Hello it's the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕

To hear him tell it earlier this month, the debt ceiling deal House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) made with President Joe Biden was a Lyndon Johnson-esque piece of high-level legislative strategery.

"This is fabulous. This is one of the best nights I've ever been here," McCarthy crowed two weeks ago upon the House's passage of the bill.

The legislation included spending levels for the upcoming (and now begun) annual appropriations process, which many naively thought would smooth the way for a relatively easy budgetary process.

But in Washington, nothing gold can stay.

The right flank of the House Republican caucus systematically punished McCarthy, furious that he'd negotiated with Biden, and ground the floor to a halt (blocking many of their own bills).

A cowed McCarthy then gave the House appropriators the greenlight to severely undercut the deal, to treat the spending levels he'd agreed to in the debt ceiling law with Biden as a ceiling.  

"You always have to remember with appropriation levels — that's your cap. You can always do less," McCarthy told reporters Monday.

Immediately afterwards, Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX), House Republicans' top appropriator, said in a statement that she would mark up the appropriations bills at 2022 levels — far below the negotiated spending levels in the debt ceiling bill, and estimated to be a $130 to $150 billion cut below current levels.

Democrats were steaming.

"It's shocking that it took less than two weeks for Republicans to walk away from an agreement that they made," said. Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-CA), head of the House Democratic Caucus. "This is an agreement that the Speaker made directly. And he took pains — remember? — to get everybody else out of the room and to get to a deal with just him and the President. And now he's walking away from that deal."

"If it wasn't so dangerous," he added, "it would be laughable."

So far, Senate Republicans are not following the lower chamber's lead. Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME), the Senate's head appropriators, are writing their spending bills to the levels established in the debt ceiling law. If Senate Republicans continue to be disinterested in joining the House's attempts to derail the process, House Republicans will find themselves increasingly siloed.

That doesn't avert the shutdown threat, though, should House Republicans continue to go it alone.

Keep your eye on TPM for my deep dive into the dynamics at play and where the shutdown risk looms largest. More next week and more on other news below. Let's dig in. 

— Kate Riga

Something Is Rotten In The State Of New Jersey

Since the FBI first executed searches on Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, Trump has wanted the records back. He sued in part to have them returned to him last year in a case that made U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon for the Southern District of Florida famous and, this week, after having been arraigned on charges of illegally retaining said documents, he asked on Truth Social when prosecutors would "RETURN EVERYTHING THAT WAS ILLEGALLY TAKEN (FOURTH AMENDMENT) FROM MY HOME?"

But what does Trump have to complain about? After all, a close reading of the Jack Smith's indictment of Trump suggests that there are more records out there which prosecutors have been unable to retrieve. Smith alleged that Trump brandished classified records at his Bedminster, New Jersey estate, but only accused Trump of illegally retaining the docs at Mar-a-Lago. Prosecutors said that Trump transported "boxes" to New Jersey, but stopped short of formally accusing him of moving classified records out of Mar-a-Lago. So, is there still more out there for the government to secure before Trump can demand that it be … returned?

— Josh Kovensky

The Audacity Of Rudy 

Recent filings in the defamation suit filed by a pair of Georgia election workers against Rudy Giuliani shed new light on the part "America's mayor" played in the plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election. They also show just how ham-fisted the whole thing was.

There is an ongoing fight over documents in the case, which centers on the thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories Giuliani spread accusing the women of somehow being involved in election fraud designed to thwart former President Trump. Giuliani and his longtime sidekick, Bernie Kerik, are both slow walking requests for emails and other communications from the womens' attorneys.

In an effort to prove Kerik and Giuliani have documents relevant to the suit, the lawyers for the women have solicited testimony and unearthed some communications from the pair. TPM has been sifting through the filings, and we just published a pair of stories with some highlights.

One of the emails from Kerik to Trump's White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows shows a "strategic communications plan" the Giuliani crew came up with to reverse the election. It also reveals Kerik wanted "between $5 to $8M" to put these ideas into action. Testimony from the suit, coupled with an email that came up in earlier legal wrangling over Meadows' attempts to keep his communications from prying eyes, also shows Giuliani was using an email address "rhelen0528@gmail.com" for some of his conversations about a plan some Trump allies thought could be used to change the result.

Giuliani's attorney, Joe Sibley, confirmed the address was the "main email used by him to communicate with pretty much everyone" and that it was based on his mother's name, "Helen." Sibley also insisted there was "nothing unusual" about Giuliani using a female alias for his emails.

Giuliani using the name "Helen" while enacting what he and his allies seemingly hoped would be a multimillion dollar strategic plan is comical, but there are also larger implications. The fact members of Trump's inner circle were using email aliases to work on their election plots shows there was some stab at secrecy. In Giuliani's case it wasn't a very good one. Not only did this address come out in court, but it also involved both his mother's name and birthdate, May 28. The fact that Giuliani, a self-styled cybersecurity expert, had email addresses that were like the digital version of Mel Brooks' idiot's luggage is simply ridiculous.

That's the thing with so much of the Trumpworld election plotting. It was, on many levels so bungled and silly, and yet, it did real damage and maybe even almost worked. These darkly comedic moments expose the foolishness of the people who sought to overthrow our democracy, but at the same time, they also serve to show the fragility of the system the plotters tried to end. 

— Hunter Walker & Josh Kovensky

"The media knows that. They're just not covering it. Then you have the liberal media, like MSNBC, with their low-IQ audience…and they're being told bad things about me and members of the Oversight [Committee] because we have the audacity to investigate."

That's Rep. James Comer (R-KY) during one of his routine rants on how the media is out to get Republicans. You'd think that people who have admitted to — on multiple occasions — not have any proof of alleged crimes they keep yelling about publicly would stop talking about it at some point but… I guess not. Maybe I just don't get it 'cause of my… "low IQ."

I'm not even going to get into the use of "bad" as an adjective... LOLZ

— Emine Yücel