That headline is somewhat of a misnomer, of course, since when the phrase "...and then there were [number]..." is usually used, it conveys a shrinking of the field -- a Hunger Games style announcement-in-the-sky to mark when a tribute (contender) dies (literally in the stories, metaphorically when it comes to politics). In this case, though, it refers to the fact that there will soon be two official major-party candidates for president of the United States, not just one: Donald Trump and Nikki Haley (both Republicans). Haley has not formally announced, but has scheduled an official announcement event for February 15th. Trump, of course, announced about twelve seconds after the midterm elections, in an effort to distract from the storyline that he backed a whole bunch of losing candidates and quite possibly cost the Republican Party control of the Senate (once again). President Joe Biden is widely expected to announce on the Democratic side, but this may not happen for weeks or even, conceivably, months, because being the sitting president gives you the luxury of choosing your own timing.

Trump, as mentioned, announced early for reasons of his own (mostly having to do with seeing an active campaign as some sort of "get out of jail free" card, which is magically going to save him from all the multiple investigations into his previous actions). But there are reportedly a whole passel of other Republicans champing at the bit to run for president as well. So what has stopped them from throwing their own hats in the ring? Well, it still is extremely early in the cycle, and announcing a run means subjecting yourself to all the campaign finance rules (which you can avoid right up until you do actually announce your intention to run). But those are really minor reasons in this particular contest -- the major reason is that many of the other candidates are downright terrified of Trump's wrath, plain and simple.

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Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is in a bind, quite obviously. He's got one member of his caucus who is not just politically toxic but politically radioactive. George Santos is currently being hounded by packs of reporters -- which is not exactly normal for a freshman congressman -- because there are just so many questions that remain unanswered about all his various lies and fabrications. Some of which may wind Santos up in some legal trouble, so he's keeping mum for the most part. And it doesn't seem like a day goes by without some further revelations of his pathological lying, which means those reporters aren't going to get bored with the story any time soon.

If these were more normal times, a party leader would either take Santos aside and tell him to do the right thing and resign, or if that didn't work Santos would be very publically drummed out of the party ranks and sent into political exile. This would mean no committee assignments and no political support whatsoever, verbally or financially. McCarthy, however, can't afford to do the right thing -- or, at least, he obviously thinks he can't afford to, from his words and actions to date. So instead, McCarthy was forced to reward Santos's vote for him for speaker by putting Santos on two relatively backwater committees. McCarthy has the thinnest of majorities and, when his full caucus is present, he can only afford to lose four votes on any issue. Currently, this is down to three votes, because one Republican House member recently fell off a ladder while doing yardwork and seriously injured himself (and McCarthy ended "proxy voting" so House members have to be present to vote once again). McCarthy's margin is so small he can't afford to lose anyone else.

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Remember the midterm election campaign last year? Remember what Republicans ran on? Apparently they're counting on everyone just conveniently forgetting, and pulling their usual "bait and switch" trick by loudly proclaiming they have a sweeping "mandate" on all sorts of stuff they barely (if ever) mentioned while running for office while largely ignoring the things they did actually run on. With the House of Representatives in Republican hands now, we will all get to see their real agenda, as opposed to the agenda they sold to the voters last year. The open question is what the public will think of it all.

Republicans, for the past decade (at the very least) have gotten elected with one overarching top priority: politically weaken all Democrats and the Democratic Party as much as they possibly can, in the hopes of improving their chances in the next election. To those unfamiliar with this concept, just think: "Benghazi!" -- Republicans rode that political hobbyhorse about as hard as they could, just to tarnish Hillary Clinton's political prospects.

That was then and this is now, however. The key phrase nowadays isn't: "...but her emails!" anymore, but rather: "Hunter Biden's laptop!" You can expect to hear lots and lots about it in the coming months, ad nauseam.

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President Joe Biden gave a speech this week on the state of the American economy. On his watch, the economy has greatly improved as we all dug ourselves out of the pandemic recession together. So Biden deserves a victory lap. He also used the speech to draw a stark comparison between Democrats responsibly steering the economy and Republicans who apparently are salivating at the prospect of blowing it all up.

Biden pointed to many indicators that the economy is strong, including better-than-expected growth, all-time low unemployment levels, a manufacturing rebound, the fact that wages are now growing faster than inflation, and that inflation itself has been coming down for six straight months. Biden's big infrastructure investments are now being implemented across the country, in thousands of projects that will improve Americans' lives (including a whole bunch of them in red states and red districts). Biden's basic message: things are getting better and better.

So of course the Republicans now want to burn it all down. The big fight in Washington for approximately the next six months is going to be over the debt ceiling. House Republicans seem to think they got elected to hold the American economy hostage to force Draconian budget cuts on a Democratic president (they never scratch this particular itch when a Republican is in the Oval Office, of course). But the American people don't seem to agree -- a recent poll showed that 73 percent of the public did not agree with the House Republicans' priorities in Congress. Not exactly a mandate, is that?

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At President Joe Biden's urging, the Democratic National Committee has picked a big and (in my opinion) a completely unnecessary fight with the state of New Hampshire. Last year, when the party met to decide which states would go first in the presidential primary calendar, Biden blindsided just about everyone with his own preferred schedule. Earlier, the party had announced there would be a free-for-all for states to apply for early primary slots, which was largely seen as a convenient way to demote Iowa from the early states, for multiple reasons (the largest being how incompetent they had been in 2020). This conventional wisdom held that one or perhaps even two other additional states would be elevated to the ranks of the early-voting states, again for multiple reasons. But few predicted that New Hampshire would be affected. This proved to be wrong, as Biden released his preferred schedule: South Carolina would be the "first in the nation" state, followed by Nevada and New Hampshire three days later (both voting on the same day). Yesterday, the party met again and instead of locking in Biden's new schedule, gave two states until June to comply with the new setup -- New Hampshire and Georgia (which was newly elevated into the ranks of early-voting states).

This is a largely symbolic and also a completely avoidable fight. What real difference is it going to make to the primaries if New Hampshire goes first or second? Why did Biden decided to pick this fight when it is going to continue to be a gigantic and distracting headache over the course of the next two years?

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The big fight shaping up in the new Congress is going to be over the debt ceiling, the news media tells us. Republicans are on one of their traditional "there's a Democrat in the White House, so we must now slash spending to the bone" quests, and so they're going to try to use the debt ceiling as leverage to force concessions from President Joe Biden and the Democratic Senate. But the big question, after you get past all the fulminating rhetoric, remains: What concessions? What are they even fighting for? And the answer, to me, lies in the past. Remember the big push to "repeal and replace" Obamacare? That's what seems almost certain to happen this time around, too.

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This is all what should have happened last August. Also, at this point it's hard not to think: "Who's next? Jimmy Carter? Dan Quayle?" In fact, it's hard for me not to picture in my head right now the image of Attorney General Merrick Garland standing on a stage behind Oprah Winfrey, who is yelling into her microphone: "You get a special counsel... and you get a special counsel!... and YOU get a special counsel!!!"

This was my initial (and admittedly, rather giddy) reaction when the news broke that Mike Pence also had some classified documents in his possession, long after he should have turned them over to the National Archives. This complicates an already-complicated storyline, since Pence is now the third ex-president or ex-vice-president to have seemingly walked off with classified documents stuffed in a box with all the other papers they took with them when leaving office. And then nobody ever looked in the boxes until now -- at least in the cases of former Vice President Mike Pence and current President (but former Vice President and Senator, from when the documents were reportedly dated) Joe Biden. In the case of former President Donald Trump, the boxes at least should have been looked into, since he had already received and answered a subpoena for all documents marked classified.

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Representative Ruben Gallego made some news today with his announcement that he is running for the 2024 Democratic nomination for a Senate seat in Arizona. If she were still a Democrat, this would be framed as Senator Kyrsten Sinema "drawing a challenger" or "being primaried" from within her own party, but since she became an Independent that is no longer true. With a Republican in the mix as well, there may wind up being a three-way contest for the seat. But then again, maybe not.

The question I've had for quite a while -- back when she was still a Democrat, even -- was whether Sinema would even bother to run for re-election. As of now, she hasn't made an announcement either way. And up until now, I have been assuming that she wouldn't run at all. When you take into account both the fact that she is incredibly unpopular in her home state together with the fact that Sinema has firmly stood for only one thing during her tenure so far -- protecting the interests of large corporations and wealthy taxpayers. Many of her constituents feel more than a little betrayed, after Sinema initially won her seat promising to take on big corporate interests. Since arriving in Washington, she has done a complete U-turn on her campaign promises, and now fights hard for things like allowing the pharmaceutical industry to charge whatever they feel like for prescription drugs.

This is not a popular position to take in Arizona, which (like Florida) has historically had a high number of retirees living there. But then again, it is not a popular position for any politician to take pretty much anywhere in the country. This (among many other reasons) is why Sinema's approval ratings back home are far underwater.

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Two years ago today, Joseph Robinette Biden Junior was sworn in as the nation's 46th president. So how is he doing at his job? His approval rating in public opinion polls has generally improved since the midterm elections, hitting numbers he hasn't seen in a year. But those numbers are still south of 45 percent (on average), which is fairly common for a first-term president but certainly nothing to brag about.

Biden has had some notable successes as president, and some notable rocky patches as well. He entered office as the COVID-19 vaccines were becoming widely and freely available, and things seemed rosy on this front for his first year, only to get a lot grimmer as the Omicron strain hit much harder than any of the previous variants of the virus. All of a sudden we weren't done with COVID-19 and life didn't return to normal as expected. But since then, the virus has become almost an afterthought and didn't matter much to voters in the midterms (even though it had been predicted that it would be a major issue).

Biden's legislative accomplishments are more impressive than any president since Lyndon B. Johnson. True, Biden did have a Democratic Senate and House to work with, but both of those had historically-slender majorities -- L.B.J., for instance, had as many as 68 Democratic senators to work with. Biden only had 50 -- including two who loved the media spotlight so much they didn't care if they torpedoed Biden's agenda in major ways. Biden also managed to pass some major bills with bipartisan support, which is almost miraculous, these days.

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There will be no column today, sorry.

Instead of writing today, I played hooky and went to watch President Joe Biden touring our local disaster areas. Reportedly, the last time a president was in our county was right after the 1989 earthquake, so I guess a big disaster is what it takes....

Anyway, seeing Biden going in a restaurant I frequent (on sunnier days) was certainly an interesting experience. As was his helicopter overflight, complete with Ospreys riding escort.

New columns will resume tomorrow, but today was a day for a field trip instead (and don't worry, the ChrisWeigant.com offices rode the storms out high and dry!)....

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant