Update: Many thanks again to Batocchio for adding this blog on Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. Wish me luck on FWA's Royal Palm Literary Awards as one of my previous articles "All Which Wicked Designs" is a finalist this year. Please leave comments: I know it's a headache, but I wanna hear from peeps, thank ye.
Congress is about to get back into session, meaning another round of the Hunger Crazy Games is about to begin. Again.
The Freedom Crash Everything And Burn Caucus is apparently making more hostage-taking demands while wielding rubber chickens, so Heather Digby Parton over at her Hullabaloo site has the details of what they want and how they want it:
But the outlines of what the MAGA caucus in the House plans to do in Washington are clear. They want to impeach Joe Biden, as we all predicted the moment they took the majority in 2022, and flood the zone with investigations. And they want to hold the government hostage by shutting down the government. If all goes well, they might even wreck the economy in the process...
The problem is that there isn’t a whole lot his loyal House majority can do to help him. They are running investigations as fast as they can think of them. Aside from all the bogus Hunter Biden nonsense and the absurd impending impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden, they’re now set upon investigating the Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg and Fulton County prosecutor Fanni Willis with the supposed intention of defunding them for their alleged misconduct. They don’t seem to realize that these are local and state offices and are hardly dependent upon whatever small amounts of money the federal government might provide...
The Far Right Wingnut leadership are so into the performative outrage that - past their ability to pack the courts with anti-abortion pro-business jurists - they can't figure out how to actually do things. Even the threat of bringing DAs Bragg or Willis before a congressional committee hearing to get yelled at won't go the way they think it will. Anywho:
But they do have one card up their sleeves that it looks like they are going to play quite soon. You’ll recall that the House Freedom caucus was quite bent out of shape last spring when Kevin McCarthy made a deal with the Democrats to raise the debt ceiling. They even staged a little hissy fit soon afterwards blocking a vote on the floor and putting the House into gridlock for week. They now plan to flex their muscles over the appropriations bills with a renewed threat of a government shutdown. And if the putative leader of their majority, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, doesn’t like it, they are pretty much on record saying that they are ready to pull the plug on his speakership...
During this summer’s recess the rebels, led by former Sen. Ted Cruz chief of staff, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, the battle lines have been drawn. The Freedom Caucus released a statement making it clear that they will oppose any short term funding bill that doesn’t meet their demands...
They are hand-waving about cuts, including Ukraine military funding and “woke” pentagon spending. But the most important ransom demand, which is gaining traction in the whole caucus, is to cut funding for the Department of Justice and the FBI if they don’t succumb to their demands. That’s right, the Republicans are now agitating to defund the police...
As Digby points out, these demands can't go very far because this bill has to go to the Senate, where the Democrats will refuse to vote on it and submit their own funding bill. Even if the Senate Dems relent to avoid a government shutdown, there is no way Biden will sign it: The Freedom Caucus' demands will undercut the relative independence of the Justice Department, as well as kneecap a major foreign policy agenda to keep Ukraine (and NATO) standing against Russian aggression.
What the House wingnuts want to do is simple: Force a shutdown, period. They want the economic chaos it will cause. They want to prove to their anti-government MAGA followers that they can deliver on "draining the swamp" of a bureaucracy that would dare regulate businesses, uphold civil rights for minorities, and enforce the tax code on millionaires. It's the same dream they've had since 2015 2013 2011 1996 and/or whenever there's a Democrat in the White House they can blame. You will notice these Freedom Caucus wingnuts refuse to crash the federal government when there's a Republican like Dubya or trump in the White House.
It's not that the shutdown will stop the federal criminal indictments against trump - the DOJ prioritizes those kind of legal cases and will operate on emergency funds - and indeed the shutdown would cut into the House GOP's efforts to impeach President Biden on whatever fictitious charge they can fantasize (as they have nothing on Hunter Biden tying to his dad). In that regard, the drama is unfocused.
The shutdown will do what the Far Right wants to see happen no matter what the legal system does to trump: the destruction of the American federal system while under a Democratic administration, so that the Republicans won't take the blame.
The Far Right ideology against the federal government - a government which leans towards a liberal ideology of serving the public trust - tells them they have to tear it down so that their ideal nation gets rebuilt on the ashes. They've been given orders - decades ago - by the billionaire lobbyists and think tank demagogues to shrink the federal government down to where Grover can drown it in his bathtub. The trick is to make sure the general voting public doesn't blame them for the tear-down.
And so we're getting the same-old rehash of the shutdown drama we've seen before. Only this time the drama could include the hilarity of watching Speaker McCarthy get tossed overboard in a No Confidence vote even if he caves to The Freedom Crash Everything And Burn Caucus, because of things like the Senate and Biden's veto pen that he can't control.
Part of me hopes that the chaos of undoing McCarthy's reign will convince the 18 or so House Republicans stuck in Biden-happy districts to flip parties to save their own skins from the internal fighting their half of the House is facing. It's unlikely - Republicans would rather resign and take a cushy think tank gig than flip parties - but wouldn't it be pretty to think it.
In the meantime, trump's January 6th trial is scheduled for March 4, 2024. The Manhattan trial on tax evasion and hush-money bribes to Stormy Daniels is set for March 25, 2024. The Mar-A-Lago classified docs trial is set for May 20, 2024. And DA Willis is pushing to get everyone including trump on her election fraud/RICO charges in the courthouse by October of this year (as a number of defendants are pushing for speedy trials of their own).
Tick-tock, Shitgibbon. There's nothing the House wingnuts can do to save you. They're too busy crashing the nation for their own ends.
1 comment:
I don't think that they will turn into Democrats (not even sure I want them to) but they can be forced to vote for sanity or lose their seats.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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