House hardliners brag about ‘chaos’ as government shutdown looms

Posted on September 14, 2023 by Joan McCarter

On its first full day of work following the August recess, the House was supposed to start the floor process to bring up the defense appropriations bill Wednesday. The people in charge of Speaker Kevin McCarthy, however, had other plans. That plan consists of: one, shutting the House down while they come up with more unreasonable demands for slashing government funding and, two, running the clock down toward Oct. 1, when they can shut the whole government down.

One of the hardliners in the House, Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, told Politico that running amok is their master plan. “We have an evolving strategy going right now. This whole place is about chaos, right?” Got that? Chaos is strategy.

McCarthy did not have enough votes to pass the first procedural vote on the military spending bill, and wasn’t going to force a repeat of his resounding defeat in June, when 11 hardliners unexpectedly voted against the motion to proceed on a bill and tied the House up for days, not allowing any legislation to advance to the floor. The ploy then was to force McCarthy to renege on the deal he made with President Joe Biden to avert a debt default, and slash the agreed-upon spending levels by billions. It worked.

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At least McCarthy learned from that experience and counted the votes before he put the defense appropriations bill on the floor, saving himself a modicum of embarrassment. Otherwise, it’s a repeat of the June fiasco, with the added excitement of a pending government shutdown in just 10 legislative days.

The obstructionists aren’t opposing this appropriations bill, just like they weren’t opposed to the legislation back in June—that was a ridiculous bit of political posturing about people’s freedom to have gas stoves. This bill, which Republicans are programmed to love because it contains money for the Pentagon, is chock-full of their culture-war bullshit. They’re blocking it because it’s the best hostage they can take now.

“Nobody’s objecting to what’s in the bill,” said House Rules Committee Chair Tom Cole. “Everybody’s trying to leverage the bill for something now.” What they want isn’t exactly clear beyond, as Politico writes, “a litany of demands from [the] right flank on how to handle federal spending talks with the Senate to avert a funding lapse.”

One thing the House hardliners don’t want is a stopgap funding bill to avert a government shutdown. That would mean continuing to spend at current levels, which they say is too much. They want to go back to the previous funding year, 2022, but that simply can’t be done in a continuing resolution. That’s not how this works. Which means they want to shut the government down.

There are any number of other demands, none of which are impeachment. “[McCarthy] starting an impeachment inquiry gives him no—zero—cushion, relief, brace, as it applies to spending,” Rep. Bob Good of Virginia, one of the revolters, told Politico. So good job on that one, Mr. Speaker.

This is another big blow to McCarthy. If he can’t get the defense bill passed—of all goddamned things—you know how hopeless it all is. There seems to be no possible way the speaker can regain control of the House at this point, and that makes a government shutdown almost inevitable.

GOP rebels shut the House down

Freedom Caucus bites back

It’s time for Democrats to force McCarthy to reap what he has sown

Posted on September 13, 2023 by Joan McCarter

Speaker Kevin McCarthy has been “leading” the House on borrowed time. The Freedom Caucus and allied members have made it clear that he serves at their pleasure. This week, chaos agent and Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz tried to shorten McCarthy’s leash, threatening to force a vote on ousting him.

Now Axios poses the question of “How Democrats could save Kevin McCarthy.” The better question for Democrats is, “Why would you bother?” The assumption—always—is that Democrats will step up to try to make things work, to help clean up messes, and to prop McCarthy up in this fight. That they’ll help save his bacon.

So why would Democrats help him and vote against Gaetz’s motion to oust McCarthy? Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee gives one justification: “If we vacated the chair, I don’t see a better speaker. So I don’t foresee that happening.” That’s a given. There isn’t a better speaker option.

That’s the kind of thinking that McCarthy is counting on from Democrats to help him. But there isn’t really a worse option, not one who’s a viable candidate. There are a lot of truly horrible people in the GOP conference, like Paul Gosar or Marjorie Taylor Greene, but they’re never going to be elected. Worrying about someone worse in the job is pointless.

And why would Democrats help McCarthy when he regularly gives them the middle finger? He just did it again on Tuesday by moving forward on a wholly illegitimate impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden. It was the same earlier in the year when some Democrats were trying to reach across the aisle to protect McCarthy in the debt ceiling fight: His staff said that effort was “garbage” and that he had “zero interest” in it.

The other argument is that he’s got to be propped up to avoid chaos. One anonymous Democrat told Axios, “No love for Kevin. But [there is] concern about more chaos, and who might take his place if he is booted.”

Spoiler alert: Right now the House is in chaos. More of it is inevitable, and there’s nothing House Democrats can do about it. Don’t fight it, embrace it. Let them defeat themselves. The No. 1 rule: When Republicans are drowning, throw them an anchor.

Sign the petition: Denounce the baseless impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden.

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What did McCarthy gain by caving on impeachment? Nothing

Posted on September 13, 2023 by Joan McCarter

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy just set himself up for a game of government shutdown Whac-A-Mole. He gave in to the loudest voices—well, two voices mostly: Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s and Matt Gaetz’s—and agreed to open an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, all based on nonsense and lies. Just about the only thing McCarthy achieved by agreeing to this was demonstrating yet again that he’ll fold to the extremists every time.

He also opened the floodgates for every other faction in the Republican conference to make demands.

Gaetz did not back down once McCarthy agreed to impeachment. On the contrary: He attacked McCarthy, promising that he’d move to oust the speaker if McCarthy didn’t start fulfilling a bunch of secret promises he allegedly made back in January, during his ego-bruising fight to win the speaker’s gavel.

Then there is the Freedom Caucus. On the heels of McCarthy’s announcement, they held a press conference to reiterate that no way, no how are they going to allow the government to be funded.

McCarthy’s impeachment inquiry hasn’t swayed the Freedom Caucus towards funding the government pic.twitter.com/sLink7n70S
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 12, 2023

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“Enough!” shouted a very worked up Rep. Chip Roy. “I will not continue to fund a government at war with the American people. We are here to change it. It is time to end it and I’m proud to stand with these patriots to do that.” What is the government supposedly warring with the people about? Who knows what Roy is ranting about this time. Maybe immigration, or the COVID vaccine, or maybe aid to Ukraine. He’s just mad.

How is McCarthy going to deal with that? With a margin of just five Republican votes to spare, he clearly isn’t going to be able to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government running. He’s going to need Democratic votes. Now that he’s decided to ratchet up the partisanship with a bogus impeachment inquiry, House Democrats sure aren’t going to want to help him out. He isolated himself further from Biden and Senate Democrats, the very people who can bail him out with an agreement.

There are just 11 legislative days before funding runs out, and as of now, McCarthy is on his own. On the Senate side, Republicans are aligning with the Democrats to avert a shutdown. The majority of House Republicans probably don’t want a shutdown, but right now they’re cowering and staying out of it.

While McCarthy is bumbling his way toward this disaster, federal government officials are being forced to spend a lot of time—and time is money!—going through the process of figuring out how to shut agencies down, who to furlough, and how to keep necessary stuff running. That means hundreds of thousands of federal workers are once again on tenterhooks, not knowing if they’ll be getting a paycheck next month.

The weakest speaker in recent memory is on a path to prove he’s also the most destructive one, just by virtue of his own incompetence.

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Why does it seem like Republicans have such a hard time recruiting Senate candidates who actually live in the states they want to run in? We're discussing this strange but persistent phenomenon on this week's edition of "The Downballot." The latest example is former Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, who's been spending his time in Florida since leaving the House in 2015, but he's not the only one. Republican Senate hopefuls in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Montana, and Wisconsin all have questionable ties to their home states—a problem that Democrats have gleefully exploited in recent years. (Remember Dr. Oz? Of course you do.)

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What exactly did McCarthy promise to become speaker?

Posted on September 12, 2023 by Joan McCarter

Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, the epitome of Florida Man, put Speaker Kevin McCarthy on notice Tuesday. In a floor speech, Gaetz alleged that McCarthy is “out of compliance” with the “agreement” McCarthy made with hardliners during his bid for the top House position. Over four long days and 15 votes in early January, McCarthy made concession after concession to the extortionists before finally getting the speaker’s gavel.

Now Gaetz says McCarthy must “dust off our written January agreement” and “begin to comply” with it, or face being ousted. Or, rather, McCarthy must face Gaetz attempting and failing to oust him when Gaetz can’t muster enough votes against McCarthy, and/or he fails to find another sap willing to take the speaker’s chair. What’s striking about Gaetz’s statement isn’t the threat—that’s par for the course with him. What stands out are the things he says McCarthy agreed to back in January.

There are the concessions Gaetz mentions that were public during the process: votes on term limits, a balanced budget, and as Gaetz says, “No continuing resolutions, individual spending bills or bust.”

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Then Gaetz lists a bunch of things that were not included in any reporting about the agreement: the full release of the Jan. 6 tapes, accountability for the “Biden crime family,” subpoenas for Hunter Biden, and finally, “the impeachment for Joe Biden that he so richly deserves.”

Curious, huh? It’s enough to again call into question whether there was really a “secret addendum” to the agreement that McCarthy swore doesn’t exist, but that a number of other Republicans said they saw. Both Axios and Punchbowl News reported that “multiple GOP aides and members” confirmed that the addendum with “the most controversial concessions” made by McCarthy exists. At the time, people assumed it was about promising various plum committee spots to the hardliners. But was that all?

