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“Fallacious”

Published by digby on September 20, 2023

The questioning of Merrick Garland before the House Judiciary Committee is enough to make you give up on democracy if this is what we have as leaders

Kevin’s conundrum

Published by digby on September 20, 2023

It seems like only yesterday that we were on the cusp of defaulting on the debt and many of us were predicting that the kamikaze Freedom Caucus was going to make it happen. They sure sounded serious. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy was unable to keep that extremist right flank under control and they were threatening to unseat him under the rule they insisted he adopt in order to get the votes he needed to attain office if he didn’t meet their demands. With a four vote margin he had almost no room to maneuver. After the interminable 15 rounds of voting and all the backroom deals he had to make to get the gavel back in January the prospects for a deal looked very slim.

Yet, with all that working against them, McCarthy and President Biden surprised everyone by managing to pound out an agreement that could get the required number of votes in both Houses. A number of House Republicans were livid, especially the Freedom Caucus, and refused to vote for it but Democrats filled in the gaps and the catastrophe was averted at the last minute.

There was a lot of grumbling but no one took any action to unseat McCarthy. instead the House Republicans picked up they left off with their performative investigations. But some of them aren’t stupid and they knew they would soon get another chance to force their will on the country. While the debt ceiling deal ostensibly “capped” all spending at 2023 levels for two years, nobody said that appropriations bills which had to be finished by September 30th couldn’t be cut to the bone.

And so, here we are less than two weeks before the deadline, no appropriations bills have been passed and the House GOP is at each throats. They may not even be able to agree on a continuing resolution to extend the deadline so they can keep the government open beyond week after next. If Kevin McCarthy can’t pull something out of his hat again, and it really doesn’t seem likely, we are almost certainly headed for another shut down.

Last week McCarthy authorized an impeachment inquiry for Joe Biden without bringing it to a vote as he had earlier vowed to do. This was widely seen as a sop to the MAGA extremists who were shrieking “Impeach!” at the top of their lungs every five minutes despite the fact that there is no evidence to support such an action. It didn’t work. Not only were they unsatisfied, they believe impeachment isn’t nearly good enough.

Last week the simmering feud between Matt Gaetz, R-Fl., and McCarthy finally boiled over when Gaetz openly threatened to take the necessary steps to remove the speaker if he didn’t agree to all of his demands. McCarthy finally lost his temper and responded, “If you want to file a motion to vacate, then file the fucking motion.” Shortly afterwards, McCarthy had to forego plans to have the House vote on a defense spending bill because he couldn’t get the votes and Gaetz fired back,“how about just move the fucking spending bills?” he told CNN.

So that went well. And so far this week, it’s going even better. Now the Freedom Caucus itself is at each other’s throats. On Tuesday, five hardcore MAGA Republicans stopped that proposed defense spending bill from even coming up for debate, once again paralyzing the the House making it impossible to move forward. This maneuver is very unusual and appears to be a tactic designed solely to embarrass Kevin McCarthy.

When asked about it McCarthy was clearly rattled:

Ask those five why they voted against it.  Think about what they’re voting against. They’re voting against even bringing the bill up to have a discussion about it to vote on. If you’re opposed to the bill, vote against the bill at the end…You could change it if you don’t like it. But the idea that you vote against a rule, to even bring it up, that makes no sense to me,”

Mike Garcia, R-Ca., was also fit to be tied and called out his fellow Republicans. He said, “out of fear, they decided to vote against the rule to even allow this to come to the floor for debate, This city, Washington DC, is riddled with Chinese sympathizers.” You read that right. He said those five Republicans were Chinese sympathizers.

Things went downhill from there. Over the weekend, the Freedom Caucus and the leadership negotiated a stop-gap Continuing Resolution to take them through October 31st and avoid an imminent shutdown. It was a ridiculous agreement that no Democrats would sign on to but they thought they could bring together the GOP caucus to at least buy some more time. But no. When it came time to vote on Tuesday, the whole thing unraveled and 16 Republicans balked. McCarthy had to withdraw that one from the floor as well.

The recriminations were swift and nasty. The Daily Beast reported:

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who opposed the bill’s continued funding of the office of Trump prosecutor Jack Smith, took potshots online at one of the bill’s sponsors, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), who shot back, “You’ll need more than tweets and hot takes!!” Meanwhile, The Hill reported that Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN) blamed “weak Speaker” McCarthy, who hit back by calling Spartz a quitter for deciding to retire at the end of her term to spend more time with her family. 

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More or less sane Congressman Mike Lawlor, R-N.Y., told CNN, “this is not conservative Republicanism, this is stupidity, these people can’t define a win, they don’t know how to take yes for an answer. It’s a clown show.” That is 100% correct.

And it’s not going to get any better.


I have no predictions as to where this is going to end up. A government shutdown seems to be inevitable, but we just don’t know when it’s going to happen. It’s possible they’ll get some kind of extension through with Democrats’ help if they can do it without any conditions. But Gaetz and his cronies don’t seem to be in the mood for that sort of thing and they are obviously eager to call for a vote of no-confidence in McCarthy.

The big question remains, however, and it may be McCarthy’s trump card in the end. As I’ve said before, who else could get enough votes if McCarthy is forced out? More importantly, what kind of masochist would want to? No, I think he’s probably safe. The country, however, couldn’t be in worse hands than those of this insane GOP House majority.

Late yesterday we had this strange report:

That it was found on a baby changing table in a bathroom is just too perfect.

Salon

Defending democracy

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 20, 2023

More strange bedfellows

MSNBC’s “Deadline White House” on Tuesday featured a long segment with members of Operation Saving Democracy. Led by Lt. Col. Amy McGrath (USMC, ret.), the group boasts “almost 600 retired Generals, Admirals, Ambassadors, cabinet and service secretaries, appointed leaders, elected officials, and Senior Executive Service leaders have come together at this time of significant threat to the essential tenets of our Democratic institutions and values.” Joining McGrath were Adm. Steve Abbot (USN, ret.) and Rear Adm. Michael Smith (USN, ret.)

The group believes “The extreme far-right authoritarian ideology that has taken hold in the GOP is an attack on democracy itself.” They hope their credentials and numbers will make an impression on the Trump cult, or else help mobilize ordinary Americans against the domestic terror threat Trumpism poses.

“Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy,” Abbot states into the camera.

“Donald Trump” is a collective noun here, shorthand for a deeper problem.

What were we just saying about strange bedfellows?

Here’s another bipartisan group (albeit less illustrious) out to save the country from that existential threat. Led by former Biden speechwriter, Mathew Littman, and including former Georgia Democratic congressional candidate Marcus Flowers, former Republican congressman Joe Walsh, and former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham, Mission: Democracy is more blunt about calling fascism fascism:

Our mission is to educate all Americans about the dangers posed by MAGA fascism and to encourage them to use our democratic process to help diminish the MAGA influence in our government.

Their ad is more over the top, beginning with a staged book burning:

Despite viral video of two Missouri Republican state senators with flamethrowers setting fire to “books” to chants of “Let’s go, Brandon,” Snopes reports that what the pair claim to have incinerated with their flamethrowers was “pile of empty boxes meant to represent what they described to as ‘woke,’ ‘liberal,’ or ‘leftist’ policies.”

Sure, and the mock gallows erected in front the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and crowd chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” were metaphorical too, like the dead and wounded that day. This is where Ann Coulter once tossed her hair, rolled her eyes, and sighed, “It was just a joke.”

Coulter recently called Trump a “gigantic p—y” after he referred to the conservative commentator as a “has-been” and a “stone cold loser.”

Actually, the appearance of all these strange bedfellows gives me more hope than I’ve had the last few weeks.

As for the flamethrower duo, someone on formerly Twitter captioned their pyro performance video, “Peaked in high school.”

