Raucous Caucus

 Re-upping this from 9 months ago (just after the third ballot in Kevin McCarthy's Speaker race), with one incorrect prediction and one correct one

Drawing by Harry Bliss.

 

LOL

Things getting heated in House GOP meeting.

McCarthy swore in his speech, dropping a “god damnit.” And he made clear he would negotiate no more. McCarthy also said opponents came to him with “personal asks” last night.

Lauren boebert yelled in response to speech: “BULL SHIT”

— Melanie Zanona (@MZanona) January 3, 2023

Then Boebert even got a chance to deliver a funny:

Teenager in the Room

Image via CityWatchLA.

Pushing the snooze button solves nothing, because these same losers will try to pull the same shit in 45 days. I voted yes tonight to keep the government open, but I’m done normalizing this dysfunction. This is not entertainment, it’s governance. 

—Senator John Fetterman

“There has to be an adult in the room,” the speaker said. He suggested that the group of 15 to 20 GOP holdouts who regularly sabotaged Republican-backed votes act like political children.

Actually, apparently unknown to McCarthy, there were dozens and dozens of adults in the room. Whether he actually decided to join them and be an adult himself is up for debate, but I'm not buying it. I think Fetterman's analogy fits better. McCarthy is the teenager in the room, grousing: "Mom, it's not even healthy to get up this early. You're stunting my growth! I had to do a whole impeachment thingy already this week!"

Now the babies in the room have fired him, and there's no Speaker in the House at all. I'm finding that hilarious, as apparently is John Boehner, who made it out of  a similar pickle with a good deal more dignity, though dignity was never his own strong suit:

Cheap Shots: Schadenfreude

This Inflation Is Enough to Drive a Man to Drink

As I wrote at Bluesky,

We wanted to understand why so many are beset by economic anxiety in spite of ample evidence that the economy is just fine. So we spoke to some professional Republican business travelers quietly stewing themselves at a barbecue joint at Newark Liberty.

I love the fact that Oates herself did this almost as much as the fact that it got done. Readers adding context confirm her estimates are about right.

***

Block That Chain

FAQ

We've got a question from Kevin in Bakersfield:

Has anyone ever asked the current president why would he have a classified document outside of the SCIF from his Senate days? Has he ever been confronted with that question? pic.twitter.com/kj6UOT2d4D

— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) June 13, 2023

Your friends in the House Intelligence Committee could explain to you that a SCIF, short for Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility, is a place where you're allowed to keep SCI, Sensitive Compartmentalized Information, and the current president, who is former Senator Joe Biden (I guess you knew that), like former Rep. Mike Pence, probably never had any SCI at his house. The overwhelming majority of classified documents are not SCI, so that's the most likely reason.

Unlike former president Trump, who had a SCIF installed at Mar-a-Lago as president, and is known to have sent himself some SCI in the 80 boxes of presidential documents he shipped there on January 19 2021, a few hours before he stopped being president; some that turned up in the 15 boxes he shipped from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives in January 2022, and some in the 65 boxes he kept there in spite of many polite requests and a subpoena. Including one of the 11 sets of classified documents he tried to hide from the FBI by keeping them in his desk drawer.

Hope that helps.

***

On Not Negotiating With Terrorists

American hostages in Tehran, 1979, via Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

From comments on Friday's post (in which it looks like I turned out to be right):

emjayay 21 hours ago

Any money cut from the increased IRS funding will actually cost multiples of the amount cut with wealthy individuals and corporations getting away with continued cheating.

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  Yastreblyansky Mod emjayay18 hours ago

  Sure, but one eighth is a lot less than all of it.

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    Jeff Ryan  Yastreblyansky16 hours ago

    But they could never cut all of it. So why are we laying down?

    I thought we didn't deal with terrorists...

Actually, we always deal with terrorists and extortionists. As you're reading this, there's probably somebody in Washington thinking about the next step in trying to get that Wall Street Journal reporter out of Lefortovo prison. Evan Gershkovich. And whoever is stuck in Iran. Every major police force has people specifically trained to talk down bombers and hostage takers. As far as I know, it's actually effective sometimes, and when it is, it saves lives, sometimes on a massive scale. I was thinking about this the whole time, even as I was using the expression myself, cheering Democrats on in their justified anger, but I wasn't thinking hard enough.  

"We don't negotiate with terrorists" means something, but it isn't exactly what it sounds like. It means more or less "This negotiation isn't going anywhere if you can't give me some reason to think of you as not a terrorist."

Joe Did What? State of the Hostage Situation

 

Poster by TaoJones42, available from Redbubble for $15.56.

As somebody or other said you can never make a deal until you do, and it looks, according to reporting from Jim Tankersley and Catie Edmondson for The New York Times last night, corroborated this morning by the Washington Post, like we're just about there with the debt ceiling, and details are starting to emerge from the process in a way they weren't before. I think we need to fold up the way we feel about the existence of the debt ceiling and keep it for next time Democrats have majorities in both houses of Congress, and take it out then and put a wooden stake through that stupid law's heart and cut off its head and fill its mouth with garlic and bury it at a crossroad (using the reconciliation procedure as needed). I may not be alive by then (last time there was a real chance was probably 1993), so I'm telling you now.

Meanwhile, we might as well turn our attention to what we're going to get instead, which Josh Marshall says is unexpectedly good: it lifts the debt ceiling, rather than increasing it to a given number, for the next two years, until out beyond the next presidential election, so that we won't have to think about it again until 2025, and the budget cuts, as far as is currently understood, are less violent than feared, keeping the veterans' money as is and freezing the rest of the non-defense discretionary spending at 2023 rather than 2022 levels, or just a bit less:

What's Next on the Debt Ceiling?

Random denomination. too. Via.

So Joe Biden, having sworn never to yield to McCarthy's blackmail and negotiate appropriations under the threat that the House could refuse to do its constitutional duty and pass a rise in the debt ceiling and allow the nation to default on its debt for the first time in our history ...

... has started negotiating appropriations under the threat that the House could refuse to pass a rise in the debt ceiling, and so forth. Have we got that right?

Possibly not. David Dayen at The American Prospect, who certainly knows more about these matters than I can even imagine, has come up with a more benign way of looking at it, anyway, based on the fact that McCarthy really did pass a rise in the debt ceiling, in his own peculiar way, even though it was in a bill the Senate and White House couldn't possibly agree to; that changed the situation, as Dayen said:

I do believe there was some inkling, at least within the White House, that McCarthy would never get that bill passed. It took a fairly superhuman effort for him to thread the needle of his caucus and find a majority, and then only when two Democrats missed the vote. You can’t fight something with nothing; if McCarthy couldn’t get consensus, at some point he’d have to acquiesce to a clean debt ceiling increase. That would have been humiliating and reasonably possible. It was worth going for from the Democrats’ perspective. 

I remember thinking that way myself, and it came agonizingly close to being true. But in the end it wasn't, and Democrats (and Mitch McConnell) had to turn to a different approach. What they're up to now is negotiating, but politely disagreeing on what they're negotiating about: the debt ceiling is "off the table", say Schumer and Biden; the debt ceiling is "off the table", says McConnell; "No it isn't," says Kevin, and it's a free country, so he has a right to his opinion. But the fact remains that when the solution comes, over the next couple of weeks, it will include a rise in the debt ceiling.

NeverKevers

Byron Donalds swearing in in 2018, via Wikipedia.

A note or two on that guy, Byron Donalds, to whom the House clowns turned today as their Speaker candidate-of-the-day. It's not clear what they have in mind except for the obvious part, that they like putting up a Black candidate against a Black democratic candidate (Herschel Walker against Raphael Warnock) because this proves they're not racists, but it's possible there's more.

One thing is that he's from Florida, representing Naples, which makes him a member of a contingent of NeverKevers, along with Reps. Gaetz of Fort Walton Beach and Anna Paulina Luna of St. Petersburg, as of yesterday's third ballot and through today's fourth, fifth. and sixth. Another thing is that all three of them have something else in common, as Florida Republicans—close connections with Governor Ron DeSantis. Gaetz was a valuable support to DeSantis—Gaetz and his pal Joel Greenberg—in the 2018 gubernatorial campaign

One former campaign adviser said Gaetz was on every conference call with advance teams “and generally was often just a key voice in directing the campaign what to do.”

“Man, I can’t tell you how much by the end of the election he was the campaign,” said another former DeSantis adviser who worked on the race. “By the time we were in heavy general election mode, DeSantis was not doing anything without Gaetz being in on it.”

and one of the things Gaetz did was to introduce Byron Donalds, who got the job of playing Andrew Gillum in DeSantis's debate preparation, which is not necessarily a small thing.

Another thing Donalds has done, which has got him a bit of a reputation for arrogance, was when he challenged the Trumpiest of the Trumpy Elise Stefanik over the position Stefanik had conquered from Liz Cheney, chair of the Republican House Caucus, even though he was still in his freshman term. He lost, of course, but he got himself noticed.

Donalds also has a truly weird little connection with DeSantis having to do with campaign finance laws, which he did an end run around in an interesting way in 2020, when he was a member of the Florida House of Representatives running for Congress:

In 2019, Donalds formed a state political committee called Friends of Byron Donalds and started raising money. Early in 2020, Donalds resigned as chairman of the committee and three days later filed to run for an open US House seat in southwest Florida.

Around that time, a super PAC called Trusted Conservatives registered with the FEC. When Friends of Byron Donalds closed its doors in June 2020, it sent its remaining reserves, about $107,000, to Trusted Conservatives. For the next three months, Trusted Conservatives spent most of that money on ads supporting Donalds or tearing into his Republican primary challengers. Donalds ultimately won the race by just 777 votes and was elected to Congress that November.

By rights, this should have been illegal on a couple of counts: you're not allowed to transfer money raised for a state election to a federal election, and a candidate isn't allowed to coordinate with the decisions made by a super PAC. But when a watchdog complaint on this went to the Federal Elections Commission, the FEC, helplessly divided 3-3, let it go, and Donalds got away with it; and this apparently made an impression on DeSantis, who himself is engaged in a federal run for the presidency with a gigantic war chest of money raised for the Florida governorship

The Florida governor is shattering national fundraising records as he seeks a second term, attracting gobs of money from Republican donors eyeing DeSantis as a potential presidential candidate in 2024. At the end of May, DeSantis was sitting on $111 million – more money than any candidate has ever needed to win an election in the Sunshine State. More donations come in almost every day.

And scuttlebutt says DeSantis was pretty impressed by Donalds's ingenious trick.

Which doesn't prove anything, obviously, but if you add in that other thing, about the other 2024 presidential candidate who lives in Florida, when he was passing out pardons to allies in 2024, but failed to offer one to Gaetz over the latter's complicated relationship with a number of very young women and a Venmo account and other misbehavior, even though Gaetz asked very politely, then it starts to add up a little, as a move against McCarthy, McCarthy being Trump's chosen candidate (however reluctantly Trump may have chosen him): Gaetz. Donalds, and Luna are organizing a little DeSantis caucus in the House, proposing to devote it to the DeSantis campaign.

Is this what Gaetz is organizing on the Hill? An anti-Trump campaign of the unpardoned (includes NeverKevers Scott Perry, Andy Biggs, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, Jim Jordan, and I think Chip Roy)? I hope so. As ever, I'm rooting for injuries, but this is a way of understanding why it's so much fun.

Literary Corner: Raucous Caucus

Drawing by Harry Bliss.

 

LOL

Things getting heated in House GOP meeting.

McCarthy swore in his speech, dropping a “god damnit.” And he made clear he would negotiate no more. McCarthy also said opponents came to him with “personal asks” last night.

Lauren boebert yelled in response to speech: “BULL SHIT”

— Melanie Zanona (@MZanona) January 3, 2023

Then Boebert even got a chance to deliver a funny:

Literary Corner: A New Voice

 

Christmas Season

by Kevin O. McCarthy

We’re Christmas season.
A talk of the majority right now
who wants to put a small continuing resolution
to bump all the members up
two days before Christmas,
to try to vote on a package they cannot read,
written by two individuals who will not be here,
on spending for the entire government.

The Democrats have been in power.
They've had the House, the Senate, and the presidency.
They did not do their work.
But they should not jam us now.
They should not jam the American public.
We cannot afford it.

We should not move a short-term C.R.
We should move one further into the new year.
Allow the American people what they said
a month ago. To change Washington
as we know it today. We can't afford
to continue to spend the way the Democrats have.
The future generation
cannot afford it as well.

If Chris Ran the Circus

 

The Spotted Atrocious.

The Most Chris Cillizza Thing Ever:

If you ever held any hope that the House select committee on the January 6 US Capitol riot might produce a report that would help us understand what happened in the lead-up to that day and, in so doing, provide us avenues to keeping it from happening again, you should give up on those hopes now.

The reason? Speaker Nancy Pelosi's decision Wednesday to reject two of the five nominees -- Jim Jordan of Ohio and Jim Banks of Indiana -- put forward by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to serve on the panel.

Absolutely! How could be possibly come to understand what happened in the lead-up to January 6 without Gym Jordan flapping his arms, barking like a dog, and running back and forth on the tabletops? We completely depend on Gym Jordan and Jim Banks for our ability to understand virtually anything!

Wait, who is Jim Banks? He's somebody who's gone from backing the Mueller investigation during his first term

Hi it's Stupid: Four Little Children

 

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images via Women's Health.

Hi, it's Stupid to say we need to keep responding to this bullshit as if there were a chance that it would make a difference in the world—Kevin Kruse and Imani Gandy are both practically weeping with fatigue at the thought of having to push that filthy stone another half an inch up the hill, and you really can't blame them, because they've been struggling for a lifetime and the opponents NEVER LEARN ONE SINGLE THING, but I thought of a slightly new line of argument I"d like to preserve for the record—

Namely, that when Dr. King said he had a dream that one day his four little children would be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin, he meant something by it, and in particular he had a reason for using the word "dream": because he knew when he woke up it wasn't going to be true. And he knew it wasn't going to come true in 1964, and in spite of all the ungratifying work he'd put in to elect a Southern Democrat to the presidency to build on the Civil Rights Act and prevent Republican Barry Goldwater from getting the opportunity to destroy it it wasn't going to come true in 1965 either, or 1967. It was going to take more than his own shortened lifespan to get there, and maybe more than those of his children as well, because the problem of racial injustice was so deeply ingrained into the fabric of American society—because it was, as we now call it, systemic. He was a master of critical race studies before they existed:

Maybe she's just smarter than Kevin

Illustration by hotlittlepotato via Wired.

An interesting claim in this WaPo story: Liz Cheney seems to think there is evidence she has the politics right, and party management seems to be trying to hide the evidence from members:

When staff from the National Republican Congressional Committee [at an April retreat] rose to explain the party’s latest polling in core battleground districts, they left out a key finding about Trump’s weakness, declining to divulge the information even when directly questioned about Trump’s support by a member of Congress, according to two people familiar with what transpired.

Trump’s unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones in the core districts, according to the full polling results, which were later obtained by The Washington Post. Nearly twice as many voters had a strongly unfavorable view of the former president as had a strongly favorable one.

Schrödinger's Poker

 

Tubalcain Alhanbra, via Shine.

The Senate impeachment trial was suddenly thrown into some kind of turmoil by the surfacing of some sort of new detail on the 6 January siege, from Rep. Jaime Lynn Herrera Beutler (R-WA and one of the ten Republicans who voted to impeach in the House), on the story Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told her of his call that afternoon to Trump to beg him to call off his thugs and stop the assault.

It wasn't going to change the outcome of the trial, though it probably should have, but it could have prolonged it beyond bearing: the House managers wanted to call her and, I thought, McCarthy as witnesses, and Trump's lawyer Michael Van der Veen threatened to come back with a call for 100 depositions, just for starters—effectively, to turn the impeachment into Benghazi hearings. 

In the end they made a deal: Herrera Beutler's story will be added to the record, but suppressed from the closing statements, and won't be part of the case on which the senators vote. 

