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Month: January 2023

A satisfying “both-sides” takedown

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump predictably does the best analysis of this “both sides” excuses for the “classified documents” story:

Look, when there’s no need for your rhetoric not to be lazy, you land on lazy rhetoric. If you can carry the day — at least with those who you’re most worried about convincing — with little effort or logical consistency, why bother putting in the effort or assembling that consistency? If your target audience hasn’t even heard the nuances that undercut your point, why bother rebutting those nuances?

So it is that we enter our second (third? Who can keep track) week of apologists for former president Donald Trump seeking to equate his effort to retain documents sought by the government with a clutch of documents with classification markings found at President Biden’s home and an office he used. Despite the ongoing incomparability of the situations, the relentless, overlapping desires to curry Trump’s favor and to appeal to his loyal followers by echoing his rhetoric has generated a new series of arguments from Republicans, encapsulated over the weekend in a revealing demand.

Where, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) demanded to know, are the visitor logs from Biden’s personal residence? To which the White House responded, in short: It’s a house.

Before we adjudicate that demand — and show the failings of Comer’s efforts to defend the request — let’s take a thousand-foot look at the situation.

In November, attorneys working for Biden discovered documents with classification markings at an office at the University of Pennsylvania that Biden used after leaving the vice presidency. They were turned over to the government; it’s not clear what they contained or whether they were still classified. Further searches turned up documents at Biden’s home that were also turned over. We also don’t know much about those documents, though Biden has expressed surprise that they turned up.

By contrast, Donald Trump took dozens of boxes of material with him when he left the White House in 2021. Some of what he took was material related to his presidency that, under federal law, remain government property. So the National Archives contacted him about turning the material over. After months of back-and-forth, Trump did send a number of boxes back to Washington. In them, archivists found a mix of personal material and documents with classification markings. The National Archives alerted the Justice Department.

Federal investigators launched a probe, talking to people at Mar-a-Lago, the event space that now doubles as Trump’s home. A subpoena was issued for any documents with classification markings — regardless of classification status — and, in June 2022, an attorney for Trump attested that all material compliant with the subpoena had been turned over. But further investigation revealed that it hadn’t been. So, in August, the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago and found dozens more documents, including a number that had been stored in Trump’s office at the property, a place where he regularly entertained guests. The rest of the documents were kept in a storage room that was off a publicly accessible hallway.

None of this is new; none of this is complicated. If anything, the summary of Trump’s documents is overly concise relative to the summary of Biden’s because most of the intermediary steps included their own cascades of questions. (At one point, for example, the government sought surveillance footage to track who had access to the hallway near one area where documents were recovered.) At the end of the day, though, the useful comparison is less about the documents than how they were handled — though even on the question of scale and intent, Trump compares unfavorably to Biden.

After the first documents became public, the ones from the Biden think tank at Penn, there was a rush to wash away all of the questions about Trump’s actions, as though someone had dropped an Uno “reverse” card. As has so often been the case with Trump defenses, the argument shifted from “what he did was bad” — and, to be very clear, storing classified documents in an insecure way is bad regardless of who might be doing it — to “the other guys are bad too.” Or, really: “The other guys are worse.” And that’s where Comer comes in.

The oversight committee chairman sent a letter to White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, asking for documentation of anyone who’d visited Biden’s home. From the standpoint of trying to argue that the other guys are worse, this is a brilliant tactic: Either Biden’s team says there are no logs — which the White House says is the case given that this is his house — you get to imply nefariousness or coverup or insincerity or laxness, take your pick. And if there are logs, they would show people, like, say, Hunter Biden!!!!! visiting his father’s home. And from there, you can loop in the entire rest of the “Biden Crime Family” literary universe.

In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday, Comer made clear that contrasting Biden unfavorably with Trump was a central aim of his efforts.

“My biggest concern isn’t the classified documents, to be honest with you,” Comer said. “My concern is how there’s such a discrepancy in how former president Trump was treated by raiding Mar-a-Lago, by getting the security cameras, by taking pictures of documents on the floor, by going through Melania’s closet, versus Joe Biden.”

