Crisis communications, at its core, is pretty simple: Discern where the story is going. Fully disclose the facts. Admit where mistakes were made. And do it all as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

So it’s been a little confounding to watch Joe Biden’s White House deal with the discovery of classified documents from his years as vice president and in the Senate casually stored in a variety of locations, including his garage in Wilmington, Delaware, beside his prized 1967 Corvette.

The impact of the first discovery, on November 2, must have been immediately apparent to Biden’s team, given the public uproar and legal thicket Donald Trump created by absconding with hundreds of classified documents when he left the White House in 2021, only to dump them at his Mar-a-Lago resort. President Biden criticized Trump for that in the fall, asking, “How could anyone be that irresponsible?”

Biden rightly noted that documents are marked classified and top secret for a reason: to protect intelligence-gathering “sources and methods” and those who risk their lives to provide crucial national-security secrets. There are protocols for handling such documents, and unsecured storerooms—or unguarded garages—are not among them. Nor are former presidents and vice presidents entitled to take classified documents as mementos when they leave office.

[Read: Biden’s classified documents should have no impact on Trump’s legal jeopardy]

Why, then, did it take months after the first discovery for the White House to acknowledge that Biden, too, had classified documents in his possession—and why did that acknowledgment come only after a leak to CBS News about an ongoing federal investigation into the matter? And why did the White House’s first disclosure omit that there had been a second discovery of documents, on December 20 at Biden’s home in Delaware? (There have been sporadic additional discoveries announced since, adding to a sense of furtiveness and lack of transparency on Biden’s part.)

Last week, Biden compounded his problems by declaring that when the special counsel investigation Attorney General Merrick Garland launched into the president’s handling of documents is complete, the country will discover that “there’s no there there.” What he likely meant was that this will be found to have been an innocent mistake, probably made by staff as they hastily packed up his office and official residence when he left the vice presidency in 2017. (This is the same case former Vice President Mike Pence is making about classified documents newly discovered in his Indiana home.)

In Biden’s defense, his lawyers, upon discovery of the first set of documents, contacted the National Archives and surrendered the materials. The president’s legal team has been cooperating with the Justice Department in its probe. Trump, by contrast, removed hundreds of documents. The National Archives and then the FBI spent more than a year trying to recover the materials. Trump’s lawyer asserted that all the documents had been returned when many had not. And the former president claimed that, having declassified them through some mystical process for which there is no record, he was perfectly free to keep them.

Still, Biden’s “no there there” comment landed clumsily, as there were documents there, in his old private office and at his home. At best, it was sloppy and improper. There is some there there. Biden and the White House seemingly have violated every precept—speed, transparency, contrition—of crisis communications.

But here is where I cut the flacks some slack. From the moment the first documents were discovered and turned over to the government, Biden’s lawyers seized control. Their primary mission has been to protect their client from legal, not political, jeopardy. And their objective has been to work with the probe, and be transparent with the prosecutors, who, as a matter of investigative protocol, never want public disclosure until their inquiries have concluded. I presume that is why Biden’s team didn’t acknowledge when the CBS story broke that there had been a second recovery of documents.

[David A. Graham: A guide to the possible forthcoming indictments of Donald Trump]

They quickly learned, however, that although prosecutors disdain disclosures from the subjects of their probes, leaks can still happen. This week, after the FBI searched the president’s Delaware home, with his permission, unnamed sources told CNN that federal investigators had been prepared to issue a warrant if the president had refused, though such a threat proved unnecessary. It was a gratuitous leak, perhaps meant to blunt Republican criticism about political bias against the DOJ and FBI, who were granted a subpoena to search Mar-a-Lago last summer after repeated attempts failed to recover the documents from Trump.

Biden’s team appears to be betting that full cooperation, and less public conversation, will lead to a relatively benign conclusion from Special Counsel Robert Hur, and that all this will wind up as an embarrassing and transient flap, rather than an enduring scandal. The revelation about Pence adds to the “everyone does it” assumption so easily sold in our nuance-resistant politics, perhaps to Biden’s benefit and certainly to Trump’s.

For now, the Biden docudrama is like a ball of yarn for House Republicans intent on tearing into the president, which risks hurting his standing among the broader public. It also could make it harder for the DOJ to pursue a case against Trump. But the president and his team might be willing to endure weeks or months more of shouted questions they cannot or will not answer if that means the special counsel ultimately absolves him of any serious wrongdoing.