I'd like to spend some time on it all the same. The story also does offer some important clarification for our understanding of what happened, alongside the reporting of Tommy Tuberville's conversation with Trump of around the same time, in which Trump had been urging him to do something to delay the certification of the election results after Pence's announcement that they would be certified in spite of Trump's complaints. In the call Tuberville is said to have told Trump he had to go because the Capitol police were evacuating the Senate chamber as the Senate's president, Mike Pence, was being whisked out of the room.

For the Record: The End of Omar

Under pressure of extreme irritation from some Twitter guy I assembled a lengthier set of thoughts starting with Representative Ilhan Omar and carrying it somewhere I haven't entirely been before. It probably duplicates some stuff I've said before, especially in the earlier bits, but I'd like to keep it here for the record in this format.

Somali Muslim Ilhan Omar complained when Irish Catholic Kevin McCarthy pressured her to show "allegiance" to Israel. She said nothing about Jews and "dual allegiance". It is time to stop misinterpreting this story. https://t.co/FZef1EiwJk

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 16, 2019

That's all Democrats have to do is apologize, not the same for Conservatives

— Maria Gillette (@mariapa1776) March 16, 2019

Do you have a reading disability? Relevant text highlighted in screenshot: pic.twitter.com/VBfARYUkq4

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 16, 2019

She and Tlaib were put under particular pressure, threatened by McCarthy. No Jews are singled out as having "dual loyalty". pic.twitter.com/CkDJ9BWeeo

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 16, 2019

I probably should have realized at this point that I wasn't going to be able to make him understand what I was talking about.

Dual Loyalty Postscript

Also Kevin McCarthy is the most classic Elders-of-Zion believer in the House. Him accusing anybody of anti-Semitism is like Joe McCarthy calling somebody a drunk.

The fact that Kevin McCarthy is allowed to comment on and criticize Ilhan Omar with a straight face is absolutely wild pic.twitter.com/jfrDHVWwF0

— the fair contract ratifier (@pblest) March 6, 2019

I'd completely forgotten about that ghastly meme of the three Jewish billionaires (Steyer's only half-Jewish, like me) threatening to buy the entire US political system which you could only save by sending Kevin McCarthy money, #MAGA.

And he's never apologized, unlike Ilhan Omar, merely denied:

Asked by Fox News Channel’s Harris Faulkner about his October tweet, McCarthy responded, “Well, that had nothing to do about faith; that was about Republicans versus Democrats.”

"Nothing to do about faith"! "Faith"! That smarmy word. No indeed, it was about race. Speaker Pelosi, please reprimand this man.

Dual Loyalty

Illustration, coincidentally, from this morning's installment of Roy Edroso's ongoing study of "Grandpa's Inbox". Note how the rightwing bottom-feeder scum associate one of the congresswomen with the theory that there's an incredibly wealthy Jewish financier working to bring the entire world under his secret personal control.

So much stuff I really don't want to think or write about, from the presidential campaign, above all Bernie and Biden, to the whole tsuris over Representative Ilhan Omar, a Somali-born freshwoman from Minnesota who wears the hijab, and her rhetorical approach to the pro-Likud lobbying forces in US politics, as described with some initial restraint by Jonathan Chait:

Earlier this month, Representative Ilhan Omar tweeted, “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby!” in response to a report about AIPAC, a pro-Israel organization. Omar’s tweet echoed a longstanding anti-Semitic trope — in particular, the implication that Jewish political influence operates entirely (“all about”) through money.

After wide condemnation, Omar apologized. It seemed fair to read her tweet generously: Perhaps she was not familiar with the particular vein of anti-Semitism she happened to echo. Indeed, progressives often make crudely reductive statements about the influence of money in supporting policies they oppose (to wit: everything Bernie Sanders says), so it wasn’t necessarily anti-Semitic for Omar to extend that thinking to Jews. Her apparently sincere apology seemed to set to rest a minor offense.

Chait is right about the more simple-minded of us progressives attributing everything bad in politics to money influence, but has the story itself completely wrong, in fact: there was no report about AIPAC. There was a report about House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who had issued a vague threat against Omar and another new congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib of Detroit, who had done something he didn't like which he equated with Iowa Rep. Steve King's remarks about not understanding when white supremacy became a bad thing: