Good news / bad news for the Speaker

Also, quantum computers and Santos

We narrowly averted a government shutdown this week.

That’s kind of normal at this point, but here’s the interesting part:

The way we did it was by doing almost the exact same thing that got the last Speaker fired. We passed a temporary budget for the next couple months.

So the question is, will that get the new Speaker fired?

I don’t think so, and here’s why:

It’s true that he really upset his right-flank. I watched on the House floor while they yelled about it, and now they’re on TV threatening to fire him.

But I don’t think they’ll actually do it because if they do, he’ll probably be replaced by someone less conservative.

The new Speaker is very conservative, but there are still about 30 members to his right, so it’s not like more conservative options don’t exist - I just don’t think any of them could win an election for Speaker.

Last month during the big Speaker fight, what the majority party was basically doing was finding the most conservative member they could all agree on, and they found this guy. If they throw him out, they’ll get someone closer to the center, and they don’t want that.

So, as weird as it sounds, there’s a chance that electing a very conservative Speaker might have unlocked the potential for more bipartisanship.

His right-flank won’t like it, but he can look at them and say, “You’ll like the next guy even less,” and it’s true.

Some flexibility to negotiate is good news for the Speaker, but here’s the bad news:

We’re probably about to kick Rep. George Santos out of Congress.

Last time you heard from me, I told you I had just voted against kicking him out because he hadn’t received due process yet.

But I also told you that we were about to get the final report from the ethics investigation into him, and when that happened he would have gotten his due process.

And that’s exactly what happened. The report came out this week and it is absolutely damning. Among many other violations, he was also spending campaign money on botox, Hermes clothing, and an OnlyFans account. (You should read the report - it’s wild.)

We’re gone until after Thanksgiving but something tells me the first order of business when we get back will be kicking him out of Congress. 

When that happens, it will take a very narrow margin for the Speaker and make it even more narrow.

A margin of just a few votes is a nightmare for any Speaker, but definitely one whose flank is comfortable taking down your whole agenda.

Which is exactly what’s happened so far this term. The truth is, we’ve gotten practically nothing done all year. All we’ve really done is narrowly avoid one default and two shutdowns. 

Why? Because for anything real to happen, it has to be bipartisan. One party controls the House, another controls the Senate. Anything that isn’t bipartisan is dead.

Which means we need a Speaker who has the leverage to actually do some deals, and it’s possible - at least, remotely possible - that the majority party may have accidentally enabled that by electing someone so conservative to the top job.

That would be a very unlikely outcome of the Speaker Wars, but it’s possible.

Quantumania (congressional edition)

I’m pretty happy about this.

Last week, I told you I got an amendment about the weather radar gap in Charlotte passed in committee. That’s good for my district, but isn’t exactly of huge national concern.

This week, I got another amendment passed. It’s wider in scope.

Short version:

Quantum computers are going to change the world. Very few currently exist, but we expect their number and their power to grow considerably over this decade.

One of the dangers is that - in theory - quantum computers could render all of our passwords obsolete. 

How? Well, I just can’t stress to you enough how powerful these computers will be. We’re talking an orders-of-magnitude difference between them and whatever you’re using to read this email, and the mathematicians tell us this will create a major crypto-security problem.

So I joined with a member of the other party and we filed a bill to try and get ahead of this by taking a coordinating approach within government agencies.

Our bill became an amendment and our amendment was included - after a unanimous vote in the science committee - in another bill that was in our committee this week.

This isn’t a save-the-world thing. It’s a normal, do-your-job thing. And it will make precisely zero headlines. But it’s basically the kind of approach we should want to see more of in Congress: Stay practical, find some common ground, move forward, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Certainly the opposite of throwing elbows in the hallway and threatening violence against testifying witnesses, both of which also happened this week, as I imagine many of you saw on the news.

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Campaign update

I’ve sent you three emails since we announced for Attorney General.

With those emails, you funded the entire first month of our campaign.

That’s extremely different. I can’t begin to tell you how different it is.

We’ve got a lot of stuff planned for this campaign that I think you’re going to love, and to be candid, it’s your response to these emails that’s making it possible.

Thank you. You rock. This is going to work.

Let’s keep it going. We’ve got an ActBlue option and a non-ActBlue option.

Best,

Jeff

P.S. - In the next email, I’ll show you how my opponent reacted when we got in the race. Pretty wild stuff. I try not to give that stuff too much oxygen, but you need to see it.