Oliver Wiseman

Reconciliation redux Build Back Better is back! Well, not quite. But Punchbowl reports that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will submit a reconciliation bill to the Parliamentarian today. The bill would allow the federal government to negotiate prescription drug prices for Medicare. On its own, the measure is popular and would give the president and Democratic leaders something to point to as an example of ways in which they are working to lower the cost of living. But Schumer and co. hope it will be more than that. If the measure passes the Byrd Rule test and the Parliamentarian deems it to be something that needs just fifty votes, Democrats plan on making drug pricing one piece of a broader package that they can pass before the midterms. But what would be in a bigger package?

Biden stuck in no-man’s land on Ukraine How long should Americans expect to pay sky-high prices at the gas station, Joe Biden was asked at the NATO summit in Madrid last week. “As long as it takes so Russia cannot, in fact, defeat Ukraine,” the president replied. With the economic situation deteriorating, even if gas prices have eased somewhat, Americans are not likely to find that answer especially encouraging. By Saturday, the scapegoat had changed, with Big Oil in the president’s crosshairs. “Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product. And do it now,” Biden demanded on Twitter, prompting a sharp rebuke from Jeff Bezos.

American impunity As you have doubtless read by now, America’s homicide rates have been on an alarming uptick in recent years. A related and important figure, if one that is less discussed, is the country’s clearance rate for murder. But those numbers are the subject of a significant new CBS investigation. The findings are alarming. Clearance rates were at their lowest point in half a century in 2020 — the most recent year for which data is available and, obviously, a significant year when it comes to the interrelated questions of policing and criminal justice. As the CBS charts show, the fall on previous years is precipitous. For the last seven months of 2020, more murders were unsolved than were solved. A first, according to Thomas Hargrove of the Murder Accountability Project.

A Biden-Trump rerun would be a sick joke White House aides want you to know that the president is irked. Grumblings to New York Times reporters reveal a top team irritated by the whispers in Democratic circles that running Biden for a second time might not be in the party’s best interest and annoyed at the idea that the president be subjected to anything more onerous than a hassle-free coronation ahead of 2024. Biden, already the oldest president in US history, would be in his mid-eighties by the end of a second term. He has cue cards to remind him how to perform the most basic of tasks (“YOU take YOUR seat” would be a good title for a book about the Biden presidency). He is absurdly bad at even the most perfunctory, bromidic parts of the job of being president.

Cassidy Hutchinson’s day in court Did Donald Trump rush a Secret Service agent in attempt to take the wheel of the Beast and drive himself to the Capitol on January 6? That is what former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson said she was told happened in her testimony before the House January 6 Committee yesterday. Hutchinson’s appearance was a surprise addition to the committee’s hearings and it made for easily the most compelling and headline-grabbing of the public sessions yet. There were wild details to the stories, many of them second-hand, relayed by Hutchinson. The former aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows said she “overheard the president say something to the effect of, ‘I don’t fucking care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me.

Will Biden listen to Macron’s energy warning? “I had a call with MbZ… He told me two things. I’m at a maximum, maximum… This is what he claims… And then he said… Saudis can increase by 150… Maybe a little bit more, but they don’t have huge capacities before six months’ time.” Emmanuel Macron delivered this oil-production update to Joe Biden after a phone call with UAE leader Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan at yesterday’s G7 meeting in Germany. Whether a genuinely candid moment or a conversation deliberately started by the French president within earshot of the assembled press, mics picked up the exchange.

Will Dobbs galvanize the left? Sometimes, defeat is just what a party, or a movement, needs. Hard lessons are learnt, uncomfortable realities are acknowledged and the group in question emerges more serious, more competitive, more potent a political force. In recent years, liberals and conservatives have often failed to learn the right lessons from their losses because they won’t accept defeat in the first place. From crackpot theories about Cambridge Analytica swinging 2016 for Trump to the idea that 2020 was stolen by Joe Biden four years later, both sides of America’s political divide have opted for comforting fictions over hard truths. But Dobbs represents unambiguous victory for the conservative movement and impossible-to-ignore defeat for progressive America.

Life after Dobbs The right to an abortion is not protected by the Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled this morning. The early May leak of the lead opinion in Dobbs did not diminish the seismic impact of its official publication this morning. In a 6-3 ruling on the Mississippi law and a 5-4 decision on the broader question of Roe, the court issued arguably its most politically significant judicial decision in a generation when it was delivered this morning. “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.

Newsom 2024? Really? There are many ways to measure the Democrats’ political problems these days. One is to look at who party officials think should be their candidate in 2024. Obama chief of staff-turned-mild irritant to the Biden White House David Axelrod was the latest Democratic big beast to float Gavin Newsom as an alternative to Biden in 2024. “If the president were not to run, it’s hard to imagine that Newsom would not be sorely tempted to enter the race,” said Axelrod Wednesday. “Newsom is young and politically muscular, which may be just what the market will be seeking post-Biden,” he added. It’s not just Axelrod. Hard as it may be to believe, Gav-mentum appears to be a real thing.

