Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Fueling ecumenical extremism

What Alan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” left me with most, beside his “these kids today” tone, was how, in our congenital hubris, many Americans believe their thoughts are their own. With no real schooling in the evolution of ideas or in critical thinking, Americans may ignore what they’ve absorbed from their cultural melieu as having no real bearing except perhaps on their sartorial and musical preferences. Fundamentalists, of course, receive an upbringing not only in what to think but in what not to, and to distrust ideas not handed down by the patriarchs, the apostles and megachurch prosperity peddlers.

A habit of not interrogating one’s own thoughts make a mind fertile ground for those deliberately sowing weeds. The Washington Post has obtained a Russian document describing its government’s efforts at just that:

In a classified addendum to Russia’s official — and public — “Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation,” the ministry calls for an “offensive information campaign” and other measures spanning “the military-political, economic and trade and informational psychological spheres” against a “coalition of unfriendly countries” led by the United States.

“We need to continue adjusting our approach to relations with unfriendly states,” states the 2023 document, which was provided to The Washington Post by a European intelligence service. “It’s important to create a mechanism for finding the vulnerable points of their external and internal policies with the aim of developing practical steps to weaken Russia’s opponents.”

The document for the first time provides official confirmation and codification of what many in the Moscow elite say has become a hybrid war against the West. Russia is seeking to subvert Western support for Ukraine and disrupt the domestic politics of the United States and European countries, through propaganda campaigns supporting isolationist and extremist policies, according to Kremlin documents previously reported on by The Post. It is also seeking to refashion geopolitics, drawing closer to China, Iran and North Korea in an attempt to shift the current balance of power.

Using much tougher and blunter language than the public foreign policy document, the secret addendum, dated April 11, 2023, claims that the United States is leading a coalition of “unfriendly countries” aimed at weakening Russia because Moscow is “a threat to Western global hegemony.” The document says the outcome of Russia’s war in Ukraine will “to a great degree determine the outlines of the future world order,” a clear indication that Moscow sees the result of its invasion as inextricably bound with its ability — and that of other authoritarian nations — to impose its will globally.

It’s hard to imagine more fertile ground for sowing such weeds than the minds of a nihilist, anti-democratic movement led by a malignant narcissist with dictatorial ambitions, unless it is social media that rewards anger, divisiveness, and conspiratorial content with engagement. The Mueller Report documented in detail how the Russian Internet Research Agency skillfully played Americans for suckers in 2016. They watched as seeds of disinformation sprouted and choked reality until Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway could proudly speak her alternative truths on Meet The Press.

Ecumenical extremism

Yes, they mean it:

The academic, Vladimir Zharikhin, called for Russia to “continue to facilitate the coming to power of isolationist right-wing forces in America,” “enable the destabilization of Latin American countries and the rise to power of extremist forces on the far left and far right there,” as well as facilitate “the restoration of European countries’ sovereignty by supporting parties dissatisfied with economic pressure from the U.S.”

Read: Undermine NATO.

For Mikhail Khodorkovsky — the longtime Putin critic who was once Russia’s richest man until a clash with the Kremlin landed him 10 years in prison — it is not surprising that Russia is seeking to do everything it can to undermine the United States. “For Putin, it is absolutely natural that he should try to create the maximum number of problems for the U.S.,” he said. “The task is to take the U.S. out of the game, and then destroy NATO. This doesn’t mean dissolving it, but to create the feeling among people that NATO isn’t defending them.”

The long congressional standoff on providing more weapons to Ukraine was only making it easier for Russia to challenge Washington’s global power, he said.

Moscow has plenty of help on Capitol Hill. Some MAGA types may be bought. Others willingly volunteer. Other volunteers may not even know it:

“I think Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base,” Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Puck’s Julia Ioffe last week. Representative Mike Turner, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, went further, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper a few days later, “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.”

It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

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The play’s the thing

MAGA House Republicans on Tuesday peformed “The Impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Act 2.”

You wonder why Republicans get nothing done? So does Chip Roy.

