The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. -Albert Einstein
Point made.
Tag Archives: Kevin McCarthy
Governance? I Think NOT!
Cowardice, greed, and arrogance are the first three words that come to mind when I ponder Kevin McCarthy’s already-failed tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives. Make no mistake … I do not support the 20 right-wing radicals who are holding the United States hostage by voting for the likes of domestic terrorist Jim (Gym) Jordan, but McCarthy does not have either the courage or the strength to lead the House for the next two years … he is a coward because he has sold his soul (and our democracy) trying to gain a position he has only been able to dream of, he is a greedy and arrogant bastard because he is putting his own desires for power ahead of the best interests of the nation. Dan Rather has a rather more well-modulated way of assessing the situation than I do at the moment, so I shall share his words with you instead of mine that would be laced with various expletives.
Burning Down The House
Chaos reigns
Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner
05 January 2023
Before craziness and chaos engulfed the House of Representatives in the saga of electing a new speaker, a Kodak moment provided a vivid portrait of the relative health of our two major political parties and our nation as a whole.
There stood Nancy Pelosi raising the gavel for the last time as speaker in front of the imposing scroll-back chair from which she had wielded power. Her job at that moment was purely ceremonial — closing the 117th Congress — but the symbolism was poignant. It marked an end to a Congress of action and accomplishment and the beginning of an era of performative pandemonium. The gavel stood there in mid-air like a baton with no one to accept it.
In the reporting on Kevin McCarthy’s travails for gaining the speakership, many have noted how small his majority is, how he can afford to lose only a few votes, and that therein lies his major problem. But as others have pointed out, Pelosi had a small majority in the last Congress — yet she maintained unity in her party and ran the House with efficiency and precision, and to great effect.
The dumpster fire we are witnessing now has been smoldering for years, if not decades. It is what happens when people elect representatives who actively hate the idea of governance. It is what happens when people rack up victories with Fox News rants and not legislation. It is what happens when a quest for power means you’re willing to yield and appease everyone and everything that can help you secure it.
To be sure, crooks, cranks, and malevolent embarrassments have not been the exclusive purview of any one political party over the years. The nature of democracy is that it can be very messy; in moments of passion, fear, or even apathy, it can sweep into office all manner of men and women who have no business being there. The idea of a legislature, however, is that the whims, idiosyncrasies, and destructive instincts of a few can be tempered by the many. Obviously that is not what is happening now.
There is a tendency among some in the beltway press to frame this as a battle of the political extremes, how the far right is undermining Republican initiatives. In this analysis there is often a perfunctory “both sides” mention of the political left, which also supposedly threatens the “center” and the ability to govern.
This simplistic framing misses the mark at this moment. On the Republican side, it is not clear what the renegades want, other than to figuratively burn down the house (or House). Some have specific demands, and McCarthy has caved more than a spelunker. But it’s still not good enough. Furthermore, these demands are almost exclusively about process and not policy. It’s about allowing a nihilistic minority to foment perpetual mayhem, thereby undercutting the debate and responsible compromise that should be the business of Congress. Ultimately, it’s about accommodating Steve Bannon and not delivering for constituents.
There is no analogous movement on the left. Even if one disagrees with the policy positions of the so-called progressive wing of the Democratic Party, ultimately those members of Congress are almost all institutionalists — in that they believe in the idea and work of the legislative branch of government. They understand that you need a speaker for the House to function, so they backed Pelosi. They left the debates and disagreements for individual bills and votes. That, by the way, is how the Founders envisioned it.
But this isn’t just about Pelosi, as formidable as her leadership skills were. The Democrats also have rallied around her successor, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who occupies more of the moderate middle of the party. As Republicans embarrass themselves on the national stage with rounds and rounds of votes, the Democrats have held steady in unity behind Jeffries. It’s an impressive show of discipline for a political party that was once mocked (including by Democratic members of Congress) for having all the herding instincts of cats.
As much as this spectacle is gaining the attention of the American people, make no mistake that it is being watched with keen eyes around the world — by our friends and foes alike. Our allies wonder, especially in the wake of the last administration, whether they can count on America. Will these renegades blow up the world economy by defaulting on American debt? Will they pass a budget? Will they support Ukraine? Will they actively continue to undermine America’s democratic traditions?
