Month: January 2023

we will see how long this is the case but right now on cable news it is all classified documents all the time pic.twitter.com/ppzHC9NheJ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 12, 2023

David Chalian on CNN said this morning:

You seem to want points from the American people that you immediately notified the archives and in turn notified the justice department when these document were found at the beginning of November, but why didn’t you notify the American people? We don’t have an answer to that question. They have no answer to the question of why they chose not to be transparent with the American people at that time.

You see, they’re not accusing him of anything they’re just asking questions. It’s all about transparency, nothing more.

Watching the feeding frenzy over Joe Biden’s documents super-scandal, I was reminded of how the media reacted when Hillary Clinton fainted on the campaign trail after months of conditioning by the right wing media that she was brain damaged. This is how it works: right wing media pounds on a story for months that the mainstream media eagerly devours but only reports around the edges. Then when an opening presents itself they burst forth with accusations that the official or candidate was engaged in a cover-up. It happens all the time.

In the current case, it’s all about the right’s ongoing mantra about the “Biden Crime Family” the assumption being that Biden had absconded with these documents in service of his corrupt dealings with foreign countries to line his pockets. His “lack of transparency” by failing to immediately call a press conference to tell the media that they’d found the documents obviously means he was hiding something and these Hunter Biden accusations are in the back of their mind as they grab the hook that allows them to launch into fledged hysteria over the issue. Since they already have a desperate need to prove that they don’t have any bias against Trump, this is manna from heaven.

Yes, I know it’s incredibly stupid, but here we are.

This is a piece I wrote back in 2016 about how the right set up the trope that Hillary Clinton was brain damaged, providing the underlying logic of Trump’s insult that she didn’t have “the strength and stamina” for the job. (Yes, it was sexism, but there was something much more specific going on.)

August 19, 2016:

How do we know it’s the dog days of August in a presidential election year? Swimmers and swiftboats, that’s how. Actually until August of 2004, we used to call swiftboating by other names: whisper campaigns and smear jobs. But after the success of the slick, pre-packaged set of lies about Senator John Kerry’s war record this tactic will always be known for the boat that first made Kerry a hero and later destroyed his reputation.

This year, we’re treated to an especially ugly form of swiftboating.  The right-wing smear machine is working at warp speed to convince the nation that Hillary Clinton has brain damage. That is not hyperbole or some kind of a joke. They are literally claiming that she is hiding a physical and mental disability which renders her unfit for office. And they are, as usual, being helped by members of the mainstream media who are simply unable to resist “reporting” such a juicy tale even knowing that it is absurd. And so it becomes part of the narrative, true or not, that will color the rest of the campaign and Clinton’s presidency should she win.

Karl Rove first crudely suggested that Clinton had a serious brain disorder when she fell and suffered a concussion a few years ago which required her to wear her thick prism glasses instead of contacts to correct temporary double vision. Nobody took him seriously at the time, but the rumor has been percolating in the fever swamps and Trump and company were obviously aware of it. Trump himself has been saying from the beginning that Clinton doesn’t have the “strength or the stamina” to be president. He also claims that she can’t campaign more than a couple of days a week and then she has to go hide and recover. (This is one of those lies so blatant that it renders people mute — Clinton is clearly campaigning constantly, indeed she’s out there more than he is.)

This attack was echoed by Matt Drudge as far back as October when he appeared on conspiracy monger Alex Jones’ show and said “she’s old and she’s sick, she is not a viable, vibrant leader for this country.”  It’s no surprise then that this latest full blown swiftboat offensive began on Drudge’s web site. It’s one of his specialties.

On Aug. 7 he linked to an obscure right wing website that had posted a picture of Clinton tripping on some porch steps and being steadied by a couple of aides under the title “2016: Hillary Conquers the Stairs.” He neglected to mention that the picture was taken in February and she was on icy stairs.

The next salvo came from Trump’s friends at the National Enquirer which published a screaming headline “Hillary Clinton’s Secret Health Crisis.” And according to Ben Collins at the Daily Beast, “by the middle of the day the No. 2 trending Google search about Hillary Clinton was: “Is Hillary having health problems?”

That night Trump surrogate Sean Hannity devoted his show to fanning the rumors, even bringing in the Fox Medical A-Team who appear regularly on the network to diagnose her from afar and demand to see a complete neurological workup and all of Clinton’s medical records. He continued the rumor mongering throughout the week.

By this time the fall was old news. Now she was said to be having seizures and speaking oddly and having weird expressions on her face and exhibiting muddled thinking. When a protester tried to rush the stage at one of her rallies and a secret service agent stepped to the podium and said they had things under control, people said he had a diazepam pen in his hand at the ready, apparently in case she had a seizure right there on the spot. (It’s all rubbish, of course.)

Meanwhile, the “Alt-right” has gone completely over the edge with this craziness. Collins writes that the conspiracy site Info Wars has turned over its entire site to these rumors:

Hillary Clinton supposedly has Parkinson’s disease, syphilis, brain damage, a brain tumor, autism, a degenerative disease that is giving her seizures and/or strokes, and a blood clot, according to InfoWars writer Paul Joseph Watson. Oh, and he says she has a drug problem. All of these diagnoses — save for Parkinson’s, which commanded a separate full-length article—came in a single one of Watson’s YouTube videos released on Thursday. It now has over 1.6 million views at press time.

Look, Steven, that's your version of the case" — KJP in response to a loaded question from Steven Portnoy pic.twitter.com/gtNryw672R

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 13, 2023

And yes the mainstream media has joined in the fun. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews has devoted several segments to the issue, apparently convinced that where Republicans blow smoke there must be fire saying, “what are the Republicans up to on this health issue? Why are they on to this? What do they know? Is there something we don’t know in the health records? Something that could change this election around?”

Newspapers are running stories pointing out that she uses a stool on stage when someone else is giving a speech as evidence that she’s too weak to stand. Web sites are posting picture arrays of Clinton using a pillow behind her back as if that’s a sign that she “needs propping up.” Dr Drew Pinsky of Celebrity Rehab weighed in saying that he’s concerned that Clinton isn’t getting the proper medical care for “her condition.” (Even Newt Gingrich called that “junk medicine.“) And fake medical records appeared out of nowhere and started making the rounds prompting Clinton’s physician to reiterate her earlier declaration that Clinton was a healthy woman capable of handling the duties of president.

Last night Trump surrogate Katrina Pierson took it to a new level by offering up a full diagnosis on MSNBC, saying there are “reports of observations of Hillary Clinton’s behavior and mannerisms,” that Clinton suffers from “dysphasia” — a neurological condition that limits a person’s  ability to communicate or understand speech. I’m going to take a guess that Pierson didn’t come up with those talking points herself.

This confluence of activity didn’t happen by chance. It was planned and executed from InfoWars to Youtube to Drudge to Hannity to The Daily Mail to MSNBC and finally the NBC Nightly News and The New York Times.   And regardless of what the fact checks say, a whole lot of people in this country now believe that Hillary Clinton, a woman of great intelligence and impressive endurance, is a brain-damaged invalid. Swiftboat mission accomplished.

I’m sure you remember how the media completely lost its collective mind when she fainted later that fall. They had been primed.

That’s why the feeding frenzy over Biden’s documents is so strangely intense. The right has been planting Biden stories in their minds for many months and now they’re going for it.

We need an immediate investigation into why people are dying suddenly from strokes and cardiac arrest all across the world.

Especially while people are continued to be forced to take #COVID19 vaccines through mandates. https://t.co/RlT8GIx7F1

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) January 11, 2023

She’s right! Until now, people hardly ever died from strokes and heart attacks. This must be investigated and all vaccines must be blasted into space on Jewish space lasers! (We can’t take the chance of them being released Chinese chain-of-function labs by Dr Fauci…)

But it does have a historical parallel

During the George W. Bush years, as the nation waged the “global war on terror,” there was massive concern among civil libertarians about the government’s indifference, if not hostility, to human rights and civil liberties. While the “Bush Doctrine” held that “either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists” and professed a commitment to spreading democracy (at the point of a gun) around the globe to defeat them, Vice President Dick Cheney articulated an even darker vision in a “Meet the Press” interview five days after the 9/11 attacks:

We have to work the dark side, if you will. Spend time in the shadows of the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion.

