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

As every long-time couple does, my partner and I have a lexicon of recurring jokes and catchphrases. One he brought to the mix is the coda on deciding to push off an unpleasant task until later: "That's a future-Kate problem." Present-Kate then will embark on the leisurely activities of her choosing while, say, her laundry pile (Mount Clothesimanjaro) continues to grow.

Congress decamped on Thursday for the long August recess, not to reconvene in Washington D.C. until early September. Did both chambers leave their work in a good place, easily able to pick back up and finish the appropriations process before the fiscal year ends and a shutdown looms on October 1? Ha.

The Senate, to its credit, got all 12 spending bills through committee — something the head appropriators, Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) were eager to tout.

"For the first time in five years, this committee finished passing all twelve individual appropriations bills with overwhelming bipartisan votes, under incredibly tough circumstances — and all before the end of July," they said in a press release.

They added that it's the first time the Senate Appropriations Committee has been led by two women. Those bills still need to get through the full Senate, but the largely bipartisan success out of committee bodes very well.

The House has much less to brag about.

There, House Republicans have passed a handful of bills out of committee that are dead on arrival in the Senate, hung with riders that restrict abortion, slice out gender-affirming care and quash diversity initiatives. Some are even more laser-focused, with one provision aimed at giving anti-abortion protesters in Washington D.C. a payday.

They were only able to pass one bill through the full chamber, amid a nasty floor fight, and (unlike the Senate) are not expected to encounter smoother waters ahead. As evident from the howls of House Democrats, those bills are little more than messaging documents with virtually no bipartisan buy-in — meaning they'll need the votes of the far-right members for whom obstruction and power flexes have become second nature.

This is all setting the stage for an unbelievably messy — and probably very slow — conference committee process, when the two versions of each funding bill must be reconciled. The House's right flank insists on the culture war provisions; Senate Democrats respond with something like "over our dead bodies." All the while, the clock ticks a possible shutdown ever closer.

"I have been talking to our members about what's going to be a brutal September," House Appropriations Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) told Politico.

But that's a future-Congress problem. 
 

More on other news below. Let's dig in. 

— Kate Riga

The Trump Loyalty Group Chat

Tucked in at the end of Thursday's superseding indictment of Trump was a solitary paragraph which contained multitudes. After the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago last year, Trump aide Walt Nauta allegedly called another Mar-a-Lago employee and, referencing the newly indicted Mar-a-Lago maintenance man Carlos De Oliveira, said, "someone just wants to make sure Carlos is good."

That same unnamed employee then purportedly did two things: told Nauta that Carlos was loyal, and then, at Nauta's request, wrote the same in a group chat which included the leader of a Trump PAC, reported to be Susie Wiles. The chat was on encrypted messaging app Signal, and allegedly includes Wiles and Nauta.

The same day that De Oliveira's loyalty was confirmed, prosecutors said, Trump gave him a call: he would get a lawyer, expenses paid by Trump.

— Josh Kovensky

McCarthy Widens His Vocabulary

This week has been dominated by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's word games.

On Monday, during a Fox interview, McCarthy said the ongoing bogus probes into President Biden and his family are "rising to the level of impeachment inquiry." But in his usual fashion, the Speaker walked his remarks back the next day and dulled his comments further on Thursday, announcing that he would only launch an inquiry if the White House does not hand over the information House Republicans are demanding.

His carefully calculated word game got mixed reactions from his caucus. While McCarthy loyalist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) parroted leadership's talking points, saying that an inquiry is actually "different that an actual impeachment vote," other far-right members like Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) criticized McCarthy, calling his political maneuvering "impeachment theater."

But the usual in-fighting within the House GOP actually gives a clear insight into party politics. The charade around a Biden impeachment points to the daily dance McCarthy has to participate in to keep the hardcore far-right members of his caucus, who routinely threaten to jam up all forms of legislative business, in line and moderates and those from swing districts, whom he tries to keep onboard with the party agenda by downplaying hardliner's shenanigans, happy.

In this case, just raising the word "impeachment" in public gives McCarthy a carrot to dangle in front of his far-right flank. And it's a carrot that serves several purposes for MAGA Republicans who are obsessed with taking revenge for former President Donald Trump's two impeachments as well as the legal heat he's gotten from the Department of Justice. And on top of revenge, McCarthy can rely on the word games to appease his far-right flank into playing along with the rest of the caucus as the fight over 2024 spending bill and appropriations bills picks up.

— Emine Yücel

"When I saw the picture, I immediately wished that it had been taken from the opposite angle and gotten Glen Grotham in the background instead of me."

That's what House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer said when asked about being in the photos of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) showing posters of Hunter Biden's nudes during a congressional hearing last week.

I never imagined Comer and I would fundamentally agree on anything but I am 100% with him on this. No one wants to be in that photo. Which brings us to the inevitable question: Why did your favorite conspiracy theorist congresswoman think those posters were a good idea? It will likely remain a mystery just like most of the stuff she does.

— Emine Yücel

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

About a month ago, we outlined how Republicans could shut down the government in the next few months, lawmaking that was legislatively distinct from the debt ceiling negotiation but intrinsically connected to it because of some provisions the final debt deal contained to guide the appropriations process.

Now, we're in the thick of appropriations season. And House Republicans are already following the pathways to shutdown.

As the House appropriations committees have started writing their funding bills, Republicans have attached all manner of poison riders they know Democrats could never vote for: cutting off abortion access, slicing transition-related health care out of coverage plans, attacking programs geared towards the LGBTQ community and obliterating Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs.

They've introduced some of these provisions, sources told me, without any warning to their Democratic counterparts, springing them on the ranking members in the middle of markup hearings. That's eroding what little bipartisan cooperation still exists on the Hill, particularly within the less scrutinized subcommittees.

It also creates a legislative dead end. While Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) caters to his right flank — in a defensive crouch after they punished him for days for cooperating with the White House on the debt limit bill — its members are crafting bills that have no hope of passage in the Democratic-majority Senate. That effectively boxes them out of the process, while Republicans and Democrats collaborate in the upper chamber to write realistic legislation.

"With a four-vote majority, it would not surprise me if they continue to use the strategy they used with the debt limit ceiling," a senior Democratic aide told me. In other words: a bill that passes on the backs of a bipartisan coalition in the Senate, plus House Democrats and whatever House Republicans are left that are interested in governing. The far-right House flank, again, would have obstruction-ed and culture war-ed itself into irrelevance.

But if enough House Republicans take their partisan obstinance to the extreme, they could withhold their votes — and force a government shutdown as soon as October. 
 

More on other news below. Let's dig in. 

— Kate Riga

Caught In Limbo

Trump claimed on Tuesday that he received a target letter from Jack Smith, inviting him to appear before a grand jury in a signal that he's likely to be indicted in the January 6 investigation. It's a long-awaited stab at accountability from the DOJ. But for now, we're in a bizarre waiting period.

Trump's announcement, predictably and perhaps intentionally, set off a wave of anticipation for when the grand jury will likely vote on his indictment and for when the charges themselves will be released. There's a lot to salivate over: though the main crimes around Trump's effort to reverse his loss in 2020 took place in public, the work of the House January 6 Committee last year demonstrated that there's still a lot we don't know. The new indictment may reveal elements of Trump's scheme which we haven't yet glimpsed.

More than that, the indictment symbolizes something bigger: Trump finally being held to account for the one example of corruption and self-dealing that literally nobody else in American history has attempted, refusing to recognize his loss in a national election and using the tools of the government to nullify its result. We don't know when, if, or how the grand jury will vote, and when the charges will eventually be released. But we're waiting and watching.

— Josh Kovensky

Inside The Showdown Between A Florida Sheriff And Neo-Nazi 'Scumbags' 

After being essentially chased out of Northern California, neo-Nazi Jon Minadeo II and members of his so-called "Goyim Defense League" set up shop in Florida hoping to find more friendly turf. Instead, they found Sheriff Mike Chitwood, a former Philly cop who is now waging what he calls a "war on anti-Semitism."

Chitwood is a second-generation cop whose father became one of the most decorated, famous, and controversial officers in the City of Brotherly Love for his hard-nosed style and habit of hurling insults at criminals.The younger Chitwood has used a similar approach to go after his local neo-Nazis, complete with merch featuring cartoons of the sheriff stuffing extremist "scumbags" into a toilet.

I talked with Chitwood about how he ended up on the front lines of the fight against America's rising tide of far-right hate. Along with exploring how a distinctly old school cop found himself engaged against a decidedly new school band of extremely online Nazis, we talked about how he has allied with local minority communities in his fight and what he's doing to look out for extremists on his own force. Chitwood also discussed how he believes federal agencies need to do more to confront hate groups. 

— Hunter Walker

"Trusting the experts is not a function of science. It's not a function of democracy. It's a function of religion and totalitarianism and it does not make for a healthier population."

That's Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — the infamous anti-vaxxer and troll 2024 presidential candidate — during a Thursday congressional hearing on supposed internet censorship. The hearing was… well as chaotic and crazed as the rest of the hearings that have been launched out of the House Republicans' "Weaponization" subcommittee in the past couple of months.  

But when it comes to this quote… all I would like to say about it is: Do you even science bro?

Anyone who knows anything about science — and that includes attending your fifth grade classes — knows that science does not require blind faith and obedience towards anyone. In fact, the scientific method — which I'm fairly certain every student learns about — makes you ask a question, do background research, create a hypothesis, experiment and gather data, analyze the data and draw conclusions. And to even be close enough to being called an expert you need to repeat that cycle thousands of times — in a much more sophisticated way than you did in your middle school science lab — over years of work which is often critiqued or overseen by other experts.

Now, doing this right does require proper grounding. Which not all of our fellow Americans, including Kennedy, seem to have. You might like to do your own research by Googling "Is vaccine bad?" but I'll take my chances with those who have years of higher education, create meticulous research, perform data analysis, and subject their work to peer reviews.

I rest my case. 

— Emine Yücel