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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, which once again has had the NFL reject its pitch to perform a live reading of this newsletter as the Super Bowl halftime show.

The United States, and its news, failed to improve this week. Congress did fund the government but is already stuck ahead of the next spending deadline. Tulsi Gabbard remains at large. And while it’s not entirely about politics—though it’s not not about politics—we couldn’t resist a few words about the gutting of the local newspaper.

Blah, blah, life is sad—well, not anymore, because we’re kicking off 2026 primary season with Texas Week! Everybody grab two handfuls of sizzlin’ Texas chili (??) and git to reading.

1.

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James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett

Entering the thick of primary season.

We are less than a month from the start of 2026 primary season, as Texas voters go to the polls on March 3. This is welcome news to the Surge. Early primary coverage feels so distant with its talk of endorsements, “war chests,” and other lifeless stats. Now we can cover proper knife fights down the stretch.

The prime drama of the week came in Texas’ competitive Senate Democratic primary between state Rep. James Talarico and U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, of Dallas. It started when Morgan Thompson, a Texas TikTok personality, said that Talarico had told her privately “that he signed up to run against a mediocre Black man, not a formidable and intelligent Black woman.” The Black man in question is former Rep. Colin Allred, who ended his Senate campaign last year and switched to a House race. Allred then posted his own video response in which he endorsed Crockett and trashed Talarico, telling him, “If you want to compliment a Black woman, just do it. Just do it. Don’t do it while also tearing down a Black man.” For his part, Talarico said Thompson had offered a “mischaracterization” of his remark, and that he described only Allred’s “method of campaigning as mediocre.” (Not a particularly controversial observation there.)

National Republicans, who would prefer to run against the more polarizing, partisan figure in Crockett, have greatly enjoyed this all. It’s been a welcome distraction from their own Texas problems.

2.

John Cornyn

How much do Republicans need to worry, here?

Our view of the Texas Senate race has been that it gets way too much attention for a contest that Republicans are probably going to win by 5 to 7 points. It’s not among the top pickup opportunities that national Democrats are targeting. Democrats haven’t won statewide there since 1994, and they seriously backslid in the state in 2024. It’s expensive to run in. There’s always a lot of temptation, every cycle, for Democrats to believe that this time could be different. It never materializes.

All of which is to say: It’s temptation time again! The national atmosphere is lousy for Republicans, the gains they made among Hispanic voters in 2024 to fortify their Texas standing are evaporating, Texas Republicans just got dusted in a special election in what they thought was a safe-red district, and, most importantly, they have candidate problems of their own. Incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, who would likely win reelection to his seat if he made it to November’s general, is in dreadful primary shape. After $50 million in advertising has been spent on his behalf, it’s still not clear that he’d make it to a runoff in his primary against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt. Even if he did make the runoff against Paxton, he’d likely be at a disadvantage. If Paxton, another partisan, polarizing figure laden with personal and professional baggage, becomes Republicans’ nominee, Democrats will feel the Texas temptation like never before.

3.

Tulsi Gabbard

Things aren’t getting less weird.

We regret to say that at the rate she’s going, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is at risk of replacing Lindsey Graham as the Surge’s go-to “Here’s what they were up to this week” entry. Not a good sign for America. We’ve learned of late that Gabbard, who had been out of the public eye for a while, has been running her own investigation into the results of the 2020 election and sniffing around old ballots and voting machines. She was on the scene at an FBI raid of a Fulton County, Georgia, election center last week and, as we learned a few days ago, apparently called the president from Atlanta and put him on speakerphone with the agents who conducted the raid. None of this is within the DNI’s purview, all of it is wildly inappropriate at best, any of it would be a major scandal that Congress oversees immediately in a functioning government.

There is more. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that there’s a whistleblower complaint about Gabbard “that is so highly classified it has sparked months of wrangling over how to share it with Congress,” and that it’s “said to be locked in a safe.” A redacted version of the complaint, then, was finally made available to a select group of lawmakers later in the week, with executive privilege claims getting in the way of the good stuff. We shall see. Elsewhere in Gabland: It was reported that Gabbard “obtained” voting machines from Puerto Rico to play around with them and look for security vulnerabilities. OK!

4.

Jeff Bezos

A lot of people’s fault. But mostly his.

The Washington Post eliminated about a third of its staff and hundreds of journalism jobs this week in the worst single-day massacre of expertise and talent we’ve ever seen—even in an industry that’s been contracting all century. The Post nixed its sports and books coverage, axed much of its arts coverage, and gutted its international and metro desks. It is now narrowly focused on District of Columbia news and politics, making it less a swaggering international newspaper than a publication whose purview matches Politico’s.

