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Sign up for the Surge<\/a>, the newsletter that covers most important political nonsense of the week, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.<\/p>\n Welcome to this week\u2019s edition of the Surge, Slate\u2019s politics newsletter that may be locked up this time next week for our \u201chate speech\u201d (our jokes that don\u2019t land). Fair.<\/p>\n It was another terrible week of news in a tense country at its breaking point, but at least we\u2019re about to get some decent weather. That means that furloughed federal workers will be able to take some nice walks during next month\u2019s government shutdown. Kash Patel attempted to save his job by yelling at Democrats. Donald Trump is looking to give TikTok to some of his friends.<\/p>\n Before we start: Let\u2019s say goodbye to sometimes Surge author Ben Mathis-Lilley, who just left Slate after 11 years to (we believe) purchase a soybean farm and get rich selling his crop to the Chinese market. We didn\u2019t have the heart to tell him<\/a>. You may read his wonderful last essay<\/a> here\u2014it\u2019s about politics!<\/p>\n Politics, politics, politics\u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n \n 1.\n <\/p>\n Brendan Carr<\/strong><\/p>\n Sheesh, sorry you didn\u2019t get invited to any Emmy after-parties.<\/strong><\/p>\n During his monologue Monday, ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel built up a joke like so: \u201cWe hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.\u201d It was certainly going out on a limb to characterize the shooter as \u201cMAGA\u201d without any information supporting that, and new information we\u2019ve seen since Monday makes the premise<\/a> look flat wrong.<\/p>\n The regime\u2019s response to Kimmel\u2019s whiffed joke windup, instead of allowing viewer anger to work its way through private action, has been to take a big ol\u2019 whack at the First Amendment. The Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, who collects tribute on behalf of Donald Trump<\/a> from telecom companies with business before the federal government, made a fairly straightforward threat to Disney, ABC\u2019s parent company, in an interview Wednesday afternoon. \u201cFrankly, when you see stuff like this\u2014I mean, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,\u201d Carr said<\/a>. \u201cThese companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there\u2019s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.\u201d Hours later, affiliate behemoth Nexstar\u2014which has a proposed merger<\/a> with another affiliate behemoth before the FCC!\u2014had said it wouldn\u2019t carry Kimmel for the \u201cforeseeable future,\u201d and ABC, at Disney\u2019s behest, announced that it would suspend Kimmel\u2019s show<\/a> \u201cindefinitely.\u201d Sinclair, another affiliate group with a conservative ethos, outdid them all by saying Kimmel\u2019s suspension was \u201cnot enough<\/a>,\u201d that it would air a remembrance of Kirk on Friday, and that Kimmel should make a donation to Turning Point USA. So: This smells an awful lot like the government using coercive power to punish speech it doesn\u2019t like, no? Carr celebrated<\/a> with a GIF from The Office.<\/p>\n \n 2.\n <\/p>\n Chuck Schumer<\/strong><\/p>\n Going for it.<\/strong><\/p>\n Six months after folding to Republicans at the previous government funding deadline, Senate Democrats have a plan. They\u2019ve refusing to go along with the GOP\u2019s stopgap bill, a seven-week extension of funding without many extraneous items attached that would give negotiators more time to work out a long-term bipartisan funding deal. Instead, Democrats have rallied around their own proposal, which would fund the government through Oct.\u00a031, permanently extend expiring Obamacare subsidies, reverse the Medicaid cuts from Republicans\u2019 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and establish certain guardrails to ensure that the executive branch spends congressionally appropriated funds\u2014essentially, a messaging bill that Republicans would never go along with. Any funding bill would need 60 votes to break a filibuster. Both were rejected<\/a> in the Senate on Friday.<\/p>\n Minds can change in the last hours before the Sept.\u00a030 funding deadline. But right now, Democrats are digging in on something that has never succeeded: shutting down the government and coming out the better for it. The Republican proposal to punt for a couple of months and leave the bigger questions for a long-term deal is standard stuff. Democrats don\u2019t really object to what it does include, just what it doesn\u2019t. That\u2019s typically the recipe for taking the blame. Chuck Schumer believes, though, that Trump and Republicans would suffer the consequences regardless. Here\u2019s how he explained it to Punchbowl News<\/a> this week: \u201cJust go to people on the street and say, when Trump says, \u2018Don\u2019t talk with Democrats<\/a>,\u2019 is he to blame for the shutdown? They say, \u2018Yes, of course.\u2019\u00a0\u201d An exciting political experiment awaits.<\/p>\n \n 3.\n <\/p>\n Kash Patel<\/strong><\/p>\n Did he yell at enough Democrats to keep his job?<\/strong><\/p>\n The embattled FBI director, under criticism from both sides for tweeting through<\/a> the Kirk-shooter search last week from a table at the upscale New York restaurant Rao\u2019s<\/a>, testified before both the House and Senate this week. And we\u2019re not sure we\u2019ve seen a hearing that has produced so many clips of a high-level government official\u2014the supposedly neutral head of the FBI at that\u2014yelling or casting insults at the lawmakers asking him questions.<\/p>\n Kash Patel told California Sen. Adam Schiff that he was<\/a> \u201cthe biggest fraud to ever sit in the United States Senate,\u201d \u201ca disgrace to this institution and an utter coward,\u201d and \u201ca political buffoon, at best.\u201d He told<\/a> New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker that \u201cyour falsehoods are an embarrassment to the division in this country.\u201d He told<\/a> California Rep. Eric Swalwell that his \u201centire career in Congress\u201d was \u201cbullshit\u201d and \u201ca disgrace to the American people.\u201d This\u2014especially the exchange with Schiff\u2014is a tactic we\u2019ve seen before from endangered Trump subordinates. When Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth\u2019s confirmation was on the ropes, for example, he found a camera bank and broadcast himself, straight to an audience of one in Trump\u2019s living room, chastising the assembled media<\/a>. Making a show of screaming at Adam Schiff, a longtime enemy of Trump\u2019s, is Patel\u2019s version of that. It probably worked.<\/p>\n \n 4.\n <\/p>\n Pam Bondi<\/strong><\/p>\n Hey, now, that sounds like wussy left-coded language\u00a0\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n Between Carr and Attorney General Pam Bondi, this week served as a reminder to top Trump administration officials with tremendous authority that you do not need to do interviews and podcasts all the time. In Bondi\u2019s case, the offending remarks came when she appeared earlier this week on Katie Miller\u2019s podcast. (All right, she probably does need to appear on Stephen Miller\u2019s wife\u2019s podcast when asked to do so, since Stephen Miller runs the country<\/a>.) In the episode, Bondi argued: \u201cThere\u2019s free speech, and then there\u2019s hate speech. And there is no place\u2014especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie\u2014in our society.\u201d Bondi, the most powerful prosecutor in the country, added, \u201cWe will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.\u201d<\/p>\n This didn\u2019t go over well on the right,<\/a> and not just because Bondi was endorsing a violation of the First Amendment. The term hate speech is nails on a chalkboard to the right, all too reminiscent of cancel culture and perceived restraints from the left against telling it like it is. It\u2019s also important, with both Bondi and Patel, to emphasize that they were already on thin ice with the right for having not yet released proof that Jeffrey Epstein was trafficking minors to every top Democrat in the country. And so Bondi tried to clean up her comments<\/a>, posting, \u201cHate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment.\u201d We don\u2019t feel it\u2019s our obligation to provide free advice to the attorney general on how to shore up her support on the right, but: probably best to retire the term hate speech altogether.<\/p>\n \n 5.\n <\/p>\n TikTok<\/strong><\/p>\n A mess all around.<\/strong><\/p>\n The Trump administration and China are closing in on a TikTok deal. As a reminder, a 2024 law required the app\u2019s China-based owner, ByteDance, to divest TikTok or face a ban in the United States. According to reporting<\/a> on the outlines of the deal this week, a consortium of companies, including Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz, would take an 80\u00a0percent ownership stake in the spun-off app. Less clear are the particulars around control of TikTok\u2019s proprietary algorithm, the secret sauce that\u2019s core to its value.<\/p>\n The first thing that pops out to us here: Oracle is Larry Ellison, and Andreessen Horowitz is Marc Andreessen. Both are<\/a> Trump buddies<\/a>, and the administration is rewarding them with a lucrative prize for their support. So there\u2019s that. But this process has also made a joke of Congress. Several times, Trump issued \u201cextensions\u201d of an enforcement delay on the TikTok ban, something he has no legal authority to do. The law passed last year gave the president one short-term extension, if a deal were in the offing. Trump has done it four times. This seems like something that Congress, which overwhelmingly approved this legislation along bipartisan lines, ought to have taken legal action against. But both Republicans and Democrats are worried about getting on the wrong side of the tens of millions of TikTok users out there by actually enforcing a law they passed. The net result is another multibillion-dollar prize for the game-show president to dangle.<\/p>\n \n 6.\n <\/p>\n Susan Monarez<\/strong><\/p>\n An honest-to-goodness oversight hearing into weird Trump-administration stuff.<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019ve Written About Politics for a Decade-Plus. Here\u2019s What Everyone Is Missing About the Trump Years. This Is the Most Withering Indictment of the Supreme Court Ever By a Sitting Judge If We Are Descending Into Fascism, This Little-Noticed Moment Will Prove Pivotal MAGA Has a New Defense for Trump Trampling the First Amendment. Don\u2019t Fall For It. As the Surge wrote about separately this week<\/a>, something most unusual went down in the Senate on Wednesday: A Republican committee chairman convened a hearing to probe a scandal within the Trump administration. In this case, Louisiana\u2019s Bill Cassidy, who helms the Senate HELP Committee, brought in ex\u2013Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez to give her account<\/a> of how she was fired for not agreeing to rubber-stamp plans to water down vaccine recommendations from a stacked panel of vaccine skeptics.<\/p>\n But did this spotlight into a controversy within the administration change anything? Maybe! It\u2019s not an accident that Cassidy held the hearing the day before that panel was set to meet to make its childhood vaccination schedule recommendations to the CDC, and the hearing displayed vividly\u2014if it weren\u2019t already obvious\u2014that these recommendations might not entirely be on the level. One of the most expected changes from the panel was that it would no longer recommend the hepatitis\u00a0B vaccine for newborns. Instead, the panel tabled that vote<\/a> altogether. Oversight is good. Hmm, any other funny business out there worth looking into\u00a0\u2026?<\/p>\n \n 7.\n <\/p>\n Erik Siebert<\/strong><\/p>\n A preview of coming attractions in authoritarianism.<\/strong><\/p>\n One last scandal, then we release you to your Saturday-morning errands. ABC News reported<\/a> Thursday evening that Trump was \u201cexpected\u201d to fire the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, \u201cafter investigators were unable to find incriminating evidence of mortgage fraud against New York Attorney General Letitia James.\u201d As of Surge press time, there\u2019s been no official announcement on whether Trump has gone through with the firing\u2014and at least some in the administration are recognizing<\/a> that this could be a hot mess. If Trump does proceed, though, we\u2019d argue that it\u2019s not great for a president to fire a prosecutor who, due to lack of available evidence, opts not to file criminal charges against one of the president\u2019s political enemies. That\u2019s all! Now that you have read the Surge, you are free to stop following the news for the rest of the weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by John McDonnell\/Getty Images. 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