A Republican Senator Puts on His Big-Boy Pants

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Welcome to this week's edition of the Surge, which dares to dream: If Bob from Chicago can become Pope, can the Surge from Washington, DC, become grand ayatollah of Iran? What's the pay?

This week: Brian Kemp has better things to do than spending three days a week in the Senate. Former President Joe Biden offered proof of life. Republican moderates are flexing previously unknown muscles. President Donald Trump watched a movie and now wants to reopen an old jail. We asked a bunch of trees what would be a good final entry, and boy, do trees have a sick sense of humor!

But first, a senator puts on his big-boy pants.

Thom Tillis

Trump placed an especially ludicrous test on the Senate by pressing it to confirm “Eagle Ed” Martin, the interim US attorney for DC, to the position indefinitely. Martin's nomination was a joke. He had no prosecutorial experience, had lost repeated bids for political office, was supportive of the #StopTheSteal movement, and forgot to disclose to the Senate his hundreds of appearances on Russian state-sponsored media programs. Trump, of course, liked him because of all the Jan. 6 stuff. But his involvement in #StopTheSteal, support for Jan. 6 defendants, and investigation of Jan. 6 prosecutors also closed off his path to confirmation in the Senate. North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, a key vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee, announced this week that he wouldn't support Martin's nomination because of his posture toward Jan. 6.

It's a rare thing to see a Republican senator commit to killing a favored nominee of Trump's in committee; we believe, in fact, that this is the first time we've seen it. And while the MAGA mediaverse quickly moved into formation to threaten Tillis, Trump seemed to take the news relatively well, saying on Thursday that it's just the way the cookie crumbles. Martin is “a terrific person, and he wasn't getting the support from people that I thought,” he told reporters. “I can only lift that little phone so many times in a day, but we have somebody else that will be great.” Great, great, great. Just great…

House Republican moderates

We have to issue—for now—a partial mea culpa to the House Republican moderates. Our belief, as Republicans began writing their “one big, beautiful bill,” was that the mods would whine, gripe, and draw red lines about spending cuts they'd never go along with—and ultimately lose the intraparty battle to spending hawks in the House Freedom Caucus and go along with whatever they wanted. But moderates have put in a surprisingly strong showing this week. Two of the most controversial proposals for Medicaid cuts—lowering the federal match rates and instituting per capita caps for Obamacare expansion enrollees—are just about dead. Meanwhile, a tax increase for the wealthy is back in the discussion ( depending on Trump's mood swings) and blue-state Republicans are feeling emboldened to increase the deductibility of state and local taxes (SALT).

The surest sign that things have moved in moderates' favor, though, is how mad the deficit hawks are. Right now, they're at a 32 members have sent a letter to the speaker level of anger. If they get much anger, that number could hit 37, or potentially 39. In any event, the weeks of private negotiation will end soon, as the committee overseeing Medicaid is expected to reveal and mark up its section of the Big Bill next week. And even though things have been moving in moderates' direction, the final product will still have hundreds of trillions of dollars of Medicaid cuts—just not necessarily the most drastic ones under consideration.

Brian Kemp

Term-limited Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp was Senate Republicans' top recruiting target this cycle as they tried to unseat Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, and preliminary polling showed he was by far the most competitive Republican option. He was unquestionably the candidate that Ossoff was the most worried about. But this week Kemp announced that he'd “decided that being on the ballot next year is not the right decision for me and my family.”

We've got to say: No kidding. What, exactly, about the Senate was supposed to appeal to Kemp, other than a sense of obligation to run for the party's sake? The Senate used to be an attractive retirement community for ex-governors. But with the institution so neutered by partisan gridlock and a dominating executive branch, traffic is now moving in the other direction. And if Kemp wants to run for president in 2028, which he probably does, starting a Senate term in 2027 wouldn't make a lot of sense. The decision leaves an open field for an assortment of yahoos from Georgia's House delegation to enter the ring, such as Rep. Buddy Carter, who has already declared his candidacy with an ad about how Ossoff loves having “men in girls' sports,” or Democrats' preferred pick, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. You can see what Senate Republicans were trying to avoid here.