The quiet significance of the January 6 hearings The unexpected star of the fourth public hearing of the House January 6 Committee was a rock-ribbed conservative most Americans have never heard of. Arizona House Speaker Russell “Rusty” Bowers found himself before the committee, and the cameras, in Washington yesterday because of a series of calls he received from the Trump team after the 2020 election. Bowers campaigned for Trump, but unlike the former president and his team, acknowledged that his side lost the 2020 election. In yesterday’s hearing he testified that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others pressured him to back a slate of rogue electors and subvert the will of Arizona voters.

Ban TikTok BuzzFeed News published an explosive report on TikTok Friday. The Chinese-owned social media company has always batted away privacy concerns by insisting that information gathered by US users of the platform has stayed in America. But BuzzFeed’s Emily Baker-White reports that “according to leaked audio from more than eighty internal TikTok meetings, China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users.” In other words, TikTok’s assurances appear to have been lies. Per BuzzFeed’s story, one member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department said, “Everything is seen in China,” in a September 2021 meeting.

Lessons from Watergate Today marks fifty years since the Watergate break-in. Given that the scandal is something of a founding myth for modern Washington journalism, there is no shortage of reflections on the meaning of the story half a century later — and what has changed between 1972 and 2022. One popular parallel is between Nixon and Trump, with contemporary commentators claiming that the big change between then and now is a level of partisanship that makes the successful ousting of a sitting president practically impossible. Witness, for instance, the one-sided proceedings of the House’s January 6 Committee. Away from this rather tired and often overstated analogy, more mischievous comparisons are possible.

Democrats start to plan Biden’s retirement The calls are coming from inside the house. That’s the main takeaway from a painfully careful new piece about the president’s age by Mark Leibovich for the Atlantic. Leibovich, a well-connected Washington journalist, spoke to “ten official and unofficial advisers to the administration who have spent time around the president,” asking them questions like, “How is he holding up?” For the most part, fine, they say. But one senior administration official was less positive when he spoke to Leibovich recently: “He just seems old.” Leibovich marshals this DC chatter to make the case that Biden is too old to run in 2024.

Biden’s geopolitical reality check Joe Biden’s plan to visit Saudi Arabia in July, announced this week, marks one of the most clear-cut foreign policy U-turns of his presidency. On the campaign trail, Biden boasted about his plans to “make a pariah” out of the kingdom. In his first few months in office, the president outlined a foreign policy that drew clear lines between the world’s democracies and autocracies — with Saudi Arabia on the wrong side of that divide, of course. But the interconnected realities of global and domestic politics, as well as soaring prices, have forced Biden to rethink such a clear-cut approach and seek some level of cooperation with the Gulf petrostate. The president has been criticized for a move that many in his own party are uneasy about.

The politics of a bear market Welcome to a bear market. Monday’s stock market sell-off means that the S&P 500 is down more than 20 percent from its record high in January. Plunging stock prices also mean that all the gains made since Joe Biden entered the White House have been wiped out. Away from the equities hit, one can see fair-weather luxuries fall by the wayside. Cryptocurrencies continue to plummet in value while the vogue for ESG investing is losing its luster, with regulators paying closer attention and investors unhappy with performance. The road ahead looks really rather bumpy. Among economists the debate is over whether we are due for more inflation, a recession, or both. Cheery stuff!

The Democrats' democracy hypocrisy The Democrats, you may have heard, are the responsible party. Joe Biden wants you to know that this is a dangerous moment for American democracy. The Republic’s future is in doubt — and only he and his Democratic colleagues can be trusted to save it. With the January 6 hearings in full-swing, the midterms approaching and Biden keen to talk about anything other than the increasingly gloomy economic picture, don’t expect the death-of-democracy language to temper any time soon. The problem is that, time and again, the party’s actions don’t match the rhetoric. Josh Kraushaar reports on a particularly pernicious example of that gap in his National Journal column this morning.

High prices raise the temperature at the White House   There had been some whispering lately that the worst of the inflationary pressure might be behind us. “Inflation is poised to ease,” read a Bloomberg headline a few days ago. But this morning brought with it the bad news that price rises are still accelerating. The consumer price index rose by 8.6 percent year on year, the Labor Department reported. The grim report set another post-pandemic record and means that prices are rising faster than they have for 40 years. Meanwhile, gasoline prices have hit another high. Also stubbornly high: the number of bad excuses and muddled thinking from the Biden administration on the issue.

Our worrying acceptance of political violence  There are plenty of good reasons to be cynical about the House January 6 Committee’s hearings scheduled for prime time this evening. The lawmakers have hired an experienced documentary maker and TV news executive to turn the committee’s work into a slick audience-friendly production. According to Axios, former ABC News president is producing the event “as if it were a blockbuster investigative special.” Meanwhile, even outlets sympathetic to the committee’s work acknowledge the electoral calculation behind the whole production. A New York Times story this week described the hearings as a chance for Democrats to “recast their midterm message.

Eric Adams comes crashing down to earth When Eric Adams was elected mayor of New York, he was a breath of fresh air. The zany former Republican ex-cop said all the right things about the urgent need to bring rising violent crime under control, reopen after the pandemic and get the Big Apple back on track. There followed a honeymoon period in which Adams was burning the candle at both ends, facing off against progressive prosecutors by day, doing his bit to keep New York’s clubs and restaurants solvent by night. “If you’re going to hang out with the boys at night, you have to get up with the men in the morning,” he was fond of saying.