John,

You haven’t heard from me for a few weeks because we were all sent home for the holidays, but now we’re back.

And we immediately hit a brick wall.

The big question is the budget. We were supposed to pass one last year, but we didn’t.

Instead, we narrowly avoided two government shutdowns by passing two temporary extensions.

The first time we did it, the right-flank revolted and fired the Speaker.

The second time, it was with the new Speaker. The right-flank didn’t fire him, but they grumbled a lot. So the Speaker promised not to do any more extensions.

The next government shutdown is scheduled for one week from today - and we still don’t have a budget.

BUT - just before we all came back to D.C. - the Speaker agreed to some major budget terms with the Senate. Most importantly, he agreed on the big budget number, or how much we’re gonna spend.

The right-flank was furious. They thought the number was too high.

So they waited until we were all called to the House floor for our first procedural vote of the week. This is the vote that lays out the other votes we’re going to take, and it’s extremely rare that it fails. Decades can pass without this vote failing.

But the right-flank wanted to send a message, so as soon as the vote began they started voting against it.

Then I watched the Speaker march over to one of the leaders of the right-flank. They were about 30 feet away from me and the Speaker was trying to get this guy to call off the attack and save the vote.

We get five minutes for most votes. There’s a big timer on the wall so we can all see how much time we have left. However, once the clock hits zero, the person presiding over the chamber - who is always an ally of the Speaker, because the Speaker picks them - can simply stand there and keep the vote open. Simply put, if they don’t go bang with the gavel, the vote technically stays open.

And that’s what was happening. I watched as the Speaker tried to coax the rebel leader to stand down and allow the vote to pass while the presiding member looked down from the podium and held the vote open.

It became pretty animated. The rebel leader waved his arms around a bunch. After about five minutes, the Speaker gave up, walked off the floor, the vote officially failed, and we all filed out and waited to hear what the heck was going to happen next.

The next day was one giant pressure campaign from the right-flank against the Speaker. They were in and out of his office, telling the press they might fire him, all kinds of stuff.

At one point, one of them even told the press that the Speaker had decided to renege on his deal with the Senate on the budget - which forced the Speaker to come out of his office and basically tell the press, “No, I didn’t say that.”

No matter what happens with the actual terms of the budget, the Speaker is going to have to pass another extension. He’s out of time.

In order to do that, he’s going to need a lot of votes from the minority party because so many members of the majority party will vote no.

At that point, he’ll be 1) passing an extension he said he wouldn’t pass, and 2) relying on the minority party to get it done.

All of this is basically certain to happen - unless he would rather allow the government to shut down, which he very much does not want.

So it’s just a lot of pain for this guy in the short-term. His right-flank is going to go completely ballistic and we’ll see if they actually try and fire him.

New Speaker = Old Speaker

It should be noted that, at this point, the new Speaker is acting the exact same way as the old Speaker. No daylight that I can see between these two guys.

The new Speaker talked tough in order to get the job, but upon getting it promptly saw that he’s got one of the smallest majorities in the history of the House of Representatives and that imposes certain mathematical realities on what can and cannot pass.

Which is to say, he went from campaign mode to governance mode, and sure enough, that’s been a painful transition.

Conversation with my staff after they read a draft of this email

“Jeff, you can’t write an email this long.”

“Why not?”

“Because the part where you ask for a contribution is at the bottom, and no one is going to get to the bottom.”

“I dunno. If it’s a good email they’ll get to the bottom.”

“No they won’t. This takes like five minutes to read. No one is going to do that.”

“Well, let’s make it an experiment. If lots of people donate to this email, then I can keep writing them the way I want.”

“Ok, fine.”

***

So here we are folks, at the bottom of the email.

You know what we have to do: We have to prove to my staff that you folks actually want this kind of detail, and there’s only one metric for success they recognize.

There’s a lot riding on this. I’m trying to fund my campaign, but I’d also like to show that treating our audience with respect isn’t mutually exclusive with raising the funds we need to compete.

So I’d appreciate a contribution - and thanks for reading.

You can give here (through ActBlue) or here (through non-ActBlue).

Best,

Jeff

P.S. - Just to give you a sense of what I’m seeing, here’s an A.I. rendering of my staff’s reaction to how long this email was: