The Clown Car Has No Brakes
The MAGA wing is driving us over a cliff.
While it’s doubtless true, as a POLITICO report declares, that “Congress is in crisis. There’s no clear escape.” the problem is with one faction of one party, not the institution itself.
The government is barreling toward a shutdown. House Republicans threaten to impeach the president — though some of them don’t see the evidence. A Republican senator has a one-man blockade on military promotions with no end in sight.
The Capitol is in crisis. And though Democrats control much of the government, Republican divisions are driving the chaos.
Each of the Hill’s messes will reach a peak this fall, starting with a Sept. 30 shutdown deadline. Each on its own is a headache; the collection of problems lawmakers have to juggle at once is almost unthinkable.
“We need to eliminate preventable errors, and we’re not doing that,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said of her party.
On policy issues such as inflation, energy and the border, she argued, Republicans have positions “that are very good to be used for a political campaign. But they are getting smothered over by issues that are unhelpful or people don’t care about.”
The Jan. 6 riot permanently chipped away at the two parties’ already-shaky ability to work together on basic tasks of governing. After two years of Democratic control, that decay is only accelerating in divided government as Congress confronts a convergence of challenges. And stopping a shutdown, navigating an impeachment inquiry that even some Republicans don’t support and solving a military crisis all require careful maneuvering.
And as Congress barrels toward all-out gridlock, Republicans are growing more frustrated about their lack of a cohesive plan to use their threadbare House majority to stare down President Joe Biden and Hill Democrats.
Summing up the lack of a GOP spending strategy, Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson opined: “It’s stupid.”
“We’ve been seeing this coming for the last three or four months. I just didn’t think we were dumb enough to get there,” he said.
[…]
Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), a former Navy SEAL officer, said in a text message to allies that he’s “at a point where I’m going to tear apart (if asked) coach/Senator/non-veteran Tuberville for personally attacking service members who have spent almost 30 years serving our country.”
“I don’t know what outcome he expected,” Crenshaw added of Tuberville, “but I’m hearing more and more that his actions are having worsening consequences.”
[…]
At the moment though, the imminent government funding deadline is Congress’ biggest problem. Halfway through September, Speaker Kevin McCarthy has no obvious plan to escape the month without triggering a shutdown that his own members fear could endanger his party’s position — and perhaps even the speaker’s own job — going into the pivotal 2024 election.
Even McCarthy’s surprising leap toward an impeachment inquiry this week failed to quell the hard-right rebellion.
It’s enough to bring the two parties together in the Senate, where frustration with the House majority is creating unexpected unity. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said he’s not singling out Senate Republicans, many of whom are working with Democrats on government funding, but he had harsh words for the House GOP: “They’re not serious public servants.”
“The Senate will not shut down the government,” said Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.). But he added, of the House where he formerly served: “I can’t answer for a place I worked in for 14 years. I don’t know what happens there. I don’t think they can predict either.”
Still, the Senate is hardly free from snags. One arrived on Thursday, as Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) procedurally protested against bipartisan efforts to unite three different spending bills on the floor — a plan telegraphed well in advance. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer blamed a handful of GOP senators for “trying to mimic the Freedom Caucus in the House.” At the moment, the chamber is in a standstill.
Across the building, McCarthy is effectively paralyzed as a band of rebels cuts off all exit routes to avoid a shutdown. The vast majority of House Republicans are ardently opposed to a funding lapse imposed by their own party, but acknowledge that they’re running out of ways — and time — to avoid it.
“Have we ever not got blamed for a shutdown? … I’m worried about the basic functions of government.” said Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-S.D.). A McCarthy ally who’s seen the speaker survive nine months of internal GOP drama, Armstrong added dryly that he calls the current spectacle nothing more than “Thursday.”
As they block the GOP’s own spending bills on the floor, McCarthy’s critics are openly threatening a vote of no confidence if he dares to work with Democrats. The latest casualty: The GOP’s own defense bill this week.
“I don’t know what they want. It’s inexplicable,” said Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), a four-decade veteran of the House. The former Appropriations Committee chief is urging McCarthy to defy his defectors by slating a vote on the party’s defense bill — and daring them to vote against it.
If it fails, Rogers said: “Let those who vote against the defense of the country explain themselves to their constituents.”
House GOP leaders are now discussing a Republican-only short-term funding patch, chock-full of border security provisions and spending cuts, that they hope to pass on the floor next week. But even if they can, that will put them no closer to reaching a deal with Democrats.
House Democrats, meanwhile, are watching entirely from the sidelines as GOP hardliners warn that cross-aisle cooperation would hasten their attempts to oust McCarthy.
“They’ve taken a sip of majority martini and it has intoxicated some of them to the point where they are walking along, stumbling,” Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) said of Republicans. “It’s not a good time.”
McCarthy’s critics seem unfazed by their colleagues’ frustrations. That’s even after the speaker’s obvious overture to his right flank, this week formalizing a Biden impeachment inquiry that threatens to cause more GOP agita. While few are publicly resisting the speaker’s move, Republicans remain divided over how long the probe should last and what should happen if they fail to uncover clear evidence linking Biden to his son Hunter’s financial dealings.
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), who has called the impeachment move “long overdue,” said Thursday that he sees virtually no way to prevent a funding lapse come Oct. 1: “Unless a miracle happens. I believe in miracles, but I don’t see it happening. There’s been no movement.”
Abraham Lincoln, who would go on to be the first Republican President, famously declared, “A house divided against itself, cannot stand.” He was referring to the battle between free and slave states and what it was doing to the nation. But the same holds true for the party he once led.
Whatever one might think of Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, they are interested in governing. But they hold their posts contingent on the support of a caucus with a significant number of people seemingly happy to see the whole thing burn down. Under normal circumstances, the obvious answer would be to cooperate with Democrats to bypass the Know Nothing wing. But they would swiftly lose their leadership positions.
Further, while the “MAGA wing” is lumped together, they are not united by an actual governing agenda. This means McCarthy can’t even buy them off by appeasing them on issues.
Regardless, the headline is correct: this is a crisis with no obvious way out.
Theoretically, the voters could punish Republicans for the damage they’re inflicting on the country by replacing them with Democrats. To a certain extent, that happened in the Senate in the midterms, with voters choosing normal Democrats over crazy Republican nominees, most notably in Georgia and Pennsylvania. But that’s essentially impossible in the House, with so many districts being uncompetitive.
We often talk about how the origins of right-wing lunacy in Congress began with Newt Gingrich in the ’90s. Honestly, though…as unjustified as I believe the impeachment of Clinton was, I could at least follow the argument. It wasn’t totally insane. In any case, I definitely think the Republicans went into that fiasco believing they could get the broader public on their side, and that even if they failed to get Clinton removed from office, it would damage him politically and harm Democrats in the Congressional elections. It didn’t work, but it was genuinely their goal.
The crazy thing is, I don’t think that’s what the Republicans are trying to do now with the Hunter Biden stuff. I don’t think McCarthy wants to pursue impeachment. He realizes how much it could hurt swing-district Republicans, endangering the party’s control of the House and also helping Biden win reelection. But if he doesn’t pursue it, he gets booted out as Speaker. The politics of the GOP has abandoned even the pretense of appealing to the broader public; it’s driven entirely by satisfying the bloodlust of the extremists.
If I were a political cartoonist, I’d depict the Freedom Caucus as the plant from Little Shop of Horrors and Kevin McCarthy as Seymour.
While this is technically true, a broader understanding would read this way: “… with so many districts containing voters that don’t take governance seriously and instead get sucked into pointless culture wars”.
Another huge part of the problem goes back to Gingrich. When he nutted the committees by essentially eliminating seniority, business interests switched their lobbying efforts and support to the house leaders. Who cares if your rep a blowhard that could not get a law passed to rename a library? What little legislation that gets crafted is negotiated at the top.
This is true for a significant portion of the Republican rank and file as well. What is the solution? It’s untenable in the long run–government just doesn’t work if a substantial portion of electeds just DNGAF about governing. Yet, this is now a feature not a bug for many Republicans–far more than I think people realize.
@Kylopod: Funny, I used Little Shop of Horrors as an example a few weeks back, talking about outcomes. I suggested that Republican leadership needed to decide which version (the stage version or movie) ending they wanted. Currently, they appear to be going with the stage production ending–allowing the blood-eating plants to multiply and take over.
And that’s why McCarthy has approved an impeachment inquiry [an act of asking for information] to look into the credible evidence that has come to light of long term corruption by Biden and family. Evidence that rises to the level of probable cause [reasonable grounds] justifying an inquiry into whether the evidence rises to the level to call for a vote to impeach [a legislative “grand jury” indictment] and subsequent trial in the Senate.
As for Sen. Tuberville holding up promotions in the DoD, a way around it is for the DoD to either follow the Hyde Amendment, i.e., the laws enacted by Congress. Or the Congress to modify the Hyde Amendment to allow the DoD to use taxpayer funds to facilitate abortions. Or the Senate could alter the rules so that a single senator can’t put a hold on Senate confirmations.
@JKB: Or, Sen. Tuberville could stop being a horse’s ass.
On the impeachment–you probably don’t realize this, but that’s a fishing expedition, much like the nonsense that Secretary Clinton was subjected to over BeNGaHzi, which was a massive waste of money and a literal nothingburger. “Fiscal conservatives” my @ss. Y’all waste a TON of taxpayer money.
At this point, I’m still happily munching popcorn while JKB and his ilk careen toward the cliff while debating whether gravity is a real thing.
It’s amazing to me how far the Rs will go to avoid simply adopting more popular policies that would win elections.
@Jen:
Unfortunately, it’s not to let them burn it all down and see how they like it. The damage to the vast majority of the population would be too great.
When Gringrich went to war on bipartisan compromise, that started the train to Crazy Town for the GOP. When the Supreme Court decided money was free speech, the train really got rolling. I’ll never forgive Romney (Corporations are people too, my friend.) and his ilk for throwing open the doors to dark money, attracting every grifting con man or con woman to do the bidding of whoever has the deepest pockets, Country be damned. Boebert, Greene, Gaetz, anyone in the sorely misnamed “Freedom Caucus “ and the utterly ridiculous Senator Potato Town are prime examples. Bottom feeding scum.
Success has many fathers, and apparently farce does too. Yes, Gingrich. But also Reagan who put a smiley face on conservatism. Nixon and the Southern Strategy. Goldwater, whose backers said, “We’re businessmen. We use mass marketing to sell our shitty products, surely we can sell even Goldwater the same way.” Even I’m not old enough to have observed earlier, but I’ve read that Eisenhower got drafted by GOPs who realized the heir apparent, Mr. Republican, Robert Taft, was a conservative loon who was going to take them down to a sixth defeat. This has been festering for a long time.
@Tony W:
Ah, but most popular policies risk spending money. That might raise Chuckles Koch and Peter Thiel’s taxes, which must not be allowed.
@gVOR10:
When I cited Gingrich, I was talking specifically about Congress. Of course it wasn’t the beginning of Republican lunatics in Congress (you might consider Joe McCarthy the first), but I think the mid-’90s was the moment when the lunatics took over the asylum.
@Tony W:
The entire modern GOP, going back decades, is built squarely on pushing unpopular policies the wealthy class wants, and getting elected by lying about what they intend to do while in office. If they pushed popular policies, they wouldn’t be the GOP. If they were honest about the policies they favored, they would cease to exist as a nationally competitive party.
@JKB:
Ok, I’ll bite: could you provide some examples of said “credible evidence”?
@MarkedMan:
A core problem of our system is that many, many districts are overwhelmingly R or D. Therefore, there is no general election pressure.
None.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I bet he can’t even come up with a specific allegation against Joe Biden. Evidence would definitely be a bridge too far.
@Steven L. Taylor: Oh no! You should give us advance notice so we can get our hip waders out.
Thanks for that opener, James. I wish the so-called news outlets would be so honest.
It’s one or two dozen crazies in the Republican Party, and the rest of the party won’t (or perhaps can’t) pull them back into reality. And their voters apparently love it.
@Steven L. Taylor:
A core part of our culture is that many voters view politics as essentially a sports competition and will follow their chosen team without paying any attention at all as to how the leaders actually govern. The preponderance of one party or even the number of parties doesn’t really affect this. There are single party cities and states that manage to field a wide variety of candidates that reflect many different views towards governance. For example, the Democratic primary in NYC or in my current home town, Baltimore, offered a number of serious and well financed candidates that had very different views on how the cities would actually be administered, views that would have significant affect on voters’ day to day lives. That also used to be true of Republican monocultures, but is less so now. I would contend that has to do with the slow implosion of a powerful ruling structure, which is going to sow chaos regardless of the electoral system.
People are slow to change their voting habits and even slower to change their culture. The voters that elected an egotistical and moronic blowhard like Tommy Tuberville had lots of choices at the primary level, and still elected the guy whose claim to fame is coaching teens in a children’s game and who literally lives in a different state. I think you are mistaken in your optimism that if those choices were present in the general rather than the primary, Alabamians would suddenly start voting for people who could actually govern.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Here:
@JKB:
They’ve been investigating for 9+ months, held hearings, and interviews, and have found nada, zilch, bubkis.
There’s a word for this. Abuse of Power.
Oh, and BTW…you belong to a cult. seek professional help. De-programming from a cult can be difficult, but there is help available if you can take the first step – admitting you have a problem.
@MarkedMan: While Gingrich had his faults, I think he genuinely wanted to get things done. And, while he did gut the power of committee chairs with ill effects, I don’t think it was intentional. He came in after the Democrats had controlled the House for nearly 40 years interrupted and the chairs of powerful committees abused their power in some absolutely egregious ways. But many of the reforms, such as getting rid of earmarks, ultimately backfired, making it harder to actually govern. The fact that the parties sorted, with the old style Southern Democrats becoming Republicans, accelerated that process.
@Cheryl Rofer: It’s definitely a mess. The primary system means party leaders have essentially no control over candidate selection and “normal” Republicans are getting pushed out. I have no idea how this process gets reversed.
@Kathy:
At what point do we have no other choice but to let it all burn down. It wasn’t even six months ago when they pulled this crap the last time? The Republicans are unifying around the fact that they can’t have any democrats vote for these budgets or their whole party will melt down in multiple tantrums. Vance is now pulling a Tuberville on Justice dept. nominees. What’s next? Mike Lee saying that no positions will be filled unless Biden resigns? Our government is rapidly turning into a pile of crap lorded over by the craziest of the crazy. You could give those morons every single thing they wanted and they will want more. None of them will be satisfied unless they are crowned sole emperor of the country.
Fuck it, shut it all down. All of it. Lay off the ATCs, send the federal marshalls home. Shut off all the utilities to capital building. Let them all fight it out Thunderdome style.
@James Joyner:
I don’t like Gingrich and never have, but I actually have no opinion on whether he intended anything in addition to taking power from the strong committee system and transferring it to himself. Whatever I think of him, he is pretty intelligent and could actually think things through. He may have actually felt that the problems presented by the strong committee system outweighed any new ones he foresaw arising from his changes. And given his nature, if he was going to take power from them, it was inevitable that he would transfer it to himself.
@Beth:
I appreciate your frustration and it is understandable, but letting the nihilists burn it all down so people will finally see how wrong they are never works. Never.
Putting McCarthy’s ambitions ahead of the county’s interests. Today’s GOP in a nutshell.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Well, Jonathan Turley has gone to all the trouble so you can just read his recent article.
@Beth:
If not for what @MarkedMan said, when Republiqans gain agency. As it is, Democrats would take the blame for not stopping the crazies somehow.
@JKB:
Turley has lost all credibility after his factless blather about the Trump document theft.
@JKB: I suppose if we read Article I we’ll find that clause which provides that Congress shall conduct an impeachment in order to provide clarity?
Turley is just another example of someone willing to trade his reputation for Fox’s bucks.
@Beth:
Biden should threaten to veto the FY24 Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill. Zero out Congress. See what they do about that. Or at least say: Not signing until you get your work done.
@Kylopod:
That was true in the Reagan/Gingrich era, but these days I think it’s even more often “…by promising to punish queers, control women, make Christianity the state religion, and keep the scary brown people away from you.” Too much of that isn’t lying, the way “bring back your coal mining and manufacturing jobs” was, or misdirection the way “
underfund serviceskeep taxes low” was.Guys, JKB has straight up admitted that there is no actual evidence of any wrongdoing on Joe Biden’s part. Take the win and call it a day.
@James Joyner:
You’re deliberately trying to Godwinize this thread, aren’t you? 😉
@JKB:
The House Inquiry is toothless if it isn’t created by a vote of the House.
It has no power whatsoever.
Why do you think they are not holding a vote?
Because there is no evidence.
Which brings us back, yet again, to gerrymandering. Destroy that hideous practice and so much suddenly works.
@DrDaveT: I agree that things have changed but in a different way than you are proposing. Put simply, the Deep
South has subsumed all other factions in the Republican party and so the Repubs have adopted their method of governance: set the public in general against a underclass and keep them constantly riled up against that underclass. This prevents the populace from paying attention as you do everything in your power to promote the interests of your benefactors at the expense of the public in general.
@MarkedMan:
Realistically it will never all be burned down. But you could see a dissolution of the US into say three to five independent nations. I think that’d ultimately be a very good thing for lots of reasons.
@DrDaveT:
You don’t think that was true in the Gingrich era? You don’t remember all the moral panics back then? Gays in the military. Gay marriage. The Southern Baptists’ boycott of Disney because of Ellen coming out and the company offering benefits to same-sex couples. Outrage over video games. Flag burning. Prayer in public schools. Creationism. Pat Buchanan’s “culture wars.” The heavily racialized fear-mongering over crime.
Not everything they did was directly lying. Some of it was misdirection. That’s why they called those things “wedge issues.”
Part of what’s changed is that the American public has moved left on a lot of those social/cultural issues (particularly the acceptance of gay people). Also, the two parties were still in a decades-long process of sorting. Socially conservative voters (particularly white evangelicals in the South) were shifting over to the GOP, but Dems still felt they had to compete for at least some of their votes. That situation gradually disappeared in the course of the 21st century as the minority population grew and the Dems made gains in the suburbs, while the last vestiges of the old Democratic South collapsed for good.
I can think of one general category of issues on which Dems are still vulnerable, and that’s crime. It was a factor in last years’ midterms–not a big enough factor to cause the anticipated red wave, but it did hurt Dems in New York. But the country is simply not in the situation it was back in the ’80s and ’90s in terms of high crime, and I think the current partisan sorting has limited its impact as well. The old adage (coined by Frank Rizzo, I’ve heard) that “A conservative is a liberal who got mugged last night” just doesn’t govern our politics anymore.
You know, we require a writ of habeas corpus for a reason. And the FBI needs something – some evidence – on which to predicate an investigation. We require probable cause for searches. We abolished the Star Chamber.
We don’t condone pure fishing expeditions in our legal system. But no such requirement is placed on the political bodies within Congress.
“We have no evidence, but we’re sure that we will find some” is the cry of a charlatan, and of politically motivated hit jobs, or of fraudsters trying to overturn a legitimately conducted election. It seems to me that there are a lot of people within the Republican party who think that they cannot win without cheating, so they will cheat. And that’s what they love about Trump. They say “he fights” but what they mean is “he cheats”. It’s still the party of Nixon.
This will ruin them. What’s up for grabs is whether they ruin the country too.
What McConnell did after Scalia and Ginsburg’s death was a blatantly cynical power play and offering to his right-wing paymasters. He’s the one who disabled the breaks, opened the doors, and took away the wheel. You can’t do things like that and expect for your acts to be mistaken for governance. All in all, the GOP basically stopped governing when they didn’t find WMDs in Iraq. After that it was just bullshit a lawyer owned by a corporation concocted as a defense of whatever narrow-minded idiocy the corporation needs to pay the officers their bonuses. And because the media had to portray this as legitimate it fooled very gullible humans into thinking being a corporate hack is a legitimate way to approach the world.
While I don’t honestly have an objection to a partisan Biden impeachment investigation (its the prerogative of whichever party controls the House to make stupid partisan decisions), @JKB one thing I find strange about Turley’s list of allegations is that, with the exception of the fifth one, none of those occurred during Biden’s time in office.
Turley, who was historically deeply concerned with the expansion of Government powers, is advocating for a pretty radical expansion of Impeachment. Historically it has only been used in the case of abuses of power while in their present office.
@mattbernius:
Indeed. Otherwise Trump would have been impeached for rape.
New York Times headline: “Bothsides in disarray!”
Byline: Peter Baker
@DrDaveT:
Technically he hasn’t been found criminally liable yet–but extending Turley’s line of argumentation Democrats would have correct to open an impeachment investigation over that and all of the other prosecutions that were delayed due to Trump being elected President.
@James Joyner: I think with Gingrich the problem was that he was willing to settle for nothing if he couldn’t win.
@JKB:
Well now we know why Turley is a failed and disgraced attorney: he doesn’t understand the law or the Constitution.
The Constitution provides for impeachment for “Treason, Bribery, or high crimes and misdemeanors” not impeachment for “finding evidence to find out what we’re impeaching for or not.”
This passage accidentally admits Republicans suffering from Laptop Derangement Syndrome know they lack any evidence of wrongdoing by Biden and are still desperately looking for an actual case for impeachment.
Which is why McCarthy does not have enough Republican votes to make his impeachment legal. Oops.
@JKB: Wa! He asked for evidence and you provided vaporware conjecture. Good job!
@just nutha: We asked for evidence, and he responded, “We’re impeaching Biden because we haven’t found evidence.”
He and Turley told the truth, on accident. Lol.
I checked Wikipedia’s article on the history of impeachment inquiries against US presidents–including failed ones, as well as one that was launched but didn’t lead to impeachment (against James Buchanan)–and it was clear that in every single one up to now, the people launching them already had specific acts in mind which they saw as crimes. It was not at all used to investigate things they claimed were suspicious in some vague, nebulous way.
@DrDaveT:
Seems like that’d be the tip of the proverbial iceberg. How frequently has Trump involved himself in his offsprings’ business decisions, say by intervening on their behalf?
@OzarkHillbilly: Maybe. But it’s not obvious that a replacement would be more able to steer the ship.
@James Joyner:
First, how dare you suggest that the Southern wing of the Democratic party became Republicans. Don’t you know that’s a fiction according to most Republicans (especially the populists)?
More on point, I was definitely thinking about how McCarthy’s involvement with the Young Guns and their attacks on Earmarks a decade ago would help eliminate his ability to control his caucus today.
https://www.today.com/popculture/conservative-young-guns-offer-views-america-s-future-wbna39154818
@JKB: That’s a non answer.
I again ask: what evidence?
@Tlaloc: it’s not just gerrymandering. It isn’t even fundamentally gerrymandering. It is the core nature of single seat districts.
I say this not to take gerrymander off the table, but to make sure we all understand what the real problem is.
@Beth:
Americans are either going to learn the lesson and start voting for Democratic Party candidates, or Americans are going to suffer the consequences.
This is why I refuse to applaud Romney. The choice is clear. Anyone who is not saying, clearly and starkly, “Vote for Biden and Democrats in 2024” is not doing enough.
@Jen:
Trump’s Saudi golf deal and Jared Kushner’s $2 billion Saudi cashgrab are finally getting a little scrutiny. As should Ivanka’s Chinese trademarks and the unexplained millions in Chinese income on the tax returns Trump tried to hide.
Trump, Kushner, and Ivanka were all taxpayer-funded White House officials, unlike Hunter Biden. We cannot have a White House beholden to Russia, Saudi Arabia, China.
I’d prefer fewer investigations and more focus on mitigating climate disaster, defeating Putin, and improving affordable housing policy. But turnabout is fair play.
@mattbernius:
Given some of the people that Republicans hold up as heroes, I would not be against impeaching some of them if they became President for their activities before they held office.
Don’t we have a few Representatives who likely committed war crimes before being elected?
The bar should be higher than for in-office crimes, but public corruption and war crimes both should be above that line. They affect the Presidency itself.
Further, if there was real evidence that Biden actually did take bribes to affect US policy (evidence would have to include a money trail leading to Joe Biden, not vague suppositions about his drug addict son trading on the family name), then he should be removed from office.
Also, given that his fail-son was trading on the family name in Ukraine, Joe Biden should have said “send the Secretary of State to deliver the ultimatum.” That was poor judgment on his part to not avoid the appearance of impropriety*.
——
*: On a scale of 0 to Clarence Thomas (repeatedly taking gifts from right wing billionaires), I’d put it at about a 0.1 Clarence — no money, a one off, just a bad look.
@James Joyner: Hakeem Jeffries could probably handle it. Yeah, I know, in my dreams of bi-partisan fairies working together.
@Kylopod:
Pundits overestimated how much crime spikes would hurt Democrats because pundits underestimated Americans’ ability to know who is in charge and where.
Crime in New York hurts Democrats, because Democrats run New York. But 9 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates are traditionally Republican, as are several high-crime municipalities like Jacksonville and Oklahoma City. Maybe it’s not as effective to blame Democrats for the travails of cities under Republican mayors and/or Republican governors.
Californians love to point out Kevin McCarthy’s deep red district is the state’s murder capital.
@Gustopher:
Most of the Obama administration’s handling of Ukraine reflected poor judgment. But hindsight is 20/20 so we’ll let history adjudicate that.
@MarkedMan:
While I generally agree with you on this, and would rather spend the next couple years making money, raving, and watching my kids, I suspect we’re going to get this anyways. I knew this was going to happen when they agreed to avert the last financial meltdown. I’m sure there’s a comment here from me to that effect. We’re just going to bounce from crisis to crisis until something fully breaks. The Republicans are going fully fash. How much longer until Tuberville, Vance or any number of Senate buttholes decides that any Democrat is illegitimate and decides to hold all confirmations, for everything until the Democrat turns over control.
This situation is just going to become more untenable. It’s like climate change.
@DK:
I can’t stand Romney. What a vacuous asshole. There’s a man who would burn down his own house and stand in the rubble wondering why someone burned down his house. I don’t believe in hell, but I hope he gets to experience it while he’s alive.
@James Joyner: You see here, this is why we are where we are. Newt Gingrich was never a “normal” politician, yes he pretended to be one and yes, he spoke in complete sentences, and probably because of it, the old JJ fell for it, but the reality has always been, with his pronouncements, books, conduct and beliefs, that he was just who he is from the word go. Look back to where he was thirty years ago, look why mainstream republicans tried to overthrow him back then, look at what he wrote, he has always been a self-aggrandizing bloviator with the moral compass of a one-cell organism. Jeez, who are you going to try to rehabilitate next.
@Tlaloc:
When I started saying this about a dozen years ago, everyone laughed. My “probable” time table said it would be 25 years before state legislatures started treating it as an actually serious question. So 13 from now, call it 2036. Then 15-20 more years to work out the details. I thought then, and still do, that the actual cause will be responses to climate change. Three to five different regions simply won’t agree on policy and spending priorities and will fear getting “cheated” by the others.
@JKB:
I also forgot to ask, since you are arguing by Turley, does that you mean you agree with Turley that the indictment of Trump in the Mar A Lago document case is damning for Trump?
Just checking to see if you only think he’s right when he says things you agree with
@mattbernius:
Somehow I don’t think you’re going to get an answer.
@mattbernius:
To quote John Larroquette: What’s your point? “Criminally liable” isn’t the standard for impeachment, and never has been. A civil finding is more than good enough for impeachment.
You would think that by now, even the slowest Republican would have realised that ‘burning it all down’ is the precise objective of the radical reactionaries who dominate their party. They have no interest in making government more effective, because they’re convinced liberals and ‘RINOs’ will control the government no matter what Congress might do. They fervently support destroying the ‘deep state’ so they can build a new MAGA one. Trump, DeSantis and Ramaswamy have concrete proposals to start doing it.
@DK: what people choose to forget is that the real reason Republicans made gains in New York is that the Republican-leaning state Supreme Court threw out the maps and rejiggered the state to make it easier for R’s to win.