Democrats Get Ready to Probe DOGE

Ahead of the 2024 election, Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson joked on a livestream that Musk was “fucked” if Democrats won the White House. Musk had trollishly asked on Twitter why, despite two Trump assassination attempts, no one tried to assassinate Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. That, he and Carlson mused, was enough for the Democrats to throw him in prison. “How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?” Musk said. “Will I see my children, I don’t know.”

For years, and especially in the last month or so, we’ve been collectively inundated with an AI industry which, uncannily and bizarrely, tells us simultaneously that AI is essential, inevitable and runs a significant chance of exterminating all of us in as few as two or three years. If you’ve dipped into this debate at all, you’ve quickly come upon discussions of so-called “rationalists” or “long-termists” or supporters of “effective altruism” who are simultaneously ubiquitous among those developing AI and in the AI safety (i.e., the folks sounding the alarm) community as well. (For the sake of simplicity and brevity, I’ll refer to these folks as the “REL nexus”: rationalists, effective altruists and long-termists. This is my coinage since I don’t know a better one.) I’ve spent a fair amount of time familiarizing myself with this world and how it relates to current debates about AI. So I wanted to share my basic impressions.

A Republican Gives a Thumbs Up to White House Effort to Seize Congress’ Power

Yesterday afternoon, TPM’s Emine Yücel got word that Senate Democrats would hold a vote on a bill that would block Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought’s latest bid to impound almost a billion dollars. Congress had appropriated the funds and President Trump had signed that appropriations bill into law, but the administration later deemed the funding too woke, finding that it helped immigrants, met its contorted definition of “DEI,” or was otherwise unacceptable.

Congress, of course, holds the power of the purse under the Constitution. If Congress writes an appropriations bill, and the president signs it, the funds must be spent in the way Congress laid out. But Vought has found ways to claim he does not, in fact, need to abide by that schema, and has used various maneuvers to not just slash funding to government offices and programs but end some entirely. This latest one is a so-called pocket rescission, exploiting a loophole Vought believes exists in the Impoundment Control Act. I won’t unpack it here, but Emine has reported on it extensively.

So, on Wednesday, Senate Democrats on the appropriations committee put forward a bill to block Vought’s pocket rescission, and all future ones. The vote was held under unanimous consent, meaning a single senator could block it. It seemed inevitable one would — the question was who, and why.

So, around 7 p.m., we got our answer: Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) objected to the bill. He did not directly address the way in which Vought’s maneuvering has run roughshod over one of Congress’ most important duties: dictating federal spending. He shrugged that all government spending should be reduced, and then said the law around impoundments was vague. “It’ll probably have to be all sorted out by the Supreme Court,” he said.

That much is right, and the Court has already shown an openness to what Vought is trying to do.

The Senate then adjourned until the midterms.

Sen. Eric Schmitt Faces Fallout From His Jack Smith Debacle

New details about Sen. Eric Schmitt’s (R-MO) fantastic flame-out during a congressional hearing with Jack Smith continue to emerge. The senator on Tuesday attempted to float a conspiracy theory about the former special counsel meeting with Fulton County DA Fani Willis at an Atlanta Hawks game. That theory immediately collapsed, but not before he accused Smith of perjury for not indulging it.

• Schmitt was warned that the texts he based his allegation on were “unvetted” and that he should proceed with caution, MS NOW reported yesterday. Some Senate Judiciary staff believe the White House had urged Schmitt to undertake his stunt, the report said.
• Schmitt in an interview with Politico was unapologetic, and seemingly confirmed that his misapprehension about whether Smith attended an Atlanta Hawks game or an Iowa Hawkeyes game had to do with completely overlooking the existence of women’s sports, a topic about which the GOP professes to care greatly. “Well, we had text messages from [Smith’s] team that he was at a basketball game, and the only game at 7:30 tip-off in the NBA was in Atlanta,” Schmitt told Politico, adding, “I didn’t know he was a Caitlin Clark fan. Now we know.”
• Schmitt’s staffer who held up a posterboard during his display was up for a new job at the White House, Politico reports. Now, he may not be.

Daniel Drezner says we are now in the Wile E. Coyote phase of the 2026 midterm, the phase of six weeks or so in which everyone knows the GOP is toast but we pretend we don’t. Some of this is simply the political press’s collective suspension of disbelief. It’s neither fair nor fun to act as though the outcome is mostly known. Nor is this new. G. Elliott Morris notes that election odds makers consistently overstate the odds of the president’s party in the midterms, which is sort of another way of saying the same thing since the president’s party is usually on the losing end of the proposition. I would argue that a significant amount of this remains the structural, though not necessarily ideological, bias in favor of the Republican party — two decades on, Washington, D.C. remains wired for the GOP. But what all of this really reminds me of is the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and what was then referred to as the “vibe shift” — both the hidden reality Donald Trump’s narrow but clear victory had purportedly revealed but also the shift in attitudes about cultural power and the future driven by that victory.

In elite circles the argument and belief went something like this. We thought that MAGA was a movement of reaction fueled by those left behind or discarded by the forward march of history and culture trying to wrench society back to an imagined 1950s. Not at all. In fact, it was the movement of the young and the most vital elements of the culture and the future. It was even expanding in the non-white constituencies which were supposed to be the anchors of the political left, the communities which were supposedly the targets and victims of MAGA, not its latest converts. Most of all, MAGA now had cultural sway to match its electoral power. And both were growing.