Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

After the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump on Saturday almost everyone wanted to know, "Whodunnit?" It wasn't just to ensure that the perpetrator(s) were identified and further risks could be countered but to understand what inspired the attack. Satirist Jon Stewart described it aptly in a monologue this week as "reverse demographics". We all want to know who the attacker was to make sure he wasn't one of us. As I described in my blog yesterday on alleged shooter Crooks, we on the political left worried that if he seemed to be aligned to the political left the right would seize on any such relationship to weaponize the false narrative they've been telling for years that the political left is extreme and uses violence to achieve its goals (when, in fact, virtually all acts of political violence in the US in recent years have been perpetrated by those aligned with the right).

The right didn't get the bogeyman they might have wanted in Crooks. His motivations remain unclear, and most of what little evidence does exist shows him lining up on the right of the political spectrum, not the left. So the right couldn't cite him as proof the left is out to get them. Instead they used the attempt on Trump's life to call for everyone, on both sides of the political spectrum, to tone down the divisiveness. That's a laudable move... except the Republicans didn't really mean it.

1) First, what the Republicans quickly showed they meant by "End divisiveness" was stop telling people how bad we are. They faulted Biden for saying in a speech last week that Trump is an "Enemy of democracy". Nevermind that Trump has proclaimed numerous times that he "Would be a dictator on Day 1" if elected president or that he has, for at least the past 8 years, characterized the mainstream press as an "Enemy of the people" for factual reporting about him he doesn't like. Or that Trump orchestrated a massive fraud to attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election and fomented an violent mob attack against the Capitol.  ...An attack which, BTW, virtually every current sitting GOP member of Congress dishonestly characterizes legitimate political protest and denies was violent.

2) Second, Republican leaders forgot within 24 hours that they'd been calling for an end to divisiveness as they returned to their usual rhetoric at the Republican National Convention that Democrats are trying to destroy America and must be stopped.

It has now been 3 weeks since Rep. Matt Gaetz made a "Motion to Vacate" Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy from office. With help from a small band of hardliner Republicans, Gaetz's motion passed. With no Speaker, the House was plunged into chaos, unable by its rules to work on any official business except holding votes to elect a new speaker. As that chaos now enters its 4th week we are... apparently not any closer to getting a new speaker.

News today was that the Republican conference chose Tom Emmer, its party whip and thus its #3 leader in the House, to be its nominee and go to a full vote on the floor. Accounts of this secret nomination meeting say it was raucous. Representatives shouted at each other, they traded f-bombs, one openly threatened physical violence on another, and that person's target begged him to come over and try it. Yes, these people carrying on like adolescent schoolyard bullies are our elected leaders. And at the end of the day, after putting forth Emmer as the nominee, he... withdrew.

Emmer withdrew because Donald Trump worked behind the scenes to torpedo his nomination. "He's done," Trump bragged to an ally. "It's over. I killed him."

This shows, BTW, that Trump is very much calling the shots in leading the Republican party. Ironically Trump's boast about killing Emmer came after his spokespeople insisted to the news media today that he has no opinion on this matter and is not at all getting involved.

And Emmer's trouble with Trump? He wasn't sufficiently loyal. Apparently 10 years ago he supported something Trump doesn't like today because it would hurt his chances of winning an election today.

Emmer was no Trump hater, though, even though Trump derided him as a "Never Trumper" in social media. Emmer, in fact, was one of the 120+ sitting Congresspeople to vote to reject the results of the Electoral College on January 6. At least unlike the previous Speaker nominee, Jim Jordan, Emmer didn't participate in plotting the attempts to overturn the will of the people on January 6.

Also, unlike Jordan, Emmer had the good sense to withdraw when he saw he wasn't going to get enough votes. Jordan failed 3 times and kept pushing until his nomination was terminated by the conference over members' objections to his strong-arm tactics— which included his political supporters making credible violent threats against fellow Republican representatives and their families.

