X-DATE: The Access Journalism–House Republican Mind Meld

I remember Duncan Black (the blogger known as Atrios) remarking that Congress would be a more functional place if every House and Senate office turned off the cable news networks that buzzed all day long, generating artificial momentum around politics. I’d like to add an additional observation: Congress would work better for the American people if House and Senate offices blocked the morning Beltway tipsheets from their in-boxes.

For years, political intelligence newsletters from Politico, Axios, and elsewhere have been a key part of the Washington ecosystem, as a sort of slightly more evolved form of horse-race journalism, where who’s up and who’s down is still completely divorced from the needs of the American people, but at least nominally focused on the policies that we all will eventually have to endure. What can be lost on the reader is the razor-thin dividing line in access journalism between reporting the news and creating it: the way in which the tipsheets launder the desires of powerful people and pressure their opponents to go along.

That’s precisely the dynamic we’re seeing from Punchbowl News, the two-year-old tipsheet that is rather obviously a direct window into the wishes of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in the debt ceiling drama. The closeness between Punchbowl and the Speaker’s office is one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington. McCarthy has called Punchbowl his first morning read.

In this case, there’s been almost no daylight between McCarthy’s debt ceiling demands and what Punchbowl has reported as the essential elements for a deal. Now, Democratic leaders don’t have to mindlessly accept media narratives; they have agency. But pushing the GOP line through “objective” journalism gives it a momentum it wouldn’t otherwise have.

My colleague Ryan Cooper has already explained how tipsheet culture has normalized the threat to default on government debt as just another political fight. Jake Sherman, the Punchbowl co-founder who is college pals with the leader of McCarthy’s super PAC, set off this part of the narrative on CNBC by nonchalantly stating that “in modern times, the debt ceiling is raised with negotiations.” This presumption helped push the White House to the bargaining table.

Sherman proceeded to tweet a short history of the debt ceiling that dismantled his own narrative. Of the 25 debt ceiling increases since 1993 that he listed, he conceded that nine were clean, and another eight were folded into bills that were passing anyway. Then the 2011 Obama-Boehner grand-bargain talks yielded the Budget Control Act, which led to the sequestration cuts. The eight subsequent increases of the debt ceiling were either clean or efforts to undo the damage that the Budget Control Act caused, with the debt ceiling increase folded in.

In other words, every increase of the debt ceiling over the past 30 years was not a hostage negotiation under threat of extinguishing the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, except one: the 2011 Obama-Boehner debacle. Out of that single instance, Sherman spun a narrative that was favorable to McCarthy’s line that his demands were routine.

On May 11, after the first staff-level negotiations to avoid default, Sherman’s Punchbowl morning tipsheet exulted that “normal conversations over the debt limit have broken out.” Thanks in no small part to his work, taking the government’s ability to pay its bills hostage is now widely considered routine.

A review of the past two weeks of Punchbowl editions reveals similar dynamics. Punchbowl has been at the forefront of claiming that only one-on-one negotiations between Biden and McCarthy can resolve the situation. “It was clear to several participants that any potential agreement would have to be cut between Biden and McCarthy,” Punchbowl wrote on May 9. “Aides on both sides of the aisle have complained that there are too many people involved in the talks for there to be a deal, at least right now,” was in the May 12 edition. “We’ve never seen a fruitful negotiation with more than 10 people in the room,” they added on May 16.

This was McCarthy’s key ask; he has wanted to shrink the table and get congressional Democrats out of the room. Biden succumbed to the twin pressures of McCarthy and the Punchbowl-set media narrative by agreeing to the demand, with OMB Director Shalanda Young, Biden consigliere Steve Ricchetti, and congressional liaison Louisa Terrell negotiating on the White House side.

It was “something that a lot of people in the talks were hoping for,” Sherman tweeted upon the announcement. The May 17 Punchbowl edition makes clear who those people were: “Senior Republicans wanted McCarthy to nail down a deal with the White House first.”

Another Punchbowl talking point is about how long it would take for McCarthy to pass a deal if he got it. “They’ll need an agreement in principle by next week,” Punchbowl wrote on May 10, based on a direct quote from McCarthy. “It will probably take a week to get a bill through the House,” it wrote May 12.

This ticking clock is based on the claim that McCarthy “agreed when he took the gavel to give members 72 hours to review legislation.” Left unsaid is the fact that McCarthy broke that promise for his own debt ceiling bill, the Limit, Save, Grow Act. There was no markup and the final bill did not have a 72-hour window. What’s more, there was no pushback, because of the time crunch.

In other words, this ticking-clock story is another fake narrative, and helpful only to one person in this negotiation: Kevin McCarthy, who wants to shorten the window as much as possible to force the White House to make a deal.

The latest talking point is around work requirements for benefit programs like SNAP, TANF (formerly known as welfare), and Medicaid. These are obviously just an obscure way to take benefits away from poor people, and Democrats are loudly rejecting them.

I think there’s concern that work requirements become the “last man in,” something introduced late in the talks not as a real issue but to make one side angry, so when they are removed, it feels like a win to that side, and they overlook the other really bad elements of the outcome (like multiyear spending caps). If you read between the lines of Punchbowl’s reporting on work requirements, they’re kind of telegraphing that.

On May 12, Punchbowl wrote that rescinding COVID aid, spending caps, and permitting reform were the keystones of the deal, with work requirements “far less likely to happen.” On May 16, Punchbowl noted, “There will be a lot of attention given to additional work requirements for SNAP and other social welfare programs, but that’s a heavy lift.” They acknowledged that McCarthy was “pushing hard” for work requirements on May 17, but that there was “strong resistance among progressives,” and that the issue “will need to be finessed very delicately in order not to unravel the negotiations.”

If you read that knowing that this is McCarthy’s house organ, you can see that they’re helping him normalize the idea that an economically ruinous multiyear spending cap is part of a “relatively straightforward” deal, and that work requirements are the last man in. This benefits what McCarthy is trying to accomplish.

“It’s becoming clear that the Democratic rank-and-file in both chambers may have to be prepared to accept spending cuts in order for this all to work,” Punchbowl wrote on May 17. You can see the normalizing process at work, where Beltway pack journalism determines the boundaries of discussion. Punchbowl was not describing what Democrats will have to be prepared to do, it is trying to force them to do it. There are a whole lot of reasons why Democrats are at the point where their president is submitting to Republican austerity demands, but tipsheet culture is definitely playing a role.