I spoke to Ben Jacobs last week for his Vox piece on the shutdown that wasn’t, and where we might go from here.

Earlier this week, Liam Donovan, a longtime Republican operative and Washington lobbyist, told me that the goal of Republican dissidents was to force a showdown and have McCarthy face a reckoning within his conference. After all, regardless of whether it happened without a shutdown or with one, McCarthy’s exit strategy was always to work with Democrats to pass legislation that would fund the government. It was simply a question of which parliamentary approach he would take and what the collateral damage would be. As of late Saturday night, the showdown had happened and the government would remain open. But, at least for a day, the reckoning would wait.

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to Jeff Stein of the Washington Post about the looming Seinfeld shutdown.

Some Republican strategists have complained about Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), one of the most bombastic GOP holdouts, who recently sent a fundraising email that blamed McCarthy for the potential shutdown.

“Gaetz is threatening the speaker’s job if he works with Democrats, while leaving no choice to but to rely on Democratic votes,” said Liam Donovan, who worked for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “The entire exercise is designed to fail. It’s all impressively nihilistic.”

Read the full piece here.

A tweet of mine showed up in today’s Axios‘ Sneak Peak newsletter focused on House Republicans’ appropriations messiness.

Between the lines: “The more dysfunctional the House is, the more it empowers the Senate to determine what becomes law,” tweeted Liam Donovan, a GOP consultant who closely tracks the House’s right-wing bomb-throwers.

• If the Freedom Caucus truly opposed an omnibus, Donovan suggested, members would support whatever appropriations bills could get 218 votes to pass.
• “In reality, failure is preferable to incremental victory because it validates” their view that both the Republican and Democratic establishment are corrupt and content with the status quo, Donovan said.

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to NBC News‘ Alex Seitz-Wald for his look at the unusually busy summer for politics.

“It used to be that even the most addled political junkies got to dry out in August,” said Liam Donovan, a lobbyist and former GOP campaign operative. “But between the new season of Law & Order: MAGA and Trump’s would-be challengers desperate to gain traction via the debate stage, this year offers even less of a respite than usual.”

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to the Washington Post‘s Maxine Joselow for her Climate 202 post on the ballooning revenue estimates for the IRA clean energy tax title and GOP efforts use them as offsets for their policy priorities.

That doesn’t mean the GOP won’t keep targeting the credits. But tax experts predicted that even if Republicans win full control of Washington in the 2024 election, they won’t seek to scrap all the incentives, especially as the money keeps flowing into red states and districts.

“Just as a matter of good tax policy, you don’t want to go after things people have made long-term investments in,” said Liam Donovan, a principal at the law and lobbying firm Bracewell. “People are sinking billions and billions of dollars into clean-energy projects across the map based on long-term certainty.”

Read the full piece here.