Milley for President? Wouldn’t it be sweet if Gen. Mark Milley, the outgoing Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, decided to enter Republican primaries? At his farewell ceremony, Milley said, “We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”

Trump responded by suggesting that Milley deserved execution. Seriously? Might Milley want to get even, the way we do it in democracies? Having the decorated Milley in the Republican field, win or lose, would shame the other candidates who wrap themselves in the flag but dishonor the Constitution. How do you run against a four-star general who protected America from Trump’s most dangerous delusions? Milley would probably lose the nomination to Trump, given the MAGA base; but he’d humiliate and weaken Trump along the way. A Milley candidacy is a long shot, but then so was General Eisenhower’s run in 1952.

Is Dean Phillips Serious? Last week, on the other side of the aisle, the Minnesota congressman went even further than in his previous statements that he is considering entering Democratic primaries, not because he wants to be president but to demonstrate Biden’s vulnerability and thus to coax first-tier challengers into the race. (“The country is begging for alternatives. Whether that’s me, whether it’s somebody else, time will tell.”) Phillips’s reward was that he had to resign from a leadership position as co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee—which now frees him to be even more explicit in pursuing his idea.

Is this crazy? It depends on how much you think Biden will be a drag on the ticket and his own re-election chances. But Phillips is saying out loud what lots of other Democrats are whispering.

Another Victory Lap for Warren? Those who listened to the oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the case challenging the funding mechanism of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau came away thinking that most of the justices weren’t buying it, including at least two of Trump’s appointees. Here’s the analysis of the Prospect’s David Dayen. As a unit of the Federal Reserve, which has plenty of its own money, the CFPB doesn’t need direct appropriations from Congress. Several other federal agencies, going back to the customs offices of the early republic, operated on their own revenues without direct appropriations.

The CFPB and its funding mechanism were the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, who was able to create the bureau as part of the Dodd-Frank Act. With its independence and resolute director in Rohit Chopra, the CFPB is the most effective of consumer agencies, and has the financial industry spitting mad. Let’s not count chickens yet, but indications are that the republic can be grateful to Warren once again.

Just What We Need. Our errant Prospect alum Matt Yglesias is promoting the idea of a bipartisan “fiscal commission” that would agree on a mechanical formula to reduce the deficit. Where to begin …? Didn’t the Bowles-Simpson Commission and its stepchild, the sequester, do damage enough? Would any bipartisan group agree to raise taxes on the rich, the only reasonable way of cutting the deficit, or would the lowest common denominator as usual be cutting social spending? The rising debt is the subject of much conservative commentary, but the high interest rates are entirely the result of bad Federal Reserve policy, not the federal debt.

Is this really a moment to think that bipartisanship could accomplish anything worth having on the taxing-and-spending front? Was Yglesias perhaps on Jupiter during the ongoing debacle over keeping government functioning at all?