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Our viewers don’t care!

Published by digby on October 4, 2023

The House is in chaos? No biggie…

How Fox News’ favorite show shared the news that the House GOP had completely blown itself up:

The conservative panelists of The Five, much like the bulk of the GOP, focused most of their ire on Gaetz while arguing that House Republicans had actually accomplished quite a bit under McCarthy in his nine-month tenure.

Noting that former President Donald Trump complained on social media that “Republicans are always fighting among themselves” rather than “fighting the radical left Democrats who are destroying our country,” Jeanine Pirro declared that she was “furious” over McCarthy’s removal.

“Now what we’ve got is total chaos when the Republicans are playing out their infighting on national television in a historic way instead of fighting Joe Biden’s policies,” she exclaimed. “The one time we are up in virtually every metric as it relates to the Biden administration, you’ve got the Republicans going out there and showing how dysfunctional they are as Matt Gaetz engages in fundraising.”

At the same time, she insisted that “they have done a lot in Congress” and “got lots of bills passed,” blaming the Senate for not wanting to vote on the House’s legislation. “They’ve done a lot in terms of oversight,” she added.

“This is the crazy thing, Democrats who hate the MAGA Republicans are joining with them to oust Speaker McCarthy,” Pirro sighed. “This is like the devil is in the middle of all of this chaos and Donald Trump is right. Why are Republicans fighting with each other like this?!”

While Pirro expressed fury over the political chaos in the House, her colleague Greg Gutfeld suggested that it didn’t really matter in the end and was not relevant to the network’s viewers.

Pointing out that Gaetz justified pushing for McCarthy’s removal because he “broke promises,” Gutfeld waved off those grievances as much ado about nothing.

“So who’s telling the truth? I don’t know,” he proclaimed. “I’m not sure that I care because I’m with Trump on this. We’re talking about this instead of the border, instead of crime, instead of inflation.”

Grumbling that Republicans “are doing this” instead of focusing on actual issues, Gutfeld then signaled to Fox News viewers that they shouldn’t care about the removal of the House Speaker.

“It’s a historic event, but it’s one of the few historic events that I don’t care about,” he said. “This has no effect on our viewers. Does it make our streets safer? No. Does it make our borders real again? No. Does it make our gas prices go down? No. It’s just sound and fury signifying incompetence.”

Shortly after this segment on The Five aired, a former Fox News employee texted the following observation to The Daily Beast.

“Yeah because we know Gutfeld would say the same thing if Pelosi had been ousted by the House progressives,” the ex-staffer said. “It’s a tired, cynical talking point to gaslight viewers to say if it doesn’t affect him, they should feel the same. No one has more contempt for Fox’s viewers then their own hosts.”

This is what The Five was really interested in yesterday:

She must have looked very closely at those dick pics. Very, very closely.

Imagine…

Published by digby on October 4, 2023

I enjoy reading the right wing apostates these days because in some ways they see certain aspect s of our politics more clearly than my own long-time allies. Maybe it’s because it’s newer to them to see this perspective or maybe it’s because some of my own allies are still mired in ancient, and currently irrelevant, internecine beefs.

This piece by JV Last at the Bulwark isn’t exactly a new insight to many of us but it’s refreshingly sharp and very, very accurate:

Imagine that it was the Democrats yesterday. Imagine that Pramila Jayapal and Cori Bush had forced Nancy Pelosi out of the speaker’s chair.

What would the reaction have been?

Dems in Disarray!

Let me channel it for you:

Democrats are controlled by their far-left who are totally out of touch with mainstream voters. This is why you got Trump the first time. White working-class voters see that Democrats have no interest in their real lives because they’re captive to progressive radicals. Republicans are going to crush them in 2024 and it will be Democrats’ own fault when Trump returns to power.

Sound about right? Did I miss anything?

Yet when Matt Gaetz holds the Republican majority hostage in the House and forces the ejection of the speaker because he made a deal to avoid a government shutdown the reaction is more along the lines of . . .

Hell’s bells Martha, this is unfortunate. Going to be a lot of chaos. But, you know, that’s how Republicans are. Oh well.

So raise your hand if you think Republicans will pay an electoral price for this debacle. Or if you think that this instance of Republicans’ failure to govern will cost Donald Trump any votes when he faces Joe Biden?

Please understand that this isn’t a complaint about media bias (though that’s real). It’s a complaint about voter bias. The public has asymmetric attitudes about Republicans and Democrats baked into their worldview.

And this asymmetry is creating a danger for democracy.

2. If Biden Had Done It

Now imagine that Joe Biden said the following words:

Just arrived at the Witch Hunt Trial taking place in the very badly failing (so sadly!) State of New York, where people and companies are fleeing by the thousands. Corrupt Attorney General, Letitia James, is a big reason for this. . . . I am not even entitled, under any circumstances, to a JURY. This Witch Hunt cannot be allowed to continue. It is Election Interference and the start of Communism right here in America!

Or these words:

They are almost all dishonest and corrupt, but Comcast, with its one-side and vicious coverage by NBC NEWS, and in particular MSNBC, often and correctly referred to as MSDNC (Democrat National Committee!), should be investigated for its “Country Threatening Treason.” . . . I say up front, openly, and proudly, that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States, they and others of the LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events. . . . They are a true threat to Democracy and are, in fact, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!

Or these words:

Mark Milley . . . turned out to be a Woke train wreck who, if the Fake News reporting is correct, was actually dealing with China to give them a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States. This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!

Imagine what the reaction would be. Again, let me channel it for you:

Holy shit, President Biden has gone insane. The cabinet should invoke the 25th Amendment and remove him from office, immediately. This man has dementia and cannot be allowed to hold power. Shapiro, Whitmer, and Newsom should announce primary challenges this afternoon. America is in immediate danger.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that we’d have an Infinity-Alarm Fire because everyone in mainstream America would think that Biden was literally (and seriously) unfit for office because he’d become mentally defective.

Obviously, those are all things Trump has said just in the last two weeks.

And what has the reaction been? Let me tell you: Over the last four weeks Trump has opened up a small lead over Biden in the polling average.

I’ll just interject here that Romney opened a lead on Obama at roughly the same time in 2012. Same thing with Reagan in ’84. While every election is different, I think it pays not to panic when this happens. Remember, Joe Biden is an incumbent president with a good story to tell who is facing a candidate who is under 91 felony indictments and is certifiably insane. And he beat that same nutcase once already.

No, it shouldn’t even be close but we have a sick political culture and we just have to hope that it’s not terminal.

Again: I am bringing this up not to complain about The Media, but to point out that we have two systemic asymmetries at play in American politics right now.

The first is structural: The combination of polarization, population distribution, and the Electoral College has given the Republican party a large advantage in the Senate and presidential elections. Maybe this advantage is transitory; maybe it’s permanent. But it’s real and is probably worth at least 3 percentage points in the 2024 presidential contest.

The second is notional: The general public holds members of the two parties to very different standards.

Here are some complaints you hear about Joe Biden’s administration:

-Inflation is up: Then the government acts to stop inflation through a combination legislation (the Inflation Reduction Act) and raising interest rates.

-Prices haven’t deflated: With inflation waning, the complaint shifts from rising prices to the fact the prices have not gone down to pre-pandemic levels for select goods and services.

-Interest rates are high: As some prices of goods and services fall, the criticism shifts to complain about interest rates being higher—even though interest rate increases were one of the tools for blunting inflation.

You see how the complaints are always shifting, yes?

Meanwhile, Trump is just Trump. He talks about communism and witch hunts and executing people and it’s all just . . . you know, Trump Stuff.

Democrats think it’s bad, sure. Republicans actually like it. And the people in the middle? Well, go look at those polls. Seems to me that they’re pretty sanguine.

When it comes to the structural asymmetry, you can at least come up with theoretical reforms: Add states; move to a national popular vote; reform the Electoral College.

None of these are going to happen, obviously. They are fantasy politics because it is assumed that the government is too sclerotic to fix serious structural problems. And this assumption is almost certainly correct.

But you can’t even come up with a theoretical solution to the notional asymmetry—to the fact that Republicans can fail even the minimal organizing tasks of legislating and have a madman as the head of the party and yet still be perfectly viable as an electoral matter—while Democrats must play perfect baseball and never antagonize anyone other than their own base voters just to get close to parity.

There is no person or thing that caused this asymmetry. It’s like the growth of a glacier: a product of forces both environmental and particular, which work in ways that are complex, deep, and slow.

Either this asymmetry will eventually resolve on its own, or it won’t.

Democrats look at Republicans like Kevin McCarthy and Matt Gaetz and say, “How could they act like this?”

And the answer is: Because the voters let them. Not always and not every time. But often enough.

Their voters don’t just let them. They actively encourage them. They now see politics as a game in which their goal is to assert their dominance, period. With the arrival of Trump it’s become the defining characteristic of the party. GOP voters revel in it.

Should the Democrats have saved McCarthy?

Published by digby on October 4, 2023

There’s quite a bit of punditry today suggesting that the Democrats did the wrong thing by failing to bail out McCarthy yesterday. Here is some important context as to why they voted in unity not to do it from a House staffer named Aaron Fritschner:

Pretty evident people don’t understand a key piece of House Dems’ thinking on McCarthy and governance of the House. The idea that we acted out of schadenfreude or pique with no thought to the legislative outlook is, of course, silly nonsense. Here’s what the takes are missing- 

On Saturday morning we had no idea what was happening. Scalise told the GOP they were moving bills that signaled imminent shutdown. This is what we expected. Then McCarthy suddenly and unexpectedly did an about face and announced a vote on a CR. We didn’t know what to make of it.

How to interpret this? McCarthy has resisted doing this all along, the wingnuts threatened to kick him out if he did it and he was running every play at their call. My immediate read was he wanted and expected us to vote against the suspension so we would be blamed for a shutdown 

I said this then (see below). And our members believed it, in fact without naming names I can say I heard it from multiple members yesterday as they were weighing how to vote, and that was with hindsight about what happened.

So in this moment, you look to McCarthy for signals—

And what signals is McCarthy sending us?

Dems: “We would like to read the $200 billion, 71-page bill we’ve never seen. You promised 72 hours but we’ll settle for 90 minutes.”

McCarthy: GFY

Dems: well we are going to take that time, but we are satisfied, we’ll pass your bill to help you get out of the jam you created for yourself

McCarthy: the Democrats wanted to shut down the government and f*ck the troops

People want us to give the guy credit for stopping a shutdown but it is still not clear to me right now sitting here writing this that he *intended* to do that.

This really matters and not just on an emotional level- the resolution set up not one but two new legislative problems 

Now we have to pass an omnibus or face a shutdown again by Thanksgiving AND we have to fund military assistance to Ukraine pretty soon. But we are told McCarthy is going to help us there, he has made an agreement to help Ukraine.

And what does McCarthy say about that? This:

And what is McCarthy signaling to us on funding? He’s going to steer us directly back into the crazy cuts and abortion restrictions, the Freedom Caucus setting the agenda, breaking his deal with Biden, and driving us towards a shutdown in November
x.com/Olivia_Beavers…

Ok we are reasonable people, maybe he’s just telling them what they have to hear and he’ll screw them at the last minute. So what’s he saying to us privately? What reason is he giving us to think any of this is going to turn out well if we help him? None.
x.com/JakeSherman/st…

The supposed “institutional interest” would have us not only put out Republicans’ many fires for them, it would have us do so based on our specific belief and trust that *McCarthy is lying*. Like, his lying is supposed to be a good thing, and what sells the arrangement for us. 

A speakership founded upon Democrats’ trust that McCarthy will lie to his own guys and not to us is not rational, folks! It isn’t sustainable or reasonable and it’s no way to run the House. We needed him to give us any reason to help him and he very intentionally did not do so. 

People say “he couldn’t make a deal it would compromise his power” and they’re just wrong, that was a solvable problem. He could’ve publicly or privately given us a sense the CR was good faith and we were going to get through the omnibus, stave off a shutdown, and help Ukraine. 

This came down to trust, and that’s the word I saw and heard from House Democrats more than any other word. We did not trust Kevin McCarthy and he gave us no reason to. He could have done so (and I suspect saved his gavel) through fairly simple actions. He chose not to do that. 

Even after all that happened – January 6th, the debt limit crisis, his vengeance against our members, breaking his word to the President, impeachment, empowering the right wing – there were Democrats who were imho willing to help McCarthy if he had given them a reason. He didn’t. 

It is completely daft to assume that Democrats could have trusted Kevin McCarthy to get us through this mess. He had run out of rope from the Republicans and he no longer had any ability to make a deal and stick to it and he didn’t seem inclined to try. He was incompetent. He never should have allowed that Motion to Vacate with one person to take effect. He put his own gun to his head.

Where have you gone Donald Trump?

Published by digby on October 4, 2023

Your party turns its lonely eyes to you

Some Republicans literally can’t think of anyone but Trump:

Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) announced late Tuesday that he will file paperwork to nominate former President Trump to be the next Speaker of the House.

“This week, when the U.S. House of Representatives reconvenes, my first order of business will be to nominate Donald J. Trump for Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives,” Nehls said in a statement. “President Trump, the greatest President of my lifetime, has a proven record of putting America First and will make the House great again.”

It’s mass delusion. And statements like that should prove to all of us that the idea that elected Republicans are all cynics and cowards is not entirely true. Some of them are brainwashed true believers in the cult of Donald Trump. To them he is literally the only leader they can conceive of.

Trump said he was fully concentrating on becoming president (to stay out of jail) but that hasn’t stopped the speculation.

He’s their north star, their dear, Dear Leader.

A very special episode of the Trump Show

Published by digby on October 4, 2023

His strategy to win the election is to delegitimize the legal system and martyr himself

I’m sure Donald Trump was hopping mad to see Kevin McCarthy and Matt Gaetz steal the spotlight yesterday with their historic antics in the House. After all, Dear Leader is on trial and he’s appearing in the courtroom even though he’s not required to so that he can preen before the cameras in the hallways and insult the judge, the prosecutor and everyone else. This is supposed to be his party and it was completely overshadowed by House Republicans who are supposed to understand that.

As of midnight last night the only thing he had to say on the matter was, “Why is it that Republicans are always fighting among themselves, why aren’t they fighting the Radical Left Democrats who are destroying our Country?” If the man he calls “My Kevin” expected him to intervene on his behalf he was sorely disappointed. In fact, he didn’t even bother to write a bland Truth Social post wishing McCarthy well in his future endeavors.

Trump was already in a bad mood on Tuesday after Forbes Magazine dropped him from the list of the 400 Richest people in America which, according to Forbes is largely because his investment in the Truth Social platform has turned out to be a dud. If this trial proceeds as it appears it’s going to, he’s going to fall even further. He stands to lose his NY properties and $250 million or more in punitive damages. He doesn’t have the emotional bandwidth to care about what’s happening in the US Capitol right now. This is important.

Trump stood triumphantly on the courthouse steps at the end of day one and crowed that he had succeeded in getting the judge to overrule himself on 80% of the case, due to the statute of limitations running out. The judge corrected him on Tuesday saying that his earlier ruling has not changed and that the statute of limitation started running every time Trump submitted a statement of facts that was fraudulent. And they were submitted every year since 2011.

Mostly he has been racing to the cameras to insult the “rogue” judge and insist he be disqualified. And he has openly instructed his followers to “go after” Leticia James, the Attorney General who brought the case. This sounds like a threat to me, but what do I know?

And over and over again he has said that his financial statements are fantastic but also that he made it clear to the banks and insurance companies that they shouldn’t believe a word they said:

During the trial on Tuesday, Trump’s former accountant testified and Trump’s lawyers attempted to blame him for the fraudulent financial statements. But the accountant testified that he could only go by the data the company gave him and that he’d compiled the financial statements based solely on information he received from Trump and his company. Apparently Trump forgot to issue him the same disclaimer he gave to the banks: don’t believe I word I say.

But the real fireworks happened after Trump sat before the judge and re-posted a Truth Social post identifying the judge’s clerk, claiming she is Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s girlfriend and linking to her Instagram account. Here’s what he said about that:

Throughout the break, he and his lawyers were called in for a private conference with the judge. When they reconvened, the judge was clearly angry and issued a gag order forbidding defendants from discussing members of his staff. According to legal observers it’s not unusual for defendants to insult the prosecutors and the judge (although it’s particularly stupid in a bench trial like this) going after the public servants who work in the courts is crossing the line.

Needless to say, Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss can testify to the fact that Trump is more than happy to smear such employees whenever he chooses. He did delete the post but not before it had been captured by millions of his followers and passed all over the internet. It was a lie based on an innocent picture of the clerk taking a selfie with the senator as thousands of other New Yorkers have done. No one should be surprised when it turns out that she is being threatened by MAGA yahoos.

It’s clear that Trump knows he’s lost this case. so he’s decided that stalking around and glowering like his mug shot will make his followers see him as defiant and courageous in facing down his accusers. I’m sure he still has hopes that he can overturn the judges ruling on appeal but in the meantime using the occasion to get free media and continue the work of delegitimizing the legal system and targeting his enemies as his primary campaign strategy.

Frankly, he’s being pretty successful. His non-stop threats and intimidation of the courts, the prosecutors, the witnesses the jurors are largely going unanswered. Yes, the judge in NY issued a gag order to protect his staff but it didn’t come with any teeth. If the judge sanctions him with fines for any of these antics, he’ll just use it to fund raise and won’t spend a penny of his own money to pay them. Is there reall a chance that any judge will order Trump to jail for contempt for something he says as they would any other defendant in these circumstances? I highly doubt it.

Short of Trump trying to flee the country or being caught on tape personally threatening someone with violence, I think this is going to be his strategy for dealing with his legal problems. He wants desperately to become president so that he can make this nightmare go away. I’m not sure how can escape these civil lawsuits, but if he becomes president again there will be ample opportunities to regain his fortune.

As president he could order the federal criminal case to be withdrawn and while the state cases theoretically can continue, you have to wonder how sentences would be carried out? Would the Atlanta police be dispatched to arrest the president of the United States? Would the Secret Service let them do it? As with everything else with Trump, we are in uncharted territory.

So, I think we can expect Trump to continue with this rebellious, insolent behavior as he deals with the legal system, daring anyone to try to stop him. He believes that his best chance of proving to the world that he isn’t a loser and protecting himself from accountability for his crimes is to win the election by destroying the country’s belief in the legal system. Every time that he defies the rule of law and gets away with it he degrades people’s respect for the legal system on all sides of the political spectrum.

The good news is that we have already seen that judges and juries are not affected by this, at least not yet. If he is ultimately held accountable I’m sure his followers will believe he’s been railroaded and we don’t know exactly what they’ll do. But at least the rest of the country might regain some faith in the rule of law. Right now, it’s hanging by a thread.

CW Watch: It’s the Democrats’ fault

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 4, 2023

Wait for it

Attributed to Sam Foster/Flickr

The narrative will come from the press, from Republicans, and from the peanut gallery.

Here’s former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, post-defrocking:

“I think today was a political decision by the Democrats, and I think the things they have done in the past hurt the institution. When they just started removing people from committee, when they just started doing the other things, and my fear is the institution fell today.”

Ah, they failed to support the institution.

Here we go:

It would be understandable if Democrats decided to remain neutral on Tuesday (by voting “present”), reasoning that it is a Republican civil war. But they didn’t. Instead, by voting “no” on the procedural motion to table Rep. Matt Gaetz’s motion—and then voting “yes” on his Motion to Vacate the Office of Speaker—Democrats effectively voted for Gaetz. And a vote for Gaetz is a vote for chaos.

Peanut gallery (I think):

Steve Benen counters on the institution:

I can think of members who can credibly claim to be institutionalists. McCarthy isn’t one of them.

What’s more, McCarthy is blaming Democrats, despite the fact that he spent 10 months alienating them; he never reached out to ask Democrats for their backing, and he ultimately offered them nothing in exchange for their support.

Even if the ousted GOP leader had made a real effort ahead of Tuesday’s dramatic events, it probably wouldn’t have mattered because he’d clearly lost Democrats’ respect and trust, after having lied to and about them.

But let’s not miss the forest for the trees: The biggest problem with blaming Democrats for McCarthy’s downfall is that none of this was Democrats’ idea. It’s not as if House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was the one who filed a motion to vacate the chair.

McCarthy spent months struggling with many of his most radical members. They threatened to try to oust him. Then they did. If Republicans are looking for who was responsible, they need only to look around at their next conference meeting.

That does not mean the press, the Republicans, and the peanut gallery won’t embrace the narrative. Democrats are always expected to be the adults in the room tasked with changing the dirty diapers.

Update: Forgot to drop this in.

Ungovernable

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 4, 2023

Unwilling to govern

This morning’s headline Christian Science Monitor.

“Kevin McCarthy just found out in the hardest way possible that Nancy Pelosi only made it look easy,” Charlotte Clymer posted at Bluesky.

“Backwards, and in high heels,” replied Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel).

If House Republicans ousting Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Wednesday was too abstruse a sign that they cannot govern like adults, bowtied Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, now speaker pro tempore, made sure cameras picked it up as he recessed the House until Tuesday.

The Republican House caucus is at war with itself. Eight Republicans led by Matt Gaetz of Florida voted to oust McCarthy on Wednesday. All eight are “traitors,” former Speaker Newt Gingrich told Fox News. “All eight of them should in fact be primaried.” Ninety-six percent of Republicans voted to keep McCarthy, he insisted.

McCarthy, “who practiced a management style of doing and saying pretty much whatever it would take to get through the day,” did not make it through yesterday.

House Democrats cut a deal with McCarthy over the weekend to help him prevent his own MAGA caucus from shutting down the government only to see McCarthy go before cameras to blame them. In a fit of pique over McCarthy averting the shutdown, Gaetz and his reactionary allies voted to vacate the office under rules Gaetz and others forced McCarthy agree to in the January deal that made him speaker.

Democrats washed their hands of the GOP’s mess and would not come to McCarthy’s aid. All voted against him.

Clymer writes:

It’s hard to understate the history at play here. It’s not just that McCarthy is the first Speaker to be removed, but that he was ousted less than nine months into his tenure, the shortest of any Speaker who didn’t die in office. It is certainly not an overstatement to point out that this is a massive political failure.

It’s not just a failure for McCarthy but the entire Republican Party, who have been made to look disorganized, fractured, and clownish by a small number of GOP extremists. The GOP will undoubtedly suffer from this in the short-term, particularly with elections next month in Virginia and New Jersey.

Ungovernable

McCarthy said Tuesday he would not run again. Axios quotes several Republicans perplexed about what comes next.

“Frankly, one has to wonder whether the House is governable at all,” said Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.).

“I’m at a loss … I don’t know who would want to operate under this set of rules,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas).

We have a lot of talented individuals in the conference,” Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) told Axios. But who would the MAGAs support? “Who are they going to accept? Are they going to attack him or her?”

Christian Science Monitor:

“Can you create a durable partisan majority? Maybe the answer is no,” says Matt Glassman, a senior fellow at Georgetown University. “There is a faction of Republicans now in the House who are willing to use all the tools available to block the agenda and undermine the policy process. When you combine that with the narrow majority, this is what you get.”

[…]

“With the slim majority that we’ve had so far, Kevin McCarthy has been a miracle worker,” GOP Rep. Mark Alford of Missouri said on CNN ahead of today’s votes. “We need a marriage counselor, basically, in our conference.”

Who’s next?

Which Republican would want to run this circus?

“President Trump is THE LEADER of the Republican Party,” tweeted Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-MAGA). “President Trump should be our Speaker!” Greene posted, ignoring House Republican Conference requiring “elected party leaders who are indicted on felony charges carrying a potential sentence of two or more years imprisonment to step aside.” Greene is lobbying to be Trump’s 2024 running mate.

Politico reports that Ohio’s Rep. Jim Jordan is considering running for the job. So is Rep. Kevin Hearn (R-Okla.), chair of the Republican Study Committee. Jordan would certainly be loud enough.

And then there is Stave Scalise, another frontrunner with Jordan. Scalise was diagnosed with multiple myeloma over the summer and has been in chemotherapy (The Guardian):

Steve Scalise, the Louisiana Republican whom some in his party reportedly want to elect as speaker of the US House of Representatives after the stunning and historic removal of Kevin McCarthy, was once reported to have called himself “David Duke without the baggage”.

Focus on revenge

The Republicans’ lunatic fringe remains in control in the House. Naturally, under McHenry Republicans are taking revenge on Democrats over Republicans’ own dysfunction. McHenry ordered Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi out of her Capitol office by today. Pelosi is in California attending memorial services for Sen. Dianne Feinstein and thus was not in town for the vote to remove McCarthy.

Democrat former House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, 84, also got summarily booted from his Capitol office, per press reports.

Expect more of that. Republicans are both unwilling to govern and ungovernable.

Their skill at controlling narratives could allow them to blame Democrats for their own nihilism. In mere weeks, stopgap funding will run out again and they’ll have another opportunity to prove themselves neither able to govern nor to rule. At least, for those willing to see.

MyKev gets the boot

Published by digby on October 3, 2023

Now what?

In a 45-minute roll call vote, the House moved to oust McCarthy as speaker. The final vote was 216 to 210 in favor of Matt Gaetz’s motion to vacate, with eight Republicans joining Democrats.

The rest of the Republicans are pissed.

Earlier today Matt Gaetz said he would support Steve Scalise for Speaker but I don’t see him taking it. He’s got a recent cancer diagnosis and is on chemotherapy. I doubt his doctor would recommend taking one of the most stressful jobs in the world right now. Who else? Nobody knows.

This is the first time in history that a speaker has been ousted with a motion to vacate the chair. It was only tried once before back in 1910 and the speaker survived. And it divided the Republican Party for many years after:

The House has never removed a speaker and hasn’t held a floor vote on removing a speaker in well over a century. In 1910, Speaker Joseph G. Cannon (R-Ill.) faced an intraparty revolt that, while unsuccessful, hardened divisions that paved the way for a Democratic takeover.

Unlike McCarthy, whom lawmakers on both sides of the aisle seem to delight in calling “weak,” Cannon was accused of being a tyrant, according to writer Booth Mooney in “Mr. Speaker: Four Men Who Shaped the United States House of Representatives.”

As a young Illinois lawyer, Cannon had been inspired to pursue a life in politics after hearing Abraham Lincoln speak in 1860. Over his many years in the House, he served Republican leaders loyally, so when he finally ascended to the speakership in 1903, he expected the same kind of fealty.

He doled out committee chairs to friends and controlled what legislation — and what amendments to that legislation — could be debated on the floor. If a House rule didn’t work in his favor, he simply changed it, since he was also the chairman of the House Rules Committee. If a Democrat or insufficiently loyal Republican asked to speak, Cannon would ignore him until he gave up.

Some of his colleagues called him “Czar Cannon,” though he preferred the nickname “Uncle Joe.” Yes, Uncle Joe.

During one meeting where lawmakers complained about his iron grip, Mooney wrote, Cannon dramatically opened his jacket and shouted, “Behold Mr. Cannon, the Beelzebub of Congress! Gaze on this noble manly form — me, the Beelzebub! Me, the Czar!”

He also sometimes compared himself to Jesus.

All of this happened before the party realignment of the mid-20th century, so Democrats were considered the more traditional party and Republicans the more modern one. Plus, a wing of the Republican Party, led by President Theodore Roosevelt, was increasingly liberal, pushing for radical stuff like income tax, food regulations and allowing women to vote. Cannon was not among them. Sure, he was happy to reduce postage costs for the common man, but making sure food wasn’t poisoned was a bridge too far.

By 1910, with Roosevelt out of the White House and his successor, William Howard Taft, proving powerless against Cannon, Democrats and liberal Republicans became so frustrated that they briefly united.

The plan was complicated and, unless you’re one of those folks who reads Robert’s Rules of Order for fun, kind of boring. Basically, they used procedural moves to trick Cannon into allowing “progressive” Republican Rep. George Norris (R-Neb.) to speak, and when he did, he made a motion that would have stripped Cannon of his seat on the Rules Committee.

For days, Cannon and his allies used every parliamentary trick they could to delay the vote, and for days, the alliance of “insurgent” Republicans and Democrats beat them back. Finally, on March 19, 1910, the House voted to strip him of his Rules power by a vote of 191 to 156. More than three dozen Republicans voted against him.

Cannon told the lawmakers that despite the humiliation of losing the vote, he would not resign unless a “motion to vacate the speakership” passed. It was the legislative equivalent of “say it to my face.”

Even Norris, saying he had already achieved his goal, lost his stomach for confrontation. The motion to vacate was defeated, 192 to 155.

Cannon continued as speaker, and Republicans remained split, helping Democrats seize control of the House in the midterm elections a few months later. Then, in 1912, Roosevelt ran as a third-party presidential candidate to oust his own successor, Taft, splitting the Republican vote and handing Democrats the White House, too.

Norris, the leader of the revolt, went on to a storied career in the Senate, generally regarded as one of the best ever. Cannon’s name, if not his reputation, has also survived the passage of time; the Cannon House Office Building is named after him.

I’m going to take a wild guess and predict that nobody will ever name an office building in Washington DC after Kevin McCarthy. Well, maybe a lobbying shop on K Street which is where he may well be headed.

There is big trouble in paradise. Here’s Chip Roy, hard right congressman, former chief of staff to Ted Cruz and member of the Freedom Caucus. He’s not happy:

Trump gagged

Published by digby on October 3, 2023

Trump got a gag order in his NY trial today after tweeting out lies and personal information about the judge’s clerk. He took down the tweet but his followers screenshot it and are passing it around and apparently there is some fundraising going on. It was a warning that he would be sanctioned if he does it again. The judge didn’t say anything about disparaging himself or the prosecutor which Trump has been doing every day during breaks in the trial. I guess he figures they are fair game. He shouldn’t. Trump is literally telling his followers to “go after” the prosecutor. And that’s the tip of the iceberg:

Former President Donald J. Trump had a lot to say on the first day of the fraud trial against him and his company. Speaking to reporters at a Manhattan courthouse on Monday, he dismissed the judge as a “rogue” justice and said he did not “think the people of this country are going to stand for it.” And he focused on the official who filed the lawsuit against him, New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.

“This is a disgrace,” he said, “and you ought to go after this attorney general.”

The remark urging people to “go after” a top elected official in New York, by a former president whose invective has become a familiar backdrop of American life, was part of a pattern of increasingly sharp language from Mr. Trump.

Days earlier, he told hundreds of Republican activists in California that shoplifters should be shot. Not long before that, he insinuated that the military general he personally appointed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed for treason.

Since he first became a political candidate in the 2016 presidential race, Mr. Trump has glorified violence, suggesting he wanted to hit a protester and offering to pay the legal fees if his supporters struck protesters at his rallies. But as Mr. Trump has been indicted four times in four jurisdictions in the last five months, and now faces a civil fraud trial in New York, his violent speech has escalated.

Mr. Trump’s public remarks, whether online, in interviews or at rallies, have always had the potential for incendiary effects. A number of defendants prosecuted over the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, said they believed they were acting on Mr. Trump’s orders.

Part of what has changed is that his violent remarks now come at a time when the indictments have already stoked anger among his supporters and when attacks against institutions, judges and prosecutors around the country have increased. The special counsel, Jack Smith, has asked the federal judge overseeing the case in which Mr. Trump was charged with trying to subvert the democratic process in 2020 for a limited gag order because of his threatening statements against witnesses, prosecutors and others.

If the judge grants the gag order, it may only increase Mr. Trump’s appeal with his supporters: The former president, who claims to be a victim of political persecution, is finding a receptive audience for his increasingly menacing language at campaign appearances. Mr. Trump has always leavened his sharpest words with humor, which can have a softening effect, a pattern that has continued with his recent appearances.

At the G.O.P. convention in California last week, Mr. Trump mocked Paul Pelosi, the husband of Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker. Last year, Mr. Pelosi was brutally attacked in his home by a man who was wielding a hammer and who was motivated by right-wing conspiracy theories. “We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco,” Mr. Trump said, before pausing and looking out at the crowd.

“How’s her husband doing, by the way, anybody know?” he deadpanned, drawing laughter and a smattering of applause. “She’s against building a wall at our border even though she has a wall around her house, which obviously didn’t do a very good job.”

Mr. Trump also talked about mass shoplifting incidents at stores in major cities. Republicans have focused on the shoplifting sprees as examples of lawlessness, saying the punishment should be severe.

“Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” Mr. Trump told the crowd at a hotel ballroom in Anaheim. The audience cheered wildly. “Shot!” he added for emphasis.

The moment was Mr. Trump’s biggest applause line of the night. Attendees rose to their feet and chanted: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

A spokesman for Mr. Trump declined to comment.

Mr. Trump holds relatively few campaign appearances compared with his rivals running for the Republican presidential nomination. And several of his recent public appearances have been connected to his indictments and court-mandated appearances.

That reality, in which his legal travails and his political campaign are merging into one, has meant that Mr. Trump’s defenses of himself — and his calls for supporters to refuse to “stand” for what he insists is a broad miscarriage of justice — are front and center in nearly every statement he makes.

Mr. Trump voices most of his anger these days in a far less visible forum: Truth Social, the social media website he started in early February 2022, just over a year after he was barred from X, formerly known as Twitter. His X account was reinstated by the new owner, Elon Musk, but he has used it only once: to post the mug shot that officials took when he was arrested in Fulton County, Ga., in connection with his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state.

On Truth Social, he criticizes the prosecutors, reposts videos and memes attacking his critics and rivals, and blasts out clips from his own speeches. In one recent clip of a speech he gave in Michigan, he complained that if he hadn’t run for president, he “would have had the nicest softest life” but that “instead, I have to beat these lunatics up all day long.”

It was on Truth Social where Mr. Trump made the comment about the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley. The general was increasingly critical of Mr. Trump as his role came to an end, an extraordinary rebuke of a former president by a senior military leader.

In a Truth Social post, Mr. Trump wrote of the general’s calls with his Chinese counterpart, “This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”

And then he said… “to be continued.”

I don’t think any gag order is going to stop him. And he knows the chance of him being jailed for contempt is less than zero. So, maybe he won’t attack that clerk again. But he’ll keep attacking people, riling up his cult to violence and even if it happens, he won’t stop. He believes that he must win the presidency by any means necessary in order to prove he didn’t lose the last one and keep himself out of jail. He will push it to the limit.

A rare moment of SCOTUS sanity?

Published by digby on October 3, 2023

Maybe …

Ian Millhiser watched today’s first Supreme Court arguments and they were apparently as nutty as the shenanigans taking place on the House floor today, where the MAGA kooks have decided to oust their own speaker and the NY Courthouse steps where Trump is babbling incoherently during every break.

Imagine that the Supreme Court of the United States spent an entire morning debating whether penguins are the primary cause of colon cancer or whether John F. Kennedy was assassinated by aliens from the planet Venus.

That’s more or less the quality of arguments that former Trump Solicitor General Noel Francisco presented to the Court on Tuesday, as part of a quizzical effort to convince the justices to declare an entire federal agency unconstitutional.

The good news is that the Court appears unlikely to buy what Francisco is selling. All three of the liberal justices took turns beating up Francisco, with an exasperated Justice Sonia Sotomayor telling Francisco at one point that she is trying to understand Francisco’s argument and is at a “total loss.”

Sotomayor appeared to be joined in her frustration by Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, two Trump appointees who showed little patience for Francisco’s attacks on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the agency that Francisco is urging them to strike down. Like Sotomayor, Barrett also repeatedly pressed Francisco to explain how, exactly, his proposed interpretation of the Constitution would actually work.

By the end of the argument, even Justice Clarence Thomas — ordinarily the most conservative member of the Court — appeared fed up with Francisco’s inability to articulate a coherent argument.

The 2023-2024 SCOTUS term will feature a growing list of cases that could transform the US, its government, and our right to free speech and public safety. We’re tracking them here.

Ian has covered the Supreme Court extensively as a senior correspondent for Vox. Read more of his reporting here.

It seems very unlikely, therefore, that the Court’s decision in Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association will end in the CFPB being struck down — and that’s a very good thing. As the banking industry warned in a brief to the justices, striking down the CFPB would mean striking down the agency that writes the rules telling them how to comply with federal laws governing mortgages. Without these rules in place, the entire US mortgage market could seize up — taking out about 17 percent of the US economy in the process.

A decision against the CFPB, in other words, could usher in the kind of economic ruin that hasn’t been seen in the United States since the Great Depression.

Francisco also spent much of the Tuesday morning argument reiterating positions he took in his brief, which could invalidate a wide range of federal programs — including Social Security and Medicare.

At various points, for example, Francisco seemed to argue that the CFPB is unconstitutional because a federal law gives it “perpetual” funding, meaning that it is funded until Congress passes a new law withdrawing that funding. But nearly two-thirds of all federal spending is perpetual, including major social programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

The Community Financial case is before the justices because the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, an increasingly rogue court dominated by far-right Republicans, last year bought the argument that the CFPB is unconstitutional. The one good thing that can be said about that decision is that it now appears very likely to be reversed.

Even the current very conservative Supreme Court appears to recognize that the Fifth Circuit’s approach would sow far too much chaos and that it would give far too much power to judges.

Click the link to read the details of what these nuts were trying to accomplish. Obviously, we won’t know for some time if they got any traction but if even Clarence Thomas sounds skeptical I think it’s probably unlikely.

The next few years are going to be filled with lousy cases like this and adjudicated in the lower courts that have been filled with unqualified Trump nominees. The Federalist Society isn’t sending their best.