Start playing offense

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 20, 2023

Stay on message

“How they do it,” Digby’s post and comments on “Tough Love For the Democrats” from Rick Wilson’s substack, blew up my Mastodon feed last night. Quite a fewf people agree it’s time for Democrats to stop farting around and treat the fight with MAGA as what it is: a fight.

Wilson shares the GOP’s two rules:

Rule 1: Just win, baby.

Rule 2: Stay on message.

Chuck your “almost religious belief that policy wins elections,” Wilson advises. Quit trying to win on fact-checking. This is a bare-knuckles brawl. Wilson credits Joe Biden for declaring MAGA Republicans a threat in 2022, that what was at stake is democracy and liberty. It still is. Next year’s elections are about “whether the American government is a tool for opportunity or one of oppression.”

“Get on and stay on this message, Democrats,” Wilson insists. Biden has gotten results. The former Republican consultant names Biden “arguably the most successful Democratic President since FDR, taken in total.”

A friend with Clinton White House experience concurs. Clinton came into office with an ambitious agenda and large margins in the House and Senate. In his first two years, Clinton “got one big budget bill through, and a NAFTA bill the Republicans and Big Business liked a lot more than working people and Democrats.” (That’s for sure.) But then things went to hell.

Obama had a decent first two years as well, Mike Lux continues:

When a youthful Barack Obama swept into power with huge margins in both houses of Congress, he had an ambitious agenda as well. Obama did get the Affordable Care Act passed (which was indeed “a big effing deal”) and the Dodd-Frank bill tightened up some Wall Street regulations in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, but everything else on his agenda fell by the wayside as Republicans crushed Democrats in the 2010 election, controlling Congress for the rest of Obama’s presidency.

Joe Biden entered the White House with big ambitions, too. The moment he entered was even more perilous than the financial crisis Obama faced. Like Obama and Clinton, he had a trifecta, but his Congress was the most closely divided in modern history — a 50/50 Senate with Vice-President Harris breaking the tie, and a four seat margin in the House.

But because of his age and experience, Joe Biden had far more success in getting things done than any president in modern history. After two years in office, President Biden’s legislative and executive action track record engendered a debate among historians: was it the most sweeping and transformative administration in 60 years or in 90?

Let’s check the box scores:

Joe Biden and the Democratic trifecta got more than 80% of Americans immunized from COVID despite the worst public health disinformation campaign ever. They revived our economy from the depths of the COVID recession faster than any other major country, got Americans much needed money to keep them going in the hardest times, and saved state and local governments from having to make massive cuts in police, fire, and desperately needed public services. They delivered the first gun safety bill in over 30 years. They delivered the biggest infrastructure bill since the interstate highway system was built in the 1950s. They revitalized American manufacturing with Buy in America policies, the CHIPs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. They passed legislation to force Big Pharma to negotiate on drug prices and bring the cost of insulin down right away. They made the biggest investment any country has ever made in clean energy.

The four trillion dollars in investments in the American economy and American people will transform the economy for generations to come.

Pundits who take the “Biden’s too old” bait deserve ridicule, Wilson believes. “Trump is just as old, much less fit, and a proven threat to the nation’s future. Start playing offense on this message, Democrats.”

And Lux? “In terms of the great things he got done, [Biden] kicked the ass of every other president in modern times.”

Saving democracy from autocratic movements has in other times and in other countries required strange-bedfellow coalitions, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write in “Tyranny of the Minority.” Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger sacrificed their political careers to join with Democrats on the January 6th Committee. Should our republic survive its current crisis, no doubt our political disagreements with anti-Trump Republicans like them and members of The Lincoln Project will resurface. Until then, welcome to the party, pals.

Republicans in disarray

Published by digby on September 19, 2023

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Comer announced that this joint effort, you know, Oversight with Judiciary, this, you know, moving towards the impeachment of Biden, that they’re going to meet next week, and they’re going to subpoena the bank records, so that will be September – be the last couple of days of September, almost October, October 2023.

They’re going to go subpoena the bank records of Hunter Biden, something they should have done in the first week. And this is why it’s a clown show, and they’re not serious. It’s all performative. Unless you’re on them 24/7, and I mean, on them. Up in their grill. Nothing will happen. They don’t want to do anything. This is the same surrender caucus. The reason the country is in the shape it’s in, is because the Republican Party under Bush and under these clowns have rolled over and been part of the problem, while lulling you to sleep over TV for stupid people.

Seriously. And they make a big deal about it. We are going to subpoena. Hunter Biden’s bank records. Dude, that should have happened the first day for drama. You should have, you should have gaveled in and subpoenaed him the first day.

In MAGA land, everyone’s a RINO. Lol.

The truth is that Bannon knows this thing is a loser and he’s just getting ahead of that failure by going on record saying they just aren’t doing it right.

How they do it

Published by digby on September 19, 2023

Former GOP strategist Rick Wilson writes about how the Republicans get over. Normally, I would say that they haven’t got the greatest track record in presidential races over the past 30 years so why listen to them? But with the imbecilic, narcissistic, pathological liar Donald Trump’s inexplicable popularity I think it’s probably a good idea to at least consider some of their tactics:

Republican political operators are raised on two rules.

Just two.

Rule 1: Just win, baby.

Rule 2: Stay on message.

If you have doubts about either of the rules, refer to the other rule.

Just Win

The “Just win” rule is precisely what it sounds like; victory is the only goal, and everything else is noise and distraction. “Just Win” is the rule that leads Democrats to wonder repeatedly why garbage-tier GOP candidates win in states and seats in which they should be competitive. It’s the reason the GOP will defend the indefensible until the last dog dies, whether policy or politician.

It’s why the shamelessness of the GOP political class, of which I was once a successful and very well-compensated member, is their superpower. It’s why they’re so quick to embrace a kind of Ohm’s Law of ugly politics: take the path of least resistance to victory, even if it’s corrosive to the nation, our institutions, and the national character. (With only a handful of exceptions, the consultant class of the GOP loathes Trump with the fire of a million suns, but the winning is so, so profitable, and the rewards of power are so rich that they’ll play along as long as he draws breath into his carcass.)

“Just win” means when it comes to lies, conspiracy, and holding a pillow over the faces of the better angels of our nature until they stop moving, they’re all-in.

Democrats just can’t get to “just win.” They want to argue and persuade on policy, not personality and character. They want voters to be enlightened and engaged about the election with the glittery promise of 600-page legislative action plans and slide decks.

It’s a sweet, if Panglossian, view of the American electorate. The Democrats are, as Bob Cesca tweeted this week, “We’re in this dangerously awkward place 1) where fascism is one election away, and 2) where regular voters don’t want to hear that fascism is one election away.”

The “Just Win” approach to this moment will require Democrats to universally drive the Biden record on the economy and foreign policy. Still, it will also demand amping up the loathing of Trump and Trumpism and telling the American people the horrors that await in the second Trump era.

I know you want to win on policy, but “want” and “need” are always miles apart. You need to win on making this a contest of good versus evil, freedom versus fascism, and America’s future versus Donald Trump and the darkness that follows.

This race will be hideous. Dirty. Demeaning. Grotesque. If you’re unwilling to draw political blood and to go as low and cut as deep as the other side, Trump wins. I wish I could tell you a prettier story about light and love, but this race will make 2016 and 2020 look like a quiet round of whist.

The second rule is more important by far.

Stay On Message

“Stay on message” reflects two big character traits of the GOP: a belief in hierarchy and a belief in consistency of message at every level of the political and media apparatus. (Spoiler: for the MAGA GOP, there is very little difference between the two divisions. The political and media space are wedded and interdependent.)

If the Democratic party, its assorted power centers, interest groups, allies, friends, noisemakers, and donors don’t get on a set of clear, unified messages on three significant areas, there’s trouble ahead. In that case, they’re handing this election to Donald Trump.

Make The Stakes Clear

Democratic party grandees in early 2022 told us the race would be about prescription drug prices and inflation. Still living in the issues-driven past, they took whatever vomitus the latest focus group emitted and ran with it. To his credit, Biden was clear about the stakes: he declared early that 2022 was about democracy and liberty.

Get on and stay on this message, Democrats.

This race is about the nation’s future and, not to put too fine a point on it, the world. Nothing about Joe Biden’s tenure has been more salutatory than his willingness to speak the truth about the consequences of failure, the survival of the American Republic, and small-d democratic principles. Why can’t national Democrats lock in on this simple message?

The enemy of this clear message is policy. Democrats have an almost religious belief that policy wins elections, and the various constituency groups want their slice of the pie; they want the election to be about their pet issue, be it abortion, gun control, climate change, LGBTQ rights, or other matters about which they’re most passionate.

But it’s not.

It’s about democracy, individual liberty, and whether the American government is a tool for opportunity or one of oppression.

Trump represents a terrifying future, and he articulates it constantly. The MAGA GOP always tells you the horrors they intend.

Democrats must drive a message of liberty versus authoritarianism and hatred at every level. If Trump wins again, Democrats can expect historic reverses at every conceivable level. The rest is all elite self-indulgence and drawing-room political noise.

Spectacle or Success

Trump and the MAGA GOP are the masters of political spectacle in every dimension. They have both intent and a media ecosystem to spread chaos and disinformation. It’s why impeachment, Hunter Biden’s laptop, imaginary immigrant caravans, Chy-na, Antifa, the World Economic Forum, drag queen story hour, and the rest of their catalog of imaginary demons will be front and center in the election.

In the words of their movement’s infamous and scabrous intellectual leader, Steve Bannon, this kind of spectacle aims to “flood the zone with shit.” And it does.

The temptation is to try to rebut all of the insanity, absurdity, and political trash piecemeal, to hit back with facts and data.

Stop. That’s the box canyon into which they’re trying to herd the pro-democracy side of the 2024 election.

Instead, get on the positive Biden record and ride it hard. This isn’t about policy; it’s about tangible results. The CHIPs Act, Inflation Reduction, and the Infrastructure Bill were all tangible wins for American workers, not Trumpian vaporware.

There’s a lot to love and more than I will include in this essay, which is already overlong. On the economy, foreign policy, democracy, leadership, and humanity, Joe Biden is a better man and a better candidate than Trump.

A unified uplift on messaging on the economy’s strength and the tough-as-nails Biden foreign policy viz both Russia and China can allow the Biden record to be framed as…and for my Democratic friends, you might want to sit down before reading this next bit…Reaganesque.

Don’t swoon. Reagan’s age was an issue going into 1984. His policies were beginning an economic and foreign policy impact, but it was a mixed picture, to say the least.

Republicans declared Reagan to be the second coming and a free basket of fries. They locked arms and declared Morning in America. It worked. It blocked Walter Mondale’s message of nuanced critiques of policy impacts with a big, smiling vision of optimism.

Joe Biden needs his allies to be unified in praise of his record. It has, almost uniquely in American politics, the advantage of being true.

Biden’s Age

I’m unsure if you heard this, but Joe Biden is old. He’s old as hell. He’s a gaffer. A codger. Older than the hills. He’s so old he remembers the party after the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht.

Great. Fine. Now, stop it. Biden is arguably the most successful Democratic President since FDR, taken in total.

Every Democrat seems to want to spear Biden over his age, and in the flood of stories in the mainstream media, the concern trolling from Biden’s ostensible allies boggles the mind. Some want to be the Democratic nominee for President in 2024. Some want to get a cheap media hit. Some want to take out Harris (a longer, more complex, and ugly story) and be the Fresh Young Thing in the Vice Presidential role for 2024.

There’s the party difference: not one prominent GOP elected official or talking head spends even 15 seconds talking about Trump’s obesity, his fast-food diet, his roaring mendacity, verbal tics, constant malapropisms, hissing intakes of breath, evident paranoia and fabulism, and raging criminality.

Here’s the counter-message: Trump is just as old, much less fit, and a proven threat to the nation’s future. Start playing offense on this message, Democrats.

It’s a choice of Old versus Evil.

Take Old every time.

Agree with this. Also — Trump is a criminal defendant in 4 different trials which means that if he is elected again we will likely have a convicted felon in the White House, one announced his candidacy by saying “I am your Retribution.” Sounds good right?

I wouldn’t care if Biden had one foot in the grave and Kamala Harris was a potted plant, I would crawl on hot coals to prevent that fascist imbecile and his henchmen from ever holding power again. Every sane American should understand those stakes and do the same thing.

QOTD

Published by digby on September 19, 2023

This is so depressing, and a major media failure. Devastatingly dangerous.

They’re all liars

Published by digby on September 19, 2023

By the way:

New testimony from a number of FBI and Internal Revenue Service officials casts doubt on key claims from an IRS whistleblower who alleges there was political interference in the federal criminal investigation of Hunter Biden’s taxes.

According to transcripts provided to CNN, several FBI and IRS officials brought in for closed-door testimony by House Republicans in recent days said they don’t remember US Attorney David Weiss saying that he lacked the authority to decide whether to bring charges against the president’s son, or that Weiss said he had been denied a request for special counsel status.

Those twin claims, made by IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, form the basis of Republican accusations that the Justice Department’s investigation into Biden’s taxes was tainted by political influence and that Weiss and Attorney General Merrick Garland tried to protect Hunter Biden in the investigation.

The new testimony comes as House Republicans begin an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden and his family, potentially undercutting one element of that effort.

At issue is an October 2022 meeting between prosecutors and case agents working on the Hunter Biden investigation. Shapley alleges that during that meeting, Weiss, the then-US attorney for Delaware, told participants that he was “not the deciding person” on whether Hunter Biden was charged, according to Shapley’s notes from the meeting. House Republicans have taken that to mean Weiss was not in charge of his own investigation, and was deferring to a higher authority.

In addition to Shapley and Weiss, there were five others in that meeting, three of whom have recently testified to the Republican-led congressional committees now spearheading the impeachment inquiry.

Marcy Wheeler has looked closely at Shapley’s notes (they are public) and they are not as clear as they are being portrayed. He may have misinterpreted or misremembered what was actually said in that meeting but his own notes do not back up what is being said.

This is the sort of arcana featured in all these right wing pseudo-scandals from Whitewater to Benghazi and they almost always feature a whistleblower of some sort who is either full of shit or totally manipulated. I think that’s what we have here. Wheeler doesn’t suggest that Shapley is lying only that he heard something incorrectly and that his notes actually bear that out.

MyKevin is the problem

Published by digby on September 19, 2023

Michelle Cottle is right about this:

The dysfunctional dance taking place in the House between Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his right flank has driven me to consider something I never imagined possible: that Matt Gaetz is right.

A House speaker can be successful only with the confidence of the members who put him or her in charge, when he or she can follow through on promises made and concessions extracted. Indeed, there may be no job in American government that calls for crackerjack deal-making skills more than that of speaker: so many egos, alliances and grievances to manage to keep things moving.

Mr. McCarthy, in his desperate pursuit of the speakership last winter, ran around making promises willy-nilly to the House’s small band of right-wingers, and he will now rise and fall on how he handles those commitments and expectations. So far, things are not looking good for Kev — and, by extension, for a functional Congress.

Miffed at the speaker’s handling of the spending fight, the right’s hard-liners have been threatening to oust him, shut down the government or both. His attempt to placate them by announcing an impeachment investigation into President Biden went over poorly, prompting multiple Freedom Caucusers to scold him for trying to buy them off. Mr. Gaetz, the Florida congressman and frontman for the rebels who temporarily blocked Mr. McCarthy’s speakership in January, dismissed the move as a disingenuous “baby step,” accused him of being “out of compliance” with his commitments to hard-liners and threatened to force daily votes to vacate the chair — that is, depose him. All of which apparently sent Mr. McCarthy into a profanity laced tirade at a closed-door conference meeting on Thursday that, according to multiple attendees, boiled down to (and here I’ve tidied it up to be family friendly): If you want to file a motion to vacate, file the flipping motion!

The speaker is clearly fed up with being bullied by his radicals. But here’s the thing. Gaetz & Company have a point: Mr. McCarthy is out of compliance with several of his promises — or at least several they claim he made. (That’s the problem with secret back-room deals.) So if the rabble-rousers want to be taken seriously going forward, they need to stop all the chest-thumping. It’s time to step up and file the flipping motion.

[…]

The extremists are easy to denounce, especially with their tendency to act out like unruly teens — or Lauren Boebert at “Beetlejuice.” But they are not to blame for the chaos consuming the House. It is Mr. McCarthy who led them to believe he would champion their policies and priorities. And it is Mr. McCarthy who elevated their influence in the conference, empowering them to wreak even greater havoc. Of course they are going to make more and more outrageous demands. That’s what they do.

Some of what Mr. McCarthy committed to was beyond his power to deliver. Take the ongoing showdown over government funding. He pledged to try to cap discretionary spending at 2022 levels or lower. But with the Democrats in control of the Senate and the White House, that is a non-starter. Worse, Mr. McCarthy effectively gave the hard-liners license to play chicken with the debt ceiling. Small wonder they were brassed off when he cut a debt deal with the Democrats in May.

Maybe the key word for Mr. McCarthy in these promises was “try.” Maybe he figured that, as long as he let the rebels take their best shot, they would cut him slack even if they failed to carry the day. If so, their outraged, burn-it-all-down reaction to the debt agreement should have disabused everyone of that notion. At that point, Mr. McCarthy really should have started adjusting his strategy — and the hard-liners’ expectations — accordingly. Instead, he doubled down on coddling them, encouraging them to plow ahead with fantasy spending cuts. The latest proposal for a stopgap bill to keep the government running through October, which the chamber’s G.O.P. leadership put forward on Sunday, was being savaged by around a dozen House Republicans on Monday, dimming its prospects for passage.

Other McCarthy promises involved bits of partisan theater. Mr. Gaetz says the rebels were guaranteed a vote on term limits, something Mr. McCarthy presumably could have arranged time for in the past eight months. But he didn’t. Because he doesn’t give a fig about the radicals’ priorities. He just aims to keep them calm enough for him to keep his gavel.

Am I rooting for the hard-liners to get their way on policy matters such as … well, anything? Good Lord, no. Their revanchist vision for America is not one that I — or a majority of voters for that matter — share. But I get their frustration and anger. Mr. McCarthy created and unleashed this right-wing monster to serve his own ambitions. And yet somehow he seems flummoxed that it is now smashing up things and demanding its due.

Of course, there are practical reasons Gaetz et al. might opt not to boot the speaker. For all their bluster, he may be the best they can hope for. He won’t get them everything they want, but he is willing to be their dancing monkey in plenty of situations. At the same time, he gives the conference enough of a sheen of establishment respectability to retain the support of its non-wingers and to not terrify more moderate voters. Arguably few other House Republicans could or would toe this degrading line.

This speaker is often said to have made a deal with the devil. But the conference’s hard-liners have made one with a cynical, inconstant opportunist. They clearly suspect their slippery chief never intended to deliver on a whole host of stuff they care about, just as they know deep down that an individual so hollow is fundamentally untrustworthy. But until someone is willing to break this stalemate, we are all stuck with their twisted, codependent relationship.

They want to vacate the chair so badly they can taste it. But the bit question remains: who wants that thankless job?

Contrasts

Published by digby on September 19, 2023

https://x.com/atrupar/status/1704140636738244767?s=20

Update: Let’s not forget this winner…