero. The outsider is either an existential threat to the status quo, or the only person who can save us from a decadent and self-interested elite. Either way, he is a main character. For years, the part of the outsider was played by Donald Trump.

Will Washington clamp down on crypto? Sam Bankman-Fried is set to testify before Congress tomorrow. If he does so, it will be the latest in a series of public appearances and interviews that suggests the disgraced crypto conman thinks he can spin his way out of trouble — and leaves the rest of us wondering, why isn’t he in jail yet? The hearing comes as Washington mulls how the law should handle cryptocurrencies. For some time now, lawmakers have wanted to do something about the burgeoning crypto craze and address the fact that no comprehensive regulatory framework for the sector exists. The fall of FTX underscored the point. With further trouble afoot in crypto-world, Washington is divided on muddled and cross-party lines over what to do about this Wild West of finance.

Sinema goes solo “Nothing will change about my values or my behavior,” said Kyrsten Sinema when she explained this morning’s surprise announcement that she is changing her party affiliation from Democrat to independent. That assurance poses a question: why leave? “Registering as an independent and showing up to work as an independent is a reflection of who I’ve always been,” she explained in a video clip on Twitter. In an article for the Arizona Republic she went further: “I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington. I registered as an Arizona independent.

Why Warnock won There were no surprises in Georgia last night. Democratic incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock saw off Herschel Walker’s challenge. The race was close without being a nail-biter. Decision desks had called the contest before 11 p.m. Eastern and, as of early Wednesday afternoon, with 95 percent of votes counted, Warnock has a 10,000-vote lead over Walker (51.4 percent to 48.5 percent). The result is an emphatic punctuation mark with which to end this year’s midterms, making the Republican Party’s missed opportunity abundantly clear. As Axios’s Josh Kraushaar notes, this cycle is the first time in eighty-eight years that the party in power has successfully defended every incumbent Senate seat.

Georgia decides Unfinished midterms’ business will be wrapped up tomorrow when Georgia voters choose between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker. The runoff has been a far more low-key affair than was the case two years ago, and understandably so given that Democratic control of the Senate is assured. And yet Georgia seems to have slipped further out of the spotlight than is warranted. No number of Democratic senators can get all that much done given Republican control of the House, of course. But in several important ways, the difference between fifty and fifty-one senators matters. While a fifty-fifty Senate gives the president’s party effective control via the vice-president’s tie-breaking vote; the same isn’t true of committees, which are split evenly.

The most pro-labor president in history? Is Joe Biden the most pro-labor president in history or a ruthless union buster? Last September he declared his intention to be the former, but today brings news that makes him look a bit more like the latter. This morning Biden signed a measure passed by the Senate Thursday that forces an end to the standoff between rail companies and workers that threatened a major freight rail strike. The legislation binds both sides into an agreement that four of the twelve unions involved had opposed because it lacked paid sick leave. Biden sought to ease labor frustration at the measure at this morning’s signing that “we still have more work to do” and expressing his support for paid sick leave.