From Josh Marshall’s newsletter:
The mystery of that three-page document continues and even seems to be picking up steam. I mentioned the gist in this earlier post here. The question is just what concessions Kevin McCarthy made to the Freedom Caucus to become speaker? It came up at a GOP conference meeting today. And apparently some details were revealed but not others. Indeed, there seemed to be some disagreement about whether it’s actually written down at all. Or, rather, there was disagreement about whether there is a mystery three-page document and then yet other commitments that weren’t even included in the three-page document. These latest details come from Axios’s afternoon email.
For the moment this is largely a controversy within the House GOP caucus. In some key ways, it’s a Capitol Hill story. Non-Freedom Caucus Republicans want to know just what McCarthy committed them to. It’s also true that informal or private understandings are often part of political deals, agreements to support someone for a leadership position and so on.
But this is a bit different.
The agreements seem likely to put the country on the course for a potentially cataclysmic political crisis in the second half of 2023. Here I’m not even talking about potential government shutdowns, massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Those are bad enough. I’m talking about a first-in-history U.S. debt default. So these are questions that not only backbench Republicans but the whole country has a big interest in knowing the answers to.
Show votes that die in the Senate and Jim Jordan’s investigations of the Deep State make for exciting headlines. But the debt-ceiling crisis and other instances of parliamentary hostage-taking are the real Washington story of 2023. And for now McCarthy isn’t even telling his own members what he agreed to do.
