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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 about whether Swalwell should resign from the House. They were facing a similar dilemma that Republican leaders have been managing in the case of Texas Rep. Tony Gonzales, who had an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide: Yeah, they’ve got to go, but with the House so evenly divided between the two parties, every single vote matters to the balance of power.

It fell to Reps. Anna Paulina Luna and Teresa Leger Fernández—a Republican and a Democrat, respectively—to push the two out as a pair. The two coordinated to threaten both men with forced expulsion votes if they didn’t resign by 2 p.m. on Tuesday. Once it became clear that both of those expulsion votes would likely succeed, the two men resigned in quick succession. A justice system in which individual members wield the axe against fellow members with the threat of forced expulsion votes is not ideal. But exceptions were invented for moments like this. This worked really well!

Surge Sunday school, Part 1.

We’ve been through quite a bit with this president of ours. Yet has a social media rant of his ever featured such a catching first line as “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime”? That can’t be taught. Anyway: Trump finally addressed the Vicar of Christ’s recent criticism of the administration over some measly imperialism and nativism. He posted that he didn’t “want a Pope” who “thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon,” “thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela,” and “criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do.” He said: “Leo should get his act together as Pope.” Actually, that might be the best line.

The pope mostly ignored this, because the pope does not get into shouting matches. But for Catholic bishops, even conservative Catholic bishops, the pope is their ride-or-die, and a wave of them spoke out this week against the president’s comments. But this is one of those moments when it’s worth looking beyond the reaction from immediate stakeholders. Say you don’t pay much attention to the nitty-gritty of politics and think they’re all a bunch of clowns. Wouldn’t a headline such as “President Trump Attacks the Pope” catch you, still, as some genuinely abnormal and alarming behavior? Trump gets away with so much when gas is $2.50. But gas is not $2.50, and he’s … attacking the pope.

Surge Sunday school, Part 2.

Here’s another headline that, again, might strike the passive consumer of news as unusual: “Trump Portrays Himself as Jesus.” Such was an A.I.-generated image that the president shared on social media shortly after attacking the pope. So would anyone on the Christian right express public outrage at this episode of cut-and-dried blasphemy? As it happens, yes, and the pushback culminated in a rare instance of Trump deleting the post.

Trump’s explanation was … well, it was this: “I viewed that as a picture of me being a doctor in fixing—you had the Red Cross right there, you had, you know, medical people surrounding me,” he said. “And I was like the doctor, you know, as a little fun playing the doctor and making people better. So that’s what it was viewed as. That’s what most people thought.” No one viewed it as that, and no one thought that. That was Christ, bro. But hey, we’re just humble out-of-practice Christians over here at the Surge—what do we know? Nepo evangelist Franklin Graham wrote that he really believes that Trump thought it was an image of a doctor. Who are we to doubt such a man of faith?

How the race to be the next attorney general is complicating the confirmation of the next Fed chair.

On Tuesday, a couple of prosecutors from U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office showed up at the Federal Reserve, hoping for a “tour” and to “check on progress” of the building’s renovation. They were turned away, as the Fed’s outside counsel, Robert Hur (remember him??), reminded them that their office’s subpoenas against the Fed had been tossed in court. In other words, it was yet another showy provocation against the Fed from Pirro’s office, a week before Trump’s nominee to chair the Fed, Kevin Warsh, has his Senate hearing to replace Jerome Powell.

Sen. Thom Tillis, a key member of the Senate Banking Committee, has said he’ll block Warsh’s nomination until the Justice Department ends the probe into Powell. So why won’t the DOJ just drop this stupid thing and get on with its new era of MAGA monetary policy? Perhaps because Pirro, who’s overseeing the Fed probe, wants to be attorney general and is showing her eagerness to do the country’s business—running criminal investigations into people the president doesn’t like—even when the chips are low.

Is it time to call the Maine Democratic Senate primary?

The race between Graham Platner and Janet Mills was billed as the showdown of the Democratic primary season: Oysterman vs. governor. Outsider vs. establishment. Young vs. old. Raw vs. seasoned. Man with a Nazi tattoo vs. woman without a Nazi tattoo. So how’s it all going since we last checked in a while ago? We don’t know what else to say: It appears to be somewhat … sorta … kinda … over. Platner is dusting Mills by lopsided margins in polling averages.

We’re having trouble seeing how this would change ahead of the June 9 primary. Platner’s dirty laundry—the Nazi tattoo, his lengthy history of gross comments on social media—has been aired extensively for months and months, so more attack ads from the Mills camp highlighting those controversies might have marginal returns. She can’t expect a sudden polling Surge™ the more people get to know her, since everyone in the state already knows her well. And attacking Platner as too risky to put up against Sen. Susan Collins in November is a tough sell when Platner regularly outperforms Mills in polls against Collins. The ever-nervous Democratic voter brain almost always defers to the safe pick in Senate races: a well-credentialed candidate personally recruited by Chuck Schumer and financially backed by the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. A major breach from that pattern may be a month and a half away.

Yet another successful discharge petition.

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Let’s end with another metric of how Republican leaders have lost control of the House—and no, we’re not even talking about the failed efforts this week to extend a warrantless surveillance program for the long term. Once again, yet another bill was passed through the House via use of a discharge petition, in which 218 signatories to a petition can force a floor vote on a bill. Prior to the previous Congress, there hadn’t been a successful discharge petition since 2015. There have been nearly 10 over the past couple of Congresses, including on bills to release the Epstein files and extend enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies.

The discharge petition in this case was filed by Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley, on a bill to extend temporary protected status for Haitian refugees for three years. Trump, who campaigned on a hoax about how Haitian immigrants in Ohio eat cats and dogs, has obviously tried to terminate Haitians’ protected status. (The question is currently before the courts.) So while the bill’s passage through the House was a significant feat, it’s unlikely to go anywhere. Alabama Sen. Katie Britt—who feels oh so terrible about poor detained immigrant children—called the bill “dead on arrival” in the Senate, and the White House, similarly, said, “This terrible bill is going nowhere and there has been a veto threat issued.” That 10 House Republicans would defy their speaker and the White House to support such a bill, though, illustrates how the politics of immigration have changed since the peak hawkishness that surrounded Trump’s 2024 election.

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