It's interesting (and by "interesting" I mean sad) that a pattern is emerging among Speaker nominees. We have the reasonable people vs. the unreasonable ones ...Actually they're all unreasonable ones, having voted on January 6 to overturn the will of the people. So really it's the extremists-who-can-be-reasoned-with-a-little versus the complete braying jackasses. The slightly-reasonable extremists like Scalise (another recent nominee who withdrew) and Emmer can at least see the reality of what's coming and step aside before being embarrassed. The braying jackasses like Jordan will stand there loudly hee-hawing until dragged away. Sadly that means the braying jackasses are running the show.

After House Republicans ousted Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House last week Tuesday, Congress has been plunged into chaos. By its own rules the House of Representatives is literally not able to act on anything without a Speaker. (There is an Interim Speaker, but the only one thing that person is allowed to do is preside over the process of electing a speaker.) What does that jeopardize? Well, aside from all the business of the US Congress coming to a standstill a few big-ticket items that could reach crisis stage soon are:

• Funding for the federal government. Two weeks ago the House passed short-term funding measures to keep the government operating for just another 45 days. Those expire in mid November. Congress needs to be working on proper, long term spending agreements now to avoid another crisis and potential government shutdown next month. Ironically, of course, it was specifically because of McCarthy's bipartisan deal to pass those 45-day temporary measures that he was sacked.


• Military aid to Ukraine. This was clipped out of the temporary funding bill to appease right wing hardliners. Without more support we could soon see this democratic country fall to Russian invasion.


• Military aid to Israel. The terrorist group Hamas launched attacks of breathtaking scale on Israel Saturday. Israel has declared war. The US, Israel's biggest supporter in the world, is limited in ability to support its ally without a functioning Congress.

While Congress remains on leave most of this week, and was on leave last week after the surprise ouster, two representatives have announced bids for the speakership. Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio have thrown their hats in the ring. And even McCarthy, just today, has proposed that he could be selected speaker again. What an awful choice those three make.

While Kevin McCarthy was bad enough, with his post-facto support for subverting the will of the people on January 6 and his support for evidence-free investigations of President Biden's son, Hunter, and the president himself, the other two are even worse. Scalise is even more of the same, and Jordan is not just a supporter of lies but an active planner of them. Jordan leads the committee that has pursued investigations of the Bidens despite no evidence of wrong-doing. Even when witnesses blow up in his face and say there's no evidence, he's kept going. Former Congresswoman Lynn Cheney has said in speeches that the January 6 committee she sat on found evidence that Jordan was a co-conspirator with former president Trump in the days before January 6 on exactly how to do it. We're clearly headed toward even worse chaos when the people who subverted the Constitution for partisan gain are now positioning to gain control of the Constitution's levers of power.

After a federal grand jury on Tuesday afternoon indicted Donald Trump with 4 charges related to subverting the results of 2020 election to remain in power illegally, Trump, one of his lawyers, and his surrogates in politics and conservative media have all predictably resorted to a Free Speech defense. As a matter of the First Amendment, they tell us, Donald Trump has the absolute and protected right to state a political opinion. This is no less than a Communist attack on the country's beloved Constitution! ...Or is it?

I said this Free Speech defense is predictable.... How predictable is it? It's so predictable that Special Counsel Jack Smith addressed it in literally the third paragraph under "Introduction" of his 45 page document. For example, see CNN's full text of indictment with annotation (1 Aug 2023).


As you read this you can sense there's a "But" coming. That "But" is spelled out in the next 43½ pages.

What's the "But"? The but is the difference between speech and conduct. The Constitution protects free speech. It does not guarantee free conduct. Rep. Jamie Raskin gave a vivid example of the difference in a media interview Wednesday:


Trump's Free Speech defense is a non-starter in any court of law. Unfortunately in the court of public opinion plus-or-minus half the country will think it's true.

Today Fox News settled a lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems at the last moment before it went to trial. With jury selection complete, Fox asked for a brief delay and, in a last-ditch, 3-hour negotiation, settled with Dominion for $787 million dollars and change over false claims it aired that Dominion's voting machines rigged the 2020 election against Donald Trump. Dominion had asked for damages of $1.6 billion and public acknowledgement of the dishonesty.

While some marvel at the number, over three-quarters of a billion dollars, it really isn't that huge.

• One, it's less than 8% of Fox New's revenues last year.


• Two, it's less than half what Fox News founder and chairman Rupert Murdoch paid to settle his divorce from his second wife, Anna Murdoch Mann— all the way back in 1999. (Murdoch divorced wife #4, Jerry Hall, last year and recently called off an engagement to would-be wife #5, Ann Lesley Smith.)


• Three, it avoids the costly reputational damage of Fox News executive and star personalities having to testify, in open court, that they knowingly put liars on TV and promoted their lies.


• But most importantly, $787 million is only a drop in the bucket compared to the damage done to the whole United States by Fox News's propagation of the Great Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump through widespread vote fraud.

Last week was the first week of the new GOP majority running the House of Representatives in Congress. Fresh off selecting House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on a nearly unprecedented 15th round of voting in the wee hours of Saturday morning then rushing home to salvage the remainder weekend, Republicans got to work on Monday. What did they do with Week One? Here's the score, and it looks like a rout for any constituency of truth or good governance.

Five Things:

• In the rules package McCarthy agreed to in partly secret negotiations to win crucial votes to become speaker, Republicans voted to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE). They removed 3 of the 4 Democratic members in the name of "term limits" and made it all but impossible for their eventual replacements to hire any staff. Why is this so bad? One immediate consequence involves Rep. George Santos, accused of lying about pretty much everything on his resume. Leadership can refer him to the OCE, confident that no meaningful investigation will actually happen. Way bigger picture, a toothless OCE will not investigate the ongoing election lies of the majority of the Republican majority who voted to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, 2021, and who still claim openly that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent.
  
  
• The rules package also created a new subcommittee charged with investigating "the weaponization of the federal government". It's been promised this subcommittee will investigate the January 6 committee and witnesses, prominent public health leaders such as Anthony Fauci who spoke about the dangers of Covid, and representative and investigators involved in the impeachments of Donald Trump. In short, it's going to be 2 years of partisan conspiracy-theory horseshit.
  
  
• The first bill the new GOP majority passed was a measure to strip funding from the IRS for hiring new agents. Republicans have painted this as saving money, and saving honest ordinary people from overreaching government thugs, by not hiring 87,000 "enforcers". In truth extremely few of the 87,000 staff the IRS plans to hire would have police powers of badges and guns. The IRS has become woefully understaffed the past several years. Hiring staff would net-net reduce the government deficit, not increase it, as the extra staff would be able to catch tax cheating in excess of their salaries. Whatever happened to the GOP being the party of "law and order"? And BTW, it's phony populism. The IRS spends little time or money "going after" middle class Americans. Tax cheating is largely the province of big corporations and the 1%.
  
  
• Another GOP vote made illegal an abortion procedure that basically doesn't exist. Conservative fabulists have decrying for month, even years now, "born-alive" abortions. They rile up the far right base, who are primed to believe basically any horseshit their thought leaders tell them, with the notion that abortion rights mean women and doctors are allowed to kill babies surviving outside the womb. Such a procedure doesn't exist and it's never been legal anyway even if it did. But by golly, the GOP made sure of that last week.
  
  
• Finally there are the committee assignments. 11 of the 17 committee chairs Speaker McCarthy appointed are members who voted to overturn the popular election on January 6, 2020. These people have no business leading Congressional committees. Possibly the worst pick among them is Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who'll chair the powerful Judiciary Committee. As the January 6 committee showed through witness testimony, Jordan did more than just cast a vote to overturn the election; he was involved in planning the attempted coup with President Trump, senior White House officials and advisors such as Rudy Giuliani. The people who tried to destroy our Constitutional form of government two years ago should not be entrusted to run it today!

Fortunately the nonsense bills the GOP House is passing won't go anywhere. They're unlikely even to be brought to a vote with the slim Democratic majority in the Senate. And even if they did, and somehow won, President Biden would veto them. But the committee assignments and rules are done deals, and those plus even the dead-letter bills are examples of the lying and naked subversion of justice we'll see for at least the next two years.

Today is January 6. It is also 2 years since January 6, 2021, a day on which a mob of thousands of supporters of then-president Donald Trump sacked the US Capitol building trying to force Congress to overturn the will of the people in the November 2020 election.

What's happened in these 2 years? Well, the wheels of justice turn slowly. But they do turn.

The US Department of Justice has charged more than 900 people with crimes. Nearly 500 pleaded guilty, typically in hope of a lighter sentence. Indeed, most pleaded guilty to misdemeanors and received little or no jail time. Dozens of others went to trial. Some have been convicted of felonies with sentences of several years.

Some of the masterminds, the people who fomented the insurrection, though, remain at large. Chief among them is former president Donald Trump. He spent months even before Jan. 6 telling lies about a "rigged" election. On Jan. 6 he whipped the crowd into a frenzy with a speech on the Ellipse in front of the White House, telling the crowd, "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore." He concluded his remarks with, "So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue" — directing them to storm the Capitol, in the minds of many who attended.

Trump is not the only politician who supported the insurrection. 147 Republican members of Congress voted on Jan. 6 to overturn the results of the election, lending more credence to Trump's "Big Lie". In the days, weeks, and months since then they have continued not only to support the Big Lie but to defend the actions of those who ransacked the Capitol as "legitimate political discourse" and portray them as victims of a "weaponized" federal bureaucracy.

Most of those 147 Republicans are still in Congress. Just tonight they selected Kevin McCarthy Speaker of the House after extracting from him promises to give plum committee assignments to some of the most extreme election deniers... and a commitment to hold hearings on that "weaponized" federal bureaucracy. Watch out for the wheels of justice that turn slowly to be forced now into reverse.

Today is the anniversary of an attempted coup against the U.S. government and its Constitution. On Jan. 6, 2021 a mob of thousands of people, some of them armed, swarmed the U.S. Capitol building with the intent of disrupting a vote to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. Members of the mob fought with police, killing one and injuring over 100 officers. Members of the House and Senate were either evacuated from the building or barricaded themselves behind cover, in fear for their lives. This is the first time ever in the history of the United States that an attack penetrated the Capitol.

What drove the coup attempt was the lie repeated daily for weeks by then-President Donald Trump, and amplified by propaganda outlets such as the Fox News Network, that Trump rightfully won the 2020 election. In fact President Joe Biden won, by more than 7 million popular votes and an Electoral College vote of 306 to 232. Trump and allied propagandists have steadily claimed, with zero actual evidence, that Biden's margin of victory is due to widespread vote fraud.

"So what. The coup was defeated," some might say. "It was only a few thousand people. Out of, what, 330 million in the U.S.?" The thing is, the thousands of rioters who mobbed the Capitol are only a tiny fraction of an ongoing coup that's been happening in plain sight. Consider these facts:

• On January 6, 2020, after the storming of the Capitol whipped up by the totally fake argument of widespread vote fraud, still several senators and over 100 representatives voted against accepting the Electoral College tallies. Their attempts to nullify the fair vote were also supported by the governors of 20 states. When the violent insurrection failed, these political leaders attempted a palace coup by using the processes of the government against itself.
• It's not just a few thousand rioters or a few hundred politicians. Still today, a year later, 75% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters believe Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election. (Example source: CNN.com article, 10 Dec 2021)
• Numerous states have enacted voting restriction laws. Even though every legal argument that widespread vote fraud occurred has been debunked and rejected by courts, politicians still take it as an article of faith to clamp down on voting rights. Of course, these clampdowns are proven not to impact voting fraud— because there is hardly any to start with— but do suppress the turnout of ethnic minorities and the poor and working classes.

So while the riotous coup one year ago today failed, there has been an ongoing coup continuing in plain sight. If Joe Biden or another Democrat elected in 2024, there could be a full scale insurrection. By then the political right will have had 4 years, not just 8 weeks, to feed its own lies and plan its next attack.