I realize that this is Memorial Day and I should really be writing a column honoring America's soldiers, but instead I thought I'd take a look at what the most impressive soldiers in today's world are gearing up to do. I speak, of course, of the Ukrainian army in their fight against the Russian invaders. The world has been watching and waiting for a while to see how much success the Ukrainians' "spring counteroffensive" could have, and it seems we're now on the brink of finding that out.

This will come as no surprise to anyone, since it might accurately be called "the most-telegraphed military campaign in history." There has been an astonishing amount of talk about the spring offensive for months and months, so there is approximately zero "surprise factor" remaining. In fact, the world's reaction to the start of the campaign might well be: "What took you so long?" After all, spring itself only has a few weeks left to run.

But for whatever reason, the big push was delayed. Ukraine got a lot of rain this spring, which turned all the ground that will be fought over into deep mud. This has long been a built-in defense for both Ukraine and Russia -- because spring mud after a brutal winter usually bogs down invading armies to the point of standstill. Both Napoleon and Hitler learned this (to their dismay), when they tried to conquer Russia. This year was rainier than most and the rains lasted longer than usual, which caused most of the delay. Tanks and heavy vehicles easily get bogged down in this sea of mud, so they had to wait for the ground to firm back up before the Ukrainians could even begin.

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We began the week waiting, and we are ending the week waiting. All week long, rumors have leaked out about the status of the budget negotiations between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden, with both sides spinning madly to impress their bases, but we end the week with no deal actually inked.

However, we may be close. At least, that's today's big leak. It seems like both sides have agreed to some topline numbers with various face-saving things thrown in so they can both claim at least a certain degree of victory. Whether this actually works or not is still an open question.

Members of both parties are doubtlessly going to howl when the details are publicly released, and then they'll accuse their own negotiators of "giving away the store." But others will accept the face-saving spin and push forward, most likely. That's usually the endgame for such sticky negotiations, at any rate.

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Sorry folks, but there will be no new column today. I had to deal with some real-world stuff (car, etc.) and also will be preparing for tomorrow's column later, so I just didn't have the bandwidth to write a new one today. But there seem to be an adequate number of people commenting on how bad the Ron DeSantis "failure to launch" event was yesterday, and the temptation to write about it again would probably have been too much for me today, so I guess the rest of the internet already has that subject adequately covered.

Instead, just because I was curious, I went back eight years to May of 2015, just to see what I was saying about the state of the presidential horserace back then. I came across this column -- published eight years ago tomorrow -- where I reviewed the state of the Republican nomination race. Astonishingly, there was one prominent name missing. Which means I have to live down having written the following line, back then: "[Donald] Trump would be (quite obviously) nothing more than a vanity candidate...." We all had to eat a few words in 2015, and that was just one early embarrassing example from my own keyboard, I fully admit.

In any case, the reason I thought I'd re-run something from back then is for the object lesson: nobody now knows what is going to happen -- at least not at this point in the calendar. We've all got a long way to go. Eight years ago, we were all wondering if Jeb Bush had already wrapped it all up. Eight years from now, whatever we're all thinking now might be just as laughable. Just something to keep in mind, that's all....

Originally published May 26, 2015

Please note that today's headline does not refer to a GOP race "to the bottom," but rather "at the bottom." Examining Republicans racing towards the bottom (however you define that concept) would be an entirely different subject, but what I'm talking about today is what is likely to become the most fierce fighting within the Republican Party's primary campaign -- the race at the very bottom of the polling -- because it will soon have an outsized importance for the overall contest to see which Republican will become the presidential nominee.

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is now officially a candidate for president of the United States. He filed paperwork earlier today, and he will be making his campaign launch announcement in a fairly unconventional way (perhaps even as we write this) on Twitter (with Elon Musk). His entry into the race is not at all unexpected, and will have come as a surprise to precisely no one. He's essentially already been running since at least last year. But by announcing, DeSantis has now made it official -- the race for the Republican nomination is now a two-man race.

Of all the GOP candidates who are taking on Donald Trump, DeSantis is the only one who has gotten any actual GOP voters to pay much attention. The rest of the Republican pack has never caught on in the polling -- each and every announced and unannounced GOP contender is pulling anywhere from five percent to zero percent right now, according to the RealClearPolitics average of the polls. Only three of them (Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy) are polling above two percent. Or to put it another way: no other candidate in the race to dethrone Trump has garnered anywhere near the support which would be necessary to pull off such a feat. DeSantis has, but even he has only managed this in a limited way.

