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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a politics newsletter that was posting memes of itself as Jesus long before that was “cool.”

We’ve got two big threads this week: creeps in the House of Representatives and blasphemy. Plus, we check in on the premier Democratic primary of the year and goons showing up at the Federal Reserve construction site.

First, let’s zoom in on a career that just ended.

The downfall of former California Rep. Eric Swalwell has had the Surge thinking even more than usual about psychopathy. According to the many allegations released against him over the past week—a week that began with him both employed in Congress and in a decent position to become the next California governor—he has, at the very least, been catting around for a decade. The more explosive allegations accuse him of regular harassment, drugging of women, and sexual assault, including among staffers. (Swalwell has admitted to “mistakes in judgment” but denied the assault allegations.) What kind of person, then, thinks they will run for a promotion as substantial as governor of California and keep these secrets contained?

Perhaps someone who’s spent the formative years of his political career being coddled. Despite negligible legislative talent and—as we can say pretty definitively now—limited intelligence, Swalwell did unusually well for himself in the House. It wasn’t just how he made himself politics-famous as a regular presence on cable news. He had good committees. He had a plum seat on the Intelligence Committee and was a co-chair of the Steering Committee, which decides committee assignments for the caucus. He was appointed to be an impeachment manager in one of Donald Trump’s trials. He got these gigs because he had ingratiated himself with former Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, who took care of her fellow Bay Area members. There were always intracaucus grumblings about her favoritism to him, and how he didn’t deserve any of it. But it didn’t seem to bother him, and he got quite used to coasting through politics. It worked until it didn’t.

2. Anna Paulina Luna and Teresa Leger Fernández

Taking out the trash, one (bipartisan pair) at a time.

Before Swalwell’s resignation, the allegations against him initially added him to a long list of high-profile cases sitting before the House Ethics Committee, where proceedings do not move at an expeditious pace. Democratic leaders, while calling for him to end his gubernatorial campaign, didn’t opine publicly........

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