Although it is still pretty early in the process, the first phase of the 2020 Democratic nominating contest is going to hinge on one simple question: Can anybody beat Joe Biden? At this point, the former vice president has such a commanding lead that the race could wind up resembling the last hotly contested primary race -- that of the Republicans in 2016. Back then, even though most of the media refused to acknowledge it until far too late, there was one clear frontrunner all along who was challenged -- unsuccessfully -- numerous times by the underdogs. Donald Trump, of course, won that race because his support never really faltered all that much and the rest of the field was busy bickering with each other. Again, it's far too early to predict such an outcome for the 2020 Democrats, but at this point it seems pretty probable that much of the beginning of the race is going to see a lot of jockeying among the underdogs, all arguing that they'd be better than Biden in the general election.

This may wind up being wildly premature, of course. Such is the nature of political prognostication. Early favorites often stumble badly once the race really heats up. Remember Jeb Bush? Or Hillary Clinton in 2008? Early dominance of the polls is no guarantee of ultimate success, obviously. But so far, Biden has been doing an admirable job of keeping his head above the fray.

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Robert Mueller broke his two-year silence this week, as he strode boldly to the podium and loudly announced: "ITMFA!" and then withdrew. 'This caused the term to spike in Google searches to a level never seen before on any subject, ever.

Well, no. That's not what happened. Many now think that's what should have happened, but unfortunately it did not.

Instead, Mueller all but begged Congress not to force him to testify, and warned that if he had to testify, he would strive to merely read excerpts from his written report and not answer any tangential questions at all (heavily implying that this would be a waste of time, and therefore why bother?). He reiterated in the strongest possible terms that Justice Department guidelines prevented him not only from indicting a sitting president, but also from accusing a sitting president of any crime in any way whatsoever (even indirectly) -- which includes making any sort of recommendation to Congress on the question of whether Donald Trump should be impeached. Doing so would be a de facto accusation of a crime, which the guidelines say Mueller should not do (under Mueller's interpretations of them).

This annoyed Trump no end, since Mueller also explicitly pointed out once again that if he had found no evidence of any crimes Trump committed, then his report would have clearly stated this in order to exonerate Trump -- but that he could not reach this conclusion at all. Trump even backed off from his "no collusion, no obstruction" claims as a result, and the best tweet he could come up with responding to Mueller was: "Nothing changes from the Mueller Report. There was insufficient evidence and therefore, in our Country, a person is innocent. The case is closed! Thank you." In other words, you couldn't prove it, so therefore it must not have happened. That's a significant change from the language Trump was using before Mueller spoke, to put it mildly.

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I generally try to avoid writing more than one article per week on any given subject, and although official Democratic debate rules is a wonky thing to write about to begin with, it is going to be critical to how the 2020 presidential nominating contest plays out. So I thought it was worth a second look, because the debate surrounding the Democratic debates just got a little more intense.

In the first article I wrote this week, I pointed out that after the first two debates, the rules would have to be tightened in some fashion to limit the sheer number of candidates allowed to participate. I predicted this would be "painful for many," and it's looking like that's already becoming true. Just after posting my previous article, the Democratic National Committee announced the rules for inclusion in the third debate, to be held in September (the D.N.C. has planned at least one debate every month this year, although August will be skipped for some reason).

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Robert Mueller spoke in public today. This was a newsworthy event because it is the first time he has done so since the start of his tenure as the special counsel investigating the 2016 election, Russian interference, and Donald Trump's obstruction of justice. If Mueller has his way about it, it will also be the last public statement he makes on any of these subjects. However, Mueller also announced his office was closing and he was ending his status as a Justice Department employee, meaning that as a private citizen there will now be nothing stopping him from testifying before any congressional committees which want to speak with him. Mueller all but begged not to be called by any of these committees, stating as plainly as he could that his written report should be considered as his whole testimony, and that he won't be going beyond its bounds should he appear in person.

This, of course, punts all the decision-making to Nancy Pelosi. Mueller is a careful writer and speaker, with each sentence parsed within an inch of its life. He did not openly call for impeachment proceedings to begin -- he didn't even use what President Trump now calls "the I-word" -- but he also made it pretty plain that the decision as to what happens next is entirely up to Congress, and that impeachment was not out of the question at all.

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Last week, the Democratic National Committee quietly instituted a new rule for their first debate, which was created to further avoid having a "kiddie table" debate on either of the two scheduled nights. This was a smart move, given that the entire random selection scheme was set up in the first place to avoid lumping all the leading candidates together in one debate, leaving all the struggling candidates to compete with each other in the other debate. It will still be a random selection process, but there will now be two tiers.

Here is the new language, according to Politico:

"The final list of debate participants (after any tie-breaking procedure is executed, if necessary) will be divided into two groups: candidates with a polling average of 2% or above, and those with a polling average below 2%," the rule reads. "Both groups will be randomly divided between Wednesday night and Thursday night, thus ensuring that both groups are represented fairly on each night."