Meanwhile, in places like Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang, despots, autocrats, and dictators are cheering our divisions and the distance they create between our national ideals and our political reality. In moments of instability in Washington, the entire world becomes more dangerous. Not that the Republican holdouts care.
The public debasement of House Republicans may make for great schadenfreude viewing for Democrats. Some literally broke out the popcorn in the House chamber. But ultimately this is a sad moment for our country. We need strong political parties that believe in negotiating, legislating, and governing. We need individual congresswomen and men of decency and integrity. We need strength and thoughtfulness to tackle our myriad problems.
We need a Congress, not a circus.
For another excellent analysis of the situation, see our friend Keith’s post … he, too, is spot-on!
Robert Reich Says “The Party’s Over”
I watched about 20 minutes of the vote for speaker of the House of Representatives. Rather boring, but I felt compelled to watch a bit of it, anyway. Within those 20 minutes or so, it was clear that there will be a second vote. Democrats unanimously voted for Hakeem Jeffries, while on the right-hand side of the aisle there were several votes for Andy Biggs of Arizona and a few for Jim Jordan of Ohio. Neither Biggs nor Jordan will have more than a handful of votes, but it will be enough to keep Kevin McCarthy from sliding right on into the Speaker’s position as he had hoped to do … in fact, I hear he has already moved his belongings into the office! The vote confirms what we already knew: the Republican Party is in chaos. Robert Reich takes it a step further and says the party’s over, that the legitimacy of the GOP, the initials of which once stood for ‘Grand Old Party’, is null and void. I’m inclined to agree with him, if saner heads don’t step up and take control, and there probably aren’t enough of those saner heads left in the Republican Party.
The Party’s Over: The end of the GOP
It has gone through three phases over the last four decades, and no longer has any reason for being
Robert Reich
03 January 2023
Today, as House Republicans convulse over electing their next Speaker, the civil war in the Republican Party comes into the open. But it’s not particularly civil and it’s not exactly a war. It’s the mindless hostility of a political party that’s lost any legitimate reason for being.
For all practical purposes, the Republican Party is over.
A half century ago, the Republican Party stood for limited government. Its position was not always coherent or logical (it overlooked corporate power and resisted civil rights), but at least had a certain consistency: the GOP could always be relied on to seek lower taxes and oppose Democratic attempts to enlarge the scope of the federal power.
This was, and still is, the position of the establishment Republican Party of the two George Bush’s, of its wealthy libertarian funders, and of its Davos-jetting corporate executive donor base. But it has little to do with the real GOP of today.
In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich and Fox News’s Roger Ailes ushered the Republican Party into cultural conservatism — against abortion, contraception, immigration, voting rights, gay marriage, LBGTQ rights, and, eventually, against teaching America’s history of racism, trans-gender rights, and, during the pandemic, even against masks. At the same time, the GOP was for police cracking down on crime (especially committed by Black people), teaching religion with public money, for retailers discriminating against LBGTQ people, and for immigration authorities hunting down and deporting undocumented residents.
Gingrich and Ailes smelled the redolent possibilities of cultural conservatism, sensed the power of evangelicals and the anger of rural white America, saw votes in a Republican base that hewed to “traditional values” and, of course, racism.
But this cultural conservatism was so inconsistent with limited government – in effect, calling on government to intrude in the some of the most intimate aspects of personal life – that the Party line became confused, its message garbled, its purpose unclear. It thereby opened itself to a third and far angrier phase, centering on resentment and authoritarianism.
The foundation for this third phase had been laid for decades as white Americans without college degrees, mostly hourly-wage workers, experienced a steady drop in income and security. Not only had upward mobility been blocked, but about half their children wouldn’t live as well as they lived. The middle class was shrinking. Good-paying union jobs were disappearing.
Enter Donald Trump, the con-artist with a monstrous talent for exploiting resentment in service of his ego. Trump turned the Republican Party into a white working-class cauldron of bitterness, xenophobia, racism, anti-intellectualism, and anti-science paranoia, while turning himself into the leader of a near religious cult bent on destroying anything in his way – including American democracy.
A political party is nothing more than a shell – fundraising machinery, state and local apparatus, and elected officials, along with a dedicated base of volunteers and activists. That base gives fuels a party, giving it purpose and meaning.
Today’s Republican base is fueling hate. It is the epicenter of an emerging anti-democracy movement.
The Republican Party will continue in some form. It takes more than nihilistic mindlessness to destroy a party in a winner-take-all system such as we have in the United States.
But the Republican Party in this third phase no longer has a legitimate role to play in our system of self-government. It is over.
What we are seeing played out today in the contest for the speakership of the Republican House involves all of these pieces – small-government establishment, cultural warrior, and hate-filled authoritarian – engaged in hopeless, hapless combat with each other, and with the aspirations and ideals of the rest of America.
The Next Two Years …
Looking ahead to the next two years in the United States Congress, I think we all foresee chaos. I don’t anticipate that the work of government, the work of We the People will be done, since the Republican-led House of Representatives has already told us they have no intention of doing their jobs. They have made it clear they plan to obfuscate and obstruct the will of the people by impeaching not only the president (not for any crimes, real or imagined, but simply in retaliation for the twice-impeached former guy), and then they plan to defund the FBI, but only after a lengthy, costly investigation led by the likes of Gym … er, Jim Jordan, himself a criminal. So, it would be easy to slip into despair, wondering why we are even bothering to pay taxes to keep the government running if they aren’t planning to do a damn thing about such important issues as the environment, guns, healthcare, education, voting rights, women’s rights, and the multitude of things that we hired them to address. But Robert Hubbell has a slightly different take, one which I think deserves some pondering. Here is a portion of his post …
The next two years.
Robert Hubbell
02 January 2023
As we enter 2023, there is no escaping the fact that we are beginning the long march toward the presidential election of 2024. As we start that journey, we have every reason to be confident about our ability to rise to the occasion. We did so in 2022, as we did in 2020 and 2018. The lesson of each of those campaigns is that our biggest challenge is overcoming the persistent media narrative that the Democratic Party is in disarray while the MAGA wing of the Republican Party is ascendant. That has not been an accurate description of the political dynamic in America since 2016, but the media has been like a dog with a bone—it won’t give up the negative narrative about the Democratic Party despite all objective evidence to the contrary.
On the Democratic side of the scale are the results of the last three elections (or four if you consider the popular vote in 2016). On the Republican side are four losing elections and truly daunting challenges entering 2023. While we should never count on Republicans to defeat themselves, the narrative is misleading if we focus exclusively on the challenges facing Democrats—a favorite journalistic technique whenever a story is needed to predict doom for the Democratic Party.
The stories circulating at the top of the news cycle this week highlight the challenges the Republican Party will face as it begins to awake from a six-year binge with a strange bedfellow whose appearance in the harsh morning light of 2023 should give the GOP a sinking feeling of regret and panic. Let’s see what the GOP sees in the mirror at the dawn of a new year.
The impossibility of breaking up with Trump.
A sizable portion of the Republican Party is done with Trump—but it will be impossible for the GOP to break up with Trump. He will either be the 2024 GOP nominee, or he will destroy the party in the process of losing the nomination. Worse, just as MAGA extremism appears to have crested at the polls, Trump is forcing contenders for the nomination to “out-Trump Trump” in their quest for the 2024 nomination. See, e.g., Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and Kari Lake.
Trump began the new year by sending a warning shot across the bow of the Republican Party. Last week, Trump posted an article titled The Coming Split on his vanity social media platform, Truth Social. The article urged Trump to run as a third-party candidate if the GOP does not nominate him for president in 2024. See Huff Post, Trump Appears To Float Third-Party Threat If GOP Won’t Back Him | HuffPost Latest News.
The author of the article, right-wing journalist Dan Gelernter, wrote the following:
Do I think Trump can win as a third-party candidate? No. Would I vote for him as a third-party candidate? Yes. Because I’m not interested in propping up this corrupt [GOP] gravy-train any longer. . . . What should we do when a majority of Republicans want Trump, but the Republican Party says we can’t have him? Do we knuckle under and vote for Ron DeSantis because he would be vastly better than any Democrat? I say no, we don’t knuckle under.
As noted in the HuffPo article, current RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel told Trump that if he runs as a third party, “We [the GOP] will lose forever.” McDaniel is right. If Trump leaves the GOP, it will be nearly impossible for another GOP candidate to win in a general election. And the result will be the same if Trump mounts a third-party challenge or merely sulks at Mar-a-Lago, hurling insults and raising money for Trump-affiliated PACs that he spends on legal defense and tacky parties.
Despite Trump’s weakened state from the midterms and mounting legal problems, Kevin McCarthy’s inability to secure the votes to become Speaker is directly related to Trump’s continuing gravitational pull on the GOP. The Freedom Caucus and assorted crazies in the GOP are demanding that McCarthy veer to the extreme edges of MAGA extremism to garner their support. For example, McCarthy has floated the idea of Jim Jordan leading a Judiciary Committee investigation into FBI Director Christopher Wray because . . . . well, you know. In MAGA-world, “FBI bad, Oath Keepers good.” Trump appointed Wray as FBI Director but has been highly critical of Wray’s unwillingness to pursue Trump’s revenge agenda against Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, etc.
Likewise, Ronna McDaniel is trying to keep her job as the Chair of the Republican Committee by saying that the top priority of Republicans in the new congressional term is “getting to the bottom of Hunter Biden’s laptop.” That should be a pretty easy task since Rudy Giuliani has had a copy of the hard drive from Hunter Biden’s laptop since October 2020. If there is anything on the laptop worth getting to the bottom of, it should have emerged by now. More importantly, the obsession with Hunter Biden’s laptop illustrates that the Trump revenge agenda is eclipsing the ability of the GOP to pursue a substantive agenda.
So, there you have it. Trump won’t let the GOP walk out the door without starting an internecine war that may destroy the party. And even without Trump actively trying to destroy the party, he has unleashed reactionary forces that even he cannot restrain. Over the weekend, McCarthy reportedly offered a concession to the radical wing of the Freedom Caucus that would allow a handful of Representative to call for a “no confidence” vote on the Speaker—something McCarthy previously said he would “never” do. As a result, the extremists in the GOP, like Matt Gaetz, will be controlling the GOP agenda in Congress. See Newsweek, Steve Bannon says Matt Gaetz Will Be ‘De Facto’ Speaker After McCarthy Concessions.
[Update: McCarthy’s humiliating offer to allow a “motion to vacate” by five members was rejected in a letter by nine Republican members sent on New Year’s Day.]
Whatever challenges Democrats face as they move toward 2024, those challenges do not include an inevitable struggle for control of the party that will inflict grievous injury no matter the outcome. Democrats face challenges, too, and we will be reminded of them early and often by the media. So, keep in mind that the next two years will be extraordinarily difficult for the GOP, even if the media fails to mention that fact.
Dealing with the polls over the next two years.
It was not your imagination. Polling regarding the 2022 midterms was not only wrong, it was so wrong that it may have negatively affected Democratic prospects in some contests. The NYTimes published a lengthy analysis of the polling errors in 2022. See NYTimes, The ‘Red Wave’ Washout: How Skewed Polls Fed a False Election Narrative. Kudos to the Times for engaging in introspection about how the media amplified misleading polls. The Times does not mention its own prominent role in distorting the narrative to the detriment of Democrats.
The lengthy analysis in the Times can be distilled to the following:
- Polls are not elections.
- In a closely divided electorate, polls communicate virtually no useful information.
- Republicans have figured out how to manipulate polls.
- Polling aggregators like Fivethirtyeight.com and the media amplify the misleading polls generated by partisan affiliates of the GOP.
- Misinformation from junk polls depressed Democratic turnout in certain instances.
The ability of Republican pollsters to distort the media narrative had real-life consequences on the outcomes in 2022. Democratic funders abandoned Mandela Barnes in his race against Ron Johnson when garbage Republican polls began to suggest that Johnson was pulling ahead of Barnes by five points (or more). In the end, Barnes lost by one percentage point. But the “negative narrative” resulted in a fundraising edge by Ron Johnson of $26 million.