Just days into Kevin McCarthy's tenure, Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska had an issue he needed the House speaker to address.

Whatever one thinks of Meta’s decision to allow Donald Trump back on Facebook and Instagram, how the company is doing so is already shambolic. This is a man who tried to stay in office despite losing the 2020 election and who incited a violent attack against Congress, efforts which Meta apparently found sufficiently dangerous to take the drastic action of banning him, then the president of the United States, from its platforms. But now Meta is lifting the ban, and as a Meta spokesperson told CNN’s Oliver Darcy, the company will permit Trump to attack the legitimacy of the 2020 election without repercussions.

Why would Meta do this? The company seems to understand that Trump’s attacks undermine democracy and can destabilize the country. The spokesperson also told Darcy that if Trump works to undermine the upcoming 2024 election, then he could face action from the company. (What actions those might be, and whether they would have teeth or simply represent the gnashing of them, is left unstated.) This distinction makes no sense, and it demonstrates the incoherence of Meta’s handling of Trump.

First, Meta’s stance is effectively that Trump is free to return to the behavior for which he was banned in the first place, simply because the 2020 election is now somewhat more distant. For too long, Facebook was tolerant of his and others’ attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 election; Trump was suspended only following the January 6, 2021, insurrection. The violence that day was especially egregious and horrifying, but insofar as Trump’s behavior was involved, the difference from his previous behavior was in degree and not type.

[Read: Trump and Facebook’s mutual decay]

What was not clear on January 7, 2021, but should be clear by now, as I have written, was that the riot was simply the final stage of a months-long attempt to steal the election. Trump began calling the balloting rigged even before Election Day, falsely declared himself the winner that night, and then spread false fraud claims for weeks. If Facebook grew concerned by the ultimate violence on January 6, it should now be concerned with the rhetoric that preceded that day and led to it.

Yet now Meta is saying that Trump can go back to using the same rhetoric that was apparently too inflammatory for Facebook to bear after the insurrection. (At the time, Trump was banned indefinitely. Facebook’s independent oversight board then criticized the approach, saying that the ban was justified but the company hadn’t laid out criteria for indefinite suspensions. Facebook responded that it would review the ban in two years, which brought us to Wednesday’s announcement.) And it’s not as though Trump himself has stopped his wild election claims since getting booted off Facebook. The day before the Meta announcement, Trump was making bogus claims that he’d “won Georgia by a lot” on his own Truth Social site. (He did not win Georgia by a lot, or even by a little.)

Second, the danger posed by Trump’s lies about the 2020 election remains. “Our determination is that the risk has sufficiently receded, and that we should therefore adhere to the two-year timeline we set out,” Meta’s Nick Clegg said in a statement, citing a review of “the conduct of the US 2022 midterm elections, and expert assessments on the current security environment.” This is unpersuasive. The 2020 election is further in the past now, but not that much further, and one reason it can’t be relegated to history is that Trump continues to surface it—and the direct harms continue. The recent arrest of Solomon Peña, a failed Republican candidate and self-described “MAGA king,” for a spree of shootings at houses in New Mexico shows how Trump’s election denial reverberates. When the ban was levied, “the point was that an election was retrospectively under attack at the moment of crisis,” Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth who has studied election legitimacy, told me. “The danger wasn’t from attacks before as much as afterward. Why would that change?”

Third, Meta is pretending that a clean demarcation exists between attacking the legitimacy of the 2020 and 2024 elections, but it doesn’t. “Attacking the legitimacy of past elections is of course a way to cast doubt on future elections,” Nyhan said. “It’s absurd to pretend otherwise.”

Political scientists have long identified a phenomenon called the “winner effect,” whereby confidence in the election system rises in partisans of the victorious party, while it erodes in supporters of the losing candidate. But even before Trump launched a seven-year (and counting) assault on trust in elections—recall that he said the 2016 election was rigged ahead of time, then claimed that the popular vote was tainted by fraud—the Republican Party was in a multi-cycle stretch of declining confidence in election systems. Each instance builds on the next.

Trump knows as well as anyone else that an attack on the 2020 election is an attack on the 2024 election. The question is why Meta refuses to acknowledge it. (The company did not respond to questions about the decision.) The fundamental explanation may simply be that Meta is responding to political pressure: It was the motivation behind the ban, and it is the motivation behind loosening it. “Democracy is messy,” Clegg wrote in his statement. Meta is demonstrating that even before Trump makes a single new post.