The Post has gone through highs and lows going back decades. Yet the acute mismanagement of the past couple of years by its owner, Jeff Bezos, after he’d lost any apparent interest in owning a newspaper, is staggering. Seeking to protect his business before the government ahead of a potential Trump win in 2024, Bezos barred the editorial board from making an endorsement in the presidential race, costing the paper hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Individual mega-billionaires are under no obligation to use their largesse to subsidize public institutions like the Post forever. (A gentleman, though, might backfill at least the hole he personally created by interfering with the editorial board.) They’re not obligated to do so when it collides with their other business interests. We do think they’re obligated, however, to find someone who is willing to carry the task forward. Rather than destroy a public institution because it’s become a hassle in various ways, sell it to someone who gives a shit.

5.

Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries

ICE negotiations are going about as well as you’d expect.

Senate Democrats got what they wanted in the government funding battle that ensued following the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Rather than extend funding for the Department of Homeland Security through September, it would be extended for two weeks while Democrats and Republicans negotiated some new restraints over immigration enforcement. The Senate passed this rejiggered deal late last week, and the House muscled it through on Tuesday.

It is now Saturday, and the sum total of negotiating progress that has been made is nothing. Democratic congressional leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries put out a list of 10 demands—among them no masks for DHS officers, no roving DHS patrols, no racial profiling—which was met coolly by Republicans. “Democrats’ newest proposal is a ridiculous Christmas list of demands for the press,” Alabama’s Katie Britt, Senate Republicans’ lead DHS appropriator, said. “They continue to play politics to their radical base at the expense of the safety of Americans.” Democrats, meanwhile, say they are being serious—and it’s the Republicans who aren’t! Et cetera, et cetera, and so on and so forth. The conversation has moved largely toward what the next short-term DHS funding patch will look like, because a bigger deal to rein in immigration authorities does not appear to be in the ballpark of imminent.

6.

John Thune

Can the GOP’s dream voting law squeeze through the Senate?

A marked push from the most conservative factions in the House and Senate to pass a major voter verification and ID bill has kicked off, but it’s hitting the same old wall: the Senate filibuster. The bill in question was, at first, the SAVE Act, legislation that would require showing “documentary proof of United States Citizenship” in order to register to vote. Now there’s a new version—the SAVE America Act—that tacks on a requirement for presenting photo ID at polling places. Senate Democrats are fully hostile to the legislation, with Schumer calling it “Jim Crow 2.0” and saying it’s about “federalizing voter suppression.”

In order to appease certain House conservatives who were threatening to hold up the government funding bill this week, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he would at least have a conversation with his senators about how to proceed on the SAVE Act and its successors. One idea that’s come up, as it often does during desperate times, is to force the minority to stage a “talking filibuster” to stall it, and wait for them to exhaust their parliamentary options. Those never happen, and for good reason: It could eat up weeks or months of valuable Senate floor time and force Senate Republicans to be on or near the Senate floor for most of that time. This is one of those discussions we’d expect to naturally dissipate on its own once it becomes clear how unpalatable all of the options are. But depending on how involved Trump gets, Thune could have to withstand a lot of pressure.

7.

Jeanine Pirro

Preach!

The U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia finally said something cool this week, then got in trouble for it. “You bring a gun into the District, you mark my words, you’re going to jail,” Jeanine Pirro said in an appearance on her old stomping grounds at Fox News. “I don’t care if you have a license in another district, and I don’t care if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else.” This didn’t sit well with gun-rights groups, who were already displeased with the administration for the way it talked about how Alex Pretti, who was carrying lawfully, shouldn’t have brought his gun with him to protest immigration officers in Minnesota. Elected Republicans, too, criticized her, with Florida Rep. Greg Steube, for example, telling Pirro, “Come and Take it!”

As Steube said in his own post, though, he’s licensed in both Florida and D.C. to carry. No one, regrettably, is going to take away Greg Steube’s gun. “Let me be clear: I am a proud supporter of the Second Amendment,” Pirro said in a follow-up social media post. “Washington, D.C. law requires handguns be licensed in the District with the Metropolitan Police Department to be carried into our community. We are focused on individuals who are unlawfully carrying guns and will continue building on that momentum to keep our communities safe.” That’s just a simple explanation of D.C. law that it’s her job to enforce. So she’ll probably have to keep apologizing.

Fort Worth ISD learned today it has lost its appeal to stop a state takeover by the Texas Education Agency, clearing the way for the TEA to replace the elected school board with a state‑appointed board of managers. Superintendent Dr. Karen Molinar, who could lose her position as part of the process, said the ruling does not change the district’s focus and that they will continue working with the agency while keeping students at the center of decisions.