The “security cameras” request, mind you, was probably aimed at least in part at ensuring that documents weren’t moved. It alone is a reminder of how the concerns and questions about the two presidents diverge. But, in an effort to go tit-for-tat with the Justice Department, and thereby to suggest equivalence, Comer demands visitor logs.

Tapper challenged Comer on this.

“Are you also asking for the visitor logs at Mar-a-Lago?” he asked. “Because the issue of whether or not sources and methods are compromised, whether or not any of these documents [have] gotten into the wrong hands, whether or not Biden or Trump allowed documents to be kept in a haphazard way, that exists, period.”

“Well,” Comer replied, “we’re doing the Biden family influence-peddling investigation.”

This is known as “begging the question.” Comer is only investigating Biden because that’s the focus of his investigation. And the purported “influence” here, it seems, is a tangential link between the Biden think tank at Penn and Chinese funding, one that, as Tapper pointed out, Penn has denied — even doing so back in 2020 when an effort to paint Biden with the same brush was attempted.

On Monday, Comer appeared on friendlier turf: Fox News’s prime time lineup. His patter was the same but the level of pushback significantly diminished.

“All we’re asking for is equal treatment here,” he insisted. “You know, why was Mar-a-Lago raided by the FBI? Why did the FBI go in and go through every room, including Barron’s room and Melania’s closet? Why did the FBI take surveillance cameras from Mar-a-Lago, but yet they haven’t set foot, to our knowledge, on the premise of either the Biden Center for Diplomacy or the Biden residence?”

The answer to those questions is consistent: Because an investigation indicated that Trump was trying to shield documents from the federal government, ones marked as classified and ones that weren’t. Again: It is not good if either Trump or Biden had classified documents in their possession; debates over the extent to which either might have unilaterally declassified them notwithstanding. But that’s not really what the Trump situation is about, which Comer certainly ought to know and certainly should convey to the public.

By suggesting that the Trump and Biden situations are the same, though, Comer and Trump’s other allies can feign equivalence and hypocrisy. And given the apparent lack of interest among Trump’s base in a more nuanced, more accurate presentation of the situation, the play works.

Meanwhile, in an alternate reality the once and possibly future president now says this:

This is a novel new defense which he must have heard on some fringe wingnut media outlet or from one of his sycophants. It’s been months and he never bothered to mention it before.

But sure, the Biden thing is exactly the same.

Trump’s comeback begins

On social media, anyway

Feel the magic:

Mounting a comeback for the White House, Donald Trump is looking to regain control over his powerful social media accounts.

With access to his Twitter account back, Trump’s campaign is formally petitioning Facebook’s parent company to unblock his account there after it was locked in response to the U.S. Capitol riot two years ago.

[…]

“Trump is probably coming back to Twitter. It’s just a question of how and when,” said a Republican who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations with Trump about returning to the platform. “He’s been talking about it for weeks, but Trump speaks for Trump, so it’s anyone’s guess what he’ll do or say or when.”

Another Trump confidant who also didn’t want to be identified speaking about conversations with him said that Trump has sought input for weeks about hopping back on Twitter and that his campaign advisers have also workshopped ideas for his first tweet.

I’ll never get over the fact that they actually “workshop” tweets. He says that he drafts his Truth Social posts too and gets comments and edits from others. You have to wonder what the drafts looked like.

You have to love this though considering all the hoopla over the government leaning on social media for partisan purposes:

“If Facebook wants to have this fight, fine, but the House is leverage, and keeping Trump off Facebook just looks political,” the adviser said, noting that House Democrats like Adam Schiff of California told Facebook last month to keep Trump off the platform.

Lol. Yeah, there’s nothing political about the House Republicans using their “leverage” though…

This speaks to the limitation of his vanity project, Truth Social where he has a bit more than 4.8 million followers while he has 88 million on Twitter and 34 million on Facebook. I don’t know if they actually thought all those people would follow him but it’s clear that they didn’t.

Negotiating with very stupid terrorists

We barely had time to catch our breath from the wild spectacle of the Republicans finally electing a speaker when their next spectacle started with a bang. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen abruptly announced that the U.S. will hit the so-called debt ceiling on Jan 19, putting the issue immediately on the front burner. The government can move money around to keep paying its bills until some time next summer, but this is  already shaping up to be an exhausting, months-long battle royale. It’s probably a good thing that they’re getting an early start since the MAGA House majority seems to need some serious remedial instruction on how the world works.