John Fetterman

Late last week, New York magazine published a lengthy, grim feature about Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman in whose past and present staffers expressed concern about the senator's behavior and mental health. While the piece was buttressed with stories from anonymous sources, the linchpin of the story was a very much on-the-record Adam Jentleson, Fetterman's former chief of staff, sharing a 1,600-word letter he'd written Fetterman's physician at Walter Reed a year ago. “John is on a bad trajectory and I'm really worried about him,” Jentleson wrote, adding that he “won't be with us for much longer.” The vignettes in the story create an alarming picture, and another story came out this week about similarly erratic behavior in a recent meeting with teachers union officials.

Fetterman has called the feature “a hit piece from a very left publication,” and critics of the piece have argued that such reporting is only emerging because Fetterman has fashioned himself into a more conservative Democrat and stalwart supporter of Israel. There's some merit to that. We do think that if Fetterman hadn't committed certain heresies against the left, especially on Israel, you'd see the left also defending Fetterman against this “hit piece.” But the impetus behind the piece appears to be Jentleson's willingness to go on the record, and Jentleson doesn't have a leftist axis to grind—he's someone who's cheered on Fetterman's centrism and dismissiveness toward annoying progressive interest groups as a model for the rest of the party. He’s not coming out with this in protest of his ex-boss’s beliefs on the war in Gaza, and the worrisome episodes in the piece speak for themselves.

Donald Trump

Last Saturday night, South Florida PBS outlet WLRN aired the 1979 film Escape From Alcatraz , starring Clint Eastwood, at 9 pm It aired it again Sunday morning at 11 am At 6:55 pm that Sunday, Trump posted on Truth Social that he was “directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America's most ruthless and violent Offenders.” The former maximum security prison in San Francisco Bay has been shut down since 1963 because it was an expensive pain in the ass to operate; it has since flourished as a museum with an audio tour, while the most dangerous federal criminals are successfully incarcerated at a modern supermax penitentiary in Colorado. But on the other hand: Whatever. If musing about Alcatraz— “something that's both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak”—while the NFL commissioner and the mayor of DC stand beside him puts Trump in a good mood, and distracts him from other silly but high-stakes ideas, he should keep doing so.

Joe Biden

To the groans of every Democratic official and strategist in the country, Joe Biden reemerged this week for a couple of interviews, perhaps trying to get a few words in before a new book takes a daisy cutter to what remains of his legacy. Biden finally showed some humility about the 2024 election result, conceding on The View that “I was in charge and [Trump] won, so I take responsibility.” But on several other occasions, he was still reluctant to acknowledge his central role in Democrats' defeat. He said he “wasn't surprised” by Harris' loss, arguing that Trump won because “they went the route of—the sexist route” and that he'd “never seen quite as successful and a consistent campaign undercutting the notion that a woman couldn't lead the country, and a woman of mixed race.” He continued to argue that Democrat voters didn't want him to drop out, saying that “the Democratic Party at large didn't buy into it” but that “the Democratic leadership and some of the very significant contributors did.” That's just not true, and it wasn't even true before the infamous debate last June. He still obviously feels that he was done wrong after the debate and could've stayed in, when the lesson of the election was that he never should've run for reelection in the first place. We doubt he'll ever admit it.

Casey Means

Weird stuff is happening in RFK Jr. world. We're just going to type it out. Trump with Drew his nominee for surgeon general—Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a Fox News doctor—this week, after Trump-adjacent online conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer called her out for distorting her summary and having said nice things about the COVID vaccine once. (Nesheiwat is a sister-in-law to former national security adviser Mike Waltz, who is also the brother-in-law of Creed singer Scott Stapp.) Trump then tapped Casey Means, an MD who dropped out of her residency to focus on wellness schemes and alternative medicine. Means' brother is Calley Means, a top adviser to RFK Jr., who, like their boss, also distrusts everything about the “medical establishment.” Casey Means has a newsletter in which she discusses topics such as how she used to go on solo hikes and ask the trees to help her find a romantic partner.

Regrettably, Loomer also disapproves of Means' selection as surgeon general, in part due to his history of talking to trees. The selection also alarmed RFK Jr.'s former presidential running mate, Nicole Shanahan, who tweeted that she “was promised that if I supported RFK Jr. in his Senate confirmation that neither of these [Means] siblings would be working under HHS or in an appointment.” Oh ho ho! “I don't know if RFK very clearly linked to me, or what is going on.” Yeah, he definitely just lied to her, but she feels that someone, who isn't Trump, is “controlling his decisions.” Last, she added that “with regards to the siblings, there is something very artificial and aggressive about them, almost like they were bred and raised Manchurian assets.” As a certain brain worm once said: A lot to chew over, here.

Slate