Greg Sargent observes this tiresome dynamic in which the media expects the Democrats to vote for a far right Speaker of the House because the wingnuts won’t take yes for an answer. He notes that it didn’t work this time. There’s a lesson in that: When Democrats refused to save Kevin McCarthy from the hard-right faction of House members who ousted the California Republican as speaker earlier this month, the pundit recriminations were thunderous and damning: Democrats had “burned” future possibilities of bipartisanship. They’d squandered a chance to own “the adult brand.” They should have “saved the country” but betrayed it instead. But now, with Republicans still struggling to elect a speaker, Democrats’ strategy — largely charted by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — is plainly working. The New York Democrat’s approach to navigating the GOP’s disaster isn’t just proving to be good politics for his party; it’s likely to produce a better result for the country as well.
Uncategorized
Elle Hardy author of Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World (yikes!!!) wrote this for TNR about a new war on the poor by Evangelical Christians: A God who does his best work in the dark hours is integral to the story of American evangelical Christianity. The stuff of country music songs and conversions in roadside motels, Jesus tends to come to people at their lowest and loneliest. The only problem is that some of God’s most pernicious modern apostles understand this all too well. At a time when fewer and fewer believers are going to church, it is consumption, in these dark times, that illuminates a deeply antisocial shift in evangelical Christian beliefs. Chief among the new doctrines is the idea that God rewards “seeding”—that is, the “sowing” of financial donations to churches, or favored online preachers—with a material harvest in return.
Yesterday he said he was trying to stay out of it: Reporter: Will you endorse Emmer? He hasn’t always been your biggest fan… Trump: He’s my biggest fan now because he called me yesterday and told me he’s my biggest fan so… I’m trying to stay out of that as much as possible pic.twitter.com/F8zwX8fVSk — Acyn (@Acyn) October 23, 2023 He is demanding a MAGA true believer and so are the MAGA true believers in the House. This is the crux of the problem. They will settle for nothing less than a Trump cultist for speaker and the rest of the caucus knows that spells disaster for the House. And yet, it’s highly likely that at least 90% of House Republicans will vote for Donald Trump in November of 2024. Update: Welp, Emmer just dropped out. Trump just derailed the speakership of the US House while sitting in a courtroom for the civil fraud trial of his business epire and listening to the testimony of Michael Cohen. — Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) October 24, 2023
They all say they love Trump’s policies. What policies? Romney: “On the Trump wing of the party, I haven't heard policy other than saying build a wall and he was president for four years and he built 50 miles. And he had a health care plan. Remember that?” @Acyn pic.twitter.com/0ItAAQIlK5 — The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) October 23, 2023 Most “moderates” rationalize their support for Trump by saying that while they don’t like his personality so much they really support his policies. And nobody ever asks them to be specific about what politics they liked? His only policies were to reverse anything Obama did, cut taxes and stack the Supreme Court with wingnuts (which would have been done by any Republican) a Muslim ban, a tariff war that cost the country billions, a wall that never got built and that’s about it. His “policies” were just a bunch of half-baked notions from the 1980s and whatever he thought of in the moment. The “policies” most Republicans support is the “policy” of having their team in power and that’s about it. It doesn’t matter who facilitates it.
We knew he said something but we didn’t know how much. And it turns out that his book is a pack of lies: Former President Donald Trump’s final chief of staff in the White House, Mark Meadows, has spoken with special counsel Jack Smith’s team at least three times this year, including once before a federal grand jury, which came only after Smith granted Meadows immunity to testify under oath, according to sources familiar with the matter. The sources said Meadows informed Smith’s team that he repeatedly told Trump in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election that the allegations of significant voting fraud coming to them were baseless, a striking break from Trump’s prolific rhetoric regarding the election. According to the sources, Meadows also told the federal investigators Trump was being “dishonest” with the public when he first claimed to have won the election only hours after polls closed on Nov. 3, 2020, before final results were in. “Obviously we didn’t win,” a source quoted Meadows as telling Smith’s team in hindsight.
America under siege The last few weeks have been more stressful than the some during the Trump administration, even during the height of the pandemic. It is easy to grow weary and lose faith that after nearly a quarter of a millennium, this country will self-correct once again. That sense is spreading (Associated Press): For many Americans, the Republican dysfunction that has ground business in the U.S. House to a halt as two wars rage abroad and a budget crisis looms at home is feeding into a longer-term pessimism about the country’s core institutions. The lack of faith extends beyond Congress, with recent polling conducted both before and after the leadership meltdown finding a mistrust in everything from the courts to organized religion. The GOP internal bickering that for nearly three weeks has left open the speaker’s position — second in line to the presidency — is widely seen as the latest indication of deep problems with the nation’s bedrock institutions.
While the House clown show fulminates over Joe Biden’s brother, get a load of what Trump was raking in from just one guy while he was president The media has been so overwhelmed with news of the war in Israel and the trainwreck happening in slow motion in the House of Representatives that a lot of stories that would have normally received front page treatment have been relegated to the back burner. When the news is emanating from the right wing media, that’s actually a good thing since it’s almost never truly newsworthy and almost always a form of MAGA propaganda. A case in point is a breathless report released last Friday from the Chairman of the House Oversight Committee announcing that they’ve found evidence that President Joe Biden’s brother paid him $200,000 in 2017, which is supposed to prove that Joe Biden was part of some kind of criminal scheme. Upon examination, one can see that the check was marked as a repayment of a loan Joe Biden made to his brother a couple of months before, not a payoff of some sort.
“Well right now, [the House] can’t govern, and I think that the eight people who betrayed the conference and joined the Democrats to defeat the 96 percent of the conference unleashed furies that I don’t think they’d even dreamed of, because it gave every person the right to be equally destructive and equally angry. Hahahaha. No, Newt, those furies were unleashed decades ago by you. Recall Newt’s first big power play against his own party: On the evening of Oct. 4, 1990, Newt Gingrich and his then-wife, Marianne, were enjoying a VIP reception at a Republican fundraiser when they were suddenly hustled over to have their picture taken with President George H.W. Bush. “I thought it was a bad idea,” Gingrich said in a series of interviews in 1992 that have not been previously published. Days earlier, Gingrich had dramatically walked out of the White House and was leading a very public rebellion against a deficit reduction and tax increase deal that Bush and top congressional leaders of both parties — including, they thought, Gingrich — had signed off on after months of tedious negotiations.
Look for him to start blowing everything up They’re serious this time: Donald Trump wanted to pull the United States out of NATO during his first term, but was repeatedly talked out of it by senior administration officials. For a possible second term in the White House, the 2024 Republican presidential frontrunner is already discussing how he could actually get it done, if his demands aren’t met by NATO. He and his policy-wonk allies are also gaming out how he could dramatically wind down American involvement to merely a “standby” position in NATO, in Trump’s own words. When the former president has privately discussed the United States’ role in the transatlantic military alliance this year, Trump has made clear that he doesn’t want the upper ranks of a second administration to be staffed by “NATO lovers,” according to two sources who’ve heard him make such comments. The ex-president has made these kinds of jabs at the longstanding alliance during conversations related to the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine. Trump, the sources say, has continued to express an openness to pulling the U.S.
Don’t kid yourself At least they aren’t blaming the Democrats anymore. (For now anyway.) Kevin McCarthy, the ousted speaker, was making his way through the Capitol when reporters asked what he thought of the chaos consuming House Republicans, who for nearly three weeks have been trying and failing to replace him. His answer veered into the existential. “We are,” he said on Friday, “in a very bad place right now.” That might be an understatement. In the House, Republicans are casting about for a new leader, mired in an internecine battle marked by screaming, cursing and a fresh flood of candidates. In the Senate, their party is led by Senator Mitch McConnell, who spent weeks arguing that he remained physically and mentally fit enough for the position after freezing midsentence in two public appearances. And on the 2024 campaign trail, the dominant front-runner, Donald J. Trump, faces 91 felony charges across four cases, creating a drumbeat of legal news that often overwhelms any of his party’s political messages.