“One thing: I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing—one—that I can go campaign on and say we did. One!” Texas Rep. Chip Roy thundered on the floor of the House in November.

Roy: One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did. Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me, one meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done pic.twitter.com/RGc4FTAelt

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 15, 2023

Roy got no takers. They were too busy performing for the Fox News audience and Donald Trump. The play’s the thing, they thought, wherein we’ll win approval from the MAGA king.

“What’s especially striking about Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachment is how little effort Republicans are investing in keeping up appearances,” Maddowblog observes:

It’s been more than a month since House Republicans made history by impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. His GOP detractors couldn’t find any evidence of him committing high crimes, but they nevertheless made Mayorkas the first sitting cabinet secretary in American history to impeached.

And then, nothing happened. The idea that this was an urgent matter of great national importance was quickly contradicted by the fact that Republicans didn’t do anything with the articles of impeachment for weeks.

Ah, but wait. They did. For Donald Trump’s trial in Manhattan to begin. They delivered the impeachment articles to the Senate on Tuesday. And who did they select for that solemn duty?

“The group of GOP impeachment managers included some of the party’s most right-wing extremists, including Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Clay Higgins of Louisiana, and Andy Biggs of Arizona,” writes Steve Benen:

These aren’t the kind of managers party officials would choose to make a credible case to the Senate; these are the kind of managers party officials would choose as part of a partisan, election-year stunt.

And that’s because this entire process is clearly a partisan, election-year stunt.

Evidence? Pishposh. Unserious impeachment managers? Step outside and we’ll show you serious.

The party that won’t raise the minumum wage or support Ukraine against the Russians won’t give their voters bread but will give them a circus in hopes that somehow it will either a) fuel their base’s simmering anger, and/or b) distract attention from Donald Trump’s legal peril.

“We’ve taken impeachment, and we’ve made it a social media issue as opposed to a constitutional concept,” former Colorado Rep. Ken Buck declared before resigning in disgust last month.

Benen adds:

GOP officials are barely even trying to prove him wrong. Republicans might as well be wearing t-shirts that read, “Yep, we’re engaged in a partisan, election-year stunt.”

NBC News’ report added, “It’s expected that Senate Democrats, who control the chamber, will band together and vote to dismiss or table the issue, then move on to other business, including the chamber’s need to renew a critical spy tool before it expires Friday. None of the Senate’s 51 Democrats have said they support the Mayorkas impeachment, and even a handful of GOP senators have said the impeachment is meritless.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will swear in senators as jurors in five hours. Watch this space.

The Lincoln Project set “The Procession of the Impeachment Managers” to appropriate music.

Fixed it @HouseGOP https://t.co/Spmw6BAaAs pic.twitter.com/VBFN7AnqFI

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) April 16, 2024

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In oral argument today, Justice Thomas is minimizing the severity of the 1/6 insurrection at the Capitol. Perhaps that's because his wife was part of the conspiracy. What a disgrace that he's sitting on this case. #SCOTUS

— Jeffrey Toobin (@JeffreyToobin) April 16, 2024

Here’s the rundown from Ian Millhiser:

The Supreme Court spent about an hour and a half on Tuesday morning arguing over whether to make it much harder for the Justice Department to prosecute hundreds of people who joined the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

It appears, after Tuesday’s arguments, that a majority of the justices will side with the insurrectionists — though it is far from clear how those justices will justify such an outcome.

The case, known as Fischer v. United States, involved a federal law which provides that anyone who “obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so” commits a very serious federal felony and can be imprisoned for up to 20 years — although, as Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar pointed out during Tuesday’s argument, actual sentences against January 6 defendants convicted under this statute have been much shorter, normally ranging from a little less than one year to slightly over two years.

According to the Justice Department, more than 1,265 people have been arrested for playing some role in the attack on the Capitol. Approximately 330 of them have been charged under the obstruction statute at issue in Fischer. One of them is Donald Trump.

As a federal appeals court held in its decision in this case, the obstruction statute is pretty darn clear that it applies to an effort to obstruct any congressional proceeding intended to certify the result of a presidential election — like the proceeding that the January 6 rioters attacked. And very few of the justices seemed to agree with Jeffrey Green, the lawyer representing a January 6 defendant, who proposed one way to read the statute more narrowly.

Nevertheless, many of the justices expressed concerns that the law sweeps too broadly and that it must be narrowed to prevent people who engage in relatively benign activity from being prosecuted.

Justice Samuel Alito, for example, expressed uncharacteristic sympathy for hecklers who interrupt a Supreme Court hearing — suggesting that prosecuting them under a statute that can carry a 20-year sentence goes too far. Justice Neil Gorsuch expressed similar concerns about prosecuting someone who peacefully conducts a sit-in to delay a court hearing, or someone who pulls a fire alarm to disrupt an official proceeding.

Indeed, Tuesday’s argument had a bit of a split personality. During Green’s time at the podium, most of the justices took turns criticizing his attempts to read the ban on obstructing an official proceeding narrowly. Even Alito, who is normally the Court’s most reliable vote for any outcome preferred by the Republican Party, got in on the game — telling Green that he “may be biting off more than [he] can chew” by arguing that the statute must be read to benefit his client.

By the time Green sat down, it appeared that he could lose in a 9–0 decision.

But any optimism that the Justice Department might have had early on in the argument must have been shattered almost as soon as Prelogar began her argument. Most of the justices peppered her with skeptical questions, although the justices who seemed to want to limit the obstruction statute struggled to agree on a single legal theory that would allow them to do so.

So the bottom line is that this case is probably going to end well for many January 6 defendants, but it is far from clear how the Court will justify such an outcome.

It appears that Trump may be spared having to pardon some of those J6 “hostages” after all. (The ones currently in jail for long terms were convicted of other crimes as well.)

Millhiser goes on to lay out the obstruction law in detail and then writes:

 [W]hile it is hard to read the obstruction law in a way that doesn’t apply to rioters who invaded a government building for the purpose of disrupting the election certification process — forcing the entire Congress to flee for safety — many of the justices were concerned with other, hypothetical cases where this law might be used to target less troubling activity.

As Alito put it at one point, “What happened on January 6 was very, very serious,” but we need to figure out the “outer reaches” of the statute.

And so Prelogar faced a blizzard of hypothetical applications of the obstruction statutes, along with vague allegations that the government was applying the law selectively to pro-Trump rioters. Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, asked her if this law has ever been applied to a violent protest in the past (Prelogar conceded that it has not, but attributed that to the fact that the January 6 attack is unprecedented).

Meanwhile, several justices expressed concerns about people being charged with a felony for what Alito called “minor impediments,” such as if a heckler forced a proceeding to be delayed for a few minutes or if street protesters made it more difficult for members of Congress to drive to the Capitol. The concern appeared to be that people who engage in minimally disruptive political protests could be charged with a very serious felony.

There are several potential ways out of this trap. Prelogar pointed out that the statute prohibits behavior that “obstructs” a proceeding, and a minimal disruption might not rise to that level — though that theory did little to quiet the many skeptical questions she received.

One of the appellate judges who heard this case, Trump-appointed Judge Justin Walker, also suggested another way to limit the law. Walker homed in on the fact that the statute only applies to someone who “corruptly” obstructs a proceeding, and he wrote in an opinion that this word should be read to only apply to defendants who acted “with an intent to procure an unlawful benefit either for himself or for some other person.”

That interpretation, which Sotomayor and Kavanaugh both alluded to during Tuesday’s argument, would allow the January 6 insurrectionists to be prosecuted — because the whole point of that insurrection was to procure an unlawful benefit for Donald Trump: a second presidential term. But it would prevent the obstruction statute from being applied to minor heckling and the like.

Among the Court’s Republican appointees, Justice Amy Coney Barrett seemed the least sympathetic to the insurrectionists. Though she asked Prelogar whether she could “be comfortable with the breadth” of the obstruction statute, she also suggested that overaggressive prosecutions could be culled because the defendants in those cases could raise First Amendment challenges.

Still, even if the Court’s three Democrats hang together, and even if Barrett joins them, it is unclear whether they can find a fifth vote to hold the January 6 insurrectionists accountable under this particular statute.

Millhiser points out that the conservative judges appear to be very “selective” when it comes to protection for protesters. Yeah.

Let’s hope they can at least cobble together a majority to narrowly agree that the law should apply to Trump. But I won’t be surprised if they let him off the hook. That would mean that two charges will be dropped but he’ll still be on the hook for two others. But it’s obvious that he should be tried under this law.

I’m sure you’ve heard that Mehdi Hassan was let go from MSNBC. It was a mistake. He’s opinionated and I don’t always agree with him but I do respect him. His interviews are among the best in the business.

Anyway, he has a new media venture called Zeteo.com, (which you can subscribe to here) and has a Youtube channel here. I thought this was especially good:

Here’s how it opens:

If you’re one of those people even on the left who isn’t that concerned by the prospect of a Trump second term that it won’t be that bad, that we survived Trump the first time round then this next segment is for you.

See I need you to hear me out and I need you to picture the scene. It’s January 20th 2025, inauguration day. You turn on the TV and Donald J Trump with his hand on his own God Bless the USA Bible is being sworn in as 47th president of the United States. Now the quadruple indicted new president makes his way back to the Oval Office and begins to make America great again again.

And based on team Trump’s own words own proud promises here’s how his first 100 days could very well turn out. Let’s go to day one — Trump begins his dictatorship.

Take the time to watch it. It’s worth it.

Trump is exhorting his cult to buy Truth Social stock. Here it is today:

On March 27th it went to 79. A whole lot of MAGA cultists are losing their red, white and blue Trump shirts.

Yahoo Finance reports:

Truth Social Stock Crashes as Donald Trump Maneuvers to Sell His Own Shares

Pulling the Ripcord

Shares of Donald Trump’s social media meme stock tumbled yet again today, sinking over 16 percent Monday morning.

The timing of the latest shellacking is particularly interesting: it comes after Trump made the first moves to cash out, likely leaving investors — who have already seen their holdings crumble — out to dry.

As Bloomberg reports, Truth Social owner Trump Media & Technology (TMTG) filed to register shares, including ones that are linked to warrants — a sign that Trump and other executives are looking to cash out far sooner than September, at which point the obligatory six-month hold on sales would be over.

Trumpet Section

The news comes after TMTG shares have been on a precipitous decline, slumping to less than $27 — significantly less than half of what they were worth around the time of the merger last month.

The drop has resulted in the former president’s net worth dropping by several billion dollars in just three weeks.

Despite the grim outlook, Trump and his collaborators could still hold on to millions of shares, likely planning to eventually sell them for many hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Bloomberg.

The company, however, still needs permission from the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Trump would also need the green light from TMTG’s board before selling — which shouldn’t be too difficult, given his personal standing.

Analysts have held that investors looking to increase their money should stay away from the former president’s meme stock, calling it a “scam.”

You’re not seeing a huge change in rhetoric from the right wingers about those stats. Imagine that. In fact, Trump is out there every day screeching that US is a dystopian nightmare of “migrant crime” and people can barely leave their houses without being assaulted. Nothing new there. But the facts are clear.

JV Last makes the case for Biden on this issue:

The “Biden crime wave” was always proffered in bad faith because the “crime wave” appeared in 2020, while Donald Trump was president: 2020 saw the largest rise in the murder rate in American history.

Now just because Biden inherited a problem doesn’t mean he gets a pass on its existence. When you’re president, you’re supposed to solve everyone’s problems, not just the ones that crop up during your administration.

And here’s the data: All crime is down under Biden, with one exception.

Violent crimes like murder and rape? Down. Property crimes like burglary and theft? Down. Crime in cities? Down. Crime in rural areas? Down.

The lone exception is that car theft in metropolitan areas has gone up. That’s it.

Like the man said: Take the W.

In Donald Trump’s final year in office the murder rate rose by 30 percent, which was the largest jump in U.S. history. Over Joe Biden’s last 16 months, we’ve had the biggest drop in the murder rate in U.S. history.

If this country puts that orange miscreant back in the White House because the media has failed to properly inform the public of what’s really happening — because of “vibes” — we may never recover. There’s still time to change that before it’s too late.

Massie: I asked him to resign.. The motion is going to get called. And then he's going to lose more votes than Kevin McCarthy pic.twitter.com/w8aJi3XRTE

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 16, 2024

Speaker Johnson should be DEMANDING that Chuck Schumer hold the trial against Secretary Mayorkas.

Instead, he’s passing Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and the Democrats’ wishlist.

I’m grateful to @RepThomasMassie for cosponsoring my Motion to Vacate.

We need a new Speaker! pic.twitter.com/sLof2v5tNI

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) April 16, 2024

Speaker Johnson: “I am not resigning, and it is, in my view, an absurd notion that someone would bring a vacate motion when we are simply here trying to do our jobs.” pic.twitter.com/jUKfCecEuj

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) April 16, 2024

It appears that Mike Johnson’s pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to obtain Trump’s protection didn’t get the job done:

Speaker Mike Johnson took the extraordinary step this morning of publicly announcing that he was “not resigning” after a second conservative GOP hardliner called for his ouster in a closed House Republican Conference meeting.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) stood up in the private meeting in the Capitol and said Johnson should “clean the barn” — clear out all pending controversial legislation — and announce he’s resigning so House Republicans can choose a new speaker.

Massie also said he would support Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) motion to vacate resolution, which the Georgia Republican introduced several weeks ago. Greene has not sought to make it privileged, which would trigger a vote over whether to oust Johnson. This was the same process used to dump former Speaker Kevin McCarthy last year.

The current wave of angst is due to Johnson’s introduction of a package of bills to send aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. House Republicans will need Democratic support to pass the rule in committee and on the floor. And the GOP will need the minority’s support to clear the package.

“We have a rudder,” Massie told reporters following the Republican meeting. ”We’re steering everything toward what Chuck Schumer wants.”

A vote on the aid package is expected by Friday at the earliest, GOP sources say.

Johnson, speaking at a House Republican leadership news conference, said it is “absurd” to try to throw him out of the office right now. Here’s Johnson:

“I am not resigning. And it is, in my view, an absurd notion that someone would bring a vacate motion when we are simply here trying to do our jobs. It is not helpful to the cause, it is not helpful to the country, it does not help the House Republicans advance our agenda, which is in the best interest of the American people here — a secure border, sound governance – and it’s not helpful to the unity that we have in the body.”

Johnson reiterated again as he did Monday that he wasn’t worried about an MTV.

But let’s be clear — It’s not great when a speaker has to go out and publicly declare that he’s not resigning just 174 days into his tenure.

House Democrats are watching the developments inside the GOP conference very closely. They’re concerned not only with Johnson’s fate but what impact it will have on the foreign aid bill, as well as whether they’ll have to intervene in any Republican attempt to oust another speaker.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and other top Democrats have signaled they’re willing to support a rule for the foreign aid package and help pass the bill as long as there aren’t any poison-pill provisions attached to the measure.

But a vote to help Johnson stave off a motion to vacate before the foreign aid package comes up is another matter, Democratic insiders said. Johnson would have to definitively state what the package will look like — and how many GOP votes he can deliver for it — before Democratic leaders are going to cut any members loose on the MTV. Timing is everything here, as always.

Two Democrats have said they’d vote to keep Johnson if it came to it. I’m not sure that would help him. There are those who believe that if a Democrats votes for something it’s automatically tainted — they could switch to take Johnson out. And if he does curvive at the hands of Democrats his caucus will treat him as a pariah. If they pull the trigger on this, he’s screwed no matter what.

He was really spiraling during this period:

Four years ago today

Trump: The governor of Washington said he can't find cotton, a swab is a very easy thing to get. And a swab is a little more sophisticated than a Q-tip, you got to be able to go out and find. The federal government shouldn't be forced to go and do everything pic.twitter.com/ZooyH7OcGl

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 16, 2024

Four years ago today, as Americans were dying and in need of testing, Trump complained it was “ridiculous” that he was “supposed” to do “testing in parking lots in the middle of a certain state that's 2,000 miles away” pic.twitter.com/3GkYgM1Im7

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 16, 2024

He was very hostile to certain states during this period because they weren’t just rolling over for anxious re-opening of the country without adequate testing and supplies. Note how he characterizes one state as being 2,000 miles away as if it isn’t part of America — the country he was supposedly leading.

His performance during that crisis should have made him a pariah in America and instead he’s a hero to almost half the population, so much so that they want him back. I’ll never stop being stunned by that.

It seems like only yesterday that Republican president in exile, Donald Trump, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson were pledging fealty to one another in a joint press conference at Mar-a-Lago. Actually, it was five days ago and it appears their political union was as short-lived as the marriage of the Golden Bachelor. As Johnson faces the most difficult week of his short career as Speaker, when asked if he supported Johnson’s plan to finally pass the long stalled foreign appropriations bill, Trump blandly replied, “we’ll see what happens with that.” So much for their beautiful friendship.

Trump has his own problems right now, of course. He’s in the midst of his first criminal trial in New York where he’s alternately nodding off and being admonished by the judge for intimidating the jurors. So I suppose it’s too much to ask that he would be concerned with something as trivial as national security. It’s just too bad that his inexplicable admiration for Russian president Vladimir Putin and his desire to thwart any deal to at the border to boost his own electoral chances has led the House MAGA caucus to refuse to allow the Senate passed, bipartisan appropriations agreement to come to a vote. All he has to do is say the word and it’s almost certain they could get it to the president’s desk by the end of the week.

The state of play changes from minute to minute so there’s every chance that this will be outdated by the time you read this. But as it stands on Wednesday morning, Johnson is preparing to present four separate bills, one for Ukraine, one for Israel, one for Taiwan and one with a hodgepodge of policies including the banning of TikTok. If he could manage to get them to the floor for a vote (not a given since MAGA Republicans are routinely voting against procedural rules which means Democrats may have to do it) he could conceivably gather together enough votes to pass Ukraine aid with a majority of Democrats and another to pass Israel aid with a majority of Republicans. The Taiwan bill shouldn’t have any trouble and who knows what’s going on with that fourth vote?

No doubt Johnson thought he had Trump’s backing for this plan when he left Mar-a-Lago on Friday but it’s likely that Trump was only half listening to him obsessed as he is with his own problems. If he did agree he certainly didn’t communicate that to Greene who said this week that she plans to pull the trigger on her motion to vacate the chair if Johnson makes any move to help Ukraine. (She was calling the Ukrainians Nazis over the weekend.) On Tuesday she was joined in her crusade by Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie who stood up in a GOP meeting and demanded that Johnson resign. He later went before the cameras and declared that he is now a co-sponsor of Greene’s motion to vacate.

Rep. Massie on Speaker Johnson: “Yeah I asked him to resign … He said he would not. And then I said, ‘Well, you're the one who's going to put us into this,’ because the motion is going to get called up.” pic.twitter.com/HrfOg2hZCm

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) April 16, 2024

Greene demanded that he resign as well:

Marjorie Taylor Greene calls on Mike Johnson to resign for funding the police and supporting our ally:

“Mike Johnson…fully funded the DOJ…Fully funded the FBI…Now he's pushing for billions of dollars to go to Ukraine…Speaker Johnson needs to resign.” pic.twitter.com/6sVtl0h8WO

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) April 16, 2024

Johnson was not amused. After the meeting he told the press that he was not resigning and that it’s “an absurd notion that someone would bring a vacate motion when we are simply here trying to do our jobs.” He has a point but that ship sailed when his predecessor Kevin McCarthy sold his spine to the far right by agreeing that any right wing kook could call for the Speaker’s ouster.

With only a two vote margin, Johnson would not survive a vote without Democrats jumping to his defense. As of Friday, when Congressman Mike Gallagher, R-Wi., departs after having resigned in disgust, that two vote margin shrinks to one. However, it remains to be seen if Greene is serious about calling for this vote or just wants to hold it over Johnson’s head while garnering tons of attention from the media.

She spoke with Breitbart on Tuesday evening and said, “yes I am prepared to do it. But the process of how I am doing it and going about it is I am being respectful of my conference and a Republican majority and I’m also being respectful of my colleagues. I didn’t like how it was done when they threw out Kevin McCarthy. It was done by force and no one had a say.” Despite her constant refrain that she has many (so far silent) supporters for this move there is little evidence that’s true. Greene added this hedge, “the reality for Mike Johnson that he just is not accepting or refusing to accept, publicly at least, is whether it happens two weeks from now, two months from now, or in the next majority, he will not be Speaker.” In other words, she’s probably bluffing.

The big question now is how the House Democrats and the Senate will deal with all this. There are two Democratic congressmen who have said they’d vote to keep Johnson if it comes to that, Tom Suozzi of New York and Jared Moskowitz of Florida. It’s hard to say whether they’d actually do that if it came down to it. More immediately urgent is how the Democrats might handle the rule vote. (Johnson could agree to a suspension the rules and bring it to the floor without all that folderol but he refuses.) The question is what the Democrats would want in return for helping him out and if they’d be satisfied just to get this appropriations bill over and done with. That is unclear but we should know in the next couple of days when we see how and if they can get these bills to the floor.

There is a possibility that it could run into some difficulty in the Senate however. Yet another surreal moment occurred on Tuesday when the House formally delivered the articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

I just delivered my Articles of Impeachment against Secretary Mayorkas to the United States Senate.

Mayorkas is derelict of his duty and must be removed from office.

Chuck Schumer: HOLD THE TRIAL! pic.twitter.com/pjTAmlJrQa

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) April 16, 2024

Greene’s demand that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer refers to the fact that Democrats may not bring up the impeachment for trial at all which has a number of GOP Senators up in arms and could gum up the works on these bills Johnson is attempting to put together. If he would just put the bill the Senate already passed on the floor, that would be the end of it. But separating it into four different bills will require the Senate to vote again and there’s a chance that they might be able to muster a filibuster if they decide to use the impeachment farce as an excuse to blow up the Ukraine funding. Thirty Republican Senators voted against the original bill and so far there does not seem to be a border component in any of the new bills (Trump’s doing, I’d guess) which was one of the incentives for the others to vote yes.

This is, in short, a huge mess and it will be a miracle if they get anything passed. Between Trump’s self-serving meddling and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s showboating, not to mention the general lunacy of the MAGA caucus in both houses, the lunatics are literally running the asylum and the security of the whole world is hanging in the balance. And it is not partisan hyperbole to say that this state of affairs is 100% the fault of the Republican Party. They are simply incapable of governing.

Salon

Updat: It looks like Johnson is going to try to the 4 votes on the floor. Who knows if the rule to proceed will pass. He says he expects a vote by Saturday night when he will have a one vote margin. There’s more and more chatter that if this falls apart, this will be the next step:

Stay tuned.

He did it again today:

Now: Trump's head slowly dropped, his eyes closed. It jerked back upward. He adjusts himself. Then, his head droops again. He straightens up, leaning back. His head doops for a third time, he shakes his shoulders. Eyes closed still. His head drops. Finally, he pops his eyes open.

— Frank G. Runyeon (@frankrunyeon) April 16, 2024

I just heard CNN describe this as “Trump closed his eyes during jury questioning.”

Ask yourself if they would be so euphemistic if Joe Biden was nodding off during his own criminal trial.