The IRS has placed a lien on Rudy Giuliani’s $4.5 million penthouse after accusing the fallen attorney of owing more than half a million dollars in unpaid taxes, DailyMail.com can reveal.
The federal tax agency claims the 79-year-old former New York City mayor owes $549,435.26 in unpaid income taxes for 2021, according to a notice filed in court in Palm Beach County, Florida.
The IRS placed a lien on Giuliani’s penthouse in Palm Beach, just three miles north of former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
If Giuliani doesn’t pay up, the September 1 lien allows the IRS to seize some of the profits from Giuliani’s condo if it were to be sold.
Surely Venezuelan software in the IRS machines is responsible.
There are “rich and famous” photos of the apartment included. Who cares?
No additional details as of this writing that would explain the difference between the two tax delinquents.
We interrupt regular broadcasting to relay the news that the IRS slapped a lien on Rudy Giuliani for $550k in unpaid taxes. pic.twitter.com/L92S7pqDh7
Last month, Giuliani’s former lawyers sued him over allegations that he had not paid legal fees that they said amounted to $1.36 million. Giuliani responded to the lawsuit by saying the dollar amount being sought was excessive.
Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, also faces a $10 million lawsuit filed by Noelle Dunphy, a woman whose allegations included Giuliani’s harassing her and discussing the selling of presidential pardons after she was hired in 2019. Giuliani has denied the claims.
In August, a federal judge found Giuliani liable for defaming two election workers in boosting former President Donald Trump’s stolen election claims.
Oh, Rudy must miss the good old days of smoking cigars with Lev and Igor.
There is so much going on here.
It’s a photo of Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas & Igor Fruman. On their phones. At a London cigar bar. In July (aka in midst of Ukraine escapades). Which he emailed to John Solomon. With the subject line “Smoke Filled Room Pre-Game Ritual.” pic.twitter.com/auke0BrUoA
Apparently, he has a great fear that someone is going to poison him.
Cassidy Hutchinson is still on her book tour. And she has some more tea (or, should I say, condiments)on Trump’s bizarre phobias and obsessions. He isn’t just an authoritarian monster, he’s also filled with weird paranoid neuroses:
Cassidy Hutchinson is not done airing out the sordid, amusing, sometimes confounding things she witnessed while working under Donald Trump. The former White House aide, whose book Enough is leading American sales, stopped by Jimmy Kimmel Liveand spent much of her time explaining, of all things, the former president’s apparent inability to eat lunch like a normal person.
Hutchinson’s testimony during last year’s January 6 hearings instantly went viral and, as Jimmy Kimmel put it on Wednesday night, “cast serious doubt on the highly professional, by-the-book reputation of the Trump administration.” Among other damning accusations, Hutchinson recalled a time when Trump threw his lunch against the wall in a fit of rage.
But apparently, that’s not even the half of it; even Trump’s ketchup allegedly has to pass muster.
“He does have a very potent fear of being poisoned,” Hutchinson told Kimmel. “… so he uses and prefers the small Heinz glass ketchup bottles because he likes to hear his valet—whoever is serving him his meal—he likes to hear the pop.”
What inspired this fear, Hutchinson’s host wondered—his ex-wives? Maybe, as the former staffer humorously suggested, it’s the whole Russia thing? Either way, it seems the former president’s staffers had a lot to worry about once the plates hit the table.
Returning to the moment in her testimony when she alleged that Trump had hurled his lunch at a wall, Hutchinson said, “Sometimes it would happen once or twice a week, sometimes more. Sometimes there would be a week or so lull, but then there would be a bad news story. But it wasn’t just launching the food and the plates and the porcelain at the wall. Sometimes it was just flipping the table.”
Although she says she’s now had a change of heart, Hutchinson told Kimmel she went to work for Trump after seeing him at a campaign rally and feeling a kinship with the crowd.
“Something clicked for me—like, that he was there to represent people like I was accustomed to growing up around,” Hutchinson said. “It was just this magnetism that I felt, and at the same time I did feel a draw to public service.”
When it came time for Hutchinson’s summer internship on Capitol Hill, she says, “naturally, things progressed for me.”
At this point, Hutchinson told Kimmel, she doesn’t regret her service in the Trump Administration.
“I used to say I was in the right place at the right time, and that’s how I got elevated to my role you know. Now I’m, was at the wrong place the wrong time? Wrong place at the right time? I don’t know.”
Analysts predict a massive drop in prices over the next few days and weeks. We’ll have to see if the media notices.
Over the past few weeks there has been non-stop hysteria over the gas price spike on the news. There has been lots of speculation about how it’s the death knell for Biden’s presidency , of course. Will they report this?
After spiking to alarming levels just last week, oil prices are suddenly in free-fall mode. The dramatic reversal should bring relief to drivers (and nervous central bankers) very soon.
US oil prices plunged by 5.6% to $84.22 a barrel on Wednesday, marking the biggest one-day decline in a year. Crude dropped even further Thursday, sinking as low as $82.24 a barrel, a five-week low.
Now, gas prices are already starting to retreat and experts predict sharper drops to come.
The national average for regular gas dipped to $3.77 a gallon on Thursday, according to AAA. That’s 11 cents below the 2023 peak set last month when gas prices experienced an unusual post-Labor Day jump.
Gas prices will tumble to nearly $3.50 a gallon nationally over the next few weeks, Andy Lipow, president of consulting firm Lipow Oil Associates, told CNN.
Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at the Oil Price Information Service, told CNN he expects an even bigger tumble — to as low as $3.25 a gallon by Halloween. Pointing to sinking wholesale prices, Kloza said retail prices should drop each day by between 1.5 cents and 2.5 cents a gallon going forward.
“People at cocktail parties will finally be talking about gas prices in a good way,” Kloza said in a phone interview. “No doubt, it’s welcome news for the consumer portion of the economy.”
It’s welcome news. And most people will notice that the price has come down. But without media attention it won’t have the political salience it should have.
That first hearing was a train wreck. Is there any possibility that the next ones will be better?
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer did not cover himself with glory in the hearings and the Republicans are not happy. They seem to think it was just a bad performance (which it was) but the real problem is the total lack of any evidence justifying an impeachment.
The House Oversight Committee’s impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden didn’t begin with the bang Republicans had wanted. The first hearing, one week ago today, was seen by many impartial observers as disorganized and rudderless. No surprise there: This has been the case throughout the past several months of the Oversight Committee’s sprawling probes into the president and the business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden.
The backlash was everywhere, on Capitol Hill and in conservative media. You can even see the skepticism in polling of Republicans. According to a new Monmouth University poll, just three in ten Republicans put a lot of trust in the fairness of the impeachment inquiry. Half of registered voters have no confidence in the probe’s fairness, with an additional 33 percent claiming to have only “a little” confidence. Just 15 percent overall put a lot of trust in the fairness of the inquiry.
This has landed Comer in the doghouse. Republicans bemoaned his inability to find credible witnesses with any firsthand knowledge of the Biden family’s alleged corruption, and the ones his committee did bring forward made clear they do not believe there is sufficient evidence to impeach the president (yet³).
Now, there are whispers that a “reset” is needed and that Comer might have to hand over control of the inquiry to someone Republicans think might be more capable, like House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan. Jordan, a former Freedom Caucus chairman, has been much more aggressive in his own hearings on Judiciary and the Weaponization of the Federal Government subcommittee, and he has significant allies in the right wing of the House Republican conference. But he’d still have to deal with the same evidence, or lack thereof, that Comer has. So it’s unclear what problem he could fix.
There is also the issue of a House without a speaker. While Republicans insist that they can continue their work, everything will be sidelined until the speaker question has been settled. If Jordan assumes the role, then he won’t take the reins from Comer, but he could also steer the impeachment with a stronger hand than McCarthy ever did.
The role of Oversight chairman during Republican-controlled Congresses is primarily that of a showman. Marquee hearings and explosive revelations are how they move the needle in upcoming elections. If Comer wants to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors.⁴ then he needs to demonstrate the ability to change public perception and create headlines. So far, he’s done the opposite—and his friends and colleagues are taking note.
1-There are about 100 of these little secret offices in the Capitol building set aside for use by senior members and are often granted as a courtesy so they don’t have to travel through the tunnels back to the adjoining office buildings like many of the rank and file members.
2-Among Republicans, of course, not the whole House.
3-This is a big caveat. Republicans and conservative media place a high priority on staying a member of the team. There is a strong likelihood that skeptics might come around as this inquiry progresses, even if no new bombshell evidence or smoking guns are produced.
4-The past two Republican chairmen of the Oversight Committee, Reps. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), are now paid Fox News contributors.
I think the inquiry will continue. Whether a vote to impeach passes the House largely rests on how tainted the GOP moderates are with right wing craziness at the time. That could go either way. But I’ll be shocked if this fizzles. It’s one of the animating issues on the right and it’s hard to see how they’ll give that up. Also, Dear Leader wants it very badly.
It’s been obvious that Rudy Giuliani drinks to excess for a long time. He’s shown up on Fox News inebriated more than once, as was obvious to anyone watching. In the infamous interview “Over Bloody Mary’s with NY Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi” he was described like this:
His ex-wife had implied, in an interview with New York, that he was an alcoholic. Others anonymously question his mental state. “Oh yeah, yeah — I do a lot of drugs,” Giuliani said sarcastically. “There was one I was addicted to. I’ve forgotten what it is. I don’t know where the drug things come from — I really don’t. The alcohol comes from the fact that I did occasionally drink. I love Scotch. I can’t help it. All of the malts. And part of it is cigars — I love to have them with cigars. I’m a partyer.”
Here’s some evidence. Although some of them are probably just Rudy being nuts, there’s little doubt that he was imbibing heavily during this period:
This speech on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 was truly epic:
According to the NY Times this week, the prosecutors really are looking at Giuliani’s drinking on election night (and probably after that) on regards to Trump’s potential claim that he was just listening to his lawyers:
For more than a decade, friends conceded grimly, Mr. Giuliani’s drinking had been a problem. And as he surged back to prominence during the presidency of Donald J. Trump, it was getting more difficult to hide it.
On some nights when Mr. Giuliani was overserved, an associate discreetly signaled the rest of the club, tipping back his empty hand in a drinking motion, out of the former mayor’s line of sight, in case others preferred to keep their distance. Some allies, watching Mr. Giuliani down Scotch before leaving for Fox News interviews, would slip away to find a television, clenching through his rickety defenses of Mr. Trump.
Even at less rollicking venues — a book party, a Sept. 11 anniversary dinner, an intimate gathering at Mr. Giuliani’s own apartment — his consistent, conspicuous intoxication often startled his company.
“It’s no secret, nor do I do him any favors if I don’t mention that problem, because he has it,” said Andrew Stein, a former New York City Council president who has known Mr. Giuliani for decades. “It’s actually one of the saddest things I can think about in politics.”
No one close to Mr. Giuliani, 79, has suggested that drinking could excuse or explain away his present legal and personal disrepair. He arrived for a mug shot in Georgia in August not over rowdy nightlife behavior or reckless cable interviews but for allegedly abusing the laws he defended aggressively as a federal prosecutor, subverting the democracy of a nation that once lionized him.
Yet to almost anyone in proximity, friends say, Mr. Giuliani’s drinking has been the pulsing drumbeat punctuating his descent — not the cause of his reputational collapse but the ubiquitous evidence, well before Election Day in 2020, that something was not right with the former president’s most incautious lieutenant.
Now, prosecutors in the federal election case against Mr. Trump have shown an interest in the drinking habits of Mr. Giuliani — and whether the former president ignored what his aides described as the plain inebriation of the former mayor referred to in court documents as “Co-Conspirator 1.”
In a normal world this would be a problem for Donald Trump but I doubt that his cult will hear about it and even if they did they wouldn’t believe it.
Former President Donald Trump is considering a visit to the Capitol next week where he is open to pitching himself as a speaker candidate, according to a Republican familiar with internal discussions.
If it happens, Trump would come speak to the House GOP sometime before lawmakers’ internal speaker election, which is set to happen on Wednesday, that person said. A final decision hasn’t yet been made. The full GOP will meet Tuesday for an internal “candidate forum.”
It’s not clear if Trump — the frontrunner in the 2024 presidential primary — would actually run for speaker. Winning would require near-unanimity from the House GOP, a difficult hurdle for the controversial former president. One of his closest Hill allies, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, is already in the race. (Jordan told NBC that he discussed his speakership bid with Trump this week.)
It remains a longshot idea: The House has never elected a speaker who wasn’t a member of Congress, though it is not technically a constitutional requirement. Trump could also run into problems with the GOP’s own conference rules, which state a member of GOP leadership is required to step aside “if indicted for a felony for which a sentence of two or more years imprisonment may be imposed.”
Can you believe it???
Still, the former president has openly flirted with the idea of becoming GOP speaker in the days since Kevin McCarthy’s fall. And several members, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga), have backed the idea.
Trump: ‘A lot of people have been calling me about speaker’
“A lot of people have been calling me about speaker. All I can say is we’ll do whatever is best for the country and the Republican Party,” Trump told reporters Wednesday.
He’s not going to do it, of course. It’s absurd. He’s just looking for attention and wants everyone to see he’s beloved by the GOP establishment.
We are living through something and I can’t tell from day to day if it’s tragedy or farce. I guess it’s probably both.
I’ve argued that he is more likely to take votes from Trump than Biden. But it appears that at this point in the cycle anyway, I’m wrong. He does take more from Biden. Dan Pfeiffer writes about it in his newsletter today:
Politico also reports that American Values 2024, a Super PAC supporting Kennedy Jr., has commissioned polling and is preparing for an independent bid.
While multiple polls demonstrated that the No Labels and West candidacies could hurt Biden, the initial speculation was that Kennedy would hurt Trump more. On its face, Kennedy Jr. has been running as MAGA’s favorite Democrat. He is a regular on Fox News and other MAGA media outlets, where he mostly attacks Biden, spouts anti-vax conspiracy theories, and toes the Trump line on Russia. If West pulls disaffected liberals from Biden, and the No Labels ticket is a place for Republicans and independents that disapprove of Biden, shouldn’t RFK Jr. take votes from Trump?
What the Polls Say
Most of the polling shows Kennedy Jr. getting 10% and 20% of the vote against Biden in the primary. The number generally decreased over the course of the year as people learned more about his disturbing views on a wide range of issues.
Kennedy Jr. has made zero effort to appeal to Democratic primary voters. Based on his rhetoric and schedule, it would be easy to assume he was actually running for the Republican nomination. The results of his approach can be seen in his approval rating. In a September Quinnipiac poll, Kennedy Jr.’s favorable rating is 32/35, with 31% who haven’t heard enough about him to form an opinion. However, that number is driven by Republican support — 48% of Republicans view him favorably. Among Democrats, only 14% are favorable, while 57% hold unfavorable views.
It’s bad for Trump to have someone so adored by Republicans on the ballot, right?
Well, maybe not.
A new poll from Echelon Insights, a well-respected GOP polling firm, shows that a Kennedy Jr. independent bid hurts Biden more than Trump. In a two-way race, Trump is up three on Biden. Trump’s lead grows to four when Kennedy Jr. is added to the mix. One point is mostly statistical noise and nothing worth worrying about this far from the election. The more interesting data can be found in the crosstabs. Kennedy Jr. gets 14% in a three-way race. But more of those votes come from Democratic-leaning voters than Republicans.
Additionally, 13% of self-identified liberals and 16% of 2020 Biden voters support Robert Kennedy Jr. Only 9% of conservatives and 10% of Trump voters defect to RFK Jr.
Why Another MAGA Candidate Helps Trump (For Now)
These findings may be surprising given Kennedy Jr.’s MAGA credentials, but there are a few reasons why his candidacy deals less damage to Trump at the moment. First, many Republicans who approve of RFK Jr. are committed Trump voters. Therefore, they like RFK Jr.’s MAGA vibes but stick with Trump. Second, some Democrats and independents supporting Kennedy Jr. are unaware of his stances on vaccines and other issues. As Kennedy Jr. is further scrutinized, some of those voters should return to Biden. Finally, the biggest reason is that, as of right now, there are more Democrats unhappy with Biden than Republicans unhappy with Trump. As Democrats become more engaged with the race, that will change (if it doesn’t change, democracy is screwed).
You don’t need a decoder ring to see what is happening here. Steve Bannon reportedly encouraged Kennedy Jr. to run. Some of his biggest supporters are MAGA media personalities like Tucker Carlson. His campaign and Super PAC are being funded by Trump supporters. According to a report by ABC News:
The super PAC, which can support Kennedy with outside advertising and other spending but cannot directly coordinate with him, raised a total of $9.7 million through the end of June.
Almost all of that sum, 96%, came from two megadonors, one of them with a history of donating to Republicans: $5 million, more than 50% of the group’s total receipts for the first half of the year, was given by Timothy Mellon, heir to the Mellon banking fortune, who previously gave more than $20 million to a super PAC supporting former President Donald Trump during the 2020 election cycle.
Encouraging third-party candidates has been part of Trump’s strategy since 2020, when Jared Kushner was reportedly involved in helping Kanye West. The original idea was for Kennedy Jr. to sow chaos in the Democratic Primary. Despite his famous name, he has been unsuccessful. Therefore, becoming an independent candidate to attack Biden from the Left on some issues (military spending) and the Right on others (immigration) is the logical next move for someone out to damage Biden. Kennedy Jr. can accumulate online attention and raise money to attack Biden — who could end up fighting a two-front war.
In the end, RFK Jr. may pull more from Trump, as Nate Silver has argued. He may have no impact at all. The campaign will change between now and next fall. Getting on the ballot is not easy or cheap, and Kennedy Jr. is unpredictable. But as of right now — his candidacy could represent another potential challenge for a President with no margin of error.
It’s literal insanity. But as someone who went through 2000 and had massive arguments with Nader voters (when the stakes were even lower) I am not sanguine that Kennedy isn’t going to appeal to people who don’t understand that their desire to either make a point about the political system by voting for someone who represents their disdain or voting for someone who is more perfect on an issue they care about will actually make the opposite point and empower someone who is invariably even more hostile to the issues they care about. It’s an age-old argument in American which has a system that leads it to maintain a two party system whether we like it or not.
Obviously, the stakes have never been higher than they are now. Not even close. Look at what the Republicans are doing in congress just this week. Look at what their standard bearer is saying outside the courtroom in New York as he stands trial for fraud. We are in deep deep trouble and we don’t have the luxury of empty gestures.
God help us if we can’t persuade every person who isn’t captured by the MAGA cult to vote Democratic this time.
And you don’t need to win over 100 percent of the people on the other side or on any side. In a democracy, what you need is a majority. — NPR’s Steve Inskeep to Anand Giridharadas at The.Ink
Aggressive gerrymandering by GOP-led legislatures means in many places it takes much more than a simple majority to win power. Otherwise, Inskeep is correct. What Democrats must do in such places is shave the other side’s vote margins.
I don’t know if you’ve read Frank Foer’s new book on the Biden presidency. It’s called The Last Politician, and it struck me that, on a completely different topic, it was presenting this idea that’s kind of similar to yours. The idea is that Biden, in Foer’s telling, is someone whose gift is this now despised art of politics, of making deals, of talking to people you don’t like, of being able to hold your nose with ugly compromises. And that idea has gotten demeaned in our time. Part of what Foer’s arguing is that, actually, in a moment of anti-democratic threat, that behavior, while maybe crass and all those things we associate it with, is crucial; it’s actually what holds societies together. I wonder if you feel like you are making a similar case but drawing on a 19th century example for the 21st century?
I think there is a similarity there, and the common thread is this: if you think that there is a minority of people who endanger the country, you need to be the one to assemble a majority to outnumber them. If you’re going to defeat someone you think is doing something terrible, and also keep a democracy, you have to build a majority. And that might mean that you have to deal with people that you disagree with on some things, or many things, or even most things, but you find enough common cause that you can work with them on something.
You write in the beginning of the book that Lincoln has been sacralized, much in the way that folks like Martin Luther King are sacralized and all kinds of heroes are sacralized, so that we lose the texture of how they actually operated in the down and dirty reality of political life. Can you give us some examples of Lincoln’s lower-order behaviors and maneuvering and machinations that illustrate this kind of politicking that you’re trying to redeem?
We want Lincoln to be a heroic, unifying figure. And he ought to be; he is in many ways a unifying figure and a great democratic figure, but we overlook the things that he did that led to his accomplishments. And one of the toughest ones was his effort to win the votes of people who hated immigrants: so-called Know-Nothings in the 1850s.
This was a huge movement, it attracted a lot of support, it included a lot of Lincoln’s own political friends in the state of Illinois, it included a lot of voters in important parts of the state of Illinois, and Lincoln hated the ideology that was being expressed. There’s a quote in the book, from a letter to his friend, where Lincoln says, I’m not a Know-Nothing, that is certain, I despise their views as much as I despise slavery, and if they ever get into power, I would rather move to a country where they make no pretense of loving liberty, such as Russia.
And yet he realizes in 1858, when he’s running for Senate, that if he’s going to have even a chance of winning, he needs to attract some of these people into his coalition. And he reaches out to Joseph Gillespie, an old friend of his, who’d become a Know-Nothing leader, and says, I need votes in your state senate district. I need votes from your supporters to have any chance of winning. Will you help me? And Gillespie does. Now, I want to add that Lincoln tried to keep his integrity. As far as I can tell, from the records that exist, he talked to these crowds only about their common aversion to slavery. He never has a whisper, even a word, where he hints that he might like their Know-Nothing ideology.
But he was still taking this morally perilous choice to build the anti-slavery coalition. That’s a hard call. Are we entirely comfortable knowing that Abraham Lincoln, the guy in the Lincoln Memorial, was on a stage with a nativist leader a couple of times? It’s kind of uncomfortable, but it was part of building the Republican Party that ended up bringing about an enormous social change in this country.
Russell found areas of common agreement with MAGAs he met in Erie. The right is not monolithic. Out in red counties, accentuating areas of positive agreement (as the song goes) has potential for shaving the GOP’s margins enough to win a majority, at least in state or congressional district races (2006). Our frenemies don’t have to check off every ideological box. Just enough to vote with us and win us power to make change.
Inskeep says, “the challenge is not to be friends with everybody, it is to assemble a majority of people who will respect your humanity, who will uphold your rights. Or who will at least a little bit support your side of the argument, as much as you can do today, as much as you can do in the next election.” That involves “in some cases risking yourself to find alliances.”
Anat Shenker-Osorio (profiled in Giridharadas’ “The Persuaders“) tells students at Berkeley (timestamp 3:09), “In advocacy … you can choose to be right or you can choose to win.” The left loves being right. Shenker-Osorio doesn’t care.
“If I can get you to do the thing I need you to do and you still think climate change is fake,” she says, “then that’s a problem for you and the person who dropped you on your head. But it’s not a problem for me.”
A lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill have no use for Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and the seven others from the Republican caucus whose votes the other day sank Kevin McCarthy’s speakership. MAGA reactionaries lobbing grenades at Democrats is one thing. Lobbing them into the Republican caucus is quite another.
As predicted, Republicans are trying to pin McCarthy’s ouster on Democrats. Reality check: It was Gaetz’s resolution. His alone. For reasons including his initiating an impeachment inquiry against President Biden and his reversal on condemning Donald Trump for precipitating a violent insurrection, Democrats saw no benefit in bailing out McCarthy.
Now comes the aftermath. Giving McCarthy the boot is not a good look either for Republicans or for the U.S.A. as a whole. After a quick review of the week’s events and Donald Trump’s “burn-the-house-down” antics at his New York trial, Peter Baker (take with a grain of salt) writes that the foundations of our democracy appear shaky both to scholars and average Americans. Also, foreign adversaries are watching closely:
Robert M. Gates, the longtime Republican national security official who served as defense secretary for both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, warned in an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine last week titled “The Dysfunctional Superpower” that both Mr. Putin and President Xi Jinping of China were interpreting America’s troubles in perilous ways.
Both leaders, he wrote, are convinced that democracies like the United States “are past their prime and have entered an irreversible decline,” evident in their growing isolationism, political polarization and domestic conflict. “Dysfunction has made American power erratic and unreliable,” Mr. Gates wrote, “practically inviting risk-prone autocrats to place dangerous bets — with potentially catastrophic effects.”
And that was before the meltdown in the House of the past few days. In an email on Wednesday, Mr. Gates wrote, “The events of the last couple of days have only underscored how real is the dysfunction.”
Washington Post:
“If you want to know what it looks like when democracy is in trouble, this is what it looks like,” Daniel Ziblatt, professor of government at Harvard University tells the Washington Post. “It should set off alarm bells that something is not right.”
Congress arrived at this point for myriad reasons, all of which build on one another, scholars say: Social media and cable news incentivized politicians to perform for the camera, not for their constituents. Aggressive gerrymandering created deeply partisan districts where representation is decided in primary contests, not general elections. Weakened political parties became captive to their loudest and most extreme members.
Taken together, those factors handed a small number of lawmakers the power to throw one of the three branches of government into disarray and, for now, paralysis.
The eight GOP members behind McCarthy’s loss (all from safely drawn GOP districts) represent just 1.8% of the country and an extreme minority. Yet here we are. The House can conduct no business until a replacement is elected. And another funding deadline looms.
“If American democracy is already suffering and weak from various maladies, this unruly crisis in the House is just going to kick it a little further in that direction,” said Alex Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. “You are taking a set of institutions and you are weakening them and then pointing to their weakness.”
That has been the conservative playbook for decades. Brand democratic governance as dysfunctional, get elected, then set about proving it through legislative sabotage. The rise of multicultural democracy has further incentivized sabotage by reactionaries who see their democratic routes to power narrowing. Facing an unfavorable strategic position, their inclination is to throw over the chess board.
As disconcerting as the events of the past few weeks have been, more worrying is what might come next. History has shown that government dysfunction can be a prelude to the erasure of democracy altogether, with authoritarianism rising in its place, said Harvard’s Ziblatt [“Tyranny of the Minority”].
“What precedes a democratic breakdown is political stalemate and extreme dysfunction where there’s a sense that nothing can get done,” Ziblatt said. “When governments can’t respond in genuine crises, it has a delegitimizing effect, and it reinforces the sense among citizens that we have to resort to other means.”
MAGAs resorted once on Jan. 6. If Trump sees the inside of a jail cell or rages himself red-faced into a coronary (like Andrew Breitbart), they’ll resort again.
Donald Trump on Day 3 of his civil fraud trial, which he is voluntarily attending:
“But I’m here, stuck here. And I can’t … I’d rather be right now in Iowa. I’d rather be in New Hampshire, or South Carolina, or Ohio, or a lot of other places. But I’m stuck here.” pic.twitter.com/EEQJNM5A20
Kevin McCarthy was behind interim Speaker Patrick McHenry’s move to kick former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Majority Leader Steny Hoyer out of their office spaces, two Republican sources told CNN.
GOP Rep. Garret Graves told reporters on Wednesday that McCarthy is getting the office that McHenry has ordered her to vacate.
“Look the deal is that the office that Pelosi is in right now is the office of the preceding speaker. Speaker Pelosi and other Democrats determined that they wanted a new … speaker, and it’s Kevin McCarthy. So, he’s getting the office,” he said.
Sources close to Pelosi and Hoyer say it was retaliation for Democrats siding against McCarthy in voting to vacate the speaker’s chair Tuesday. The unofficial offices are located near the House floor.
McCarthy and McHenry’s did not respond to requests for comment.
Graves then put the blame on Democrats for voting McCarthy out of office.
“I don’t know what they’re complaining about,” Graves said. “They created this situation.
“I don’t know what they’re complaining about,” Graves said. “They created this situation.”
It’s the Democrats’ fault for not saving McCarthy from his own caucus. I’ve heard some fatuous BS in my day but that really takes the cake. The whole party is like a bunch of juvenile delinquents.