It wasn’t long before it became clear what he meant. Eventually, the press and other investigators uncovered evidence that the government had gone very dark indeed. It had unleashed the FBI on innocent American Muslims, while military units and the CIA were kidnapping and torturing supposed terrorism suspects in secret “black sites” all over the world. There were secret no-fly lists and warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens, nearly all of this occurring in total secrecy without oversight by the courts or the Congress.

Many civil libertarian organizations, from the ACLU to the Brennan Center, protested all this blatantly illegal or unconstitutional government activity and those voices grew even louder after the 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden, which showed the vast scope of these programs. From the beginning there were calls for a “new Church Committee” to investigate the vast overreach of the intelligence community. That was a reference to the semi-legendary committee led by Sen. Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat (!), in the wake of Watergate, whose unwieldy official name was the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities.

Although it was associated with Richard Nixon’s scandals, the Church Committee was truly bipartisan — conservative hero Barry Goldwater was among its five Republican members — and examined the excesses and illegal activity of the FBI, CIA and NSA during the entire postwar period, much of which had been revealed in the press during that era of aggressive investigative journalism. That committee, along with the similarly aligned Pike Committee in the House, uncovered information about such programs as COINTELPRO, which involved the surveillance and infiltration of American political and civil rights organizations, and Family Jewels, a covert assassination program aimed at removing foreign leaders the U.S. didn’t like. One of the most shocking discoveries was Project MKULTRA in which the government used torture and drugs on unwitting Americans for illegal experiments in mind control. Several other programs were revealed involving a cooperative relationship between Intelligence agencies and the news media to disseminate government propaganda both domestically and overseas.

It may all sound like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel, but it all actually happened right here in the good old USA. These astonishing revelations led to the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which created the (still secret) FISA court, and to the creation of the standing committees on intelligence in both houses of Congress. But while the Church Committee has a historical reputation as having substantially reformed the Intelligence agencies, the truth is that its effect was limited. It wasn’t easy to get any significant reforms through Congress, and it didn’t take long before those changes began to erode.

Nonetheless, the Church Committee stands as a symbol of strong bipartisan investigative oversight and reform of the most powerful and secretive law enforcement and Intelligence agencies. So when civil libertarians called for a “new Church Committee” a decade or more ago, that made sense.

Throughout the post-Church era, the American right has almost entirely been on supportive of government secrecy and the intelligence agencies (as with the notorious Dick Cheney quote cited above), allowing for a handful of self-styled libertarians like Sen. Rand Paul and his dad, former congressman Ron Paul. In fairness, most Democrats have been as well. It has mainly been progressive Democrats (like Rep. Barbara Lee and Sen. Ron Wyden, for instance) who opposed these programs while the rank-and-file right enthusiastically endorsed torture and mass surveillance and asked for more. But ever since Donald Trump and his inexplicably Russia-friendly campaign came on the scene seven years ago — cheering on illegal hacking of his opponents by foreign agents — the right has worked itself into a frenzy about the “deep state” abusing its power by investigating Trump’s suspicious behavior.

The true leader of the new House majority, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, came up with a plan to turn the tables, now that the GOP has subpoena power:

.@TuckerCarlson suggested forming a new “Church Committee.” @GOPLeader is making this happen in the House rules package. I’ll serve on it, and we will go wherever the evidence leads us. pic.twitter.com/86gGvlGD5V

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) January 7, 2023

The real name of this Republican snipe-hunt committee gives away what this is all about: The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The New York Times reports it will have “access to information on par with the House Intelligence Committee,” and Republicans say they have a mandate “to scrutinize … a concerted effort by the government to silence and punish conservatives at all levels, from protesters at school board meetings to former President Donald J. Trump.” You can see why they’d need the highest security clearances for such important work.

This latest “investigation of the investigators” will specifically go after the law enforcement officials investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection and will be chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who was intimately involved in the attempt to overturn the election results in 2020. In other words, this neo-pseudo-Church Committee has been tasked with investigating the law enforcement agencies that are investigating them.

This bears almost no resemblance to the bipartisan Church Committee, which was established by a nearly unanimous vote in the Senate to look at systematic abuses going back decades under administrations led by both parties. But it does bear great resemblance to some earlier committees that purported to be rooting out abuses in the U.S. government. Ironically enough, the name McCarthy is associated with both of them.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin first made his name in a 1950 speech claiming that he had a list of communist sympathizers in the State Department. He spent the next half decade accusing hundreds of federal employees, including members of the military and the Truman administration, of being Soviet spies or “fellow travelers.” His investigations and public hearings were a cavalcade of lies and spurious accusations. He was coddled and enabled by Republican leaders, all the way up to President Dwight Eisenhower, who were too timid to confront him lest they anger his multitude of online fans. (Joe McCarthy would have been sensational on social media.)

There is no single figure like that McCarthy leading the charge in this new GOP majority. There are dozens of them, and they have no genuine interest in abuses of power or the excesses of the “deep state” (which most certainly have continued under both parties). They simply want to avenge their leader Donald Trump and intimidate the authorities into backing off from any potential prosecution of Trump and his closest allies. So they intend produce a full-blown televised McCarthy-esque spectacle aimed at proving that Trump was the innocent victim of liberal (perhaps communist?) cops and spies within the federal government who seek to ruin everything America stands for.

Joe McCarthy was washed up and dead from alcoholism at the age of 47. These heirs to his legacy will end up clowning on Fox News and fundraising big bucks online from suckers who will themselves into believing it’s all real. As the O.G. commie Karl Marx famously observed, “all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. The first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

Salon

Budgets are moral documents

The cartoon at the top has stayed with me since I first spotted it. “This is my list of things I don’t want others to have” describes in a dozen words the conservative governing philosophy in a way that might otherwise require a doctoral dissertation.

The entire Jim Crow era was based upon keeping black people from sharing in freedoms, privileges and power white people enjoy. New Jim Crow voting restrictions being passed today are based on it. Every time a conservative utters the phrases “real American” or “real America” they are making a claim to privileged status they believe is their birthright. Others equally American, at least in theory, must prove themselves worthy in a world where conservatives claim a veto over their advancement. Typically, whenever conservatives feel their social status threatened.

Republican budget priorities and fixation on tightening election rules reflect a narrow, exclusionary view of who counts as a citizen and who does not.

Catherine Rampell examines the new rule set House Republicans just passed and finds the same bias towards the right’s kind of people.

Spending programs benefitting the plebs must be paid for. Tax cuts for the wealty and corporations? Nope.

“Going forward, tax cuts do not need to be offset with any sort of savings elsewhere in the budget,” Rampell explains. “They can add trillions to the debt. No problem.”

The GOP has stacked the deck in favor of lowering taxes and against spending anything on those Others.

“There are a couple of big takeaways from these technicalities,” Rampell writes:

First is that, if you read between the lines, you’ll learn that even Republicans don’t believe their own long-standing promise that tax cuts will pay for themselves. After all, if the GOP genuinely believed this, they wouldn’t need to make it easier to pass tax cuts thatdon’t pay for themselves. Because such tax cuts … would not exist.

Second is who and what they care about.

“This is fundamentally about who pays for what, what are we investing in, and who’s left behind,” said Joel Friedman, a researcher for the Center on Budget Policies and Priorities. “It puts up barriers to the type of investments and public services that will help people through health care, education, supporting kids.”

As a result, we can expect more kids and poor families to face hardship, particularly if there is a downturn this year; and perhaps (even more) tax cuts for the rich.

[…]

Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what your priorities are, President Biden often says. Well, Republicans have shown us: a lower tax burden on the rich, less help forthe poor and the middle class.

More important than what Republicans want for Christmas is what they don’t want others to have.

For Democrats, e pluribus unum and “created equal” are more than pretty words.

No shame. But you knew that.

The right is addicted to daily outrage like a meth addict to crank. It is the fuel without which Tucker Carlson has no show and the Matt Gaetzes cannot show out. There is no close-up magic artistry to it. That their daily performances of outrage are strained and obvious is of no more concern than a dope-slap is to fans of the Three Stooges. Subtlety is not part of the shtick. But gas stoves?

The GOP once felt obliged to dog-whistle its prejudices. But that was pre-Trump. Nowadays MAGAs wear their animus on tee shirts or fly it from the back of a white Dodge Ram.

That said, a whispering campaign on the part of the GOP against one of their own almost evokes nostalgia for the Karl Rove-era (Politico):

As Harmeet Dhillon seeks the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, opponents have begun raising concerns about her Sikh faith — a development that has left some members of the committee unsettled.

Two supporters of Dhillon, who is challenging incumbent RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, told POLITICO that McDaniel allies have brought up Dhillon’s religious affiliation with them in recent weeks. One of the two said that a fellow RNC committee member, who is openly supporting McDaniel in the race, brought up concerns about Dhillon’s “Sikh faith” during a recent phone conversation. That person was granted anonymity to discuss the matter.

The topic has become so buzzed about that Dhillon herself has been forced to address it publicly, this week retweeting RNC members who condemned those drawing negative attention to her religious affiliation.

McDaniel is a Mormon and “wholeheartedly condemn[s] religious bigotry in any form.”

The focus on Dhillon’s faith hasn’t just come from people supporting McDaniel. In an email sent to an RNC member on Sunday, a purported supporter of “MyPillow” CEO Mike Lindell, who is also running for committee chair, brought up Dhillon’s religion as an issue. The copy of the email, which was provided to POLITICO with the sender’s name redacted, urged the recipient to support Lindell, an “ardent Christian conservative.”

“She is an Indian Sikh by birth and heritage, Not of Judeo-Christian worldview,” the emailer wrote of Dhillon. “None of these core character positions aligns with the Republican Party Platform, planks, or conservatism in general.”

Reached for comment, Lindell told POLITICO to “shove it.”

In a statement to POLITICO, Dhillon called it “hurtful to learn that a handful of RNC members, in a close race for RNC chair, have chosen to question my fitness to run the RNC by using my devout Sikh faith as a weapon against me.”

Has Dhillon spent any time with members of her own party? Has she appeared with Carlson and seen how the her allies play? (She has.)

But if there’s something Republicans cannot abide more than people of non-Christian faiths who don’t know their place, it’s a loser. Trump’s star is on the wane and McDaniel’s reelection is in jeopardy.

Chris Horn, a GOP commentator in the state and chair of Alabama’s Tennessee Valley Republican Club, is not on the steering committee but has openly supported McDaniel’s reelection. While acknowledging that Dhillon has the right to practice her faith, he defended Republicans who are seeking information about Dhillon’s religious beliefs. He said he is concerned Dhillon would cut existing RNC programs targeting Protestant, Catholic and Jewish voters — something Dhillon has not proposed doing.

“People aren’t bigots because they ask questions,” Horn said. “That’s a legit question: Is the Republican Party, or even the Democratic Party ready for someone of the Sikh faith?

“If someone from another faith wants to be the leader of our party, then you’re going to be the leader of tens of millions of Christians. And there’s not been any conversation about that at all,” Horn added. “That’s just the fact of the matter.”

Come on, Chris. Just come out and say it.

Closer than we knew

Vanity Fair looks at the 13,000 addendum to the new paperback release of NY Times reporter Michael Schmidt’s Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President featuring a long profile of former Chief of Staff John Kelly:

Last March, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Donald Trump reportedly told a room full of Republican National Committee donors that the US should “put the Chinese flag” on a bunch of military planes and “bomb the shit” out of Russia—and afterward, “we say, China did it, we didn’t do it, and then they start fighting with each other, and we sit back and watch.” Maybe you remember this, because it was a fucking insane thing to say. Or maybe you don’t, because Trump has said and done fucking insane things on a near-daily basis for many years now. Either way, it seems that this was not a one-off, and that suggesting the US attack another country and blame it on someone else is reportedly very much the 2024 presidential candidate’s thing.

In a new section of his 2020 book on Trump, as obtained by NBC News, New York Times correspondent Michael Schmidt reveals that Trump spent much of 2017 suggesting “behind closed doors in the Oval office” that he wanted to attack North Korea. The then president, Schmidt writes in the soon-to-be released afterword to Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President, “cavalierly discussed the idea of using a nuclear weapon against North Korea, saying that if he took such an action, the administration could blame someone else for it to absolve itself of responsibility.”

For his part, John Kelly reportedly attempted to explain to his boss why that probably wouldn’t work, noting that “It’d be tough to not have the finger pointed at us,” but, of course, the then White House chief of staff was using reason and logic, two things that haven’t typically worked on Trump. Still, according to Schmidt, Kelly tried, bringing in “the military’s top leaders to the White House to brief Trump about how war between the US and North Korea could easily break out, as well as the enormous consequences of such a conflict. But the argument about how many people could be killed had ‘no impact on Trump.’” Nor did the threat of economic blowback; according to the book’s update, informed of why all of this would be a very bad idea, the president would still “turn back to the possibility of war, including at one point raising to Kelly the possibility of launching a preemptive military attack against North Korea.”

Last May, less than two months after the former guy reportedly floated the idea of attacking Russia and blaming it on China, we learned that, according to former defense secretary Mark Esper, Trump asked, on at least two occasions, if the military could “shoot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs,” saying, “They don’t have control of their own country.” Told all the various reasons this idea was a no-go, the then president reportedly insisted that they could do it “quietly,” adding: “no one would know it was us.” Informed that, yes, people would know it was the US, Trump apparently responded that he would simply lie and say the US didn’t do it.

Trump released a video last week announcing that he would order the military to take out the cartels if he wins the white house again. So he’s still on it.

I saw Schmidt on MSNBC and he says that when Trump was threatening fire and fury on Kim Jong Un, Kelly managed to get him off of it by suggesting that he make friends with the dictator — something that no one else in history had ever done. It didn’t solve the problem of North Korea’s nuclear program but it did keep Trump from launching nuclear war. As we know, he loved his “friendship” with Kim.

And this:

On the news that AG Garland has appointed a Special Counsel to investigate Joe Biden’s classified documents here’s Donald Trump’s response:

The DOJ took months to decide to name a Special Counsel for Donald Trump’s Mar-a-lago but it only took a month or so to do it in Biden’s case. I suppose you might think that means the Biden case looks much worse than the Trump case ever did but that would be stupid. Garland did it because of politics and I suppose I don’t really blame him.

It does fry me that they continue to think that naming Republicans (or someone who’s been out of the country for 5 years as Jack Smith has been) would somehow appease Trump and the GOP. They have made it an unofficial rule that only Republicans can be Special Counsels whether the subject is a Democrat or Republican and it hasn’t helped to legitimize these probes on the right one bit. They only care that a Democrat is taken down and if the prosecutor fails to do that they are either liberal symp or incompetent. Look at what they said about rock-ribbed Republicans James Comey and Robert Mueller.

As for Trump, well just look at those posts above. He calls Jack Smith a deranged, criminal, savage thug. So that worked out well.

A dispatch from red America:

Missouri has a lot of problems, but if you were in the statehouse today, you would have thought the biggest one was what female legislators wear.

Peter Merideth (D-St. Louis) shared the news on Twitter, “Debating the house rules on the floor today, and the first amendment offered by a Republican is about making stricter the rules of what women have to wear in here.”

“Yep, the caucus that lost their minds over the suggestion that they should wear masks during a pandemic to respect the safety of other is now spending its time focusing on the fine details of what women have to wear (and specifically how many layers must cover their arms) to show respect in this chamber,” Merideth added. He also clarified that lawmakers “thought a couple women last year didn’t dress nicely enough for their standards.”

I guess there was quite a debate but they ended up compromising by allowing women to wear cardigans to make sure their arms are covered if they didn’t want to wear a jacket. I wonder if they consulted with the Iranian Ayatollahs. They have a lot of experience policing women’s clothing (although it’s causing a bit of a problem these days … )

The good news is that apparently they aren’t requiring women to wear dresses with stockings and high heels so never say they are mired in antediluvian sexism.(And yes, the change was proposed by a Republican woman. What a gal.)

I mentioned the possibility of the Democrats and some swing district Republicans using the discharge petition as a way to get the debt ceiling raised against the will of the GOP House majority. It’s not a very promising route unfortunately. Semafor’s Joseph Zeballos-Roig explains(subscription only):

The discharge petition may be ill-suited to raise the debt ceiling, which carries a hard deadline before causing economic calamity. The process for forcing a vote is clunky and time-consuming and some experts believe House leadership could throw up additional roadblocks along the way.

“It’s kind of like trying to do open heart surgery with an ax,” Josh Huder, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University, told Semafor. “It’s just a very blunt instrument that’s unwieldy and will take a lot of time to accomplish what you’re trying to do.”

The steps to get to a vote are laborious:

-The bill must first sit in committee for 30 days
-Supporters have to gather 218 signatures
-The measure must sit in the discharge calendar for 7 days
-The Speaker then sets a time for the vote within 2 legislative days after a petitioner says they intend to bring up the motion

Complicated budget negotiations typically go to the last minute. So while a discharge petition might be able to get a bill past an unwilling speaker or a conservative-stacked Rules Committee that could otherwise halt it, the journey would require more time than they’re likely to have. And that assumes the Senate has the votes to follow through as well.

Even a brief default on Treasury debt could be an economic disaster, sending the markets into a panic while making it more expensive for Washington to borrow in the future as investors question the dependability of U.S. bonds.

“I would certainly not bet the faith and credit of the United States on that as plan A,” Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., the ranking member of the House Budget panel, told Semafor. He predicted the whole process “from beginning to end will take at least four months.”

Still, a discharge petition could potentially play some role in talks with enough foresight and coordination.

One option Democrats are likely to pursue is submitting “clean” bills early in the debate to raise the debt ceiling temporarily, or by a set amount, as a failsafe option.

Having a clean debt limit bill on deck could give moderate Republicans a way to pressure either side to reach a deal.

In this scenario, some Republican members might initially support their side in budget talks — but warn conservatives that they planned to join the petition if they determined the caucus was no longer working toward a realistic agreement or were keeping proposals with bipartisan backing from the floor.

If just five Republicans followed through on their threat and joined all Democrats, that would then get the petition to 218 signatures, enough to trigger a vote.

Conservatives, for their part, don’t seem too worried about an end-run around them. “It’s a bigger lift than you think on those things,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, one of the Republicans who initially resisted McCarthy, told Semafor.

Here’s Chip Roy on the debt ceiling today:

Roy: I intend to use the debt ceiling to ensure that we get fiscal and structural reforms. pic.twitter.com/5KWS3r6VhI

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 11, 2023

Fasten your seatbelts.

I’m not talking about Prince Harry

Steve Scalise is an unserious, clown-like person. Listen to this stuff. pic.twitter.com/W5HmNEuDHN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 12, 2023

That’s the person the media was touting as the moderate, sober choice to replace Kevin McCarthy if he didn’t get over the line on the speaker vote. He is much more popular in the caucus than McCarthy and you can see why. He’s nuts and so are they.

Here’s an example of Scalise’s rhetoric from December:

“Today’s final report is further proof that Democrats’ sham panel never was about impartial oversight—it was purely about politics. Instead of conducting impartial oversight of the federal government’s pandemic response, Democrats worked overtime to cover up President Biden’s failure to protect Americans. Democrats refused to investigate after we exposed the Biden White House manipulating the science to allow a radical teachers union to rewrite CDC guidance so they could make it easier to shut down schools. They refused to investigate the origins of COVID-19 and efforts by Dr. Fauci to downplay the Wuhan lab leak theory.

Democrats also refused to investigate the Biden Administration sidelining scientists during the booster approval process, and they have failed to hold former Governor Andrew Cuomo and other Democrat governors accountable for their deadly orders forcing COVID-positive patients back into nursing homes, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of thousands of seniors. The Biden Administration’s reckless actions denied a proper education to millions of our nation’s young people, placed Americans at risk for future pandemics, and denied grieving families the justice they deserve.

I know you are but what am I?

He’s a mainstream Republican leader. That’s what we’re dealing with now.