We begin today’s roundup with Tony Romm at The Washington Post, who runs down the Republican vote in the House to reverse the IRS reform package adopted by Democrats aimed at cracking down on tax cheats:
Fulfilling their 2022 election pledge to take aim at President Biden’s economic agenda, House Republicans late Monday voted to strip roughly $71 billion from the Internal Revenue Service, targeting money Congress approved last year to help the agency find and pursue tax cheats.
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Democrats, meanwhile, repeatedly pilloried Republicans for engaging in political hyperbole — and faulted the GOP for pursuing legislation that would add to the federal deficit despite the new majority’s fervent commitments to improve the country’s fiscal health. The criticisms came in the wake of a report Monday from the Congressional Budget Office, which found that clawing back IRS funds would curtail its ability to collect unpaid taxes, adding about $114 billion to the deficit over the next decade.
Andrew Solender at Axios highlights the secret document that Kevin McCarthy used to garner the support of the extreme right in the House:
A private document that only some House Republicans have seen and others refuse to talk about could play an outsized role in the governance of the chamber over the next two years.
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Many of the GOP members Axios spoke to about the private document said they hadn't seen it, while others who hold leadership positions were notably circumspect about any knowledge they might have of it.
More from Matt Lewis at The Daily Beast:
McCarthy’s speakership may be a personal Pyrrhic victory, but the larger problem—for those of us hoping to fight back against the radicals on the right—is that McCarthy’s compromises will hurt mainstream conservatives, while emboldening the radical Republicans and even swelling their ranks.
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Assuming McCarthy honors the spirit and the letter of this deal (we’ll see), this agreement means we can expect more Matt Gaetzes and Lauren Boeberts.
This wouldn’t have happened if McCarthy’s enemies had simply accepted his ascension to the speakership as a fait accompli.
And Ed Kilgore at New York Magazine breaks down McCarthy’s concessions:
One compromise basically promised that the House would never pass an omnibus appropriations bill again, holding votes on 12 separate appropriations bills instead. The problem here is that Congress has routinely relied on omnibus bills in recent years not just to “hide” controversial spending items but because it has proved impossible to get separate bills through Congress by the end of each fiscal year. Last year, for example, six appropriations bills made it through the House and zero made it through the Senate. In effect, the House is now demanding that both chambers now do something they’ve been unable to do for decades. It’s a recipe for fiscal gridlock, government shutdowns, and, at best, a system in which the government chugs along on the power of “continuing resolutions” — stopgap spending bills that keep spending levels the same — which is likely what the MAGA conservatives want. So, ironically, instead of the deep and thoughtful review of federal spending the rebels claim to want, this promise will probably produce at least two years of keeping the federal government on automatic pilot when it comes to spending priorities.
Meanwhile, Paul Krugman at The New York Times runs down the Republican delusions on the economy:
You’ve probably read a lot about the political delusions of Republican extremists — and these days a vast majority of Republicans in the House are either extremists or opportunists willing to go along with whatever the extremists want. It’s important, however, to realize that G.O.P. economic views are almost as divorced from reality as their political fantasies are.
On the topic of the political unrest in Brazil, Eugene Robinson calls election denialism “America’s Trumpist export” to Brazil:
What makes Sunday’s violence and destruction in Brasilia so deeply shocking is that we saw it here first. Instead of serving as a model of democracy, the United States has given the world lessons in denying election results and stoking popular disappointment into nihilistic rage.
On a final note, Shan Wu at The Daily Beast explains why the classified documents returned by President Joe Biden’s staff are nothing like those stolen by Donald Trump:
Even instant political spin put forth by Republicans like Rep. Bryon Donalds and the newly minted speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, focus entirely on using the Biden documents matter as a defense of Trump. In an interview on CNN, Donald clung to the idea that Trump as president had the power to declassify documents while Biden, as a then-vice president, did not—in complete ignorance of the fact that even now Trump’s lawyers have failed to identify any documents that Trump supposedly declassified.
