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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, Slate’s politics newsletter that can’t wait to play its weekly pickup water polo match in Trump’s new “American flag blue” Reflecting Pool.
We’d give the politics this week a solid B+. The new Fed nominee looks like he’ll be confirmed, even though he’s not sure who won the 2020 presidential election. The FBI director is suing a magazine. People continue to die in Congress.
Let’s begin with a double blast of hot, hot, HOT redistricting-war updates.
1.
Hakeem Jeffries
A win that Democrats needed—and for more than just the seats.
Democrats scored a hard-fought, messy, and vital win this week in the Virginia redistricting referendum, which will likely give the party four new House seats in the state and bring it to parity with—or even give it an advantage over—Republicans in the midcycle redistricting arms race that the White House initiated last year. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who poured a lot of time, money, coordination, pressure, and campaigning into the outcome, was understandably gloating following the result. He spoke of how he warned Speaker Mike Johnson last year that this gambit, which began when Texas redistricted last year, would backfire, as it now has. And he issued further warnings to Florida Republicans, who meet next week to consider new maps. “Our message to Florida Republicans is, ‘F around and find out,’ ” he said at a press conference Wednesday. This followed his Tuesday night statement, which concluded with a promise of “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”
The Virginia win was about more than just picking up the seats. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, Democrats in Congress have been squeezed between a base that insists they fight at every turn—and as dirty as need be—and the cold, hard reality that there’s not much they can do from the minority beyond a performance of fighting. The Virginia gerrymander was the sort of gloves-off retaliation against Trump that the base has been fantasizing about, and the biggest win of Jeffries’ still-early tenure as Democratic leader. Now it just needs to stand up in court.
2.
James Blair
Blairymandering under duress!
Dig just past the layer of outrage and cries of unfairness from Republicans following the Virginia result, and you’ll discover kernels of introspection. Republicans in the House and Senate were openly griping about the White House’s pursuit of midcycle gerrymandering now that they may come out the worse for it. “We have to understand that for every action, there are second- and third-order effects that we could live to regret,” Arkansas Rep. Steve Womack, for example, told NBC News. “I don’t think it was well thought out in the people pushing it.” The response of North Carolina Rep. Richard Hudson, chairman of House Republicans’ campaign arm, to a question about whether the redistricting war had been worth it was telling. “It’s not for me to decide that,” Hudson said to reporters. “It wasn’t my decision.”
It was Trump’s decision, but the Trump aide who pushed the idea is James Blair, the Trump machine’s top political hand. He was the one who pitched Trump on pursuing this path last year to fortify the House Republican majority in the midterms, and became so closely associated with the plan that it became informally known as “Blairymandering.” So it fell to Blair to become the face of the administration spinning the loss in television hits on Wednesday. His message was: Chin up! “What I expect is that when all of this redistricting sort of continues this cycle, is that there will be a narrow advantage for Republicans,” Blair said on CNN. Maybe? Who knows! But what else is he going to say, really? That his signature political project this cycle may have been a failure?
3.
Kevin Warsh
How independent would the Fed be under him?
The question hanging over Kevin Warsh’s nomination to chair the Federal Reserve is whether he would conduct monetary policy according to the president’s wishes instead of independent economic analysis. This is the question because Trump’s chief criterion in his search was finding someone who would do whatever he wanted, and he landed on Warsh. Warsh also has a history of changing his mind on the need for tight or loose money that aligns closely with which party is in power, or whether there’s a Fed vacancy on the horizon.
Warsh said in his opening testimony that he was “committed to ensuring that the conduct of monetary policy remains strictly independent” and that this independence was “essential.” Well, phew, guess we’re all set, then. But that would-be independence may begin only after Trump loses his power to revoke Warsh’s nomination. When Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren asked Warsh whether Trump lost the 2020 election, Warsh responded, “We try to keep politics, if I’m confirmed, out of the Federal Reserve.” When she asked again, Warsh said, “Senator, I believe that this body certified that election many years ago.” Not a great start, from a backbone perspective.
4.
Jeanine Pirro
Finally backing down.
Who won what election against who? Blah, blah, blah. Your little questions no longer matter, Elizabeth Warren, because Kevin Warsh is now en route to becoming chairman of the Federal Reserve next month. The biggest hang-up with his nomination was not that there was a lack of organic support among Senate Republicans. It was that North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, who enthusiastically likes Warsh, had nevertheless vowed to block his path out of the Banking Committee until U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro dropped her investigation into the current Fed chair, Jerome Powell. As we wrote last week, Pirro was refusing to do so, perhaps because she was trying to impress Trump into making her the next attorney general.
On Friday, just a couple of days after publicly insisting that the probe would go on, Pirro finally caved. After getting assurances that the Fed’s inspector general would do a “comprehensive report in short order” on cost overruns of the Fed’s building renovations, Pirro wrote, she directed her office to close the investigation. (She did say, though, that she “will not hesitate to restart a criminal investigation should the facts warrant doing so.”) We have to say: It’s slim pickings assessing the most effective moments of Senate Republican pushback against Trump administration excesses. But Tillis’ blockade here has to be at the top.
5.
Kash Patel
Long week at the office. Time for a stiff drink?
What the hell is going on at the FBI? Lord if we know. According to a report in the Atlantic late last week, though, the answer is: drinking. Per the report, “a recurring source of concern across the government” has been that Director Kash Patel’s drinking not only impairs his ability to do his job but also makes him “vulnerable to exploitation or coercion by foreign adversaries.” OK, but what the article fails to mention is that excessive imbibing could also make Patel vulnerable to having a good time and feeling awesome.
Is any of this true? Patel strongly denies it, and on Monday he sued the Atlantic for $250 million, or roughly what the Atlantic spends on new hires in a given week. While winning that case would be uphill sledding, the report may have ultimately been a useful development for him. Trump has been in a firing mood of late, with Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Lori Chavez-DeRemer—oh, yeah, Trump canned her this week, whatever—all gone, so all eyes were on which controversy-prone appointee he might turn to next. It’s unlikely to be Patel now, because no way he’s going to let the fake news media push him into a personnel change.
6.
David Scott
A most egregious case of Democrats not knowing when it’s time to quit.
Georgia Rep. David Scott died this week, becoming the fourth House Democrat to die in office this Congress. His passing did not come out of the blue. For years, Scott has been in poor mental and physical health, closely guarded by his staff at levels akin to those of late-stage Dianne Feinstein. For several election cycles, fellow Democrats had been trying to goad him into retirement, to no avail; his colleagues finally removed him as the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee after the 2024 election. And despite his fully, visibly deteriorated abilities, he had filed to run for reelection at 2026.
We don’t want to be uncharitable toward the recently deceased, and we should note that he logged decades of impressive years before succumbing to decline. But there’s no other explanation for how he served the past few years essentially incapacitated—and now leaves Democrats down another vote in the House—beyond selfishness. Members who tried to nudge him out perhaps should have nudged a little harder. It’s difficult to describe, after what we saw with President Joe Biden’s choice to run for reelection in 2024, how angry these acts of stubbornness by those well past their prime now make Democratic voters.
7.
John Kennedy
Is this the last reconciliation bill?
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Hegseth Just Sent an Alarming Message to the Rest of the World
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Democrats Just Won Big in Virginia. A Court Could Still Take It Away.
Republicans’ plan for the past few weeks to solve the (ongoing, still!) lapse of congressional appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security has been a two-part strategy: to pass a bipartisan bill funding all of DHS except for immigration enforcement operations, then to load the hell up on immigration enforcement money through the partisan reconciliation process, which is not subject to a Senate filibuster. The House won’t act on the former until they see the Senate act on the latter. This week, Senate Republicans kicked off that reconciliation process by passing a blueprint for it early Thursday morning. It would devote $70 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol over the next several years. The idea is to deliver these agencies their regular annual funding in one large bundle that can run through the rest of Trump’s term.
One of the ways that leaders have kept this reconciliation package so “skinny”—i.e., not loaded up with everyone’s pet projects—is to suggest that there will be time for all of that later, in yet another reconciliation bill. We’re not so sure that will happen, and we’re not alone. Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy held up votes on the reconciliation blueprint for a spell Wednesday night making this case. “There’s not going to be a third reconciliation bill,” Kennedy said on the Senate floor. He proposed, then, that Republicans do more with the current bill beyond funding immigration enforcement. Such as: “I’d like to see us come up with one or two issues that will help the American people with the cost of living.” Addressing the top issue for voters before an election? It’s an intriguing idea, sure. But what about just giving voters more ICE mega-warehouses to overwhelm small-town sewer systems?