Sign up for the Surge, the newsletter that covers the most important political nonsense of the week, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a politics newsletter that has never once been banned from a D.C. bar for launching into antisemitic rants directed at Irish-Italian Catholic lawmakers. Now, anti-Catholic rants directed at Jewish lawmakers? That’s a different story.

This week, we maintain our unnecessary obsession with the California governor’s race and get to work on our obituary of Sen. Bill Cassidy’s political career. Silly episodes abounded in congressional budget hearings. Plus: The mysterious case of a missing New Jersey lawmaker.

(You know what else happened this week? Slate released its new season of Slow Burn, this one about the making of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and written and reported by Slate’s Susan Matthews. Listen on your phone here or on your computer here.)

We’ll begin this week, though, with two entries of service journalism about a couple of suspect uses of taxpayer dollars that are in the pipeline.

The IRS lawsuit scheme nears its payoff.

In late January, Trump sued the IRS and Treasury Department for $10 billion over tax returns that, years ago, were leaked to the public. This unusual instance of the president suing his own executive branch looked like a setup from the start. It opened a possibility of an out-of-court settlement with his Justice Department lackeys for whatever he wanted.

The suit isn’t faring so well in court, as the judge has questioned whether the two parties are “sufficiently adverse to each other.” (You’re on to something, judge.) That means it might be time for the crafters of this shakedown to stop pretending to go through the legal process and just wire the cash already. The New York Times reported early in the week that the Justice Department “is holding internal discussions about settling” the case. The terms were still being batted around, and CNN reported that a settlement could “include a provision on the IRS dropping audits of the president and members of his family, as well as audits of the family’s businesses.”

The latest report from ABC News, though, is that Trump might drop the suit “in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration.” We can’t help but get a kick out of the Justice Department recognizing that straight-up paying Trump would look bad, and viewing a slush fund to give to Trump’s friends as some sort of reasonable compromise. It would merely be a different flavor of raiding the Treasury for personal gain. Keep an eye on this one. That shouldn’t be hard, since they’re making no effort to conceal it.

2. Elizabeth MacDonough

Will she spoil the fun of a........

© Slate