The Archive

IN THIS EDITION

A brewing Lone Star State primary

What’s going on with Dem leadership?

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Rayburn coffee shop

The Zooms behind the firings

THE TOP

A brewing Lone Star State primary

Welcome to The Readback, our weekend digest featuring the best of Punchbowl News this week – a quick roundup of all our scoops, analysis and Capitol Hill insight you won’t find anywhere else. We’ve also included a few of our favorite outside reads from the week.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton made a stop by our Washington office on Monday morning and sounded every bit like someone itching to challenge Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) from the right.

Paxton hasn’t officially made any decisions on whether he’ll run for Senate. And so in the lead-up to our interview, we wondered how much Paxton would lean into his dissatisfaction with Cornyn. Sometimes politicians who are still in the “deciding” phase of their campaigns are cagey, which doesn’t make for a great interview.

Early on, we realized Paxton would have no problem being forthright about his ambitions.

Paxton claimed his polling against Cornyn was “significantly good.” Paxton predicted, “I can win if I have $20 million” in fundraising. He went after Cornyn’s policy positions, including his support for Ukraine and previous skepticism about President Donald Trump, and called the incumbent’s views “extremely unpopular.”

“He’s just never in the right place for Texas primary voters,” Paxton concluded about Cornyn.

Can Paxton actually win? It’s clear the Texas AG thinks he has a real shot to exploit some tangible anger that the Republican base feels toward Cornyn.

Paxton referenced a notable interaction at the 2022 state party convention when Cornyn — who was playing an influential role in crafting a bipartisan gun safety bill — was booed by GOP activists.

Plus, Paxton brought up Cornyn’s May 2023 comments to Texas reporters slamming Trump.

“I think President Trump’s time has passed him by,” Cornyn said at the time. “I don’t think President Trump understands that when you run in a general election, you have to appeal to voters beyond your base.”

Here’s how zeroed-in Paxton is on Cornyn: On Friday, he dug up an old tweet from Andrew Desiderio from 2023 to prove the point that Cornyn hasn’t defended Trump enough.

Cornyn has been making strides to shore up his right flank, to be sure. Cornyn endorsed Trump, voted for all of Trump’s nominees and is pushing pro-gun rights stances.

But in modern Republican Party primaries, style matters just as much as substance. And it’s undoubtedly true that Paxton’s brand is MAGA while Cornyn’s aligns more with the George W. Bush GOP.

In Texas primaries, races have to be run like national campaigns given the expensive media markets and the state’s massive scale. We’ll be following along every step of the way.

What I’m watching: The opening four days of March Madness are some of the best that sports has to offer all year. Soaking in the upsets and praying my bracket emerges unscathed!

– Max Cohen

You can find The Readback in your inbox every Saturday at 8 a.m. And don’t hesitate to reach out to readback@punchbowl.news with feedback. Enjoy The Readback.

What’s going on with Dem leadership?

It’s now been just over a week since Senate Democrats, led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, cleared the way for a GOP-drafted government funding bill and, in doing so, sparked a wider conversation among Democrats about how they can be a more effective opposition party.

The episode also helped us better understand the leadership ambitions of Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii). On Wednesday, I wrote about Schatz’s vote to help pass the GOP funding bill and avert a government shutdown, which was a pivotal moment as Schatz looks to lay the groundwork for a leadership run.

But let’s get back to the current leadership.

As we’ve written, Schumer’s job isn’t in jeopardy. But he certainly has his work cut out for him. And while Schumer postponed his previously scheduled book tour events this past week — citing security concerns — he still sat down for all of the TV interviews he had lined up for the week.

Schumer hasn’t been shying away from questions about whether he made the right decision. On Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show earlier this week, Schumer was asked to respond directly to the prominent Democrats — including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi — who were criticizing his decision. Hayes played a number of clips while viewers could see Schumer watching and listening on a split-screen.

What Schumer said in response was an important element of this debate that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention.

In the immediate aftermath of Schumer’s move to help pass the GOP funding bill, a few Democratic senators I spoke with were venting about House Democrats’ relentless pressure campaign urging their Senate counterparts to hold firm against the CR. A common refrain went something like this: The House has it easy, they don’t have to deal with the consequences of forcing a shutdown like we do in the Senate.

And, to my surprise, Schumer pretty much said this out loud during his interview with Hayes.

“They had it a little easier because they could vote no against the CR and not cause a shutdown,” Schumer said.

That comment seemed to fly under the radar this week, but it really underscores the House vs. Senate tensions we’ve seen on full display, including between Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Members of the House love bashing the Senate. Senators don’t often respond so directly. That Schumer did so is clearly a sign of the frustration he and other Senate Democrats are feeling about the backlash from their counterparts across the Capitol.

Congress is back on Monday, so keep an eye out for even more sniping between the two caucuses.

What I’m watching: I just started watching “Paradise” on Hulu with Sterling K. Brown, James Marsden and others. Already hooked.

— Andrew Desiderio

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Rayburn coffee shop

It’s a recess Readback, and I want to use this opportunity to tell you that the Common Grounds – a new-ish coffee shop that opened on the ground level of the Rayburn House Office Building – is good.

Located in a spot that used to be an &pizza, Common Grounds shares an owner with the Cannon Coffee Cart – another recent-ish upstart on the Hill. That makes it one of the few small businesses offering food and beverage on the Capitol campus, along with the Punchbowl News team’s beloved Cups & Company in Russell.

I drink a lot of coffee. Inarguably too much coffee. I will sleep when I’m dead. But Common Grounds’ coffee is noticeably great. The cold brew I hoovered up on Friday was among the best I’ve had on the Hill – rich without being overwhelming. I’m told the shop sources its coffee beans from the Arkansas-based Onyx Coffee Lab. That is good news for the state’s gavel-heavy House delegation and staff.

But the real surprise, for me, was the food. I ordered an everything bagel sandwich with egg, cheddar cheese and bacon. A lot of bagel sandwiches in the DMV area are just OK. To live in D.C. is to endure sub-par bagels compared to our peers in New York, New Jersey and – yes – even Chicago. (Call Your Mother, Bethesda Bagels, you are exceptions, and I love you.)

But this was just a damn good sandwich. The bagel was shockingly fresh for a Friday morning of a congressional recess in a House office building. The cheese was subtle and perfectly melted. The bacon was allowed to sing without being too crunchy or chewy.

It was even good 20 or so minutes after I picked it up. I ordered the meal before a source meeting and waited to dig in until that sitdown was over. My mustache can make eating sandwiches in polite company an occasionally fraught endeavor.

What I’m reading and watching: I picked up a copy of “Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel this week on a trip to Savannah, Ga. I tore through the book in less than a day! The 2014 novel was wildly prescient about what it would be like to live through a dangerous global pandemic. We’ve got a bit less civilization-rebuilding to do in our version, but the beats are similar.

I’ve also been watching the TV version of the book on HBO, which is great. I don’t agree with every change made in the jump from book to screen, but hey, that’s showbiz.

– Brendan Pedersen

The Zooms behind the firings

The call was like a lot of work reunions: old colleagues, some in sweatshirts, logged on to a Zoom call to say hi. People left early or joined late. The topics meandered and repeated. A mom called in from outside a school as she waited to pick up one of her kids.

The topic, however, was President Donald Trump’s move to fire two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission and its consequences for fraud victims, Big Tech mergers, economic stability, the rule of law and the form of the U.S. government. It was weighty stuff.

The move is likely illegal, and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, the commissioners now in limbo, have promised to sue.

Trump allies have reassured the public that the Supreme Court will soon overturn constitutionally illiterate and outdated precedents about independent agencies, so the firing is sort of legal-like, or perhaps pre-legal. Either way, it’ll have big repercussions for the FTC’s mission, the Fed and lots of other organs of government.

But back to that call. As news of the firing broke, a progressive group assembled a Zoom with Bedoya and Slaughter to talk with reporters and other key figures from the Biden-era tech antitrust world.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) spoke. So did Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), former FTC Chair Lina Khan and ex-Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra (who was an FTC commissioner at one point too).

The old assistant attorney general for antitrust addressed the call as well, and his former principal deputy and congressional liaisons were logged on, alongside the onetime consumer protection bureau chief and top spokesperson for the FTC.

Slaughter was the one waiting outside the school, joking she’d have to “manage 65 children” when Drama Club let out.

For all the potential stakes of Trump’s decision — and despite Slaughter and Bedoya repeatedly urging a focus on the FTC’s mission rather than on themselves — the reunion was another one of my semi-regular reminders of the people beneath the policy.

Even when public officials are real people with school pick-up duties, we should still insist on the best governance from them. Their humanity is a bit beside the point on the policy questions — but if you want to understand why government works the way it does, it’s also pretty important to remember.

What I’m listening to: Very little! I accidentally left my earbuds in the Capitol before recess, and have been living fairly podcast- and Spotify-free all week. Another reason I’m excited for lawmakers to come back to Washington.

– Ben Brody