Clear and Present Danger

This article is from Prof. Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack blog of Jan 3, 2023.

 

Today, the Republicans took over the House of Representatives.

The first thing they did was to remove the metal detectors that were installed after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The removal was one of the things Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) promised far-right Republicans in hopes of winning their votes to elect him speaker. The House has not yet voted on the rules package that ends “Democrat fines for failure of Members to comply with unscientific mask mandates and security screenings before entering the House floor,” but the metal detectors are gone, just three days before the second anniversary of the January 6 attack.

So far, the removal of those metal detectors is the only concrete outcome of McCarthy’s attempt to woo the extremist members of his conference.

McCarthy failed today to win the House speakership. For the first time since 1923, the speaker was not decided on the first ballot.

The reason for the failure is that the Republican conference in the House is feuding internally. On the one hand are the extremists who maintain the reason the Republicans lost ground in the last three elections is that party leadership has not gone far enough in dismantling the government. They are led by lawmakers who were key in former president Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, men like Scott Perry (R-PA), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Jim Jordan (R-OH). “I stand firmly committed to changing the status quo no matter how many ballots this takes,” Perry tweeted. “If…McCarthy had fought nearly as hard to defeat the failed, toxic policies of the…Biden Administration as he has for himself, he would be Speaker of the House right now.”

Politico’s Heidi Przybyla recalled that in his 2021 memoir, former Republican speaker John Boehner said of this faction: “What they’re really interested in is chaos.… They want to throw sand in the gears of the hated federal government until it fails and they’ve finally proved that it’s beyond saving.” And they are tied tightly to right-wing media: “Every time they vote down a bill, they get another invitation to go on Fox News or talk radio,” he said. “Its a narcissistic—and dangerous—feedback loop.”

On the other hand are Republicans like the one who spoke to CNN’s Jake Tapper last night, saying that the holdouts want “procedural trickery that no one in America gives a damn about, but that might give these few loudmouths just a little bit more of the attention and power they crave…. None of these narcissists—and that’s what they are, pure narcissists—did a damn thing to help us win the majority. Nothing. If anything, many of them were liabilities, requiring outside help from Kevin McCarthy, ironically. So they contribute nothing to the team, and then have the audacity to demand outsize influence and power.”

The statement is important; equally important is that the source wanted to stay anonymous.

Before today, there were plenty of signs McCarthy did not have the votes he needed to become speaker. About five extremists had made it clear they would not vote for him, and another bloc of about nine Republicans had waffled. McCarthy tried to bluster his way through the uncertainty, beginning the process of moving into the speaker’s office last night.

But as former White House press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted: “politics 101 rule—avoid going into a vote not knowing if you have the votes….” McCarthy revealed that he had not mastered that rule when the House began to vote. It turned out that he was down not just the five promised “no” votes, but a full 19 votes as extremists threw their support to members who share their ideology. Meanwhile, the Democrats united around Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the House minority leader.

The results of the first ballot had Jeffries in the lead with 212 votes and McCarthy second with 203; Representative Andy Biggs (R-AZ), who was part of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election, had ten votes. Nine votes went to miscellaneous others.

A second ballot again saw Jeffries and McCarthy at 212 and 203 respectively. But extremists concentrated around Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), giving him 19 votes.

A third ballot had Jeffries holding steady at 212, while McCarthy dropped a vote to stand at 202. Jordan picked up that vote to stand at 20. A dropping vote is never a good sign for a frontrunner.

And with that, the House adjourned about 5:30 p.m., sending representatives off to negotiate behind closed doors.

At stake is the direction of the Republican Party. While extremists blame their recent losses on the leadership that will not, they insist, go far enough, observers note that Republicans have lost voters who see the party as far to the right of the mainstream. Moving the party farther right is the last thing less extreme Republicans want, especially those 18 new Republican representatives from districts President Joe Biden won in 2020. An extremist House speaker will almost certainly kill their careers as two years of headlines feature members like Lauren Boebert (R-CO) lecturing and Jim Jordan yelling.

So, as McCarthy’s bid for speaker bogs down, the question is whether they will accept the extremist Jordan—who is deeply implicated in the January 6, 2021, attempt to overthrow the 2020 presidential election—as speaker, or whether they will work to find a compromise candidate by working either with Democrats or with Republicans who regroup around someone who isn’t Jordan. Former Republican governor of Ohio John Kasich has already called on House Republicans to work with Democrats “to pick a speaker to run a coalition government, which will moderate the House and marginalize the extremists.”

But which way they will go is unclear. As congressional reporter for Punchbowl News Max Cohen reported tonight, the Republicans still have to defer to their media for direction. Representative Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA), who expects to be in the House leadership, said of the 19 voters who swung to Jordan: “We’ll see what happens when Tucker and Sean Hannity and Ben Shapiro start beating up on these guys. Maybe that’ll move it.”

As for the man who sparked this meltdown, NBC’s Garrett Haake tweeted an exclusive story: “Former President Trump declined to say if he’s sticking by his endorsement of Kevin McCarthy for speaker tonight, telling me in a brief phone interview he’s had calls all day asking for support, and ‘We’ll see what happens. We’ll see how it all works out.’”

People are comparing this multiple-ballot contest to that of 1923, when Progressive Republicans forced incumbent speaker Frederick Gillett, a Republican, to accept rules changes that gave them more power before they would put him back in office. Perhaps more instructive, though, was the speaker’s contest of 1855–1856, when a struggle over the future of the country created shifting coalitions that crossed party lines until, after two months and 133 ballots, representatives put Nathaniel Banks, who had ties to most of the different factions, in the speaker’s chair.

Conspicuously excluded from the talking and visiting on the House floor today was newly-elected George Santos (R-NY), whose lies about his education, employment, financing, and so on would lead any healthy political party to demand an investigation of him before he took office. In this case, though, his vote for McCarthy was too important to pass up, so he sat shunned by his colleagues, alone and silent, except when called on to vote.

The House Democrats, meanwhile, organized without a hitch, putting together a leadership team that consists of Hakeem Jeffries (NY), Katherine Clark (MA), and Pete Aguilar (CA). With quite a bit of enthusiasm, the Democrats voted as a bloc to give Jeffries more votes than McCarthy, whose party is in the majority.

The Senate, too, organized easily and with what looked like a good deal of fun. Vice President Kamala Harris swore in the senators, then chatted with families and posed for pictures.

Tonight, Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) wrote to the Architect of the Capitol complaining that McCarthy had occupied the office of the House speaker without having been elected. “How long will he remain there before he is considered a squatter?” Gaetz asked. “Please write back promptly as it seems Mr. McCarthy can no longer be considered Speaker-Designate following today’s balloting.”

The first day of Republican control of the House of Representatives does not bode well for the next two years.

Kevin McCarthy spent a large portion of his political career catering to former President Donald Trump and his allies, hoping that one day it would result in his being voted in as House Speaker, but on Tuesday, he was rewarded instead with the type of humiliation we have not seen on the House floor in a century: Being forced to smirk through repeated public beatings at the hands of his own members.

McCarthy and Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw and their ilk convinced themselves that they could throw in with the world’s biggest grifter, tell lie after lie after lie to their own voters, campaign for a boat of shithouse rats so crazy that they make yesterday’s crazies blush—and at the end be rewarded with their loyal support.

Those who threw in their lot with Trump will soon see the demise of their political careers and McCarthy saw his today.

What McCarthy found is that crazy begets crazy.  Once the floodgates opened the 5 Never Kevin votes had ballooned to an unthinkable 19. And then the same 19 voted against him a second time.  And in the third vote the 5 that had become 19 was now 20.  In desperation, the Republicans voted to adjourn  the House until noon Wednesday.

We know no one of any consequence is paying attention to Trump and his daily raving.  Trump has degenerated into a fat old man, living in a Florida motel room, playing golf every day, and shouting at the neighborhood children to “get off my lawn”.  McCarthy is headed in the same direction.

Read the article in its original form here.

By Robert Reich.

Friends,

Today, as House Republicans convulse over electing their next Speaker, the civil war in the Republican Party comes into the open. But it’s not particularly civil and it’s not exactly a war. It’s the mindless hostility of a political party that’s lost any legitimate reason for being.

For all practical purposes, the Republican Party is over.

A half century ago, the Republican Party stood for limited government. Its position was not always coherent or logical (it overlooked corporate power and resisted civil rights), but at least had a certain consistency: the GOP could always be relied on to seek lower taxes and oppose Democratic attempts to enlarge the scope of the federal power.

This was, and still is, the position of the establishment Republican Party of the two George Bush’s, of its wealthy libertarian funders, and of its Davos-jetting corporate executive donor base. But it has little to do with the real GOP of today.

In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich and Fox News’s Roger Ailes ushered the Republican Party into cultural conservatism — against abortion, contraception, immigration, voting rights, gay marriage, LBGTQ rights, and, eventually, against teaching America’s history of racism, trans-gender rights, and, during the pandemic, even against masks. At the same time, the GOP was for police cracking down on crime (especially committed by Black people), teaching religion with public money, for retailers discriminating against LBGTQ people, and for immigration authorities hunting down and deporting undocumented residents.

Gingrich and Ailes smelled the redolent possibilities of cultural conservatism, sensed the power of evangelicals and the anger of rural white America, saw votes in a Republican base that hewed to “traditional values” and, of course, racism.

But this cultural conservatism was so inconsistent with limited government – in effect, calling on government to intrude in the some of the most intimate aspects of personal life – that the Party line became confused, its message garbled, its purpose unclear. It thereby opened itself to a third and far angrier phase, centering on resentment and authoritarianism.

The foundation for this third phase had been laid for decades as white Americans without college degrees, mostly hourly-wage workers, experienced a steady drop in income and security. Not only had upward mobility been blocked, but about half their children wouldn’t live as well as they lived. The middle class was shrinking. Good-paying union jobs were disappearing.

Enter Donald Trump, the con-artist with a monstrous talent for exploiting resentment in service of his ego. Trump turned the Republican Party into a white working-class cauldron of bitterness, xenophobia, racism, anti-intellectualism, and anti-science paranoia, while turning himself into the leader of a near religious cult bent on destroying anything in his way – including American democracy.  

A political party is nothing more than a shell – fundraising machinery, state and local apparatus, and elected officials, along with a dedicated base of volunteers and activists. That base gives fuels a party, giving it purpose and meaning.

Today’s Republican base is fueling hate. It is the epicenter of an emerging anti-democracy movement.

What we are seeing played out today in the contest for the speakership of the Republican House involves all of these phases – what remains of the small-government establishment GOP, the still-fulminating cultural warriors, and the hate-filled authoritarians – now engaged in hopeless, hapless combat with each other, and with the aspirations and ideals of the rest of America.

The Republican Party will continue in some form. It takes more than nihilistic mindlessness to destroy a party in a winner-take-all system such as we have in the United States.

But the Republican Party in this third phase no longer has a legitimate role to play in our system of self-government. It is over.

While Republicans told you to fear “socialism,” the capitalist stole your pension, took your savings, sent your job overseas, robbed you of health care, dismantled your children’s educational system, and put you in debt.

All you are left with is hatred of dark-skinned people,  hatred of foreigners, and your guns.

Trump is struggling to raise money — and likely is illegally spending what he has raised

Donald Trump has already raised a massive war chest for his 2024 presidential run, but a new analysis shows he can’t use the bulk of it for his re-election campaign.

The Guardian examined the former president’s fundraising operation and found that his small-donor network is dwindling and some high-profile donors have abandoned him, and the analysis revealed that about $78 million of the $95 million raised so far cannot be used directly on campaign operations.

“There are a lot of moving parts, but there are a lot of reasons to believe that Trump is struggling more than he has in recent years to raise money,” said Robert Maguire, research director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

That watchdog Campaign Legal Center (CLC) has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) alleging that Trump is violating “soft money” laws by moving money from leadership PACs to super PACs after becoming a presidential candidate.

“Therefore Trump violated federal law that prohibits that kind of soft money transfer,” said Saurav Ghosh, director of federal campaign finance reform for the CLC.

Trump raised an astonishing $882 million during the 2020 cycle and $500 million more since then, but those funds have been depleted by legal defense spending, Melania Trump’s personal designer (WTF??) and assistance to Jan. 6 rioters, the analysis found.

The ex-president’s team and his allies have set up a network of similarly named PACs and committees, and the most prolific one in this cycle, Save America leadership PAC, raised about $111 million and has about $21 million left after the midterms, but those funds must be spent to support other candidates and can’t be used on his own race.

Other Super PACs have about $57 million more on hand, and while they can be spent to support Trump’s campaign and rallies, they cannot coordinate with his campaign operation.

While he continues to draw smaller donations from supporters around the country, Trump has lost his top two donors from 2016 — Robert and Rebekah Mercer — and megadonors like hedge fund manager Ken Griffin and Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman have publicly said they aren’t helping out.

“He captivates a huge population of small-dollar donors willing to keep giving their money to him,” Maguire said. “He still has the capacity to raise money off the MAGA crowd, but the question is, ‘Is that going to cool off? Is there enough in the till?’ — and that remains to be seen.”

Trump delayed and delayed making Jan 6 video — by ordering non-stop Diet Cokes

On the day after his supporters ransacked the United States Capitol building, former President Donald Trump released a video announcing that he would be leaving the White House and that then-President-elect Joe Biden would be taking over.

However, outtakes released by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riots showed that Trump was reluctant to read from the script he had been given, and refused to say that the 2020 election was over even as he prepared to leave the White House.

And as newly released testimony flagged by Politico’s Kyle Cheney shows, Trump’s reluctance to concede he would be leaving extended beyond what the House Select Committee showed in its hearings.

Specifically, former Trump White House photographer Shealah Craighead told the committee that Trump would repeatedly deploy what she viewed as stalling tactics during the filming of the video.

“His agitation of stopping and starting the conversation was based on asking for Diet Cokes several times, or stopping to take a sip and then starting again, immediately stopping and taking another sip and then starting again, reading some of the scroll, and then asking for a new Coca-Cola, or needing a towel to wipe his head or something,” she explained.

Craighead then told the committee that it seemed as though Trump wanted to do anything he could to not film the video.

“It was just there is anything — you know, as you procrastinate, you’re finding anything to… not to do what you have to do,” she explained. “Anything that he could procrastinate with before getting the words out he would do.”

There is no doubt about it:  Donald Trump is mad — “mad” not in the sense of “angry”, but mad in the sense of insane, mentally unstable, loony, crazy as a shithouse mouse.  Here are examples.

Jan 2 -3, 2023, Trump goes on late-night rant against innocent Georgia election workers.

Former President Donald Trump late Monday night took to his fake Twitter app Truth Social to rekindle conspiracy theories about two Georgia elections workers whom he and his allies baselessly believe prevented ballots that were supposedly cast for Trump from being properly tabulated, thus costing him Georgia’s sixteen Electoral College votes in the 2020 election.

During a House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol hearing in June, Wandrea Shaye Moss and her mother Lady Ruby Freeman testified under oath that Trump’s then-attorney Rudy Giuliani alleged that they helped steal the presidency away from Trump.

Moss emotionally recounted how erstwhile New York City Mayor Giuliani’s false accusations destroyed her life:

It’s turned my life upside down. I no longer give out my business card. I don’t transfer calls. I don’t want anyone knowing my name. I don’t want to go anywhere with my mom because she might yell my name out over the grocery aisle or something. I don’t go to the grocery store at all. I haven’t been anywhere at all.

I’ve gained about 60 pounds. I just don’t do nothing anymore. I don’t want to go anywhere. I second guess everything that I do. This affected my life in a major way. In every way. All because of lies, for me doing my job, the same thing I’ve been doing forever.

READ MORE: The mother-daughter Georgia election workers targeted by Donald Trump are being lauded as heroes

Moss and Freeman sued Giuliani in December 2021. He attempted and failed to have the defamation proceeding dismissed this past November.

The case stated that “on multiple occasions, strangers camped out at Ms. Freeman’s home and/or knocked on her door. When Ms. Freeman was not home or would not answer the door, these strangers would sometimes also harass her neighbors. Strangers were coming to her home so frequently that the local police agreed to add her address to their patrols in the area.”

The mother-daughter duo also filed a lawsuit against the right-wing news website The Gateway Pundit for promoting Giuliani’s “campaign of lies.”

That complaint, which was ultimately settled by the parties, contained additional details of the petitioners’ plight:

Freeman made a series of 911 emergency calls in the days after she was publicly identified in early December by the president’s camp. In a Dec. 4 call, she told the dispatcher she’d gotten a flood of ‘threats and phone calls and racial slurs,’ adding: ‘It’s scary because they’re saying stuff like, ‘We’re coming to get you. We are coming to get you.’

Two days later, a panicked Freeman called 911 again, after hearing loud banging on her door just before 10 p.m. Strangers had come the night before, too. She begged the dispatcher for assistance. ‘Lord Jesus, where’s the police?’ she asked, according to the recording, obtained by Reuters in a records request. ‘I don’t know who keeps coming to my door. Please help me.’

READ MORE: Georgia election workers sue Rudy Giuliani after his lies about them reportedly resulted in nonstop threats

All of that prolonged trauma was forced back into the fray by Trump’s trio of so-called “Truths,” which were posted roughly twenty minutes apart.

11:47 p.m.:

Wow! Has anyone seen the Ruby Freeman ‘contradictions’ of her sworn testimony? Now this is ‘BIG STUFF.’Look what was captured by Cobb County police body cameras on January 4, 2021. ‘And everything they are saying is false. Everything from the quote unquote SUITCASES OF THE BALLOT BOXES, TO THE WHY WE OPENED THEM BACK UP. EVERYTHING THEY SAID WAS FALSE.THE FBI…REACHED OUT TO ME ONLY TO CLEAR MY SOCIAL MEDIA (evidence tampering?)…COUNT WAS LOW, IT WAS REALLY LOW.’ Now it gets really bad,TRUTH 2

12:07 a.m.:

Ruby Freeman, page 2: ‘BOOM under the table. Cut the zip ties to scan them so the number would go up…so that’s how the number was CREATED, by the ballots going through the scanner…I do want an attorney. IT’S ALL A FRAUD. EVERYTHING THEY ARE SAYING IS FALSE. FROM THE SUITCASES OF THE BALLOT BOXES, TO WHY WE OPENED THEM BACK UP. EVERYTHING THEY SAID WAS FALSE.’ They got Ruby 7 top D.C. lawyers and protection from the FBI (Again?). WHY? She then ‘changed’ her statements – LIED? TROUBLE FOR RUBY!!!

12:29 a.m.:

What will the Great State of Georgia do with the Ruby Freeman MESS? Why not just tell the TRUTH, get rid of the turmoil and guilt, and take our Country back from the evils and treachery of the Radical Left monsters who want to see America die? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

READ MORE: Georgia election workers sue far-right website ‘The Gateway Pundit,’ citing ‘campaign of lies’

On Monday, CNN reported that a Republican lawmaker is raging against “chaos agents” within the House GOP who are set on tanking GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) in his bid for Speaker of the House.

Republicans, who won an unexpectedly narrow majority in the House after a contentious midterm election last year, are set to vote on the Speakership tomorrow.

“Rep. Dusty Johnson, a South Dakota Republican, said that he found it ‘incredible’ that the same members pushing for a more ‘open and transparent’ GOP conference are getting behind a ‘shadow candidate’ they plan to ‘ambush’ Republicans with at the start of the new Congress,” reported Manu Raju, Melanie Zanona, and Lauren Fox.

“‘I think members are growing increasingly frustrated with the intransigence of some of the holdouts,” said Johnson, who described the rebel Republicans as “chaos agents who are trying to cause trouble.”

In a subsequent CNN interview with Erica Hill, Johnson vowed that McCarthy would be elected even if it takes “30 ballots”.

“Other dark-horse candidates could emerge if McCarthy drops out, according to Republican lawmakers,” said the report. “Among the names that have been floated: North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry, a McCarthy ally who is poised to chair a top committee next year; Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, a co-founder of the far-right House Freedom Caucus; and Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole, a veteran lawmaker who would be seen as more of a temporary caretaker for the job.

None of those lawmakers, however, have expressed any interest in the job, and they would almost certainly run into the same dilemma as McCarthy: Preventing more than four Republicans from defecting in a bid to win the speaker’s gavel.”

Already, five far-right Republicans have vowed to vote as a “Never Kevin” bloc, which would already be more votes than McCarthy can afford to lose. Meanwhile, at least nine other Republicans are undecided.

Trump’s taxes show Trump lived off daddy’s trust funds. He made money off daddy’s name and he made money as a reality TV host. That’s about it. He used this money to cover all his business failures. He used it to pay lawyers and accountants to bail him out of all his failures and crimes.

When it comes to crimes Trump was mostly a minor league player for most of his life. He would cheat on his taxes. Set up a charity and use that money to bail out his failures. He did the same with his fake school. On Jan 6, Trump left the minor leagues for the major leagues when it comes to crimes.

Daddy’s trust funds, daddy’s name, money he made as a reality TV host won’t bail him out this time.

Trump is one of the luckiest, most incompetent fools who has ever lived. He should have stayed in the minor leagues. He could have continued to play the part of a successful business man. Continued to fool people he was something he is not. He should have never run for president and he sure as has hell shouldn’t have attempted a coup or stolen top secret documents. That’s the major league of crimes and Trump is no major league player.

And — if the truth be told — he ran through daddy’s money and the TV earnings long ago and now is in debt up to his eyeballs. If he can’t roll the debt over as it matures (borrow again to pay off the previous lender), he’s doomed. Most legitimate lenders won’t touch him anymore and his name, his only real asset for the last couple of decades, is not what it was. Makes him the perfect stooge for money launderers and other criminals.

On New Years Day, former President Donald Trump took to his Truth Social platform to release a list of various Republican lawmakers and public officials whom he claims to have pushed out of office over disloyalty to him.

First on the list, Trump named several outgoing or already out-of-office Republican senators who spoke critically of him to varying degrees throughout his presidency — Sens. Bob Corker (R-TN), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Ben Sasse (R-NE), Pat Toomey (R-PA), and Richard Burr (R-NC). Republicans no longer even control all of these seats as a result; Flake was ultimately replaced by now-independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, while Toomey will be succeeded by Democrat John Fetterman.

Trump then listed off a number of members of Congress he takes credit for defeating or forcing into retirement, including several who voted to impeach him after the January 6 attack.

On that list were Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY), Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), Tom Rice (R-SC), Peter Meijer (R-MI), Jaime Hererra Beutler (R-WA), Fred Upton (R-MI), Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH), John Katko (R-NY), Justin Amash (I-MI), and Mark Sanford (R-SC). Some of these lawmakers didn’t leave entirely due to Trump — Kinzinger and Upton’s seats were redrawn in unfavorable ways, for instance — and several, like Meijer and Hererra Beutler, will now be replaced by Democrats.

Finally, the former president named two anti-Trump Republican governors he claimed to have defeated, but his claim in both cases is questionable.

He listed Gov. John Kasich (R-OH), a Republican who crossed the aisle to back Biden for president in 2020, who wasn’t defeated at all but simply reached his term limit in 2018; and Gov. Charlie Baker (R-MA), who retired from office extremely popular and will be succeeded by Democrat Maura Healey.