Early this summer, the federal government will, in all likelihood, exhaust the “extraordinary measures” it is now employing to keep paying the nation’s bills. As the country careens toward that fiscal abyss, Congress will face a now-familiar stalemate: Republicans will refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless Democrats agree to cut spending. Democrats will balk. Markets will slide—perhaps precipitously—and the economy will swiftly turn south.

When that moment arrives, the most important people in Washington won’t be those who work in the White House, or even the party leaders who occupy the Capitol’s most palatial offices. They will be the House Republicans who sit closest to the political center: the so-called moderates. The GOP’s majority is narrow enough that any five Republicans could dash Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s plan to demand a ransom for the debt ceiling. They will have to decide whether to stand with him or join with Democrats to avert a first-ever default on the nation’s debt.

“Those guys will be called on to save the day,” says former Representative Charlie Dent, a Pennsylvania Republican who, until his retirement in 2018, was one of the House’s most prominent moderates.

[Yascha Mounk: How moderates won the midterms]

Dent is talking about Republicans such as Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, whose Omaha district voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump in 2020. Bacon is a leader of the faction of Republicans hoping to serve as a counterweight to the House Freedom Caucus and the far-right hard-liners who extracted all manner of concessions from McCarthy earlier this month in exchange for allowing him to become speaker. During the four days of voting that McCarthy endured, Bacon regularly held court with reporters outside the House chamber, castigating the holdouts as the “chaos caucus” and comparing them to the Taliban.

Bacon, a 59-year-old former Air Force commander first elected in 2016, styles himself as a pragmatist and a realist, and he is keenly aware of the sway that he and other like-minded Republicans could have. Indeed, he and his allies have already blocked two bills backed by some on the far right—including a measure to replace the federal income tax with a 30 percent sales tax—from coming up for a vote. But don’t call him a moderate. “I’d rather be called a conservative who gets things done,” Bacon told me.

In rejecting the moderate label, Bacon is no different than the other 221 Republicans now serving in the House, virtually all of whom describe themselves as some version of conservative. As the party has moved to the right, so, too, has its leftmost flank. The decline of the GOP moderate is a story more than two decades in the making, but it carries particular significance at a moment when centrist lawmakers could wield so much power. If they choose to use it. If they exist at all anymore.

Two years ago, Bacon picked up the discarded flag of a dormant GOP group called the Main Street Caucus. The caucus is the House extension of the Republican Main Street Partnership, a political organization founded 25 years ago by then-Representative Amo Houghton of New York. The original Main Street Partnership was explicitly, and proudly, moderate; Houghton called himself a “militant moderate,” and the group’s aim was to “serve as a voice for centrist Republicans,” as well as to soften the GOP’s harsh rhetoric and policies on abortion, gay rights, and the environment, among other issues.

The Partnership remains active—it spent $25 million in support of Republican candidates last year—but it has rebranded itself to stay relevant in today’s GOP. Searching through its website history on the Internet Archive, I found that the Partnership dropped the words moderate and centrist from its mission statement sometime in the fall of 2011, shortly after the last new Republican House majority forced a confrontation over the debt ceiling with a Democratic president. They’ve since been replaced by more generic descriptors, such as common sense and pragmatic.

“We used to be called moderate. We are not moderate,” says Sarah Chamberlain, the Partnership’s CEO and a former aide to Houghton (who retired from Congress in 2004 and died in 2020). Its members now identify as “pragmatic conservatives.” “The entity from day one has the same name, but it looks very different,” Chamberlain told me.

[David A. Graham: Kevin McCarthy’s predicament is a warning]

The Main Street Caucus isn’t the only congressional group whose members once might have identified as moderate. Others include the Republican Governance Group (formerly known as the Tuesday Group) and the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus. A couple dozen Republicans, including Bacon, are members of all three groups. But they each eschew the word, in part, Bacon explained to me, because in primaries “it’s used as a cudgel.”

Another reason is they are simply more conservative than their predecessors. As Republicans who embraced the moderate label, including Dent, have left Congress over the past 20 years, the Republicans replacing them have moved ever further from the political center. Many of the original members of the Tuesday Group and the Main Street Partnership, for example, backed abortion rights; Dent, who left the House five years ago, told me he believed he was either the last, or one of the last, House Republicans to hold that position.

Earlier this month, the Main Street Caucus—the largest of the three groups, with about 60 members—elected as its chair a Republican even more conservative than Bacon, Representative Dusty Johnson of South Dakota. When I spoke with him by phone, Johnson eagerly volunteered that both he and the group’s new vice chair, Representative Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma, earned higher ratings than the average House Republican on the scorecard kept by Heritage Action, the conservative activist group that has warred with GOP moderates for years. “We are members who overwhelmingly want to deliver policy wins—conservative policy wins,” Johnson told me.

The big question now is whether the GOP’s self-identified pragmatists will stand up to—or simply behind—the party leadership in the fiscal battles to come. During the speakership fight, Johnson, Bacon, and other pragmatists served as McCarthy’s protective guard, staring down the GOP holdouts by declaring that they would vote for no one other than McCarthy. Yet, with only a few complaints, they largely blessed the concessions the new speaker made to empower the far right at his own expense.

Bacon assured me that he and his fellow pragmatists will use the leverage they have, noting the two bills that they had already prevented from coming for a vote. On the debt-ceiling debate, however, many of the deal-seeking Republicans are sounding like McCarthy, who has said the president must endorse spending cuts in order to lift the borrowing limit. “We’re not going to raise the debt ceiling until we have some additional fiscal responsibility returned to spending in this town,” Johnson told me. He put the onus on Biden and the Democrats to negotiate, equating their refusal to do so with “choosing the path of legislative terrorism.” Other members of the Main Street Caucus struck a slightly more malleable tone. “We have to be aggressive on spending, and it’s something I ran for Congress on, so I’m comfortable with that,” Representative Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota told me. “But we also have to continue to be able to govern.”

The primary mechanism that the pragmatic Republicans could use to bypass McCarthy is a discharge petition, which would force a vote on increasing the debt limit. Given the GOP’s narrow lead in the House, only five Republicans would need to join Democrats to get the requisite support. (One GOP leader of the Problem Solvers Caucus, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, mentioned this as a possibility when the hard-liners were blocking McCarthy’s path to speaker.) “It would be very difficult for me to sign a discharge petition against leadership,” Armstrong told me. “I would never say never, but I would be very, very skeptical that I would ever sign that.” Yet in the next breath, Armstrong suggested that if the stock market were crashing, that could change his mind: “I’m not cratering every senior in my district’s 401(k). I’m not doing it.”

[Annie Lowrey: The trillion-dollar coin might be the least bad option]

A discharge petition is an imperfect vehicle for resolving a debt-ceiling crisis; because of the House’s procedural rules, gathering signatures would have to begin weeks or even months in advance. In 2015, Dent helped lead a bipartisan coalition in using a discharge petition to go around the GOP leadership to pass legislation reviving the Export-Import Bank, a federal credit agency that conservatives wanted to let die. Then-Speaker John Boehner had already announced his departure, having been ushered into retirement by a far-right revolt. “Ordinarily, the speaker would be pretty upset about it. I can assure you he was not,” Dent recalled.

A dozen years ago, it was Boehner leading a House GOP majority bent on securing spending cuts in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling. After several rounds of negotiations failed—including an attempted “grand bargain” on taxes and entitlement programs with then-President Barack Obama—Congress agreed to form a “super committee” to put in place budget caps that became known as sequestration. (Congress would later prevent many of these caps from being put in place.)

Dent predicted that Republicans would win few if any concessions from Democrats for raising the borrowing limit this time around. “You’re going to get something close to a clean debt-ceiling bill,” he told me. Perhaps Biden will agree to form a fiscal commission to propose possible spending cuts, Washington’s favorite face-saving punt. A fig leaf, in other words. Bacon told me he’s hoping for something more, such as a commitment to keep increases in federal spending below inflation. “I’d like to see more than a fig leaf. I’d like to at least see some underwear on.”

What’s all but certain is that a significant chunk of the House Republican conference won’t go for that kind of deal. Republicans told me that they doubt the party could pass any debt-ceiling increase on its own, and many conservatives might reject any deal that McCarthy could get Democrats to endorse, if he can get Democrats to negotiate at all. That will put the pressure once again on the GOP’s pragmatists, the Republicans who pass for moderate in 2023 but won’t dare use that word. If and when the debt crisis comes, they could well be the ones deciding between, well, moderation and default.