What if Democratic funders had not abandoned Barnes based on misleading polling? Would Barnes have fared better if the Democrats had not ceded the fundraising advantage to Ron Johnson? We will never know the answers to those questions for certain. But we can stop falling for the same stupid Republican games in the future.
So, here’s the point: Don’t stress out over polls during the next two years. We must go about our business as if every vote might be the deciding vote in every election.
The New Kid In The Party?
A good governor … and here I am using the term more expansively to include all government decision-makers from state legislators all the way up through the U.S. Congress and even the president … will make every decision based on what is best for the country and for its people – ALL its people, not just white people or male people or Christian people or straight people. They will sometimes err because they will rarely, if ever, have all the facts upon which to base their decisions, but they will be guided in making decisions by the facts they do have, and their conscience reminding them of their responsibility to the people of the nation. Federal officials must remember that while they were elected by the people from their state or district, their decisions, their votes and their actions affect every individual within the country, thus they should act accordingly.
I believe there are some in our government who actually do just this, make decisions based on what seems at the time to be in the best interests of the people … ALL the people. Unfortunately, however, there are more than a few who make their decisions on the basis of what’s in it for them, of their own quest for power, for re-election, for financial gain. Now, I won’t deny there are some on both sides of the aisle who have forgotten their responsibility, but over the last decade, the Republican Party, aka the GOP, appears to no longer care about either the country or the people. They have sacrificed integrity. Their forefathers must surely be doing that proverbial “rolling over in their grave” thing.
I could point to so many, such as Marge Greene who was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives despite being a follower of QAnon, despite believing that Jewish space lasers (hint, in case any Republicans are reading this, there ain’t no such thing as Jewish space lasers) started the California wildfires. Or the pistol-totin’ barhop, Lauren Boebert who proudly put a photo of all her children holding big guns on her Christmas cards. And then, there’s Kevin McCarthy, vying to be the next Speaker of the House, whose only platform is revenge against any and all liberal democratic policies and those of us who support those policies. But for now, I want to focus on one incoming member of the House, a person who will be seated in the House of Representatives next Tuesday, a person who has broken the boundaries of dishonesty: George Santos.
I wrote about Santos just over a week ago, after the New York Times published a laundry list of the lies he has told … everything from his heritage to his education to his work history to his family to his criminal record to his financial situation … and more! Last week, a day or two before Christmas, Santos was confronted about his lies and said he would talk about it all ‘next week’ … next week now being this week. Well, he did. He admitted to most of his lies, claimed the felony convictions against him for theft in Brazil were false, but the documentation proves the lie. Did he ‘come clean’ with humility and shame? Nope … just stated as a matter of fact that yes, he lied, but that he still has every intention of taking his seat in the House of Representatives next Tuesday! The unmitigated gall left me speechless, but only for a moment.
This is a new low even for the Republican Party and if, in fact, they allow him to be seated in the House on Tuesday, it will be the most definitive statement yet that there is no conscience, no morals, no values, and no integrity within the Republican Party. One lie of any substance would have disqualified any Democratic candidate, but Mr. Santos told lies about every single aspect of his entire 34 years!!! I imagine there are some Republicans who are wishing they could crawl under a rock right about now – Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney – but the rest seem to be scratching their heads and wondering how to get this out of the news, how to make it disappear. Not a single word from the otherwise garrulous Kevin McCarthy … funny that.
This is, for the Republicans, as bad a nightmare as the former guy, an egomaniac, planning to run for the Oval Office again. I would pity the Republicans, but … they brought this mess on themselves when they first began letting unqualified circus clowns run for office. It seems to me that a person who cannot even be relied upon to tell the truth about where he went to college (he didn’t), property he claims to own (but doesn’t), where he has worked, his ancestry, his criminal past, where he lives, cannot possibly be trusted to be an honest lawmaker! I thought Herschel Walker told some mighty big lies, but Santos even makes him look like an amateur. Santos is right up there with the former guy, who wouldn’t recognize the truth if it smacked him upside the head! This is NOT what this nation needs … lawmakers who cannot ever be trusted, whose words and actions must always, always be fact-checked! But alas, this is the new GOP – which, by the way, no longer stands for “Grand Old Party”, but rather for “Gaslight Or Perjure.”
Members Of Congress Walk Free
While I was pleased to see the January 6th committee issue recommendations on four counts of criminality for Donald Trump (see Keith’s post for an excellent summation), I must admit to being a bit disappointed on one front. The committee did make recommendations that four members of Congress should be investigated by the House Ethics Committee, not for their roles in the January 6th attempted coup, but for refusing to testify before the committee. Numerous members of Congress did, in fact, participate in the attempts to overturn the election and silence the voices of the majority, and personally I consider it a slap in the face to We the People that they are to be allowed to keep their seats in Congress with no accountability for their actions. Philip Bump, writing for The Washington Post, summed it up well …
Trump’s Jan. 6 enablers in Congress can now exhale
Philip Bump
20 December 2022
The House select committee investigating the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, concluded its work on Monday, releasing part of its report on its findings and a clutch of referrals to the Justice Department for possible criminal investigation. It also released a less explosive set of recommendations: that four members of Congress should be investigated by the House Ethics Committee for failing to comply with the committee’s inquiry.
With that, the door apparently closed on one of the most titillating aspects of the riot, that members of Congress might have been somehow directly involved in the day’s violence. But the door also seems to have closed on another aspect of the post-election period: accountability for members of Congress who eagerly worked to assist Donald Trump’s effort to retain power despite his election loss.
That group had already sidestepped one mechanism for accountability. As The Washington Post reported last week, nearly every member of the House who voted in opposition to recognizing electors from Arizona or Pennsylvania in the hours after the riot — trying to effect through their votes what the mob had been trying to achieve through force — were reelected in last month’s midterm elections. In fact, there’s no obvious evidence that they suffered any political effect for their participation in the effort to block those electors.
But not all of those members of Congress were equivalently invested in preserving Trump’s power. A smaller group, generally closer to the caucus’s rightmost fringe, worked directly with outside groups on promoting the idea that the 2020 election had been stolen and worked with the White House on boosting Trump’s bid to derail his election loss.
Reporting from Talking Points Memo indicates that more than 30 Republican members of Congress communicated with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to offer moral or structural support for Trump’s effort. They passed along unfounded claims of fraud, sent messages of encouragement to the president or, at times, called for a more forceful response to block Joe Biden’s inauguration. In many cases, those legislators were also amplifying false claims about the election to their supporters.
On Nov. 4, 2020, the day after the election, the Twitter account of Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) was flagged 19 times for sharing false or baseless claims about the election results. She continued to make similar claims in the months that followed; she continues to do so to this day. Greene also participated in a briefing at the White House about the election results (despite not yet serving in Congress) on Dec. 21, 2020, along with a number of other House Republicans including Reps. Mo Brooks (Ala.), Brian Babin (Tex.), Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Paul A. Gosar (Ariz.), Andy Harris (Md.), Jody Hice (Ga.), Scott Perry (Pa.) and Jim Jordan (Ohio).
Organizers had planned a series of events centered on Jan. 6 in the weeks before the Capitol riot. One, scheduled for Capitol Hill just as the counting of electoral votes began on that day, was put together by fringe activists working under the “Stop the Steal” banner. The lead organizer, Ali Alexander, identified Greene as a friend who was engaged in trying to prevent Biden’s inauguration.
He also claimed that Biggs, Brooks and Gosar had been involved in planning his event. Alexander is not a trustworthy source of information, and the Capitol Hill rally never materialized as planned. (Greene denied involvement in planning an event, as did Biggs and Brooks. Gosar has not addressed the claim.) A potential lineup of speakers submitted with the group’s permit application, though, lists Greene, Gosar, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and others as speakers. Another organizer of the combined event program for the day (including Trump’s speech) offered a similar list of elected officials as having participated in the discussions: Biggs, Boebert, Brooks, Gosar and Rep.-elect Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.).
(In the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot, there was an enormous amount of attention paid to tours of the Capitol complex given by Republican legislators in the days before the riot. There’s no evidence that this was nefarious; it appears to have been primarily a function of unlucky timing.)
These details, though, distract from the broader effort to bolster Trump’s rhetoric. The post-election period offered Republican leaders a choice: build political capital with right-wing voters by siding with Trump’s obviously false and baseless claims of fraud or challenge the sitting president’s rhetoric — including by refusing to amplify it. The elected officials listed above had no qualms about sharing misinformation about the election. In fact, their messages to Meadows often indicate that they may actually have believed the quickly debunked claims they were spreading. Even on Jan. 6 itself, Greene and at least one other elected Republican tried to blame the riot on the political left.
While we talk about the House select committee as being focused on the Capitol riot, the committee’s work covered much of the post-election effort by Trump to retain power. The preliminary report released on Monday explores not only the immediate triggers for the riot but also other parallel efforts by Trump and his allies to keep him in office.
Which makes the committee’s limited condemnations of other elected officials more notable. Despite those legislators having been actively involved in the broader effort and serving in positions that require an oath of fealty to the Constitution, the committee offered only formal objections over the failure of four legislators — House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Biggs, Jordan and Perry — to comply with the committee’s requests for information. Instead of doing so, several of them were explicit in casting the committee as illegitimate or partisan, intentionally weakening the potency of the committee’s work.
It’s unlikely that the Ethics Committee will offer much of a slap on the wrist, if any, particularly since that bipartisan committee will soon be chaired by a Republican. Those members of the House who amplified Trump’s false claims, worked to assist with his efforts to retain power, voted to block electors from Arizona and Pennsylvania and then blocked or minimized the investigation undertaken by their colleagues will simply continue to serve in Congress.
On Jan. 3, they will once again take a sworn oath to defend the Constitution, as they did on the same day two years prior.
The Week’s Best Cartoons 12/17
This week there were a number of easy targets for the talented cartoonists, including Elon Musk, Kyrsten Sinema, Kevin McCarthy, the former guy, and more. The cartoonists picked up those balls and ran with them and, as usual, our friend TokyoSand over at Political Charge was in line to catch them! Thank you, TS!!!
How ironic that the deeper we get into the holiday season, the more the news is covering the antics of incredibly selfish people. Check out how editorial cartoonists covered the likes of Kyrsten Sinema, Trump, and Elon Musk.
If GOP MAGAs Gain House Majority, It’ll Be Pay-back Time Leaving Little Time For Lawmaking
I know most of us will be glad when Election 2022 is behind us, and certainly we’re all hoping for the best possible outcome. In today’s post, our friend Gronda explains what the Republicans have in store if they are the victors at the end of the day, and it’s not a pretty picture. Thanks, Gronda, for sharing your prescient views.
The state of US democracy is in serious peril /Daryl Cagle / politicalcartoons.com
The following scenario is a conservative depiction of what voters can expect if GOP MAGAs gain a majority position in the US House of Representatives, post the November 2022 elections:
GOP MAGAs supporters of the defeated ex-president have started making demands on GOP MAGA lawmakers if they gain a majority position in the US Congress, like exacting retribution against everyone on the GOP MAGA defeated ex-president’s enemies list. In most cases the GOP MAGA voters are basing their commands on lies like the 2020 election was stolen from their leader by fraudulent means by the Democratic Party POTUS Joe Biden, that the ex-president’s trusted associates like the VP Mike Pence and the Justice Department’s head Mr. Bill Barr failed to do their jobs to keep their leader in power, that the US congressional GOP MAGA leaders like…
View original post 1,081 more words
‘Raw smarm’ is not a descriptor a person should aspire to
When I’m voting for a candidate, I want to know who he/she is. Yes, I care about their stance on the issues of the time, but I also care about who they are … are they a good person, an honest person, a person of integrity, or will they pay lip service simply to win votes? Today, we are seeing far too many, especially in the Republican Party, who will do or say whatever they believe gives them the best chance at winning in November. These are NOT people I can respect, they are not people of integrity or people who have values that in any way match my own. Honesty. It’s all I ask. Our good friend Keith highlights one in particular, Kevin McCarthy, who is about as honest as a snake oil salesman. Thank you, Keith!
Smarm is not a good word to be described as. As a verb, it means the following: “behave in an ingratiating way in order to gain favor.” Synonyms for the term including being “obsequious, sycophantic or servile.” This term was used to define the Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy by a fellow Republican, former Congressman David Jolly. The reason this time is recordings of McCarthy saying Trump was unaware that his followers were executing the insurrection on the Capitol.
In an article called “‘Very rarely does America get to see the raw smarm of Kevin Mccarthy’: former Republican colleague” by Sarah K. Burris of Raw Story, no punches are pulled to react to McCarthy’s latest sycophantic episode to curry favor with the former president. Here are a few paragraphs, with a link to the article at the end.
“‘And you know [McCarthy] had a glimpse into the reality that…
View original post 549 more words
What Drives The Election Roller Coaster?
The upcoming elections remind me watching a game of tennis, or ping pong … back, forth, left, right, back, forth. Round and round she goes, where she lands no one knows. To say that it is stressful is an understatement! Frank Bruni’s latest column sums it all up fairly nicely …
Live By the Trump, Die By the Trump
By Frank Bruni
8 September 2022
Democrats were doomed. We prediction-mad pundits felt predictable certainty about that. The recent history of midterm elections augured disaster for the party in power. Inflation would make the damage that much worse.
So why are Republicans sweating?
Their overreach on abortion and the subsequent mobilization of women voters explain a great deal but not everything. There’s another prominent plotline. Its protagonist is Donald Trump. And its possible moral is a sweet and overdue pileup of clichés — about reaping what you sow, paying the piper, lying in the bed you’ve made.
Republicans chose to kneel before him. Will he now bring them to their knees?
Thanks in large part to Trump, they’re stuck with Senate candidates — Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker in Georgia, Blake Masters in Arizona — whose ineptness, inanity, immoderation or all three significantly diminish their chances in purple states at a propitious juncture.
Thanks in even larger part to Trump, voters ranked threats to democracy as the most pressing problem facing the country in a recent NBC News poll. That intensifying concern is among the reasons that President Biden went so big and bold last week in his intensely debated speech about extremism in America. He was eyeing the midterms, and he was wagering that Republican leaders’ indulgence of Trump’s foul play and fairy tales might finally cost them.
Trump is also a factor in Republicans’ vulnerability regarding abortion rights. For his own selfish political purposes, he made grand anti-abortion promises. He appointed decidedly anti-abortion judges, including three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. He as much as anyone fired up the anti-abortion movement to the point where Republicans may now get burned.
With two months until Election Day, Republicans want to focus voters’ attention on unaffordable housing, exorbitant grocery bills and the generally high cost of living. They want to instill deeper and broader fear about immigration and crime. They want to portray Democrats as the enemies of the American way.
But that’s more than a little tricky when Trump had America’s secrets strewn throughout the bowels of Mar-a-Loco. When his excuses for mishandling those classified documents change at a dizzying clip, contradict previous ones and often boil down to his typical infantile formula of I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I. When he uses Truth Social, the media penal colony to which Twitter and Facebook sentenced him, for all the old falsehoods plus new ones. When criminal charges against him aren’t out of the question.
The progressive excesses of some Democrats pale beside the madness of this would-be monarch.
Democrats could still have a bad, even brutal, November. That is indeed how the pendulum historically swings, and two months is plenty of time for political dynamics to change yet again. Biden could overplay his hand, a possibility suggested by that speech.
But for the moment, Republicans are spooked. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, has decided to try to recapture the party’s long-ago Contract-With-America magic by detailing a “Commitment to America” that will no doubt omit what should be the most important commitment of all — to the truth. It also won’t erase the fact that 196 of the 529 Republican nominees running for the House, the Senate, governor, attorney general or secretary had “fully denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election,” according to a chilling FiveThirtyEight analysis of the party’s nominees as of Wednesday.
That morally corrupt position was probably a political asset in their primaries, just as having Trump’s endorsement usually was. But in the general election? As Republican nominees pivot toward that, at least a few of them are realizing that it’s a different ballgame — and that Trump is trouble. They’re taking baby steps away from the world’s biggest baby.
Good luck with that. He’ll never let them go, never muffle himself long enough or behave well enough for there to be a Republican narrative that doesn’t revolve around him. That was clear to Republicans from the start. To hang with him is to hang with him.
Filosofa's Word 