Meet The Speaker Of The House

Posted: October 30, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment

“The swamp is on the run, MAGA is ascendant, and if you don’t think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement, and where the power of the Republican Party truly lies, then you’re not paying attention.” — Congressman Matt Gaetz (MAGA-FL) talking about the new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (MAGA-LA).

Last week House Republicans ended three weeks of bitter infighting, recriminations, and ignoring the people’s work by electing a new Speaker of the House. The unanimous Republican vote for Congressman Mike Johnson of Louisiana proved that the rabble rouser Gaetz was accurate in his assessment. The House Republican Party can only be considered a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump, Inc. and a solid MAGA institution. There are no moderates left on the Republican side of the House given that the support for “MAGA Mike” was without exception.

Note that Trump thoroughly controls the House through his MAGA acolytes. His autocratic control can be discerned from one telling event. Speaker Johnson was the Republicans’ fourth choice after they deposed former Speaker Kevin McCarthy — thrown out because he dared to pass bi-partisan legislation to keep the government functioning under a Continuing Resolution (CR). Their third choice was Congressman Tom Emmer of Minnesota. He had the votes of most of the caucus, but one social media post by an ex-president doomed his chances and his support evaporated before a formal vote on his Speakership. In other words, Trump vetoed Mr. Emmer from becoming Speaker. Trump supported Mr. Johnson and he became Speaker. Pretty simple. One person out of the government controls what happens with the party holding the majority in the House. It took them three weeks to figure out who would be the biggest MAGA champion, but they found their guy.

It appears that Speaker Johnson is a nice, polite, well-dressed individual with a pleasant smile. Do not let the packaging influence your opinion of what is inside. Here are a few examples.

He is labeled an “election denier” but it goes far deeper than that. Former Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) called him “the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.” He organized over 100 House Republicans to sign an amicus brief to the Supreme Court supporting an effort by the Texas Attorney General to throw out the results of the presidential vote in four swing states. The Supreme Court turned it down. In gathering support for that effort, Mr. Johnson sent an email to all Republicans in Congress explicitly saying that Trump asked him to recruit all of the Republicans to join the brief to the Supreme Court and that he would report those that sign on as Trump “will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.” A not so subtle threat. When that didn’t work, he helped to organize the sedition caucus of Republicans that voted on 6 January 2021 to decertify the results of the election — after the capitol was attacked. He was an ardent advocate of the Dominion voting machine scam claiming that the machines came from “Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela.” The very allegations that cost Fox News three-quarters of a billion dollars and for which increasing numbers of scammers are pleading guilty in court agreeing that they are all lied when they claimed that there was massive voting fraud.

This does not bode well for certifying the 2024 election results in the House.

One would think that this alone would disqualify anyone from becoming the second in line to the presidency — behind a president he apparently does not think is legitimate. When asked about this in recent interviews, he refused to answer.

But wait! There’s more!

For example, he is widely recognized as a right wing, white Christian nationalist, although he demurs when asked if that his world view. As he stated in a recent interview on Fox News, “I am a Bible believing Christian, …go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my world view.” Such a devotion to his religion is in itself not a problem. The problem is that he has worked most of his adult life to push his religious principles ahead of, and over-riding those of other religions or those that have no religious belief at all. His states is that the U.S. was founded on Christian principles and that the Constitution is really a Christian document, but a Christianity that he defines. To him, our constitutional republic was established by the Founding Fathers because “they followed the Biblical definition of what a civil society is supposed to look like.” He is vigorously opposed to same-sex marriage, LGBTQ rights and the influx of immigrants (not just border control but who is allowed to enter the U.S.).

After the mass shooting in Lewiston Maine he said in response to a question about stricter gun laws that “The end of the day, it’s, the problem is the human heart. Its not guns. Its not weapons. At the end of the day, we have to protect the right of the citizens to protect themselves, and that’s the Second Amendment.” A few years ago, in his speeches (some call them sermons) he blamed school gun violence on various social issues including abortion, divorce and the teaching of evolution.

There is more, but it is clear that he is far to the right and in perfect alignment with MAGA principles. As to governing, we will see. He has little experience in any government leadership position having never even chaired a full committee within the House of Representatives. The coming months are going to be difficult for our country as we still need to fund the government, decide on aid to Israel and Ukraine and deal with the many issues that continue to languish in the House for lack of action because the MAGA agenda is Hunter Biden’s laptop and not much else.

Some might argue that having anyone as Speaker is better than having no Speaker at all. Well, with “MAGA Mike” we may have just gotten exactly what we asked for.

Dysfunction Or Destruction?

Posted: October 23, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

Tomorrow, it will be three weeks since the United States of America had an actual Speaker of the House of Representatives. On 3 October, Republican Representative Kevin McCarthy (CA) was voted out of his position as the Speaker due to a revolt of the hard right MAGA Republicans. They were enraged that he worked to pass a bipartisan continuing resolution (CR) to keep the government operating until 17 November of this year. For those zealots, doing anything with the support of Democrats is unacceptable. In this case, it was, to them, an outrageous breach of faith that Mr. McCarthy worked to allow the government to continue to operate without their hard right policies in place. Since then, the Republicans (the majority party in the House is always responsible for choosing the Speaker) have floated a number of options for choosing a new Speaker, including giving the current Speaker Pro Tempore Representative Patrick McHenry (R-NC) more power to enact some basic legislation. (Under the current rules, the Speaker Pro Tempore can only preside over the election of a permanent Speaker.) Complicated, it is. The only good thing that has happened so far is that Representative Jim Jordan (MAGA-OH) failed three times in his attempt to bully, intimidate, and threaten his way into the Speakership.

Democrats have consistently and unanimously voted for Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY). Note that he gets more votes than any Republican so far (it takes a majority of 50% plus one to be elected). Mr. Jeffries continually floats bipartisan proposals to solve the crisis, but Republicans refuse to allow Democrats to participate (see above and the impact on Mr. McCarthy when trying to use bipartisanship).

As I write, nine Representatives have thrown their hats into the ring to attempt to convince their colleagues that they should take the gavel. I will note that only two of those running voted to certify the election of President Biden in 2020. It would seem that acknowledging the results of a free and fair election would be a prerequisite for the job which is second in the line of succession to the presidency, but it is not in the current state of the party formerly known as the Republican Party. This does not bode well for certifying the 2024 election results should their preferred candidate lose.

As the old saying goes, “pay backs are hell!” This past week numerous Republicans and their families were the recipients of death threats, vile insults, intimidating emails and other actions that are part and parcel of the MAGA playbook against their perceived “enemies” (fellow Americans) because they would not support Mr. Jordan as Speaker. They were aghast at what they heard and appalled that it happened. Hmmm. I don’t recall any of them standing up and expressing their outrage when political violence was threatened by an ex-president and his MAGA acolytes against those in the other party, the Department of Justice, FBI, or judiciary, to name but a few of their targets.

The main question I now have is whether the Republican Party’s inability to preform the most rudimentary of parliamentary duties is a result of their dysfunction or is it a deliberate attempt at destruction? There are a solid block of the hard right in the caucus that are perfectly happy to knee cap the democratic process and thereby prevent the most basic of government functions to take place. If past performance is indicative of future results, then I opine that although not planned, the current state of affairs fits perfectly into their scheme to burn it all down and start over under autocratic rule with a certain ex-president in charge.

The world is on fire with serious conflicts in Europe and the Middle East that each have the potential to blow up into wide-spread wars impacting our own national security. The government shuts down because of the lack of spending authority in about four weeks. All funding for the military, foreign aid, government functions, etc. originates in the House of Representatives, which can take up no legislation without a Speaker. Layer on top of that Republicans in the Senate holding up promotions for over 300 senior military officers and the Ambassadors to Israel and Egypt, as well as other ambassadors, in the midst of an explosive crisis.

Such actions have serious domestic and international consequences. The lack of the House to get itself in order is not only a national embarrassment, it sends exactly the wrong signal to our adversaries and undermines our claims that democracy is the best form of government on the planet. Putin, Xi, Kim and others are loving it.

Meanwhile, an ex-president is openly admiring our adversaries, mocking our own men and women in uniform and generally running amok as he pursues his personal wealth and power.

Even the most casual observer of our domestic political turmoil would recognize that the Democrats are interested in, and capable of, governing even if one may disagree with particular policies. That same observer would also recognize that as a party, Republicans either have no interest in, or ability to, govern. Governing requires positive actions. The MAGA crowd, and those Republicans that refuse to stand up to them, have only negative actions to sustain them. They are against a lot, but there is little to nothing that they are doing to move the country forward.

At the risk of sounding like a doomsayer, I do not see things getting any better leading up to and beyond the 2024 election. Political violence and dysfunction are part of the MAGA playbook. There will be serious attempts to disrupt the elections and we already know that the MAGA followers will not accept the results of any election that they do not win. We had one failure of imagination in that no one expected an attempted coup in our country. It happened. Given the current state of affairs fomented by one man and his followers in and out of Congress, I have little expectation that things will improve over the coming year. Dysfunction or destruction? It does not matter. The results are the same.