So both the leading candidates and those not doing so well will be evenly split between the two nights. This could still wind up creating a "kiddie table" debate, but the chances will be lower -- and even if it does happen, the undercard debate is still guaranteed to have some larger names.

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What do you do with a president who wants to be impeached? That's a surreal question, but then again we live in surreal times. Donald Trump seems more and more like a man begging the House Democrats to impeach him. It's like every political decision he makes is designed to be so outrageous that it'll surely goad Democrats into starting an impeachment committee.

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That headline can, of course, be read two ways. One is very serious, since America has experienced multiple natural disasters over the course of the past year which have not yet been adequately addressed by Congress. And the other is, well, ironic. As we all lurch to the end of another "Infrastructure Week" trainwreck, the Republican Senate just provided some relief from the ongoing disaster at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Mitch McConnell, taking a page out of Harry Reid's playbook, apparently threatened his whole chamber with the thing they fear more than anything else (save not getting reelected) -- the loss of one of their many, many weeks of vacation. McConnell had sworn he was going to hold a vote on a disaster relief bill before the vacation break, and he actually browbeat his fellow Republicans into doing their jobs. So they sat down with Democrats from both the Senate and the House and hammered out a "clean" disaster relief bill. "Clean," in this instance, means "with no money for Trump's frivolous border wall." Republicans also caved on the other main sticking point that Trump had personally introduced, by agreeing to provide disaster relief money for Puerto Rico. The bill sailed through the Senate today (with all the senators keeping a close eye on flight times out of National Airport, of course), and will be taken up by the House as soon as time permits (this could mean a "voice vote" with nobody in the chamber tomorrow, or if Republicans balk at this tactic, it may mean a vote after vacation time, next month.

Senate Republicans really needed a win, and not just to please McConnell. By passing a bipartisan bill (the vote was 85-8), Senate Republicans showed that Trump's current hissy fit isn't going to stop them from doing deals with Democrats. This became a big worry, as even Republicans started pointing out the fact that, other than confirm conservative judges, they have gotten absolutely nothing at all done this year.

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You just know it's going to be entertaining when the White House announces an upcoming "Infrastructure Week," because the end result is always a fiery trainwreck of epic proportions. In one of the first instances of this recurring phenomenon, Donald Trump hijacked (there's simply no better word for it) what was supposed to be a press announcement rolling out a plan to reduce regulations to get road projects built faster. With Elaine Chao helplessly looking on from the sidelines, Trump instead let fly his unhinged "very fine people on both sides" rant in response to the racist riots in Charlottesville, Virginia. That was the biggest and most spectacular Trumpian trainwreck during a planned Infrastructure Week, to date. But now we've got President Man-Baby's latest temper tantrum to compare it to. Because Infrastructure Week always means "never a dull moment" in the Trump White House.

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President Donald Trump is stonewalling Congress. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is not convinced that the time has yet come to open impeachment hearings. If this dynamic doesn't change, then the battles over access to Trump, Trump's advisors, and Trump's business records (including his taxes) will likely play out in the federal courts. Trump is convinced that this is either a winning strategy for him, or at the very least a way to stall the entire fight until after next year's election. If either of those are true, he will avoid any negative consequences for his actions at least until he knows whether he's going to get a second term or not. But he may have miscalculated, because his "big stall" tactic may just backfire on him in a big way.

The first of many judicial decisions to come on Trump's stonewalling was handed down yesterday. The federal judge ruled on a case where Trump is suing to quash a subpoena for his financial records, which was issued to his accounting firm. The judge essentially laughed out of court the arguments made by Trump's legal team, and for good reason. Team Trump was arguing that, constitutionally, Congress can only legislate -- make laws, that is -- and that they really have no right to investigate a sitting president at all. Investigating the president furthered no "legislative function," Trump's lawyer's argued, therefore no such investigation was legitimate or constitutional. Trump's lawyers wouldn't even agree that former presidential investigations (Whitewater, Watergate, Teapot Dome) were legal and proper.

The judge disagreed. In a big way. If Trump's legal argument were to be adopted, it would mean that Congress couldn't even investigate a president they were attempting to impeach, which is a clearly-defined congressional responsibility in the Constitution itself, he pointed out. That reasoning is ludicrous on its face, obviously. The judge ruled the subpoena was properly issued, handing Trump the first big legal loss in his stonewalling strategy (hopefully, it won't be the last, especially if Trump's lawyers continue making the same laughable argument to different judges).

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It's always amusing when the inside-the-Beltway pundits realize with astonishment that they've been wrong about something. What happens is that one of them decides they know "what the American voter is thinking" and then all the rest of them stampede to the conclusion that this is really what's going on out in the heartland. They write articles and make television appearances corroborating each others' opinions, and it soon becomes virtually accepted fact among the cognoscenti. Then, reality interjects itself and their house of cards collapses -- leaving them to construct yet another false narrative to run with (which they almost always immediately do).

Part of the problem is that the pundits, always facing one deadline or another, tend to microanalyze whatever just happened and thus miss the forest for the trees (or "for one leaf," at times). They seldom sit back and look at the bigger picture, or notice how the trends slowly are bending one way or another.

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