House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has finally made his opening bid, in the showdown with President Joe Biden (and the Democratic Senate) over raising the nation's debt ceiling. Today McCarthy released a proposal he thinks he will get 218 Republican votes and actually pass the House. It remains to be seen whether that's even true or not -- a vote won't be held until at least next week, and to say that not everyone in the GOP caucus is on board yet is an understatement. But at least he's finally put some numbers down on paper for all to see.

To be certain, this is still somewhat of a bare-bones effort. McCarthy and his fellow Republicans are attempting to tie the debt limit increase to the annual federal budget. But while President Joe Biden has released his full budget proposal (he did so weeks ago), McCarthy still has yet to even come up with an overview of the actual Republican budget. That would be a separate bill from what he introduced today, and then later a full budget bill (or bills; by regular order there should be 12 appropriations bills) would have to pass as well. While today's bid begins the process, the Republicans are still precisely nowhere on their actual budget itself, it bears pointing out.

Biden's position up until now has been a firm one: he is demanding a "clean" debt ceiling hike, with no conditions or strings tied to the budget (since the budget is an entirely separate process). Biden will negotiate with the Republican House, in other words, but only through the regular budget talks. The debt ceiling is so important that it must get done on time with no threat of a national default.

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After their first 100 days in power, the cracks are beginning to show in the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Speaker Kevin McCarthy is going to try to pass a bill with a bare-bones summary of a budget within the next few weeks, but at this point no bill has actually been written and no GOP consensus has emerged about what that bill should (or shouldn't) contain. It is still unclear whether any plan is going to get the 218 votes to pass. Factionalism within the Republican conference is a tough hurdle to get over, what with the razor-thin majority McCarthy has to work with. But the debt ceiling looms, so it is now "put up or shut up" time for McCarthy's Republicans.

McCarthy, up until now, has attempted to paint the entire crisis as somehow being President Joe Biden's fault. McCarthy complains that Biden won't come to the table to negotiate. This is laughable, because until McCarthy actually puts a few numbers on paper, there simply is nothing to negotiate about. Biden has released his budget -- a full budget, hundreds of pages long, with specific numbers for everything in the federal budget. McCarthy is desperately trying to come up with a summary of the Republican budget -- a short overview with general spending guidelines but no detailed specifics (other than the ones McCarthy chooses to include, as part of his agenda). But until McCarthy does put his cards on the table, there is no reason for Biden to negotiate, because there isn't anything to negotiate about yet.

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We may get to a crossroads this week over the situation Senator Dianne Feinstein's absence in Washington has created. But that's not the same thing as the problem actually being resolved, which could take longer. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is reportedly going to call for a vote on temporarily replacing Feinstein on the Senate Judiciary Committee, while still allowing her to keep her Senate seat. Not having Feinstein in Washington impacts the Democrats' ability to round up enough votes -- but not in a critical way -- for Senate floor votes. Not having Feinstein on the Judiciary Committee, however, has meant the halt of Biden judicial nominees getting expedited committee votes to move their nominations to the floor. That is a much more serious matter.

What seems likely to happen next is that Schumer will call for "unanimous consent" to approve the temporary committee assignment shuffle. However, any single senator can block this move, and two Republicans have already indicated they are going to do so (Tim Cotton and Marsha Blackburn). Which means the motion for unanimous consent will fail.

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There's a new reality in American politics, and one political party is reaping the benefits of it while the other is trapped in a downward spiral of ever-increasing extremism. Some Republicans are beginning to understand the power of the sleeping giant they have awoken, but there's really no easy way out from the conundrum they have created for themselves. Abortion is going to be a potent political issue for at least the next few elections, and Republicans' only answer so far is to double down, triple down, or quadruple down on forcing the most extreme positions they can come up with on as many of the American people as they possibly can.

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The ranks of the 2024 Republican presidential field just grew by one. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina is the new entrant, but at this point (with the exception of Ron DeSantis) it really looks for all the world like nothing more than a race to be Donald Trump's vice-presidential pick. I say that for two reasons -- the fact that so far no one else other than DeSantis has gotten any sort of traction at all in the polls, and the fact that none of the candidates have really directly taken on Trump in any meaningful way. To put it another way: there still isn't an "anti-Trump" candidate in the running.

Officially, there aren't that many people actually running yet. Scott, for instance, didn't even announce that he was about to officially announce his bid -- instead he merely indicated that at some unspecified point in the future he would probably be making an announcement about his upcoming official announcement. In Washington-speak, he "formed a presidential exploratory committee." Which is official enough, for our purposes -- it's more than some others have done yet.

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Senator Dianne Feinstein is not back at work. This means that since February, the citizens of California have only been represented in the Senate by a single senator. Which, in a 51-49 Senate, is starting to become a problem. Feinstein has already said she will be retiring instead of seeking re-election in 2024, but she had planned on finishing her term before stepping down. Three prominent Democrats have already begun campaigning for her seat. But if she doesn't finish her term, then it's going to upset the entire Senate election applecart.

Even though I live in California, I hadn't really realized how long Feinstein's absence has been. She was diagnosed with shingles (which I have heard is a particularly painful disease to contract), and she was hospitalized for treatment. She is now out of the hospital and resting at her home in San Francisco. And she is 89 years old.

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You can choose your metaphor for the bind the Republican Party has created for itself on the issue of abortion. The most popular (since it seems to be the most fitting) is that they are the dog who finally caught the car and now don't know what to do with it. Or maybe they've painted themselves into a corner and are now trapped on a shrinking piece of political real estate. But I'm going to start this off with a different one: Republicans riding down a very slippery slope on a toboggan.

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Republicans seem to be increasingly fond of using the levers of government -- any levers of government they control -- to get their own way, no matter what. Perhaps this was spurred by Donald Trump's attitudes (and/or lawlessness) or perhaps it is the end result of a gradual Republican slide towards authoritarianism, but whatever the actual cause Republicans are now engaged in rather extraordinary uses of government power to punish those whose political opinions they disagree with. This is a far cry from the traditional Republican stance against "Big Government" it should be noted -- just one more in a long list of previous ideological positions they have completely abandoned in the Trumpian era. They now seem to have settled on: "The era of Big (Republican) Government is at hand!" as a guiding principle.

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Today's Republican Party is not just the Party of Trump, it also is now the Party of Trumpism -- or to put it in plainer terms: authoritarianism. "We're going to do whatever we want to do, because we can" seems to be the new rallying slogan for Republicans. Never mind what the public thinks or wants, never mind the possible political backlash, it's just going to be full steam ahead for as long as they can get away with it.

The week began with the new episode of the continuing saga of The Trump Circus (this week's episode: "Merry Arrestmas!"), where the nation was treated to the spectacle of a former president being charged with 34 felonies in New York City. The best single sentence summing up the day's events came from a Washington Post article:

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The Tennessee state house chamber just took a step down a very dangerous path. It voted to expel one of its members on purely partisan lines (this is as of this writing -- votes on expelling two others are expected shortly). Expulsion has historically been used only in the most drastic and serious instances, such as when a member has been convicted of a crime but refuses to resign their seat. This time around, three Democrats are up for expulsion for mounting a political protest on the chamber's floor. That's it -- there was no other underlying reason. They're getting kicked out for being rude.

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