The Gerrymander Wars Escalate

Any regular follower here knows I am not a fan of the gerrymander.

I've railed about it often: how it distorts true representation, suppresses voter interest and turnout, and drives the major political parties to pander more to the monied powers than to genuinely represent their districts and states.

For some time there in the late 2010s, I had some hope that legal fighting over the gerrymandering efforts by Republicans in key battleground states like Florida would end the issue: That the skewing of representation and denial of voters rights would irk even conservative-leaning courts to level the electoral field and letting sanity prevail.

Alas, the Roberts Court in 2019 nuked those hopes from orbit. All I had left were my observations that even by 2022 the GOP efforts to rig the congressional elections in their favor had turned farcical and clinging to a diminishing returns cliff - all those distorted districts and they still only have a 4-5 seat lead in the House - of their own making.

With the 2026 midterms looming - and with growing evidence that the slim Republican holdings in both the US House and Senate are slipping away - you can taste the desperation of the Far Right to impose their minority rule with escalating efforts across GOP-controlled states to skew their gerrymandered districts even more. Especially as trump himself - openly noting that losing Congress this 2026 would end his reign of madness and sadism - has been running around since 2025 - when his polling numbers slipped as ICE thuggery and tariffs increased - demanding states like Texas and Indiana redraw their districts to keep Democrats from gaining control of a divided House.

The big difference this election cycle - and a big reason why the Republicans are panicking in public - is that the Democratic Party finally decided to take the gloves off and do their own extreme gerrymandering to counter the decades of GOP mapmaking that drove us to this cliff.

I've noted before that yes, Democrats were guilty of gerrymandering in states their legislatures controlled, especially in Maryland, Illinois, and California. It's just that the Dems never pulled it to the extremes the way Republicans did in Texas, Ohio, and Florida. 

Until now: California passed a voter referendum in 2025 allowing them - the most populous state - to skew their congressional districts to where Republicans may not have any seats left; and Virginia passed a voter referendum this month allowing them to redraw districts to where mathematically speaking the Democrats can win the US House by 1-2 seats.

The Virginia results are under legal scrutiny at the moment, so it may not be settled for this midterms. In the meantime, the GOP panic that they could lose the House - and lose it for a long time, because they don't have as many nationwide voters as they'd like to keep skewing the results - has resulted in map madness in the large-population states they still control.

Florida, for example, called an emergency legislative session: Not about data centers, or AI, or education needs, or funding for the upcoming hurricane season; but about redrawing a map they already skewed 20-to-8 in their favor back in 2022. It's bad enough that they're planning to divide the Tampa metro - as huge a Democratic Party stronghold in the state you can find - so that none of the seats representing that metro will favor Dems: A clear partisan attempt to negate the rights and powers of a large number of American citizens.

The funny thing about all this? All of these Republican efforts to gerrymander themselves into permanent victory could actually help them lose it all (via David A. Graham at The Atlantic):

But partisan gerrymandering does have one ultimate weakness—a foe that doesn’t always win, but whose victories are especially satisfying. That foe is gerrymandering itself. If you have never heard of a dummymander, this is probably a good time to learn the word. Dummymander is the term that the political scientists Bernard Grofman and Thomas L. Brunell coined for what happens when a gerrymander backfires, hurting the party that it was designed to help. Dummymanders are nothing new, but the bunch of new districts drawn in recent months mean that they could play an important role in the outcome of the midterms...

Now the action is mostly reaching its end as the deadline for finalizing 2026 maps nears, although some questions remain. (Among them: Will the Supreme Court issue a ruling weakening the Voting Rights Act in time for Republicans to draw new maps for this cycle? (editor's note: goddamn this foreshadowing...) The consensus among election analysts is that the redistricting will end up giving Republicans only three or four new seats, if any. But Democratic prowess in recent special elections raises the possibility that rather than a cold-blooded political hit, the GOP’s efforts could end up as a Pyrrhic victory.

In late January, a Democrat won a Texas state Senate seat in Tarrant County—in a district that Trump won by 17 points in 2024. Most House districts won’t see a shift that big, but victories like these have raised the possibility of Democrats catching enough of a blue wave that maps drawn to help Republicans might actually hurt them. The math is simple: In order to draw more districts favoring Republicans, GOP legislators had to spread their own voters a little thinner. But if they spread them too thin and Democrats have a good year, Republican candidates will become vulnerable.

One thing that keeps getting overlooked in these gerrymander wars is the role no-party-affiliate (NPA) or independent voters play in how districts get won. When they're drawing these maps, the Republicans (and Democrats) look at how much they can spread out their registered voters they expect to show up, and then pray that the third-party indy voters either side with them or fail to show... which is a huge gamble to take if you're trump's party when polling shows a lot of independent voters are pissed at trump right now. You can survive independent voter outrage if your district is +5 or +8 in favor of your party, but you can't if you've got the percentages at +1 or +2.

Many of Grofman and Brunell’s examples of dummymanders come from late in the 20th century, when Democrats still held lots of southern seats because of historic party support, but were on the verge of losing them to Republicans. For example, they write that the map Georgia Democrats drew after the 1990 census looks more like a Republican gerrymander than one drawn to help Democrats, which the authors blame on “the belief that it is good to be as thin as possible as long as you still remain breathing.” Entering the 1992 election, Georgia had nine Democratic House members. Three won, but three lost, and three more retired.

In the wake of those 1990 redistricting, the Republicans rose on the demographic - and racist - shifts from social conservative Democrats fleeing a party more inclined to defend civil (Black) rights. Those shifts were accelerated in the 2000s by the War on Terror of 9/11 and the growing evangelical Christianist voting base, which led to the Tea Party/anti-Obama fervor that drives the modern Republican base to this day.

Thing is, that partisan shift is pretty much played out. For all the ongoing outrage and demonizing the Far Right produces and consumes within their own circles, they can't increase their voting base any further. At best, they can bamboozle or enrage certain voting blocs - Latino men for example in 2024 - to side with them for one or two election cycles before their hypocritical true selves emerge and drive those blocs off.

This is one of the reasons the Republicans are not only struggling to gerrymander every state they can to favor themselves, they're also desperate to take away voting rights from everyone - Blacks, women, college-age, LGBTQA+ - they don't want voting. The conservative mindset on full display that only THEIR side should have power and rights, and everyone else needs to sit there in our cages being grateful for the crumbs thrown our way.

I'm terrified of the damage these gerrymanders are going to inflict: the lack of honest representation that will ignore the needs of our communities just as we need help from government the most.

The only true way in my opinion to end these gerrymander wars is for the rest of us - all of us - to show the fuck up at the polling stations during the midterms and vote the Republicans - the ones most responsible for propping up that child-raping, grifting, sadistic trump - out of office. As much as the Democrats are playing these mapmaking games, they're not the ones responsible for this monstrous tyrannical regime arresting families, crashing economies, and bombing schools.

We are long past due holding the Far Right accountable for all the sins they've inflicted on the rest of us. To hell with their games: VOTE THE REPUBLICANS OUT.

Then we'll see an end to these fucking partisan maps.

In The Matter of Allegations Relating to Gaetz

Update: Io Saturnalia to Steve In Manhattan for tagging this article for Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. I hope everyone's safe and healthy and enjoying whatever there is of the holiday spirit. Except for Matt Gaetz. I hope he rots.

I need to get back into the blogging mindset, and what better way to get at it than to report on the nastiness of Florida's Worst Scuzzbucket (AKA Matt Gaetz)?

After all the storm and fury over the House Ethics' investigation into his misconduct with underage women - where the House voted to suppress the committee's report while trump was offering Gaetz control of the Justice Department, all of it rendered moot when Gaetz dropped out after a disastrous meeting with angry Senators poised to deny him the post - the committee decided to leak that report this week anyway.

Going by the summary, here are the things that Gaetz did that crossed a whole bunch of lines (skip to page two):

In sum, the Committee found substantial evidence of the following:

• From at least 2017 to 2020, Representative Gaetz regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him.

• In 2017, Representative Gaetz engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl.

• During the period 2017 to 2019, Representative Gaetz used or possessed illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, on multiple occasions.

• Representative Gaetz accepted gifts, including transportation and lodging in connection with a 2018 trip to the Bahamas, in excess of permissible amounts.

• In 2018, Representative Gaetz arranged for his Chief of Staff to assist a woman with whom he engaged in sexual activity in obtaining a passport, falsely indicating to the U.S. Department of State that she was a constituent.

• Representative Gaetz knowingly and willfully sought to impede and obstruct the Committee’s investigation of his conduct.

• Representative Gaetz has acted in a manner that reflects discreditably upon the House.

Based on the above, the Committee concluded there was substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules, state and federal laws, and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress.

This is the stuff that the House Ethics committee uncovered in spite of a Justice Department's investigation into Gaetz's criminal behavior back in 2021 that ended up going nowhere. The DOJ argued at the time that they couldn't proceed to criminal charges on Gaetz because their witnesses were either unreliable on the stand or unwilling to testify. You can see that as well in the committee's work where most of the teenage girls claimed their Fifth Amendment rights to avoid self-incrimination, but even then the congresscritters and their staffs were able to put the pieces together that would have made a legitimate criminal case. Goddamn.

One of the horrifying elements of these reports is how much of Gaetz's misconduct was openly known. Not so much the prostitution, but his eagerness to sex women far younger than his own age range and his often drunken (now allegedly drugged) state of mind. Stories were rife about fellow legislators at both the state house and congressional levels how Gaetz would brag about and share pictures of his sexual exploits in the public forums. For all that his fellow congresscritters were bothered by his vulgarity, none of them cared enough to stop him until his business buddy Joel Greenberg got caught and revealed the nastier stuff hiding under the Florida GOP's foundations. 

While a solid number of our Republican elected officials DO care about their own personal conduct and ethics, they do happily turn a blind eye to a lot of this bad behavior because of two reasons: Some of them fear "rocking the boat" and disrupting their party's access to power; and Some of them honestly don't see the harm of sexually exploiting / abusing young women - even underage - because their own conservative philosophy - that women and the young are not part of their elite status and thus exploitable by their laws - allows it.

Granted, Democrats in power get caught in their own sex scandals and misconduct towards young women as well, but on this scale? With this level of disdain and disregard that Gaetz kept displaying towards his targets? You can feel from just reading the report the contempt he had, the lack of emotional connection to most of the girls he manhandled.

When you expand your view to examine the sexual misconduct we've seen over the years, you should notice that when it comes to Republican sex scandals there's an open display of misogyny and toxic masculinity driving most of that behavior. It's at a point where a more nonpartisan government would require full drug testing and ID checks of women under 40 at every Republican-based country club and convention gatherings just to make sure they're not violating laws.

And we STILL haven't seen a full accounting of Jeffrey Epstein's Client List containing the names of Men Of Power - both Republican and Democrat and CEO billionaire alike - who "flew the Lolita Express" engaging in sexual misconduct with seriously underaged girls.

Do us a huge favor, Joe Biden: Just before you leave office this January 20th 2025 PLEASE release the Epstein Client List (redacting the names of victims ONLY) not only to the general public but to every law enforcement agency on the planet.

Women remain abused as long as Men of Power retain that power to abuse them. THIS NEEDS TO END.

And ship Gaetz to the nearest prison for breaking drug use and statutory rape laws, please and thanks this Saturnalia season.

Brief Thoughts About Daylight Savings in America

Seriously: If Joe Biden pledges on the 2024 campaign trail that he will force Congress to hold an emergency session to pass legislation ending this travesty of time-wasting called Daylight Savings, and then uses the National Guard to block access to the bathrooms and soda vending machines to ensure both Republicans and recalcitrant Democrats vote passage of this reform, Biden will garner 65 percent of the national vote.

The whole stress-out over Daylight Savings Time - springing forward an hour in Spring, falling back that hour in Fall - has been a well-documented source of frustration for Americans for decades now, and we keep getting more evidence how it's not really doing us any good (via Danielle Pacheco and Dr. Dustin Coltiar at the Sleep Foundation website):

Adjusting the time by one hour may not seem like too drastic a change, but sleep experts have noted troubling trends that occur during the transition between Standard Time and DST, particularly in March. These issues include upticks in heart problems, mood disorders, and motor vehicle collisions. Furthermore, DST can cause sleep problems if circadian rhythms are not aligned with natural cycles of light and darkness. Some people also experience insomnia symptoms due to spring time changes...

Humans and other mammals are guided by circadian rhythms, which are 24-hour cycles that regulate sleep and other key bodily functions such as appetite and mood. These rhythms are largely dependent on light exposure. In order to reset each day, they must be synchronized with natural light-darkness cycles in order to ensure healthy, high-quality sleep.

The transition between DST and Standard Time has darker mornings and more evening light. This can essentially “delay” your sleep-wake cycle, making you feel tired in the morning and alert in the evening. Circadian misalignment can contribute to sleep loss, as well as “sleep debt,” which refers to the cumulative effect of not getting enough sleep on a regular basis...

While many people adapt to time changes, some studies have suggested the human body never fully acclimates to DST. Rather, their circadian misalignment may become a chronic or permanent condition. This can lead to more serious health problems, especially for those who experience “social jet lag” because their demands at work or school take precedence over a full night’s sleep. Social jet lag has been linked to a higher risk of obesity, depression, and cardiovascular disease. The effects of DST subside gradually after a few weeks...

There are a number of other things that disrupts a person's normal sleep cycle - travel, uneven work hours (morning / evening shifts), neighbors practicing with their garage band at midnight, similar hazards - but this is one directly caused by government policy. And it's a policy that continues to annoy if not enrage most Americans suffering from it. Nearly every poll out there - like this one in Business Insider - has a majority of people wanting an end to the damn thing.

The problem is nobody can agree to make Standard time - based on the actual solar cycle - or Daylight Savings - which moves ahead an hour and gives businesses more sunlight in afternoon/evenings for work - the national default.

Considering how the medical experts point to that circadian rhythm as key to our health, I'd argue to keep our hours to the Standard setting. It's how our planet works, how our bodies work, and goddammit we've lived for centuries without springing forward for anything.

The big reason we went to Daylight Savings was energy conservation during wartimes - First One and Second One - and then even more in the 1970s when the energy crisis hit our nation hard. Thing is ever since the 1980s when technology innovations with energy-saving methods improved our usage - even as we've expanded more use with computers, smartphones, and other electronics - the need to enforce energy conservation with summer daylight actually diminished.

There's a number of other issues with sleep depravation that need resolving, especially the early schooling hours that affect teens when they're forced to attend junior and high schools before dawn. They are at that age - still developing - where disruption of the sleep cycle affects them the most, and there's been a huge push to get states to move school hours to later in the day. All this Daylight Saving stuff is making this harder on the kids and their families.

Standard Time is the way to go.

If you do this, Joe Biden, you will go down in the history books as our greatest President ever.

Do it.

Save our Sleep Modes!

 

The Bare Minimum of Congressional Standards

So, having completed NaNoWriMo for 2023, and trying to get back into the swing of political blogging again, is there anything out there this Friday I could comment about?

...

Oh, right. This happened (via Eric McDaniel at NPR): 

Members of the House of Representatives voted 311-114 Friday morning to expel New York Republican George Santos from Congress. Santos is the sixth House member ever to be expelled from Congress.

Santos is accused by prosecutors of a number of financial misdeeds, including reimbursing himself for loans to his congressional campaign that he appears to have never actually made — in essence, stealing money from campaign donors.

Almost all Democrats and more than 100 Republicans voted to expel Santos, who will now be replaced in a special election...

You know, I'm still not convinced George Santos is his real name.

This is someone who got caught committing some very shaky con games who still bluffed and bought his way into elected office before anyone even cared to follow up on a background check.

It slowly turned out Santos violated a number of campaign finance laws: Getting his helpers to fake signatures, shake people down for credit card numbers, and spend tens of thousands on personal perks instead of actual campaign work. If there was any positive in this story, it's that Santos set records for fastest criminal indictments issued against a freshman congresscritter.

There had been a vote to expel Santos on November 1, but it fizzled due to it happening before an official report from the in-house Ethics Committee - an otherwise toothless entity - was released. As soon as THAT came out - documenting all the sins Santos committed not only towards his constituents but also towards his fellow elected officials - this second vote came up and this time the two-thirds supermajority needed to expel him was pretty much confirmed.

Granted, Santos hasn't even been convicted yet in a court of law, something the previous Congressmen expelled for their sins had to incur (that or getting expelled for joining the Confederacy). Expulsion doesn't require convictions however, merely the disapproval of Congress members betrayed by their own. Stealing from the voters was one thing, but grifting fellow Republican congresscritters (and their mothers)? Unforgivable. 

This was all happening as the House Republicans are struggling to stay on-message - attack Hunter Biden so they can justify impeaching Joe Biden - with half the party voting to keep Santos among their ranks due to their majority control being the slimmest in American legislative history. The GOP were holding roughly a five-seat majority, which is now down to four seats and even harder to maintain a unified front. With reports that several other House Republicans - especially ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, still bitter about his downfall - are looking to retire before 2024 even shows up on the calendar, Speaker Johnson - more vulnerable than ever for his own Motion To Vacate doom - tried to pressure his caucus to keep Santos to shore up the vote. That he and the rest of the GOP leadership failed - losing 105 Republican votes - speaks to the lack of power they truly hold.

In the meantime, the House will muddle through more continuing resolutions and fights over financial aid to Ukraine and Israel while a special election takes place in 90 days to temporarily fill that seat (the regular 2024 election will still happen). Given how Biden won that district in spite of Santos' "win" in 2022, there is a good chance the Democrats can flip that seat. Until then, inertia and corruption are still in play.

The members of the House may well pat themselves on the back for performing the bare minimum towards upholding some standards, but they have yet to do anything to prevent any future Santoses from joining their little club. There needs to be a massive overhaul of the electoral process: Greater transparency in tracking the campaign money and enforcing against misuse; public background checks to ensure the candidates are even who they say they are; even serious efforts to reduce the expenses and reduce the temptations of all that money bouncing back and forth.

Until then, we're going to see more con artists like Santos play their games in getting elected by hook and by crook into Congress, where the real money is. Gods help us.

The Crash The Nation Over The Cliff Party Is Back At It

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.

The 2023 Budget Fight As An Ongoing War

Well, I just wrote a few days ago about how the current Republican Congressional push to force a debt ceiling default just to make Biden's re-election hopes go up in smoke, but somehow during this weekend Biden was able to get Speaker McCarthy to sign off on a budget deal. Some details via Claudia Grisales, Ximena Bustillo, Franco Ordoñez, and Joe Hernandez at NPR:

President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached an agreement in principle to avoid a potentially disastrous government default and raise the nation's debt ceiling. But as details – and criticism – of the deal began to trickle out on Sunday, both sides moved to rally support for a plan that negotiators concede will not please everyone...

The deal follows weeks of negotiations and a tense creep toward a deadline to raise the government's borrowing limit. The final package is expected to have opponents on the extremes of both parties, but the announcement Saturday indicates that Republican and Democratic leaders believe they will gain enough bipartisan support to pass the legislation. That confidence will be tested over the next few days as the measure makes its way through the House, where Republicans hold a slim majority.

The proposal holds nondefense spending for fiscal year 2024 at roughly current levels and raises it 1% in 2025, according to a source familiar with the negotiations. The agreement separately raises the debt limit for two years.

Overall, it's something that sticks to the current fiscal path that the federal government was on. There doesn't seem to be a lot of deep cuts to social aid, the restrictions Republicans are getting on food stamps may not create massive consequences (the work requirements are going to be affecting people who are already working). This deal can be considered a win for Biden since it kicks any further debt ceiling fight past the 2024 elections (providing of course Biden wins re-election and the Dems can at least retain partial control of Congress) and because it plays up to the national media's expectations of "bipartisan" deals getting done.

Thing is, the fight isn't over. Digby at her website has more on that:

It’s not over yet, because Kevin McCarthy still has to round up enough votes to get past the Hastert Rule (GOP can’t bring a bill to floor with a majority of Democratic votes) and he might still face a motion to vacate the chair when all is said and done (which is his problem, not ours) it appears that creaky old Joe got the best deal we could have expected, most importantly an agreement to extend the debt limit until after the next election...

Digby quotes from Dave Dayen at the American Prospect:

With one potentially major exception, the relative harm and help was kept to a minimum in the final agreement. It will only be a little bit easier to commit wage theft, or to sell defective or poisoned products. It’ll only be a little harder to get rental assistance or tuition support. Only a few people will be freer to pollute the environment; only a few will find it more difficult to get food. The Internal Revenue Service will only be a little worse. A lot of things will stay the same. Almost nothing will get any better...

The goal here was to allow both sides to say contradictory things to their members. Republicans can say they achieved the target of the Limit, Save, Grow Act to limit discretionary spending to FY2022; Democrats can say they only froze spending at current levels. And both are sort of right.

Digby then cites Dan Pfeiffer over at Message Box News (what the hell is that? nevermind, keep reading):

I want to hold out judgment on the work requirements until I see the details, but based on what we know, Biden limited the damage demanded by the GOP.

There’s not much to love in this deal for progressives, but Biden seems to have preserved all of the climate funding from the Inflation Reduction Act. If that’s the case, it’s a big win.

The deal is not great, but it’s a far cry from what the Republicans wanted. Notably, the Republicans played their best card, and all they got was a suboptimal budget deal...

Joe Biden played a very tough hand well. He got a better deal than many thought possible, and he forced the Republicans to adopt a series of very unpopular positions that they will have to own on the campaign trail next year. 

There is nothing inspirational about “could’ve been much worse.” No one will run to the polls or volunteer to make phone calls because Democrats “limited the damage.” But the debt limit was President Biden’s first showdown with the MAGA Republican House. All things considered, he navigated it quite well.

Again, Biden got the best of this - and will still likely get hammered by Beltway Media for some reason or another to keep their "horserace for 2024" narratives going - while McCarthy has to face his own House factions and keep them from turning on him or each other.

I mentioned it before: There is that Freedom Caucus faction that came into this budget fight wishing for a government default who are going to be livid that the debt ceiling will be addressed with this deal. These are the congresscritters who WANT to drive the nation over that cliff, and if McCarthy is putting the brakes on that act of destruction that caucus is going to lash back.

As Digby pointed out, the current House rules are that the "majority of the majority" (that Hastert Rule) requires that enough Republicans agree in principle on this deal, and there's no guarantee McCarthy has those votes. He's working with around a 5-vote majority: If enough Far Right Republicans say no, then this can't even get to a floor vote where the Democrats could agree to it as a bipartisan act.

And that's not even addressing the possibility of one of the Freedom Caucus members calling for a "Vacate the Chair" vote of No Confidence to force McCarthy out as Speaker. I dunno if that can happen before this deal can come to a vote, but if it does the whole thing becomes a clown show.

All of that would definitely become a major Biden win, because he made the bipartisan effort to avoid economic catastrophe while McCarthy and the House GOP couldn't. Enough House Republicans could arguably go with this deal to avoid that public debacle, but then again this modern Republican Party has a history of napalming everything instead of taking the sensible option. And then Biden can step in and invoke the 14th Amendment clause anyway and resolve the debt ceiling matter altogether.

This is going to be a crazy week ahead, America.

Hope you got the popcorn popping.

Basic Things To Know About Yet Another Republican Default Threat

There's a Democrat in the White House and there's Republicans in charge of one-half of Congress, so those of you who survived 2011 and 2013 budget crises know what THAT means: Yet another attempt by the goddamn Republican wingnuts hoping to drown the nation in Grover Norquist's bathtub, forcing spending cuts on social aid that they themselves are too afraid to do on their own, and maybe even nuking the global economy just to blame the Democrats for their own sabotage.

So as we're facing another budget battle that could lead to a U.S. default and global economic meltdown, let Stacey Vanek Smith at NPR spell out what's at stake:

One of the outcomes that would happen if the U.S. defaulted would be a major hit to the United States' reputation internationally.

"It would be a disaster and the reputation of the government for meeting its debt obligations would be in tatters," says Darrell Duffie, professor of finance at Stanford's Graduate School of Business...

So much money that the country can right now borrow up to $31.4 trillion, a debt ceiling that will need to be raised or suspended to avoid a default.

And if the U.S. defaults, the interest rate on the country's debt would go up because the U.S. would be seen as riskier: too politically dysfunctional to get its bills paid on time...

An actual default would also deliver a massive shock to financial markets, raising the prospect of a new global financial crisis.

Investment bank UBS estimates the S&P 500 could fall by at least 20%. Bond markets would tumble, and that would send borrowing costs higher across the economy including for already-high mortgage rates.

And banks would be hit as well given that lenders are among the major investors of government debt. As a result, depositors and investors could start to worry about whether banks are on solid ground at a time when the banking sector has recently suffered through the failures of three smaller and regional lenders...

(Economics professor from University of Michigan Justin) Wolfers says if the U.S. defaults and there's no more money to spend, the government suddenly wouldn't have cash to run basic operations, things like schools and roads.

Government workers could get their pay delayed if the government runs out of cash, while businesses that have contracts with the governments might also stop getting paid for a while.

And the list of people who may not get vital government benefits is long, including most prominently veterans who rely on these payments as a lifeline as well as retirees who rely on Social Security payments.

All those missed payments would have a direct impact on the economy...

The shock to financial markets and the impact across the board would be blows of such magnitude that many experts believe would lead to a U.S. recession: unemployment could spike, lending could freeze up and the economy could shrink...

All of these things are wonderful in the eyes of the Far Right, because they can use all of that to blame Biden and the Democrats even though THEY'RE the ones insisting the federal government defaults on our national debt. They've done this shit before, and while they took some of the blame the Republicans didn't lose control of Congress at the ballot boxes in 2012 and 2014 while the Democrats were hit with "both sides at fault" blame by a short-term-memory mainstream media.

The big reason for Republicans holding the debt ceiling vote hostage is that it brought Joe Biden - who lived through these fights ten years ago and promised not to make the same mistakes - to the negotiating table over the Republicans' budget-slashing agenda.

Try to remember, kids: Between 2017 and 2018 the Republicans had FULL control of the budget process, with both wings of Congress AND donald trump in the White House eager to sign off on anything they sent him. The Republicans succeeded in passing a massive tax cut bonanza for the rich, but refused to commit any major spending cuts to balance their budgets. Even they knew full well any slashing of the social safety net like Social Security, Medicare, Food Stamps, and any other public aid would have been political suicide for their party.

Which is why, whenever the Democrats are in partial or complete control of Congress and the White House, the Republicans will do everything they can to force the Democrats to do their dirty work for them and get the Dems held accountable if any social aid does get cut.

But this time around this game of fiscal brinkmanship is a little different, and more terrifying.

There's still a faction of the House Republicans - the Freedom Caucus - that wants more than just the massive spending cuts that the rest of the Republicans would be happy with: The Freedom Caucus doesn't want the debt ceiling to go up under any circumstance. These wingnuts want the federal government to default no matter what.

It's more than just crashing the national and global economy just to make Biden look bad for 2024: These wingnuts are convinced it will bankrupt and flush out an entire federal bureaucracy they fear is too far liberal/Woke for them to ever control. The Freedom Caucus honestly wants to burn the whole government down so that they can take over and rebuild their fantasy utopia on the ashes.

In the previous budget showdowns, these Freedom Caucus members were too few to hold up any compromise deals that were eventually hammered out in 2011 and 2013. THIS TIME, the caucus has the advantage of a tiny Republican majority in the House. Speaker McCarthy has basically a slim five-vote advantage over the Democrats, and all it can take is five angry wingnuts from his own party to nuke every deal and bring on that default.

Making it worse is that McCarthy, in order to gain that speakership, granted his party a "No Confidence" veto power where a single congresscritter could call for his removal. Any attempt to get centrist Democrats to cross the aisle and help him with a budget deal would trigger that revolt.

There's a less-likely scenario where the other saner Republican factions - the ones who will deal for spending cuts but won't cross the line of driving the entire planet over the cliffs - could threaten their own "No Confidence" on McCarthy to force him to ignore the Freedom Caucus, but that would lead to open schism and the Republicans still have enough intra-party discipline not to fall apart like that. Yet.

We are looking at three scenarios at this point:

1) President Biden refuses to play the Freedom Caucus' game of default, and calls on his authority under the 14th Amendment to maintain the nation's full faith and credit: Or even more fun, mint the trillion-dollar coin. That could lead to the House Republicans pushing for impeachment - which will fail - and more likely force a legal court battle that would go to an ultra-conservative Supreme Court that may side with the wingnuts to re-interpret the Constitution to allow economic havoc.

2) Nothing gets resolved, and the debt ceiling triggers a default. The Freedom Caucus gets exactly what they want. The global economy goes into a tailspin and Gods help us if the Republicans use this to regain full control in 2024. More likely is that even the deep-pocket billionaires supporting the GOP are hit hard by the recession to where they hold back on funding, and enough voters get angry enough at the real culprits to instead re-elect Biden and throw enough Republicans out of the House to reflip it back to Democrats.

3) The Freedom Caucus refuses to budge on their stance even with major concessions from Biden on spending cuts, driving enough Republicans in unsafe congressional districts to quit the party and flip the House now to where the Freedom Caucus lose their power. Granted, this is pure wish-fulfillment on my part, but given the hard-line position of that caucus there doesn't seem to be any other sane option left to the nation.

By most reports, we're looking at the debt ceiling to kick in during the first weeks of June.

By all evidence, the Freedom Caucus - as an act of sedition - is more than happy to let our nation fail.

By all rights, saner heads should prevail and kick those self-serving destructionists out of power.

Losing It All In the Dirt Digging

(On a personal note, I will appear at the Bartow (FL) Writers Block and Street Fair as a local author this Saturday May 20th from 10AM to 6PM. It's a fund-raising effort for the local church charities, and it'll be  pet-friendly event with a ton of activities. I do hope to see some people there, and buy my books!) 

(Update: Again, many thanks to Batocchio at Crooks & Liars for adding this article to Mike's Blog Round-Up!)

One of the things expected from the US House Republicans this congressional cycle was a persistent wave of mudslinging "investigations" into conspiracy-driven wingnut allegations aimed at Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and the Democratic Party as a whole. 

Not because there was any well-known dirt or questionable conduct by Biden himself, but because the Republicans needed to demean him, ruin his public persona, and make it harder for Biden to run for re-election in 2024.

Look at the trend of Republican dirt-digging over the decades. The Far Right had Whitewater (and then Vince Foster's suicide) to harass Bill Clinton in the 1990s, they had BS on Obama's birth certificate in the 2010s that went nowhere, and then a Solyandra scandal that went nowhere, and then Benghazi to undermine Hillary Clinton for her 2016 run, and then Hillary's emails and private server that all turned into nothingburgers but arguably succeeded in throwing that election cycle to trump.

This time around, the House Oversight and other special committees were going after Joe for his son Hunter's possibly corrupt work with Ukrainian businesses. Which is, to be fair, leading up to a handful of misdemeanor charges and one felony tax dodge charge sometime soon. Frustratingly for the House GOP, they couldn't dig up any evidence Hunter's father ran interference for him.

In the aftermath of that failed press conference, the chair of the Oversight Committee James Comer went public with the admission that they couldn't get any whistleblowers in the federal agencies to step forward, and that his committee lost track of "a key witness" that would have tied the whole room together uh tied Hunter's corruption to Papa Joe's decades of Senate and Vice Presidential work.

The public mockery for Comer's mishandling of witnesses came quick (via Igor Derysh at Salon):

Fox News host Maria Bartiromo pressed Comer on the evidence on Sunday.

"You also spoke with an informant who gave you all of this information," she said. "Where is that informant today? Where are these whistleblowers?"

"Well, unfortunately, we can't track down the informant," Comer replied. "We're hopeful that the informant is still there. The whistleblower knows the informant. The whistleblower is very credible."

The "Girlfriend From Canada" excuse and "The Dog Ate My Homework" excuse can only take you so far, bro.

Comer added that "no president has ever been accused of the things that the Biden family's been accused of."

Bro. I'm pretty fucking sure the trump family has been accused of more serious shitload of corrupt things during their years in the White House than Joe's.

"Hold on a second, Congressman. Did you just say that the whistleblower or the informant is now missing?" Bartiromo interjected.

"Well, we're hopeful that we can find the informant," Comer said. "Remember, these informants are kind of in the spy business, so they don't make a habit of being seen a lot or being high profile or anything like that."

Comer added that nine of the 10 informants "that we've identified that have very good knowledge with respect to the Bidens, they're one of three things. They're either currently in court, they're currently in jail, or they're currently missing..."

"It is stunning that some people are missing, that you need to the prove this," (Bartiromo) said. "Just stunning. A stunning breaking news story this morning that some of these people now may be missing," she later added as she wrapped up the interview.

Granted, until it's time to present this all in a courtroom, you don't want to leak the identities of people who are honestly exposing criminal misdeeds at the risk of their own lives. But Comer isn't exactly credible himself talking about "credible" people we have no idea who they are. For all we do know, Comer's "witnesses" are Far Right conspiracy buffs with no access to Biden's inner circles or even any ties to federal agencies under Biden's administration (then or now).

But if we're taking Comer's work seriously, then what Comer's admitting to is a terrible breach of investigatory procedures. One of the first things you gotta do when you're pulling witnesses together is that you gotta talk to them face-to-face as soon as possible, get their statements on record, verify the source(s), confirm they're in a position to know, etc. What Comer's admitting during that interview is that they didn't even have a handle on the informant to confirm the whistleblower was even real.

The House Republicans were charging ahead without having any evidence or witness to guide them. It's that whole "cart before the horse" and/or "get your damn ducks in a row" idiom (or metaphor, I'm not sure which) in real life.

I've represented #whistleblowers, especially within Intelligence Community (spies), for more than 25 years. Strange, I've never lost one.

🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️https://t.co/OxtxEavVtB

— Mark S. Zaid (@MarkSZaidEsq) May 14, 2023

At best, this was sloppy and incompetent. At worst, the House Republicans honestly didn't care if they had a witness/whistleblower at all. All they really wanted was the illusion that they had dirt on Biden.

Consider the other thing Comer said in that interview: Most of their informants were themselves facing criminal charges or currently in jail (as well as missing). We're talking about witnesses who won't exactly have honorable intentions to spill dirt or be considered reliable. But again, the facts were NOT at issue here. All Comer and the House GOP wanted were Big Lies about Biden to make Biden and the Dems look crooked, even if the facts proved otherwise.

When the House witch hunts inquiries into Joe Biden began, the Republican leadership all promised that they would have a number of key witnesses and whistleblowers to expose the fraud and danger of a Biden Presidency. They pretty much sent invites to every disgruntled federal employee from the FBI on down to the custodians at the American History museums to approach them with any scandalous whisper they could share. And yet, by all signs of things nobody did.

Consider this the Underpants Gnomes Congressional Inquiry. All they had going in for Step One was "Find incriminating dirt on Biden," and what they hoped for at Step Three was "PROFIT." They had nothing for Step Two.

For all the hopes and fantasies and conspiracy-mongering among the Republican faithful, there doesn't even look to be any large-scale corruption going on among the hated Democratic ranks. Whistleblowers and informants aren't stepping up because they're afraid to (compare to the numerous informants that cropped up during trump's misrule), there just aren't any real informants out there when it comes to Democratic governance.

Until Comer or Jim Jordan or Kevin McCarthy or anyone else among the House Republicans can present even one sliver of evidence of corruption, we shouldn't be taken in by their unfounded allegations about misconduct under Biden's leadership.

All the Republicans have anymore are the lies they keep telling themselves, even more than the lies they try to tell us.

It'd be funny and even pitiful, if it weren't so dangerous for the nation.

A Very Short Con Caught

Even the longest con was never more than an assortment of moments that were in themselves very very short.
-- Ally Carter, Uncommon Criminals

While most of America lauded Carroll's civil courtroom victory over con artist donald trump, another political con artist faced his own gauntlet of justice in another part of New York. Remember old George "What's My Real Name" Santos who got exposed for lying about his resume, his biography, his marriage history, his non-profit scams, his (skip a bit Brother), right after winning a congressional seat from Long Island? 

Well, the Federales finally charged Santos on some serious felonies Wednesday morning. Via Brian Mann at NPR: 

Republican Rep. George Santos surrendered to federal authorities at a courthouse in suburban Long Island on Wednesday facing 13 counts of criminal wrongdoing.

Federal prosecutors say he allegedly "devised and executed a scheme" aimed at defrauding donors to his 2022 political campaign.

"This indictment seeks to hold Santos accountable for various alleged fraudulent schemes and brazen misrepresentations," said U.S. Attorney Breon Peace in a statement...

According to the criminal indictments, Santos claimed money donated to his 2022 campaign would fuel his bid for office, paying for TV advertisements.

Instead, he allegedly spent the cash on luxury designer clothes and to make a car payment and pay personal credit card bills.

Santos also faces a charge that in 2020, he fraudulently applied to receive unemployment benefits when he was employed and running for Congress in his first bid for public office...

I've seen a number of people online question "why the hell commit unemployment benefits fraud when he was making more money with his actual job?" Because, as any con artist will tell you, it's all a game. Many conservatives already viewed unemployment aid as a rip-off committed by lazy freeloaders, why NOT jump in on that "scam" when the federal aid was increased to help during a global pandemic? Also wik, con artists love to have different revenue streams to line their pockets in case one scheme goes dry. Back to the shenanigans:

Long before these charges were filed, it was clear the freshman lawmaker had pushed the boundaries of conventional political scandal. After his victory in last November's midterms, it was revealed that he fabricated most of the persona presented to voters.

Santos lied in interviews and campaign documents about his education, his professional accomplishments, his record as a champion volleyball player and his family's experiences in the Holocaust.

He also faced multiple investigations into how he raised and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign cash, including a mysterious $700,000 gift he made to his own election effort.

It remains unclear where that money came from...

Which is why I've seen other people online imply that the federal prosecutors are not done filing charges on Santos. THESE are the matters they can present right now in a criminal trial to a judge and jury.

Why Santos - whose provable history underscores a lifetime of check fraud, charity rip-offs, and other low-scale cons - decided to move up to the major leagues to pull off scams he wasn't ready to run only makes sense when you step back and recognize that the entire modern Republican Party has happily turned itself into a massive money-making scheme.

The distance between a novice still-young con artist roughly a decade into the Game and an aging bloated con artist like donald trump who's been at this grifting for fifty years has now closed thanks to the unethical state of the GOP. As David A Graham noted at The Atlantic (paywall):

For Santos to be indicted the same day that a jury in Manhattan found former President Donald Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation against the writer E. Jean Carroll is a fitting symmetry. Both men engaged in ceaseless chicanery for years before entering politics, and both found immediate and unexpected success in their first runs for office. But both men are now also wrestling with the realization that although you can get away with a lot in private life, the political spotlight can sometimes light the way for litigants and prosecutors...

In this way, his story resembles a shorter, smaller-time imitation of Trump’s. In his life as a real-estate developer, entertainer, and self-promoter, Trump was often ensnared in scandals, but he was able to escape serious scrutiny and personal criminal consequences for them. Trump’s methods were not quite so brazen, though they were sometimes pretty blunt: inflating and deflating the value of assets in different filings, for example, or simply inventing square footage for buildings. For decades, he got away with this, but entering politics brought attention he didn’t want...

This is, once again, an indictment of a legal system that continually overlooks white collar crime until it's at a scale of disastrous proportions. It's also a massive indictment of a political environment - thanks to the odious Citizens United ruling by a Republican-shaped SCOTUS - of billions of campaign dollars tempting the grifters into more brazen public acts that cannot be ignored.

My mother just mentioned this to me while driving to and from my nephew's college graduation this weekend: "We jailed Martha Stewart for less." (Now I know where I got that attitude from) Even she gets how troubling all this corruption has gotten.

I hope Santos get exposed for more of the fraud he's committed (especially that $700,000 mystery loan). I hope trump gets nailed to the wall by the New York attorney general for his financial crimes.

Let all the con artists answer for their sins. It is high time we held white collar criminals to stern measures.

The Weakest Speaker

It took fifteen tries.

Kevin McCarthy lost the Speakership vote 14 times, equaling the 0-14 futility of the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Even after a long delay Friday afternoon where he and his allies offered the Freedom Caucus holdouts everything under the sun, he still failed to get over the 218 hurdle of claiming the Speaker's job overseeing the US House of Representatives.

It took one more round of open begging to Matt Gaetz - that he's not under indictment yet after the revelations of the Greenberg scandal still angers me - before McCarthy edged out the count due to several Freedom Caucus holdouts to switch to "Present" to lower that threshold to 216. 

Whatever deal McCarthy offered also triggered an incident where another congresscritter had to be restrained from punching Gaetz in the face. It turned out Rep. Mike Rogers (AL) found out that a committee chair he was set to take was getting offered to Gaetz as a buyoff.

Rogers shouldn't be surprised. In the pursuit of the job title and the glory that comes with it, McCarthy was willing to sacrifice and trade away everything else - including his pride and honor - just so he could wield the gavel. 

So what exactly did McCarthy sacrifice? Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo passes along what he gleaned from CNN: 

• A McCarthy-aligned super PAC agreed to not play in open Republican primaries in safe seats.
• The House will hold votes on key conservative bills, including a balanced budget amendment, congressional term limits and border security.
• Efforts to raise the nation’s debt ceiling must be paired with spending cuts. This could become a major issue in the future when it is time to raise the debt limit to avoid a catastrophic default because Democrats in the Senate and the White House would likely oppose demands for spending cuts. (Personal note: Those spending cuts more than likely attempts to gut Social Security and Medicare)
• Move 12 appropriations bills individually. Instead of passing separate bills to fund government operations, Congress frequently passes a massive year-end spending package known as an “omnibus” that rolls everything into one bill. Conservatives rail against this, arguing that it evades oversight and allows lawmakers to stick in extraneous pet projects.
• More Freedom Caucus representation on committees, including the powerful House Rules Committee.
• Cap discretionary spending at fiscal 2022 levels, which would amount to lower levels for defense and domestic programs.
• Seventy-two hours to review bills before they come to floor.
• Give members the ability to offer more amendments on the House floor.
• Create an investigative committee to probe the “weaponization” of the federal government. (Personal note: This is the committee the MAGA wingnuts want to start to harass the Justice Department and FBI for their investigations of trump and other Far Right leaders)
• Restore the Holman rule, which can be used to reduce the salary of government officials.

To be fair, a handful of these concessions - like the 72 hour review time on bills heading to a floor vote - are reasonable. Others, such as the power to amend bills when they reach the floor and forcing appropriation bills to face separate votes, are likely to slow down the House's operations if not kill legislation outright. The 'Separate Appropriation' requirement is a likely move to cut Food Stamps funding away from Farm Bills, something that's been bugging the hard-line GOP for decades.

Something not mentioned in Sullivan's list but a key element of the powers that McCarthy traded away: The Motion to Vacate requirement dropping all the way down to a single member of Congress able to call that motion to remove a sitting Speaker - which is now McCarthy himself - on any whim. Granted, it would take a full House vote to complete the motion and remove a Speaker, but we're talking about a process that would openly kneecap the leader of the House - and technically the leader of the majority party - without consequence or limit. The one time it had been used back in 2015, it didn't succeed but it undercut the authority of then-Speaker John Boehner and led to his eventual resignation. 

McCarthy is essentially giving the Freedom Caucus a veto power over anything a Speaker brings to the floor of the House, and the means to delay everything and harass everyone as they go on an ideological warpath.

If there's any good news, a lot of the deals McCarthy made are things that will never survive outside the House. The planned Balanced Budget Amendment vote - which would insanely cap annual spending to force draconian spending cuts - requires a two-thirds vote in the House to begin with, and there's no way the Democrats will back it. The US Senate - currently under Democratic control - will never agree to term limits or any House bill demanding harsher immigration policies (or funding that Godless trump Wall). The Senate will block - or at least reduce the damage of - any attempt by the House to undo Biden's infrastructure and budget victories from 2021-22, including the wingnuts' open calls to defund the IRS. The threat of capping discretionary spending - even defense spending at a time the Pentagon wants to support Ukraine's defense against Russia - would raise howls among pro-military supporters even among the GOP House ranks.

The bad news: The Far Right wingnut circus we just endured this past week to vote on a Speaker will now turn into the Far Right wingnut circus recklessly investigating sham conspiracy theories surrounding Hunter Biden's Russian-tampered laptop. Another circus will recklessly investigate the FBI for doing their damn jobs investigating trump, yet another circus will recklessly investigate sham claims of voter fraud in 2020, and I wouldn't be surprised if McCarthy allows Jim Jordan to reopen Benghazi and recklessly investigate Hillary's emails just for nostalgia. 

We will see within the first week of Congressional activity the Freedom Caucus freaks drumming up any excuse to file impeachment against both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Any excuse - from unproven voter fraud of 2020, to anything Biden (didn't) do for his son Hunter, even the excuse of Biden being too old (and Harris too ethnic) - will do.

Any chance of sanity will depend on any number of disgruntled "sane" Republicans - I doubt any moderates have survived - saying "fuck it" and turning on the wingnuts that turned their House into a clown car. Problem is, the "sane" Republicans have yet to lift a finger to stop this madness since the 1990s, and I doubt any of them have grown a spine strong enough to push back against the downward spiral into madness.

There won't be any sanity coming from McCarthy. He's sold that along with any integrity or pride he ever had. And he sold all that on the cheap. He's going to be the weakest Speaker of the House in modern memory - possibly in U.S. history - and he's going to be too busy holding onto the backside of the monster he's unleashed for dear life.

When the Cougar-Eating-People's-Faces Party Starts Eating Their Own

There is an article by Jonathan Chait at New York's Intelligencer, it is behind a paywall, but it is considered already one of the best insights into the self-destruction of the House Republicans as they repeatedly vote (and fail) on the Speakership well into the third day: 

Reporters attempting to discern the conflict have taken to describing the competing factions as “conservatives” (the far-right members opposed to Kevin McCarthy’s bid for Speaker of the House) and “moderates” (the much larger faction of Republicans loyal to him). But these labels do very little to clarify the strange mania devouring the House Republican caucus. If you define conservative in traditional terms — meaning loyal to the conservative movement of Goldwater and Reagan and opposed, in principle, to any new taxation or social-welfare benefits — the entire Republican caucus is composed of conservatives. McCarthy’s loyalists aren’t moderates and don’t describe themselves as such.

Indeed, the division has barely any real ideological content at all. What Republicans are fighting over is whether to accept the limits of sharing power.

One of the key differences between the two major parties is that Democrats accept the reality that their agenda is not going to move forward when the opposing party occupies the White House. Democratic partisans might grow angry at their leaders for failing to stop it, but members of Congress generally understand that there are limits to the power of the opposition, and even the most unrealistic Democratic rank-and-file voters don’t expect their leaders to actively advance liberal policy in the face of a Republican president. Progressive Democrats wanted to defend Obamacare from Donald Trump’s repeal attempt. They weren’t demanding that Nancy Pelosi somehow force Trump to enact Medicare for All.

Republican voters, by contrast, expect and demand that the conservative agenda be advanced even — perhaps especially — under Democratic presidents. The Republican caucus is routinely gripped by frenzied efforts to compel Democratic presidents to roll back the welfare state. Newt Gingrich shut down the government to pressure Bill Clinton to sign a capital-gains tax cut and reductions to Medicaid and Medicare. Republicans used both shutdowns and the debt ceiling to try to blackmail Barack Obama into repealing his signature health-care plan...

Do note that in 2017 when Republicans had enough control to repeal Obamacare, they fought amongst themselves so viciously that in the end they couldn't agree to any replacement for it, and the whole effort collapsed on itself. The only thing the Republicans could do was the one thing they all agreed on: massive tax cuts for the rich.

Half the reason why Republicans want Democrats to do their dirty work for them is because in some respects they know they're too incompetent to do it properly. The other half of the reason is that Republicans are sadistic freaks looking to force Democrats to kill their own ideals. It drives Republicans crazy when Democrats refuse to break themselves, and it makes the Far Right believe they need to become even crazier about "Owning The Libs" when there are better things they can do with their time. Back to Chait:

This is why Democrats tend to splinter when they hold power but unify in opposition while the reverse holds true for Republicans. Democratic demands expand when the party holds full control of government and contract in opposition. Republican aspirations paradoxically become more grandiose during Democratic presidencies, which draw Republican minds deeper into the fever swamps of hysteria, making them more insistent on demands for maximal confrontation. These demands are inevitably impossible, causing Republicans to turn, again and again, against their own leaders...

Because this anger has no productive channel, it returns again and again in the form of internal recriminations. The House caucus during Democratic presidencies for the last quarter-century has been an endless procession of coup attempts. Gingrich was deposed for failing in his holy mission of forcing Clinton to slash government. John Boehner and Paul Ryan were driven into retirement. The House Republican caucus will be a cauldron of rage, because the party, at its core, does not believe it should be forced to share power...

What the Freedom Caucus is doing right now - the three straight days of foiled voting for McCarthy to the Speakership - is for multiple reasons. Above all, the insurgents genuinely do not trust McCarthy as he is the Establishment figure they fear would compromise with Liberal Dems on any issue. They are 20 nihilists in the face of 200 other Republicans who actually do want government to work (because it would help their rich business allies the most). The Freedom Caucus wants to squeeze every last bit of power - with none of the accountability - they can get from McCarthy and the other Republicans so that the Freedom Caucus holds all veto power to punish everyone - even the eventual Speaker - for infidelity to the Far Right dogma. 

One more reason they're doing this: This vote standoff is preventing the US House from doing anything else. They are delaying their rules getting voted on, they are delaying committee assignments, they are delaying any legislation getting passed quickly to the floor to send to the Senate and thence to the White House for signing. The Freedom Caucus is getting the government shutdown of their dreams, and they barely have to lift any finger to do so.

The terrifying thing is that this was the perfect year for the extremists to hold the entire House hostage. If the Republicans HAD won the midterms with a massive Red Wave takeover - with 30 or more seats as projected - the overwhelming number of Republicans would have crossed the 218 threshold for McCarthy to win without conceding a thing to his haters. Because the Republicans hold a meager 5-seat advantage, there are enough Far Right wingnuts willing and able to block McCarthy from winning outright.

This is now a purity test by the Freedom Caucus on the rest of the House Republicans. If McCarthy tries to break the impasse by making a deal with Democrats to let him win - either by supporting him or by voting "Present" to lower the 218 threshold - the Far Right MAGA voting base will crucify him and primary his ass in 2024. If any other Republicans break the deadlock by voting "Present" to let the Democratic leader Jeffries win a plurality count, those Republicans will be the ones crucified and ousted in 2024 primaries as well. There aren't enough promises McCarthy can make to flip enough wingnuts, so that's not an option. The only other end is for McCarthy to drop out and let another - someone only the Freedom Caucus can trust to be their puppet - more extremist candidate win, with the implied threat to "moderate" Republicans not to oppose.

There is an option out: There are at least 14 Republican representatives who come from districts that voted for Biden instead of trump. Several of their districts went for Biden by double digits, to where if they did flip first to the Democratic party they would avoid the threat of 2024 primary removal and win over enough Democratic voters to stay in office. That would shift majority control to the Democrats, letting Jeffries win the Speaker spot, and negate everything the Freedom Caucus is trying to impose.

The Freedom Caucus - and their media allies, when they wake up from sleeping through the intraparty fighting - will raise holy hell if that happens, and those congresspeople will be under severe harassment by MAGA voters declaring them traitors to America the party. But it will break the deadlock.

It will also break the Republican Party, with a fracturing that would spread not only to the Senate but to the state legislatures and to the lobbyist SuperPACs forced to take sides.

It all depends on if there's enough Republicans sitting on the Centrist/Moderate fence to grow a collective spine and make a move against the wingnuts. This is a fight that has been long in the making, ever since the 1990s Culture War shifting of the GOP to further conservative extremism. 

This is going to depend on who rusts first.

Drama In the Rotunda Involving No Llama. Bumma.

You know, when a political party wins control of the House Of Representatives, they tend to already have their ducks in a row when it comes time to vote for the Speakership. Usually it's the guy (or gal) who'd been leading the gang of congresscritters while in minority opposition, so it ought to be a no-brainer.

So here we are in 2023 with the Republicans regaining control of the House and proving they got no brains at all. Via Brad Dress at the Hill:

Nine House conservatives expressed doubts about electing Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as the next Speaker of the House, calling for a “radical departure from the status quo” ahead of the Tuesday floor vote.

In a Sunday letter obtained by The Hill, Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas) led seven other hard-line Republican House members and members-elect in calling McCarthy’s responses to their pre-election demands “insufficient...”

McCarthy won a Republican conference vote for the Speakership last month but must garner the support of a majority of the House on the floor Tuesday to secure the position...

Under other circumstances, a small number (nine among 435 congresscritters) like this would be easily ignored while the Speaker-to-be makes arrangements to secure the 218-vote minimum to clear the hurdle. Unfortunately, the Red Wave Ebbtide the Republicans suffered this midterm gave the Republicans a mere 5-seat majority (and that's with a guy in George Santos who's going to get extradited to Brazil sooner than they thought). It's one of the narrowest party majorities in House history, and it's the narrowest during the most partisan division between factions since the Civil War.

It's kind of an open secret - hell, I blogged about it years ago - that the ever-ambitious McCarthy was an embarrassment of a leader, committing faux pas in a way that denied him a Speakership back then, and he was only Minority Leader during the 2018-22 Democratic cycle because nobody else wanted the job and he still had some favors to call in. 

Well, now McCarthy is trying to win over the more extremist, pro-trump members of the GOP, and he's finding out the Freedom Caucus and other rabble-rousers are hungrier for power than he realized.

Tengrain noted this back in December, when the insurgents were issuing demands that McCarthy cannot or dare not deliver:

The letter from HFC Chair SCOTT PERRY (R-Pa.), Republican Reps. CHIP ROY (Texas), DAN BISHOP (N.C.), ANDREW CLYDE (Ga.), PAUL GOSAR(Ariz.) and Reps.-Elect ELI CRANE (Ariz.) and ANDY OGLES (Tenn.) makes several demands of any would-be Republican speaker, including that they:

Reinstate the “motion to vacate” — basically, allowing any member of the House to force a vote to oust the sitting speaker. The letter notes that the rule was “in place for a reason from 1801 to 2018”;

Provide the House with 72 hours of notice on every bill and grant members the ability to amend legislative text;

Promise that Republican leadership and associated outside entities (like the McCarthy-aligned Congressional Leader Fund) will not wade into primaries;

Give conservatives more representation on so-called “A” committees, including the House Rules panel;

Use must-pass bills to try to secure a number of policy wins, including: (1) leveraging the annual defense authorization to reinstate service members who were dismissed due to their refusal to get the Covid vaccine, (2)forcing any debt ceiling increase to be accompanied by spending cuts, and (3)requiring the farm bill to include cuts to food stamps.

So demand #1 is a culture war item that serves as a MAGA get out of jail card in the military, #2 is to assure that there will be a forced recession if the gubmint cannot stimulate the economy (and don’t kid ourselves, “spending cuts” is the dog whistle for Social Security and Medicare) and #3 is just about cruelty...

This was something I noticed back in the early 2010s, when the "Tea Party" Republicans - made up of the Freedom Caucus leaders of today - were insistent on gutting the federal government during their shutdowns to impose the most amount of cruelty on the poor and working classes as much as possible. THAT hadn't changed. What they're doing now is making sure McCarthy can't pull a Boehner stunt to pass legislation to compromise with a Democratic Senate and White House.

That "Motion to Vacate" is also a kind of "No Confidence" vote that was in the rules for hundreds of years - part of the Jefferson Rules of Order passed down from session to session - that got used several times to undercut Boehner and Paul Ryan during those budget fights, leading to Pelosi and the Dems refusing to set that rule when they retook power in 2018. It's a license to let the backbenchers throw bombs at the party leadership without penalty, and McCarthy was reluctant to bring it back... until this weekend, when he caved on that issue.

Funny thing was, the insurgents - represented by Matt Gaetz at that conference meeting - refused to support McCarthy with that move, insisting on further power. 

Something something, "Moving the Goalposts," victory for wingnuts, repeat.

So we're looking at an eventful Tuesday on Capitol Hill one way or another.

Either McCarthy surrenders on every issue his own party extremists want - which runs the slight risk of irking the remaining moderate caucus members (and yes, there are about 30 of them left) - or he fails to make the Speakership on the first ballot, which makes him look weak before he can do anything about it.

It's something that hasn't happened often, in fact not since 1923 (via Ronald G. Shafer at Stars and Stripes (paywalled)):

Today, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is struggling to win enough votes to be elected speaker when Republicans take narrow control of the House, as he faces opposition from some right-wing members of his party. As a result, it may take more than one ballot for anyone to gain the 218 votes, or the majority of votes cast for candidates, needed to win the speakership. McCarthy has warned fellow Republicans against a floor fight, saying, "If we play games on the floor, Democrats could end up picking who the speaker is."

The last time a speaker election took more than one ballot was in 1923, when Speaker Frederick Gillett (R-Mass.) was reelected on the ninth ballot.

But the longest speaker vote began on Dec. 3, 1855, when the 34th Congress convened. Democrats controlled the Senate, but no party controlled the House after the disintegration of the Whig Party. About a third of House members were Democrats. The rest belonged to a mix of parties, including the new Republican Party. Many were members of the secretive American Party, also known as the Know Nothing party...

Finally, on Feb. 1, 1856, Democrats adopted a new strategy. First, they backed a new speaker candidate, proslavery Rep. William Aiken Jr. (D-S.C.), the 50-year-old son of railroad magnate William Aiken Sr., after whom Aiken, S.C., was named. Second, Democratic leaders announced that they would propose the next day a previously rejected resolution to elect a speaker with only a plurality vote. Under this plan, if a majority of members failed to elect a speaker in three consecutive votes, the candidate who got the most votes on a fourth tally would win.

Aiken was sure to win over enough Southern House members to gain a plurality and the speakership, newspapers reported. "We think we can count 109 votes for Mr. Aiken, if jealousy or something else does not defeat him," a Washington Star correspondent wrote. That night, Democratic President Franklin Pierce congratulated Aiken in advance on his victory...

Talk about counting chickens before they hatched.

The fourth, plurality vote began. As the clerk tallied the total, "the excited crowd on the floor and in the galleries looked on in silence," the Picayune reported. "The suspense at this crisis was agonizing. Every eye turned and every ear inclined with intense interest towards the clerk's desk to hear the result."

Just before 7 p.m., the clerk announced the total: 103 votes for Banks, 100 for Aiken. Some lawmakers who had been expected to switch to Aiken had not come through. "As the result was announced, the audience in the galleries manifest their joy by peal after peal of deafening cheers," the Picayune wrote. "The ladies waved their handkerchiefs wildly and clapped, and [anti-Banks] gentlemen stamped and raved, and swore."

So the lesson here is, Have a Solid Majority That Outnumbers Your Extremist Caucus in the House First.

The speculation about what will happen to McCarthy circles around the uncertainty of where the insurgent votes could go. There is an official challenger in Andy Biggs (AZ), but there's still a possibility the Freedom Caucus members or other factions waiting in the shadows backing the likes of Jim Jordan (OH). There is even the possibility that if not enough House Republicans show up to actually vote, a united effort from the Democratic House members backing newly chosen leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY) can place Jeffries in minority control as Speaker.

The Speakership is a powerful office: It sets the committee members (meaning Jeffries could exile the pro-trump Republicans to minor duties that won't affect policies or push for impeachments), oversees floor debates (Jeffries can limit when and how long Republicans can scream for the cameras), and disciplines the House if someone (hint: anybody from the Freedom caucus) gets out of line. Even with the Republicans controlling a slim majority of actual votes, A Speaker Jeffries can limit the amount of damage the Republicans can do.

If this happens - if the Republicans collapse in disarray in failure to control the Speaker's office - things can get very nasty very quick within their own ranks. Accusations of betrayals between the factions could lead to genuine schism, a possible end to the Republican Party itself at the national level.

That's too far to speculate, though. There is often enough self-control among the party leaders to pull back from the brink of their own implosion. It's all about power, and the House Republicans would be foolish to blow apart at the moment of seizing that power for themselves.

Then again, the Freedom Caucus is made up of wingnuts who want to watch the world burn.

Wouldn't hurt to warm up the popcorn.