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President Joe Biden could have avoided the political nightmare he is now caught in the middle of, if he had earlier worked with those in Congress who attempted to deal with the situation before it ever got to this point. But Biden, for some inexplicable reason, decided not to defuse the ticking time bomb and instead he counted on it not blowing up in his face. Assuming for the moment that somehow we'll all manage to safely get out of this situation in the next few weeks (which is still a rather large assumption, at this point), Biden should at least learn the lesson of his own inaction. When the dust settles on the current debt ceiling crisis (no matter how it works out), Biden should immediately move to avoid it ever happening again. Right after whatever deal is struck and passed through Congress, Biden should announce to the country that he has now determined that the debt ceiling itself is incompatible with the 14th Amendment and therefore unconstitutional and null and void. Doing so after the current crisis has been resolved would allow the issue to be litigated while there is no looming threat of default. The case could work its way through the courts all the way up to the Supreme Court with plenty of time to spare, and whichever way the courts ultimately ruled, it wouldn't cause a worldwide economic panic.

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Senator Tim Scott announced today that he is running to be Donald Trump's running mate. The veepstakes has begun!

[Perhaps I am being a bit too snarky. Allow me start over....]

Senator Tim Scott today announced his longshot bid for the Republican presidential nomination. The political media is paying more attention to Scott than some of the other GOP candidates, mostly because he has already raised over $20 million and will be able to run ads right up to the New Hampshire primary date. This means he'll have to at least be taken semi-seriously, but the reality of the situation is that the best Scott will likely be able to do is to get Trump to name him to the vice presidential spot on his ticket.

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With twelve more days left in the month of May, the debt ceiling follies continue unabated. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy just "paused" the negotiations with President Joe Biden, which was a rather pessimistic note to close out what had otherwise been a rather optimistic week. There is speculation that both sides are using this "pause" merely as a political signal to their respective bases -- to show that they are negotiating hard and not giving away the store. If this is true, negotiations will likely resume at some point this weekend. But it's anyone's guess whether they'll agree even on a framework (much less actual legislative text) any time soon.

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President Joe Biden really has no excuse for the conundrum he has created for himself in next year's early primaries. He should have understood from the start what the outcome would be, but he apparently didn't think things through enough. If he had a different history in politics he might have had a believable excuse, but he just doesn't.

For instance, if Biden had hailed from California, the entire fiasco might be a little more understandable. What I mean by this is that sometimes I talk to friends of mine out here in the Golden State (who have lived most or all of their lives here), after they have either moved to or travelled through states east of the Mississippi River. And at some point they all uniformly say the same thing while describing their adventures: "I can't believe how small the other states are! You drive for a couple hours and all of a sudden you are in another state! And then you drive like another hour and you're suddenly in a third state!" Important to note: these people had been travelling in the Midwest and South. None of them (so far) had made it up to New England, which would truly have blown their California-bred minds.

In one recent such conversation, my friend made a further point (after an extended visit to Ohio): "I can't believe how much state and local boosterism there is -- all the college logos and team logos and state pride, it was just everywhere." Well, yeah. People take pride in their state and the smaller the state is, sometimes the fiercer that pride gets.

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A small wave of primary and special elections happened yesterday, and the results were summed up in a Washington Post headline today: "Republicans Keep Having Bad Elections." This continues an 11-month streak of good showings at the ballot box for Democrats, which began immediately after the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision threw out Roe v. Wade. And while off-year primary elections and midterms aren't always a good predictor of what will happen in the next presidential race, the trendlines certainly do seem to be favoring Democrats.

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May is half over. June looms.

That is where we are, as President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy try to hammer out some sort of deal which will allow the nation not to default on its debt. Nobody's really sure if June first will actually be the deadline -- the "drop-dead date" is constantly in flux as money comes into government coffers and flows back out again. If we make it to mid-June, the drop-dead date could shift as late as August or September, for instance. But we can't count on that happening -- we must act before the earliest possible date it could happen, which is the first of next month.

There was a big meeting today between Biden and McCarthy and the other three congressional leaders (Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and the most significant thing that appears to have been decided is that the other three will largely bow out of the final negotiations and leave it to staffers from Biden and McCarthy to finalize a deal. That is progress, of a sort, since such negotiations will be easier between only two parties.

It sounds like at least the outlines of a deal are coming into focus, although there is one remaining large sticking point that both sides seem to be drawing red lines on -- adding work requirements to federal programs (which would really be "expanding work requirements," since they already exist). Putting that aside, it seems that much has been at least tentatively agreed to already.

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