It’s always good to note tiny milestones, because when put together they spell out a big message. Part of the message to be derived here is that Kevin McCarthy is indeed the weakest and most ineffectual Speaker that the House Of Representatives has ever known. That will be his legacy and most definitely so if this government shutdown madness takes place, which it will Sunday morning, when the clock rolls over to 12:01. The United States government will be at a standstill, with the exception of exempted services which will continue to run, like Social Security and Medicare — for now. It’s a law of dysfunction that it seldom stays contained, but rather grows and spreads.
To nail him on his ineffectuality comes the youngest member of the House, and in taking to task the Speaker, this is an historic moment. We’ve never seen this before and this is in the history books, so note it well. Your great great great great grand descendants will be reading this.
Never before has the youngest member of the House spoken so disrespectfully of a (powerless) Speaker. https://t.co/2v5KoFPzm4
— Lawrence O'Donnell (@Lawrence) September 28, 2023
And make no mistake, Lawrence O’Donnell is not chastising Donalds, no, he’s merely observing what is going on and that this is unprecedented. The government shutdown is proceeding apace and it is political theater. Here’s the bottom line: My Kevin isn’t running the House Republican caucus, Donald Trump is. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has it wired:
In recent days, Donald Trump has issued two commands to the House Republican majority. First, the former president told them they must “either IMPEACH the BUM or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US!” Next, he told them to shut down the federal government in order “to defund these political prosecutions against me.” He further ordered them: “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!”
This explains why, as the last days slipped away before the federal government’s funding expires on Saturday night, House Republicans weren’t even trying to avert the shutdown. Instead, on the House floor, they wasted days debating spending bills that would do nothing to ward off the looming crisis even if they passed — and one of the four failed. And then, just two days before the shutdown deadline, they staged the first hearing of their “impeachment inquiry” into Biden — an embarrassing session in which even their own witnesses said they didn’t have the goods on the president.
In the Senate, by contrast, Republicans and Democrats negotiated a short-term deal to avoid a shutdown. As it advanced through the Senate by overwhelming votes of 77-19 and 76-22 en route to passage, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) pleaded with colleagues to avoid the “actively harmful proposition” of a shutdown that would cost taxpayers billions of dollars and “take the important progress being made on a number of key issues and drag it backward.”
But Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said he wouldn’t even allow the House to consider the bipartisan Senate compromise.
And so, barring some deus ex machina, millions of U.S. troops and other government employees will be forced to work without pay beginning on Sunday. Other federal workers will be furloughed; millions of women, infants and children will be denied food assistance; and many more Americans will find that the government services they count on — national parks, airport security, medical research, health and safety inspections, small business loans, infrastructure projects — have been curtailed.
But House Republicans did take action to protect and insulate one crucial government function from the ravages of a shutdown. They have designated their impeachment inquiry into the president an “essential” operation, CNN’s Annie Grayer and Melanie Zanona report, so vital to the national interest that it must continue undisturbed during a shutdown.
Stop here and we’ll all shake our heads collectively, as we reach for the aspirin bottle. It’s way too early for booze, although that may change, depending upon how batshit this finally gets. You actually read that, that impeaching Joe Biden is an essential government function, whereas paying government employees is not.
Trumpty Dumpty has decreed unto them that he needs the Biden impeachment inquiry to go forward, because he needs cover for his own disastrous headlines and the five (5) trials that he has scheduled right now, the first one to begin on October 2, in the Trump Organization fraud case.
So Trump is desperate and we mean desperate. He’s got to keep his MAGA troops in the House firing out news video so that he can counter the disastrous headlines. That’s all that this is about.
How’s that for a set of priorities? The troops won’t be paid and infants won’t be fed — but the pursuit of Hunter Biden must go on.
Perhaps it is “essential” to keep the impeachment investigation going because, after nine months of subpoenas, interviews, hearings and the mining of 12,000 pages of bank records, House GOP sleuths still haven’t produced any evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden. In a stark acknowledgment of that failure, they now claim that they don’t actually need direct proof of misconduct to impeach him. Instead, they have trumpeted all the financial and sexual misdeeds the president’s son undertook while in the throes of a crack cocaine addiction, and they are trying to sell the public a smear by association: Biden fils did bad stuff, so Biden père must be impeached.
If that was the case, Trump himself might be up on illegal drug charges, considering the behavior of his eldest eponymously named son. And you saw all the idiocy yesterday on C-Span or CNN, or clips that we posted here, whatever you watched. Milbank continues.
And there was Jonathan Turley — of course. The go-to Republican witness regularly contradicts his earlier positions to suit whichever argument his hosts are making. Ostensibly a constitutional lawyer, he is best known as a Fox News regular who falsely claimed that Dominion Voting Systems machines switched Trump votes to Biden in 2020. Among the headlines on his recent columns for Fox News, the New York Post and others are references to the “Biden corruption mindset” and a proposal for Biden to “pardon Hunter and withdraw from the 2024 election.” Another headline: “Joe and Jill Biden finally acknowledge 7th grandchild for most obnoxious reason.”
Yet even this partisan panel couldn’t deliver. Not one of them testified that House Republicans had met the threshold for impeaching a president. “I do not believe that the current evidence would support articles of impeachment,” Turley informed them.
Let us stop again, as now our heads are really hurting. If, in fact, there was insufficient evidence to support articles of impeachment, as their own expert just said, and there was not “that type of nexus,” Turley’s words, then this is an essential government function why, now? Your guess is as good as anybody’s. Because as Jamie Raskin put it yesterday,
“If the Republicans had a smoking gun or even a dripping water pistol, they would be presenting it today, but they’ve got nothing on Joe Biden.”
They have no. Thing. But that doesn’t matter because this is a magic show, ladies and gentlemen, it’s all sleight of hand and illusion. Illusion and allusion, innuendo and idiocy. An the “if” word reigns supreme.
“If the current president has been compromised.”
“If the president is involved.”
“If a nexus was established.”
“If he sent the money.”
“If Vice President Biden used his office to influence domestic or foreign policy for the financial benefit of his son.”
“If Joe Biden or his family is receiving some kind of benefit.”
And if you were born with wheels, you’d be a wagon, right? And if you were born with wheels and Trump’s money, you’d be a solid gold wagon, in fact. We can fantasize all day. And if we were House representatives, we would be doing precisely that — or knocking down the fantasy, one or the other.
Nearly five hours after the hearing began — and 57 hours before the government was to shut down — the Democrats’ witness, law professor Michael Gerhardt, revealed that he had been keeping a tally. “More than 35 times the Republican witnesses and Republican members of the committee have used the word ‘if,’” he said.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Tex.) replied that “if they would continue to say ‘if’ or ‘Hunter’ and we were playing a drinking game, I would be drunk by now.”
This isn’t satire. This is what’s going on in our House as the wheels of government are being brought to a halt so that political theater, in the service of Donald Trump, can continue unabated and greatly adorned. That’s all this is.
And now we get to the ransom note portion of our commentary. This, too, will be read by your great, etc., descendants in history class — assuming history is still taught and we’re not all illiterate savages grubbing for roots and berries at that time.
McCarthy, trapped in a no-escape escape room, attempted to create a diversion. He issued a last-minute ransom note to Biden: Republicans will let the government remain open if he closes the southern border. Never mind that McCarthy probably couldn’t deliver on his end of the deal. Did the speaker forget that Trump shut down the government in 2018 for the same reason? It didn’t end well.
“Look, this isn’t that difficult to happen,” McCarthy told reporters. “All the president has to do: Call us up. Let’s go sit down and get this done before the end of the week. He’s changed this by a simple stroke of his own words of how this border is happening.”
Stroke of his own words?
The shutdown cometh — and the only man who can stop it is talking gibberish.
By late Thursday, even McCarthy’s Republican colleagues were baffled. “Mr. Speaker, leaders lead from the FRONT,” Rep. Scott Perry (Pa.), head of the House Freedom Caucus, posted on social media. “We need your plan.”
This you’ll love. Here’s what Perry and some of his colleagues, who for reasons we can’t explain are choosing to treat this situation as something normal, sent to McCarthy yesterday.
You think My Kevin has answers to any of this? Does a man who keeps running out of the room, probably so he doesn’t piss himself publicly, strike you as somebody with a plan? There is no plan. McCarthy is like a fruit fly, he lives from sunup to sundown and he’s in survival mode, 24/7. He navigates from crisis to crisis. Or he did. Now the shit is about to hit the fan. Watch. And Kevin McCarthy will join Trumpty Dumpty in the splat department.
Traitors and nazis in our government holding children and the military hostage!!!! All being done by a goddamn criminal nazi traitor who no longer is in the government!!!! Who put them there? The goddamn American public that’s who! So please explain how the phuck we were going to stop Hitler, the Italians and Japanese without picking up a phucking gun? We have ONE goddamn shot…ONE…to stop them without being faced with the same situation. ONE! If we don’t, our future generations won’t get the truth. I wonder how much ‘truth’ the Russians are getting? Or North Korea? Or the Saudis? The worst time to realize the house is on fire is when you’re trapped in the basement with no exit.
Apparently the ‘pubes think folks need bread and circuses with no bread. Someone needs to alert them to this: did not work for the Romans.
Raskin is right – his colleagues in the GOP don’t have even a dripping water pistol. They DO however have something else that’s dripping. For us older folks, at least if one ever served in the military a certain scourge was all too common. A sexually transmitted disease and it was common and in many cases (i.e. a major ship headed into certain foreign ports) large outbreaks was predictable. Gonorrhea. The “Clap.” aka “Drippy Dick.”
House GOPers pushing their impeachment and shutdown nonsense have given their caucus and the Speaker in particular a case of POLITICAL Drippy Dick!
If the idea is that the shutdown will halt Don John’s date with a judge they goofed.
Two of the upcoming cases are nothing to do with any federal funding – they’re STATE cases (Georgia and New York) and they will go ahead whether there is a federal shutdown or not.
But then it would take at least three brain cells to realise that
Congress’ pay should also stop when the government shuts down.
That would get their asses moving.
And put a hold on the ‘presidential pension’ and the wages of the SS bodyguards at Mamaladeo