That’s not to say that debt-ceiling standoffs are some core tactic of the MAGA movement. In fact, Republicans raised the debt ceiling three times during the Trump administration with no fuss at all. They never felt it necessary to try to persuade Trump to cut spending, and the Freedom Caucus didn’t utter a peep as he massively increased the deficit. These hostage situations are reserved for times when the GOP holds the House and a Democrat is in the White House. Shocking, I know.

This debt ceiling vote is a ritual with no real purpose. The government made the decision during World War I, for reasons that should have been temporary, to require a vote to agree to pay the nation’s bills. This makes no sense: Congress already voted to spend the money, so it’s ridiculous to require another vote to pay it out. In fact, after the Civil War, the drafters of the 14th Amendment, concerned that Southern Democrats (pretty much the MAGA types of that day and age) would make good on their threat to disavow the national debt incurred during the war, explicitly wrote into the Constitution the words, “the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.”

Not only are payments for necessary services, from Social Security and Medicare to food safety and even the sacred-to-Republicans border security at risk, as the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampbell explains, this could tip the entire global economy, already in a fragile state, over into crisis:

Until now, U.S. debt has been considered virtually risk-free. The riskiness of all other assets around the world is benchmarked against the relative safety of U.S. Treasury securities. If the U.S. government reveals itself to be an unreliable borrower, however, expect to see shockwaves course through every other financial market, as many question how safe (or not) those other investments might be. This is the last thing the economy needs amid fears of a global recession.

The bottom line is that this debate is ridiculous. Unfortunately, the Republican Party is even more ridiculous these days, so we are destined to play chicken with the good faith and credit of the U.S. government every time these circumstances present themselves.

It should be noted that all of this was evident when the Democrats still had the House majority, which was more than willing to raise the debt ceiling during December’s lame-duck session. Unfortunately, the Diva Twins, meaning Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, refused to eliminate the filibuster or use the budget reconciliation process to get it done.

Luckily, not all Democrats fail to grasp the moment. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii phrased things perfectly, channeling Michael Corleone in “The Godfather Part II,” when asked what Democrats might be willing to offer Republicans: “In exchange for not crashing the United States economy, you get nothing.” Regarding demands that Democrats sit down with their opponents at the negotiating table, he replied, “We have to tell them there is no table.”

Previous debt ceiling standoffs came perilously close to crashing the world economy. This new GOP crew is champing at the bit to see if they can get that done this time around.

You can’t negotiate with people who behave the way these Republicans are behaving. They aren’t just delusional but also massively ignorant about what they’re attempting to do. Take, for example, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, just named to the House Oversight and Homeland Security committees, who said this on Steve Bannon’s podcast shortly after the November election:

What we have to do is, Republicans, when we’re in control of the purse and we’re setting these appropriation bills, and our budget is — we have to refuse to raise the debt ceiling. We have to get spending back under control and we have to do that by any means possible. And if that means a government shutdown, then I’ll be calling for a government shutdown. Because this government — and you can see the people support what I’m saying, Steve – because this government shut our country down with those COVID shutdowns.

That is literally gibberish, completely incomprehensible. Rep Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., made an even dumber comment:

That doesn’t make any sense either. Our currency is not “devalued,” and that’s got nothing to do with the debt ceiling in any case. He apparently doesn’t even grasp that taking the debt ceiling hostage is about trying to force Democrats to agree to massive spending cuts in the future, in exchange for paying the bills today. Evidently he doesn’t want to pay them at all.

Here’s some more gibberish from the actual speaker of the House, when asked about Democrats’ demands for a clean debt ceiling increase:

Would you just keep doing that? Or would you change the behavior? We’re six months away? Why wouldn’t we sit down and change this behavior so that we would put ourselves on a more fiscally strong position?

Here’s another idea that’s always popular on the right — which would be necessary if they really plan to eliminate the national debt completely, as McCarthy apparently promised in his backroom deals during the speakership saga:

Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio is at least a bit more coherent, recognizing that Republicans may have stepped on the third rail with talk about cutting military spending, which one of the backroom negotiators, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, says was never on the table. Jordan said, “Military cuts could be made by eliminating ‘woke policies’ & re-examining aid to Ukraine, allowing the government to focus more on troops and weapons systems.” There’s also been talk about eliminating much of the officer corps, which would be an interesting experiment.

Hilariously, Republicans are trying to spin the impending mess this way:

That’s cute, but it’s not going to fly. Republicans have already shown the whole country that they are wildly unhinged, and nobody will mistake which party is being reckless and which isn’t.

It’s also clear that they don’t care. Donald Trump, their battered spiritual guru, explains what it’s really all about:

It’s about putting on a spectacle to own the libs, of course. What else would it be? Trump may have lost some of his mojo but his legacy is secure. The Republican Party is still MAGA all the way down.

#slowcivilwar

Why does the conservative American Dream look like Mogadishu?

Jeff Sharlet is documenting the attrocities.

TSA confiscates an anti-tank weapon from a passenger’s luggage at a Texas airport

I’ll repeat: Why does the conservative American Dream look like Mogadishu?

And like Syria:

We have met the enemy….

And he is the rest of us

Donald J. Trump is a catalyst not a cause. Trumpism and its nihilistic “Deep State” wreckers have deeper roots than the shallow, game-show grifter whose name attached to our grievance-fueled anti-democracy movement.

There is more than polarization afoot, argues Brian Klaas, writing from Britain. Unlike the U.S., few in England buy into conspiracy theories. Here, polarization “plus this conspiracist tendency risks turning run-of-the-mill democratic dysfunction into a democratic death spiral.”

The paranoid style was with us since before Richard J. Hofstadter’s 1964 essay. Jared Yates Sexton argues that conspiratorial thinking found fertile ground in the New World and was present at the nation’s founding.

Klaas compares the belief gap (The Atlantic):

According to YouGov polling, a third of Americans believe that a small group of people secretly runs the world, while just 18 percent believe the same in the United Kingdom. Similarly, 9 percent of Americans think COVID-19 is a fake disease. In Britain, that figure is just 3 percent. Seventeen percent of Americans agree with the statement that “a secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles has taken control of parts of the U.S. Government and mainstream U.S. media,” compared with 8 percent of Britons.

What makes our domestic crackpots more of a threat today is they are being elected to positions of leadership. (Lunatics and asylums, as it were.) The consequences aren’t just a threat to democracy but to Americans’ lives, not to mention their liberty and pursuit of happiness. Florida under Gov. Ron DeSantis is on its way to becoming the first among The Fascist States of America. Cranks like former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn should be laughingstocks, and would be in Britain, Klaas argues. Instead, they headline right-wing conferences here.

Deranged grifters profit from what the writer Kurt Andersen has called the “fantasy-industrial complex,” in which media provocateurs, including Infowars and Fox News, have cashed in on political messaging defined by a conspiratorial mindset.

They prey on susceptible individuals, particularly those who are lonely and bored, browsing alone, and finding online communities to replace real-world ones. People with paranoid personalities are particularly vulnerable, as are those with a Manichaean worldview—a perception that the entire world is a battle between good and evil. At the ReAwaken America event, one speaker advanced the outlandish claim that the election was stolen by demons.

The fringe right and evangelicals share common paranoid proclivities. Raimundo Barreto and João B. Chaves trace connections between the apocalyptic Christian nationalism that drove Trump’s January 6 insurrection and similar fervor that fueled the Bolsonaro insurrection in Brazil two years later. It is no coincidence that after the Civil War, “thousands of American Confederate families migrated to Brazil, partially attracted by the endurance of slavery there.” They brought their conservative theology with them (Washington Post):

Brazilian evangelicals often look to their U.S. counterparts for inspiration, resources and even the legitimacy of their beliefs. A new generation of Brazilian evangelicals is networking with Christian nationalists in the United States and other parts of the world. The significant evangelical participation in the crimes against democracy committed in Brazil on Jan. 8 suggests the potential dangers of this transnational religious phenomenon.

Thomas B. Edsall examines the personality characteristics at work among Republicans reaching for leadership roles. Their election denialism and racial resentments go hand-in-glove, finds Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at M.I.T. (New York Times):

According to Stewart’s calculations, “a Republican at the 10th percentile of the conspiracism scale has a 55.7 percent probability of embracing election denialism, compared to a Republican at the 90th percentile, at 86.6 percent, over 30 points higher. A Republican at the 10th percentile on the racial resentment scale has a 59.4 percent probability of embracing denialism, compared to 83.2 percent for a Republican at the 90th percentile on the same scale.”

In other words, the two most powerful factors driving Republicans who continue to believe that Trump actually won the 2020 election are receptivity to conspiracy thinking and racial resentment.

“The most confirmed Republican denialists,” Stewart writes, “believe that large malevolent forces are at work in world events, racial minorities are given too much deference in society and America’s destiny is a Christian one.”

One study from political scientists Alessandro Nai and Jürgen Maier at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Koblenz-Landau finds that “subclinical ‘psychopathy’ is significant in the behavior of a growing number of elected officials.”

Nai and Maier also refer to a character trait they consider politically relevant, Machiavellianism, which they describe as having

an aggressive and malicious side. People high in Machiavellianism are “characterized by cynical and misanthropic beliefs, callousness, a striving for argentic goals (i.e., money, power, and status), and the use of calculating and cunning manipulation tactics,” and in general tend to display a malevolent behavior intended to “seek control over others.”

Through generating chaos if need be.

A 2021 paper, “Some People Just Want to Watch the World Burn: the Prevalence, Psychology and Politics of the ‘Need for Chaos’” argues:

Some people may be motivated to seek out chaos because they want to rebuild society, while others enjoy destruction for its own sake. We demonstrate that chaos-seekers are not a unified political group but a divergent set of malcontents. Multiple pathways can lead individuals to “want to watch the world burn.”

More strategic and less religiously dogmatic actors such as Steve Bannon may envision rebuilding from the ashes. Evangelicals view the conflagration as a trigger for the return of their heavenly king. In the meantime, they’ll settle for an earthly one. And install one by force if they can manage it. They’ve been primed from Sunday school to desire a king. Democracy is for unbelievers.

In a recent paper, Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux found

“the need for chaos is most strongly associated with worries about losing one’s own position in the social hierarchy and — to a lesser, but still significant extent — the perception that one is personally being kept back from climbing the social status ladder,” noting that “that white men react more aggressively than any other group to perceived status challenges.”

You didn’t need a scholarly study to confirm that, but there you go.

Klaas concludes:

To solve a problem, you first must agree it exists. Democracy therefore requires a shared sense of reality. Instead, America has splintered into a choose-your-own-reality society, in which citizens self-select into whatever version of the world they want to inhabit, reflected back at them by media outlets that earn most when they challenge worldviews least. Conversely, in Britain, the BBC continues to dominate broadcast-media market share, and outlets that push conspiracy theories have tiny audiences. Moreover, left-wing and right-wing politicians both watch and agree to be interviewed by the BBC, whereas in the U.S., politicians gravitate toward friendly partisan media outlets.

Even if politicians can agree a problem exists, the Manichaean nature of conspiracy theories—and the extreme claims embedded in conspiratorial cults such as QAnon—makes compromise unlikely. Trying to find shared ground with a fellow American who disagrees with you on health care or taxes is one thing, but if you believe that Democrats are harvesting children to suck their blood, then working together on, say, democratic reform becomes much harder. Granted, elected Republicans on the whole don’t truly believe those more outlandish claims, but some of their core voters do, and that puts pressure on them to treat Democrats like evil enemies rather than legitimate political opponents.

Their champion in the new Congress is a former(?) QAnon believer who has blamed wildfires on Jewish space lasers.

Things not to believe about politics

A primer

Paul Waldman with a very helpful reminder:

Like many billionaires, Elon Musk apparently sees himself as a genius not only in areas where he has real experience but in all things, including politics and government. Which is why he tweeted this about the omnibus spending bill Congress passed last month:

This is a common type of misinformation, one that swirled about with particular intensity regarding the omnibus bill. Not that Musk doesn’t believe it; I’m sure he does. His tweet shows how easy it is to be seduced by ideas that have intuitive appeal but are completely wrong.

Let’s begin with Musk’s assertion and work our way through some other widespread but pernicious ideas about how politics works:

“If members of Congress read bills before voting on them, legislation would be better.”

How could anyone oppose that? But the truth is that most legislators usually don’t read the text —and that’s fine. It isn’t because they’re lazy. It’s because legislation involves a specialized type of language, written by experts for purposes that have nothing to do with understanding and wise decision-making. Members should know exactly what they’re voting on, but the text of bills is only tangentially related to that goal.

The omnibus bill runs more than 4,000 pages, because it’s funding our extraordinarily complex government, which does all kinds of things we want it to do, and it is written in arcane legislative language. I don’t care much whether my senators pored over the section on rural electrification and telecommunication loans that specifies this:

For the cost of direct loans as authorized by section 305(d)(2) of the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 (7 U.S.C. 935(d)(2)), including the cost of modifying loans, as defined in section 502 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, cost of money rural telecommunications loans, $3,726,000.

Neither should you. It’s enough that they’ve been told, and are okay with, about $10 billion being spent in that particular section.

“If only we stopped wasteful spending, we’d solve most of our problems.”

Waste is bad, after all. And there is plenty of waste in government, just as there’s waste in pretty much every corporation and nonprofit organization everywhere.

But when someone rails against wasteful spending, they seldom specify exactly which spending is supposedly wasteful.

If you press them, they’ll probably cite either spending that’s utterly trivial — some silly-sounding program that spent a few hundred thousand dollars somewhere — or spending that is quite important but they don’t happen to like. Some people think Medicaid is “wasteful,” but the tens of millions of Americans who count on it likely disagree.

As a corollary, some assert that stopping spending will tame inflation. “The ONLY way to stop soaring inflation is to STOP RECKLESS SPENDING,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) tweeted last month. Sounds reasonable, right? But inflation is declining, not soaring, and while the level of government spending can contribute to inflation, lots of other factors affect it too: interest rates, the resilience of supply chains and the weather, to name a few.

The truth is that people such as Scott who rail against “wasteful spending” want to spend on some things but not others. The omnibus bill contained a staggering $858 billion for the Pentagon. At the current rate of growth, we’ll spend more than $10 trillion on the military over the next decade. Ask Republicans whether we should cut that to tackle inflation and see what they say.

“My family balances its budget. Why shouldn’t the government?”

The reason is that the government is not a family or a household. For instance, when times are tough, deficits do, and should, go up. That’s because the government brings in less revenue and has to do more to help people. If the government slashed spending during every recession to balance the budget, it would only make things worse.

Your family also probably borrows money to invest in important long-term projects that cost too much money to pay cash up front — like your home or your education. So should government.

“Government should be run like a business.”

But government isn’t a business. It’s not an enterprise devoted to obtaining profits. It does many things that cost money but don’t produce a financial return, like delivering mail to far-flung rural addresses or caring for the sick.

“The parties need to stop the partisan squabbling and get things done.”

This is an incredibly common idea, one driven by the presumption that political differences are meaningless. But especially in our polarized age, political differences are incredibly meaningful.

Partisans “squabble” over questions such as whether abortion should be legal, whether taxes for the wealthy should go up or down, what to do about climate change, whether to extend health coverage to more people and whether workers deserve higher pay, to name just a few.

There aren’t nonpartisan answers to these questions just waiting to be seized if people would put aside party loyalties. Those loyalties are driven by deeply held values, and, a lot of the time, conservative and liberal values aren’t compatible.

“We need more people in Congress who aren’t politicians.”

You hear this often from first-time candidates, who present their lack of qualifications as their key qualification. Yes, politicians are prey to some bad tendencies — self-aggrandizement, cravenness, short-term thinking — but just as you wouldn’t hire an accountant to rewire your house or an electrician to do your taxes, you need people who understand politics and policy to deal with political and policy questions.

To return to the omnibus spending bill, none of this means there aren’t objectionable things in the bill. There are. But they didn’t get there because members didn’t read the bill, or because anyone was being “reckless,” or because of a deficit of common sense. They were choices, some of which you might like and some of which you won’t. That’s how policymaking works.

Every word of this is correct. Now, I can understand that some average voters might say things like this because it’s what they are told by people who know better. There is no excuse for politicians to spread this swill and definitely no possible reason for the media to do it. But they do — talking heads drop this stuff more often then anyone else and everyone around the table sighs and chuckles mordantly. It’s been going on as long as I can remember and it’s completely irresponsible.

Your daily Marge

I thought it might be important to remind ourselves just what kind of person has been put on the Oversight and Homeland Security Committees today:

That was in 2018.

Dear god.

Marge today:

The new fascism

Talk about optics … yikes.

It’s not just optics. It’s very dangerous propaganda:

I assume that Desantis thinks he can gather unassailable wingnut cred by doing all this stuff and then tack to “the center” and pretend he isn’t insane in a general election. But I don’t think that’s possible these days. This stuff lives on the internet forever.

On the other hand, he may just be betting that between election suppression and propaganda a majority will sign on to this extreme far-right agenda. Maybe he thinks he can ride this insanity all the way to the White House. After all, Trump wasn’t exactly a middle of the road guy.

However, the voters who loved Trump loved him because of his attitude, fame, wealth and other intangible personality traits. (Why, I’ll never understand.) And he went after specific people they didn’t like. DeSantis is a simple bully who instead of entertaining his audience with colorful insults and childish nicknames, is systematically attacking institutions and ideas, using the power of his state government to shut down dissent. His culture war crusade is grim and methodical and his personality is dark and mean. Maybe that will be attractive to the majority of voters. But it never has been before.

Sure there are political junkies and right wing true believers who like this stuff. And they number in the tens of millions. But in order to win, you need more than that, which even Trump with his more entertaining, World Wide Wrestling style of politics couldn’t do. Which Biden voters are going to be drawn to vaccine hostility? How much ritual humiliation of LGBTQ people will they tolerate? Do suburban moms really want to destroy public education by sending teachers running for the exits and banning books? Are main street Republicans looking for the government to dictate what private businesses are allowed to say and do?

There is always the chance that we’ll find ourselves in a major crisis and people will look to a strongman type. Who knows? Maybe the Republicans will even provoke the crisis for that purpose. (It wouldn’t be the first time a right wing faction successfully seized power using that tactic, would it?)

But short of that, I wonder if DeSantis is going to wear well. He’s just going so far, so relentlessly. Is the country ready for this level of radicalism? I guess we’re going to find out.

The first impeachment is in the hopper

Some supposed “moderates” are nervous

It won’t make a difference:

Senior House Republicans are moving swiftly to build a case against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as they strongly weigh launching rare impeachment proceedings against a Cabinet secretary, a plan that could generate sharp backlash from GOP moderates.

Key committee chairmen are already preparing to hold hearings on the problems at the southern border, which Republicans say could serve as a prelude to an impeachment inquiry against Mayorkas. Three House committees – Oversight, Homeland Security and Judiciary – will soon hold hearings about the influx of migrants and security concerns at the border.

The House Judiciary Committee, which would have jurisdiction over an impeachment resolution, is prepared to move ahead with formal proceedings if there appears to be a consensus within the GOP conference, according to a GOP source directly familiar with the matter. The first impeachment resolution introduced by House Republicans already has picked up support, including from a member of the GOP leadership team.

A GOP source said the first Judiciary Committee hearing on the border could come later this month or early February.

One top chairman is already sounding supportive of the move, a sign of how the idea of impeaching President Joe Biden’s Cabinet secretary has moved from the fringes to the mainstream of the conference.

“If anybody is a prime candidate for impeachment in this town, it’s Mayorkas,” Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told CNN.

It’s exceedingly rare for a Cabinet secretary to be impeached, something that has only happened once in US history – when William Belknap, the secretary of war, was impeached by the House before being acquitted by the Senate in 1876. Yet it’s a very real possibility now after Kevin McCarthy – as he was pushing for the votes to win the speakership – called on Mayorkas to resign or face potential impeachment proceedings.

With no signs that Mayorkas is stepping aside, House Republicans are signaling they’re prepared to move ahead, even as a bevy of members are uneasy about the approach.

Indeed, McCarthy has to balance his base’s demands for aggressive action with the concerns from more moderate members – many of whom hold seats in swing districts central to his narrow majority. And some in safer seats aren’t yet sold on whether the GOP should pursue that route.

“Clearly, the management of the Southern border has been incompetent,” Rep. Dusty Johnson, a Republican of South Dakota, told CNN. “That is not the threshold in the Constitution for impeachment – it’s high crimes and misdemeanors. … I would want to think about the legal standard the Constitution has set out – and whether or not that’s been met.”

If he loses more than four GOP votes on an impeachment resolution, the effort would fail in the House and could mark a huge embarrassment for the GOP leadership. Already, he has lost one vote – Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas who said he’d oppose the effort – and several other members are far from convinced that charging Mayorkas with committing a high crime and misdemeanor is warranted, even if they believe he’s done a lackluster job in helping secure the southern border.

“Has he been totally dishonest to people? Yes. Has he failed in his job miserably? Yes,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a Florida Republican, said of Mayorkas. “Are those grounds for impeachment? I don’t know.”

Indeed, Republicans from swing districts are urging their colleagues to not rush into impeachment, which would be dead-on-arrival in the Senate and could turn the American people off if the party is perceived as overreaching.

“The border is a disaster and a total failure by the Biden administration. We should first to try to force change through our power of the purse,” Rep. Don Bacon, who represents a Biden-won district in Nebraska, told CNN. “Maybe after more oversight we’ll see where middle America is at, but I don’t think independent, swing voters are interested in impeachments.”

Asked Tuesday about his pre-election warning that Mayorkas could be impeached by the House over the GOP concerns about the borders, McCarthy railed on the problems at the border.

“Should that person stay in their job? Well, I raised the issue they shouldn’t. The thing that we can do is we can investigate, and then that investigation could lead to an impeachment inquiry,” McCarthy told CNN, adding it could “rise to that occasion” of an impeachment if Mayorkas is found to be “derelict” in his duties.

They’re going to do it anyway. They’ve already filed articles of impeachment and they’re gaining supporters:

[T]here are signs that the push is gaining steam in the House GOP.

Fallon’s resolution has attracted the support of several Republicans who previously held off on calling for impeachment, including Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican and member of the Homeland Security Committee, and Oklahoma Rep. Stephanie Bice, a new member of the GOP leadership team – signaling the idea is hardly isolated to the fringe wing of the party.

Fallon, too, had not previously backed impeaching Mayorkas until this Congress. Fallon said that he introduced impeachment articles to help get “the ball rolling,” but still believes it’s key to show the American public why they believe Mayorkas deserves to be removed from his post.

“It is important, it is an emergency, you need to break the glass, you really do need to take it up, and then we’re going to have an additional investigation,” Fallon told CNN. “While that’s why I filed the articles, you can always just sit on them and not do anything with them. That starts the ball rolling, we’re going to give Mayorkas the opportunity to defend himself and his department.”

Meanwhile, key committee chairs are vowing to hold hearings on the crisis at the southern border and prepping plans to haul in officials for interviews. GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who leads the powerful House Judiciary Committee where impeachment articles would originate, suggested the issue would be one of the first hearings when his panel gets up and running.

GOP leaders are cognizant of the fact they can only afford to lose four Republicans on any given vote, and want to build a thorough case for impeachment that can bring the entire party along. But pressure is already building on McCarthy, who has emboldened members of his right flank in his bid to claim the speaker’s gavel – and even given them a powerful tool to call for his ouster if he doesn’t listen to their demands.

Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican and one of the key negotiators in the standoff over McCarthy’s speakership and who was the first to call for Mayorkas’ impeachment, told CNN: “I’ve been very public about my belief that he has violated his oath, that he has undermined our ability to defend our country.”

This is just the beginning. Aside from the debt ceiling terrorism, these ridiculous investigations and impeachment hearings are going to take up all the oxygen in this congress. Soon, Trump is going to be joining the fray. Should be a lot of fun…