That is where things stand.
(In all seriousness we will be bringing back my daily Editors’ Blog post next week after our brains recover from the dumpster that is on fire on the House floor right now.)
In the meantime, Emine Yücel and I are covering all of today’s madness here.
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The White House announced on Thursday that President Joe Biden will give several individuals who defended democracy after the 2020 election the Presidential Citizens Medal to mark the second anniversary of the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
Continue reading “Biden Will Award 12 Who Defended Capitol, Blocked Big Lie On Jan 6 Anniversary”There’s a dog not barking here that may be obvious but is worth mentioning. It’s not just that Donald Trump’s low-energy endorsement of Kevin McCarthy isn’t carrying the day. It’s that Trump’s name hasn’t really come up at all. Lauren Boebert, in her nominating speech, name-checked him to note how his endorsement of McCarthy was not swaying her. But that’s the exception that proves the rule. Not in the sense that she’s not taking Trump’s guidance but because she’s even discussing him. Trump’s wishes, feelings, threats, anger and really anything else about him are just completely absent from this entire drama. In a way that is the biggest story here.
I thought it was worth making a simple point. The spectacle of the last two days is an embarrassment. The House GOP and really the GOP generally has shown itself incapable of governing in the most basic sense. But I’ve heard some suggestions that this is sort of a lo-fi reenactment of the events of two years ago: more chaos, more craziness, more dysfunction. It’s worth pushing back a bit on that appraisal. This is democracy. If anything there is something a bit invigorating about seeing vote after vote where the outcome, immediate or eventual, isn’t at all clear. One vote, followed by various frenzied negotiation, another vote, followed by more.
Continue reading “It’s Messy and It’s Fine”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
No heroes. No good guys. No redeeming characters.
The House GOP internecine strife is, in the short term, more damaging to themselves than to the country, which makes it fun to watch, at least for a while.
But in the longer term, it doesn’t much matter who prevails in the speaker vote. Kevin McCarthy and the fractious members opposing him all embrace the same “tear it all down” impulses. They’re driven by the same destructive motives and play to the same base political instincts.
Watching them rip each other apart live on national TV offers a palliative schadenfreude. But it won’t last forever. In the meantime, there is essentially no House of Representatives: The members can’t be sworn in. Committees can’t form. Oversight can’t happen.
They’re already achieving destruction of a kind.
If you weren’t able to follow along closely with us, the day pretty much went like this:
When the House reconvenes at noon today, don’t be surprised if it adjourns again pretty quickly. Absent a deal of some kind, McCarthy and the Republicans appear reluctant to continue with the spectacle of losing floor votes.
But is there a deal yet? Not as of this morning.
Lots of rumor and conjecture.
The contours of all the deals floated since the fall election remain similar: McCarthy’s foes want maximum leverage over him to continue to foment chaos and weaken him. McCarthy keeps caving to those demands, but it fails to win him a deal.
Perhaps the best way to think about it is: The Freedom Caucus wants to do to McCarthy what McCarthy and the GOP conference want to do to Biden.
There’s no compelling protagonist here. Just a pack of antagonists looking to do damage.
The NYT, which has often struggled to capture the true nature of the modern Republican Party, comes close to getting it:
That ideology of destruction defies characterization by traditional political labels like moderate or conservative. Instead, the party has created its own complicated taxonomy of America First, MAGA and anti-Trump — descriptions that are more about political style and personal vendettas than policy disagreements.
Very little overt investigative action from Special Counsel Jack Smith has been publicly visible so far. The main exception was a batch of subpoenas that went out in the fall to state and local election officials in the key jurisdictions Trump was focused on during the 2020 election aftermath. Now news outlets have gotten ahold of the responses to those subpoenas from two jurisdictions. No big new reveals:
The records do not include any communication from Trump himself and do not appear to show attempts to coerce county officials, as Trump tried to do in Georgia. But they do show how Trump’s lawyers for weeks positioned themselves for post-election legal challenges in the county. They alleged that thousands of ballots had been improperly cast and, weeks before the election, filed a public records request aimed at scrutinizing the process by which mail-in and absentee ballots were counted.
The second of the two seditious conspiracy trials against Oath Keeper members continues in Washington, D.C., with testimony from a new witness that “the extremists hatched an explicit plan to enter the Capitol and stop the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory,” TPM alum Rachel Weiner reports.
After a weeklong trial, a state judge has rejected a complaint that an Oath Keeper was ineligible to serve in the state legislature under a provision of the state Constitution that bars people from holding public office if they belong to a group that seeks to overthrow the U.S. government by violence.
Incoming state Rep. David Eastman (R) “did not have a specific intent to further the Oath Keepers’ unprotected speech or conduct,” the judge ruled.
Sonia Sotomayor, on how she feels about the current direction of the Supreme Court:
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Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) failed to win the gavel again after a sixth House speakership vote Wednesday evening. When the House reconvened at 8 p.m ET Republicans unified for the first time in two days and voted to adjourn until 12:00 p.m. ET Thursday.
Continue reading “House GOP Majority Wins Its First Vote… To Adjourn Til Tomorrow”The House is set to come back into session at 8 p.m. ET. You can follow along with the TPM team here. But the House may not be in session for long. Kevin McCarthy told reporters he thought it was “best” not to vote again tonight because the results would be the same (he falls short of a majority) but that talks were continuing. Not a sure bet we’ll see a quick adjournment, but that definitely looks possible.
Continue reading “What Will The Evening Hold?”When we talk about the GOP as a failed state run by assorted warlords think about stuff like this.
Continue reading “Failed State”Today’s and yesterday’s events were predictable, unbelievable and hilarious all at once. One increasingly common refrain from analysts and reporters is that the issue between Kevin McCarthy and his now-20-plus rebels is really personal. They don’t trust him, will never trust him. Perhaps. But this personalizing analysis ignores the larger dynamic that has been unfolding in the Republican Party for more than a decade. We might trace the roots of the present moment to Barry Goldwater, to Newt Gingrich, to the Tea Party, or to Donald Trump. But the key turning point here is 2008 and 2009 when the GOP ceased to function as a center-right party of government and became something more like the sectarian revanchist parties that have long existed on the margins of European parliamentary politics.
But the U.S. isn’t a parliamentary democracy. Its constitutional structure makes it all but inevitable that two coalitional parties will trade power back and forth. This shift in the GOP happened along with a deep fracture, and an inevitable one in an American context. The House Freedom Caucus was nominally formed in 2015. But it was an institutionalization of the Tea Party radicalism that had its roots in the shift from Republican to Democratic rule in 2008 and 2009.
Continue reading “The Real GOP Steps Forward”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
While it couldn’t manage to elect a speaker, the new GOP majority in the House did manage to remove immediately the magnetometers installed at the entrances to the chamber after the Jan. 6 attack:
After he failed on three separate votes to win the speakership yesterday, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) will try again today when the House reconvenes at noon.
McCarthy did not consolidate support Tuesday. Punchbowl has a good rundown of the behind the scenes action.
We’re going to sidestep most of the inscrutable internal machinations because frankly there’s not much evidence that what’s happening behind closed doors is any more meaningful or less comical than what’s happening in public.
Never thought I’d see the day:
Two different shots of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) chatting on the House floor with extremist Republicans caught of a lot of attention during the speaker vote:
A fun little bit of insider knowledge about how AOC’s convos were captured on camera:
The former president scored a trifecta:
They couldn’t help themselves and who can blame them. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) with the flavor of the day from the Democratic side:
This once-in-a-century humiliation of a party’s nominee for Speaker is chickens coming home to roost for McCarthy, who whitewashed right-wing insurrectionism on the House floor. Nobody’s getting killed now, but the House GOP now sleeps in the bed they made with Trump and Bannon.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), who became the Senate first female president pro tempore, a role that is third in the line of presidential succession: “Well, today I’m second, because Kevin McCarthy’s not speaker.”
Your occasional reminder that the House GOP majority’s inability and unwillingness to govern has real consequences:
On any other first day of Congress, George Santos would have been the lead story. But as Kevin McCarthy foundered, Santos struggled to break through:
As journalists continue to process the extraordinary volume of material released by the Jan. 6 committee, some more highlights:
Sweeping up a few related tidbits:
The lack of any overt developments in the Mar-a-Lago documents case continues to heighten the suspense. The only new news is that Special Counsel Jack Smith has returned to the U.S. from the Hague.
Nicholas Confessore on the invention of Elise Stefanik.
A couple of developments to flag:
Two men were arrested on federal criminal charges arising from the Christmas Day attacks on four power substations in Washington State.
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