There is a lot to try and make sense of on today’s monthly-ish BradCast roundtable with two of our favorite panelists, featuring just a bit more disagreement among us than usual. [Audio to show follows this summary.]
FIRST UP… A few news headlines, some of which bleed into today’s conversation with our guests. Among those headlines…
- Dr. Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment during his testimony today before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee as Chaired by longtime Fauci conspiracist Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) who seems to believe the renowned, 85-year old, advisor to seven Presidents as a decades-long public health and infectious disease expert somehow caused the COVID pandemic. Or something.
- Outgoing Republican Senators John Cornyn (TX) and Thom Tillis (NC) make clear they are not yet satisfied with Donald Trump‘s personal criminal attorney and Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche‘s spoken (but unwritten) promise that Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for criminals is actually “dead”, much less the unprecedented IRS immunity deal Blanche made with Trump’s other lawyers in response to Trump’s lawsuit against Trump’s IRS. The suggestion, as discussed with our guests today, is that one or both Senators, whose careers Trump has already ended, may be willing to block Blanche’s nomination. (After air time, just moments ago, Thursday’s scheduled vote out of Committee was postponed.)
- South Dakota‘s sitting Governor Larry Rhoden easily won the state’s Republican Gubernatorial primary runoff on Tuesday, after previously coming in second in last month’s first-round primary where nobody received more than 35%, forcing yesterday’s runoff. That now sets up a November contest with Democratic former state Senator Dan Ahlers in the otherwise very “red” state.
- New polling this week finds Texas state Rep. James Talarico now five points ahead (45% to 40%) of the state’s corrupt, criminally indicted and impeached A.G. Ken Paxton in the Lone Star State’s U.S. Senate race. The contest is for the seat being vacated by Cornyn after Trump’s stunning endorsement of Paxton in the state’s March primary ran the 4-term Republican establishment stalwart outta the Senate on a rail.
THEN… With all of that news, and more, we’re joined once again today by our longtime, progressive, almost-always-right, old school blogger pals HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Hullabaloo and the man known mostly as ‘DRIFTGLASS’ from The Professional Left Podcast and the Driftglass Blog.
Heather — ever a champion and patriot — joins us today not only from vacation, but while suffering a cold while on vacation!
Among our usual broad conversation and trenchant (if occasionally snarky) analysis of the latest Trump Era madness and news, there are a couple of points today on which we fail to come to consensus.
Does anyone really think that Cornyn and/or Tillis, with pretty much nothing to lose at this point (Trump already ended both of their Senate careers) are ultimately going to block Blanche’s nomination as A.G.? Really? On that point, we are all in agreement. They will ultimately cave, despite the news after today’s show that his Senate Judiciary Committee vote scheduled for tomorrow has now been postponed.
“I have to say it would thrill me to see this. It really would. Because Trump stabbed both of those guys in the back, hard. Especially Cornyn, but Tillis, too,” argues Digby today. “If those two were to actually take Todd Blanche, it would cure my cold overnight.” But, she adds, “If Cornyn showed just a tiny bit of integrity, it would be beautiful. So that’s why I don’t think they’ll do it.”
“We’ve been around this block enough times to be sick and tired of going around this block,” Driftglass rings in. “Republicans are Republicans. Every now and then they show little flashes of what resembles integrity, and then they cave.”
We don’t find consensus today, however, on Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear‘s response to whatever is going on with the Bluegrass State’s senior, if retiring, Senator Mitch McConnell, who is either alive or dead at this point. Nobody seems to know for sure. This week, Beshear, a 2028 Presidential hopeful as a two-term Democratic Governor from an otherwise “red” state, sent another sternly worded letter to the office of McConnell, who has been missing from the Senate since being hospitalized after a vaguely-explained medical emergency at his D.C. home more than 40 days ago. The Governor is demanding the 84-year old Senator either “directly and verbally address the people of Kentucky and provide proof of your capacity to serve, or resign.”
Digby reads into Beshear’s handling of the matter an indication that the Governor “may have some information, may know something here” about McConnell’s condition, and that Beshear is handling the matter deftly.
With a possible deadline of August 3rd, after which — at least according to state law, if not the state Constitution — it would be too late for Beshear to call a special election, I think the Governor is being far too timid in his response. Driftglass is called upon to be the deciding vote on the matter and on what he describes as “Schroedinger’s Senator. You won’t know until you open the casket, you can’t really tell if he’s alive or dead.”
We discuss Trump’s no-way-out Iran War which, Digby asserts, Trump “lost months ago, basically before it began” in what she describes as “an absolutely historically bad decision.”
And finally, what all of this may mean come November, with Trump’s approval rating now historically low and underwater on just about absolutely everything. (Yes, new Economist/YouGov polling out this week even finds him at -15 on the issue of Immigration!)
Where we veer away from consensus once again today is on what effect all of this — Trump’s personal unpopularity, his disastrous standing on the issues, his wildly unpopular War in Iran — will have on the electorate this November. Driftglass is sticking with his prediction that Dems will flip 36 seats to take the majority back in the U.S. House. (That’s, essentially, the same 40 seat flip he predicted last year, but with a few seats allowably scaled back due to the Republican Party’s unprecedented midterm gerrymanders this year.) But he is far less certain that Republican voters will allow a Democratic takeover of the Senate, pegging that as likely to be 50/50 (in which case, Republicans retain their majority with Vice President J.D. Vance as the tie-breaker.)
But any comparison, such as the one I offer, between the “thumpin'” faced by George W. Bush‘s Republican in 2006 in the wake of his disastrous Iraq War that year and the price that Trump Republicans may pay for his Iran War this November, is misplaced, Drifty argues.
“The Republican Party is simply not the same party that they were in 2006. They could be shamed in 2006. They could pretend they’d never heard of George Bush. This is a cult now. The catastrophe in Iran is simply not what people around here who are MAGA are talking about at all. They’re talking about Fauci being the worst villain in history and Mamdani being a ‘secret Muslim terrorist’ in New York. So this is not penetrating,” Driftglass warns from amid the cornfields of central Illinois.
“What I’m hoping,” he adds, “is that those undecided voters who can’t tell the difference between a chicken dinner and broken glass will figure out that, this once in their life, maybe they pick the chicken dinner. If that happens, if the undecided and the ‘independents’ come off the fence, then I’m willing to stand by a 30-40 seat flip in the House and maybe even take the Senate by two.”
Driftglass is rarely off the mark. He may not be this time either. But I think he’s ‘misunderestimating’ the enormity of the failures of Donald Trump that even his most ardent supporters — at least a few of them — are finally coming to terms with. It doesn’t take but a few percentage points of Republicans to either stay home or vote Dem this November to turn an otherwise close race into a Democratic landslide. But he ain’t buying my argument. So, here, we call in Digby to settle the tie.
Yup. It’s another very lively BradCast today! I hope you’ll tune in…