Gaetz is an experienced and well-known liar, so anything he says has to be taken with at least a grain of salt, if not a bucketful. Gaetz says it’s “written” and McCarthy has a copy, so unless and until it’s made public, we have no way of knowing for sure.

But time and again, McCarthy has made all sorts of conflicting promises, telling people what they want to hear in order to get their votes. During the debt ceiling negotiations, McCarthy was promising the rank-and-file one thing and the Freedom Caucus holdouts another. Freedom Caucus member Rep. Ken Buck just explained how McCarthy “has made promises” on spending levels, on the continuing resolution, and on impeachment “to different groups.” And for McCarthy right now, “it is all coming due at the same time.”

This is something the rest of the Republican conference—especially the 18 members elected in Biden-supporting districts—should be demanding to know more about. Exactly what did McCarthy promise in order to get his speakership, and who did he make these promises to? That would be a good thing for them to know before they follow him down this ridiculous impeachment rabbit hole—and put their own reelection in jeopardy.

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Freedom Caucus stalwart opposes impeachment, becomes GOP target

Posted on September 12, 2023 by Joan McCarter

Rep. Ken Buck is a prototypical Freedom Caucus member. The Colorado Republican relishes being a maverick, voting his conscience, and fighting with leadership—or with his extremist colleagues—when he feels like it. Now Buck finds himself enmeshed in that “perfect storm” he warned Speaker Kevin McCarthy was coming, and the House Republican majority is turned inside out. Buck is now on the outside of a ridiculous scheme, which has been put into motion by McCarthy, to move forward on impeaching President Joe Biden.

The problem is that Buck remains reality-based. He used to be a federal prosecutor, so he knows some stuff—like the fact that in order to impeach a president, you have to have evidence that they’ve done something impeachable. “The time for impeachment is the time when there’s evidence linking President Biden — if there’s evidence linking President Biden to a high crime or misdemeanor. That doesn’t exist right now,” Buck said in an interview on MSNBC last weekend.

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He called Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s threat to shut the government down if McCarthy didn’t agree to start an impeachment inquiry “absurd.” Now Greene is on the warpath. “This is the same guy that wrote a book called ‘Drain the Swamp’, who is now arguing against an impeachment inquiry,” Greene said. “I really don’t see how we can have a member on Judiciary that is flat out refusing to impeach. … It seems like, can he even be trusted to do his job at this point?”

It’s possible that Buck was involved in ousting Greene from the Freedom Caucus (he had a lot to say about it) a few months ago, or that Greene thinks he was, so she might be going after him for that. One of the reasons Greene was booted was because she was too cozy with leadership—specifically with McCarthy. Whatever the case, there is now a contingent in the House GOP that is aligning themselves with Greene—and apparently leadership—against Buck.

A number of sources told CNN that “there is growing frustration” in the conference, “including among the leadership ranks,” over a number of Buck’s positions, probably stemming back to his vote to certify the 2020 election and his defense of former Rep. Liz Cheney when Republican leadership was kicking her out. He’s also voted against some bills McCarthy considers key to demonstrating his leadership, like the debt ceiling deal and the defense authorization act. These are very Freedom Caucus things to do; Buck has never voted for a debt ceiling authorization because he hates the debt. About half of his fellow caucus members also voted against it.

It’s a hell of a thing. One of the most Freedom Caucus-ish members of the Freedom Caucus is now sounding like a reasonable, sensible, establishment kind of Republican, and leadership is running with the hare-brained impeachment idea. There’s clearly no room for being reality-based in the House with Kevin McCarthy (at least nominally) in charge.

That’s a Republican Party in disarray.

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McCarthy facing ‘perfect storm,’ warns Freedom Caucus member

Posted on September 12, 2023 by Joan McCarter

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is facing a “perfect storm” of complications when the House returns to work Tuesday, Rep. Ken Buck said during an interview on MSNBC’s “Inside with Jen Psaki” on Sunday. The Colorado Republican should know—he’s a member of the extremist Freedom Caucus, the group that is gleefully making McCarthy’s life miserable.

McCarthy has promised a lot of different things to a lot of different people, Buck said, including suggesting that he’s open to the idea of impeaching President Joe Biden. Buck is not an impeachment believer and has taken on radical GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, saying that "the idea that that she is now the expert on impeachment or that she is someone who should set the timing on impeachment is absurd." He added that it should only happen if there is “evidence linking President Biden to a high crime or misdemeanor. That doesn’t exist right now.”

As for the “perfect storm” brewing in the next three weeks, Buck lists a continuing resolution that has to be passed to keep the government operating, the massive funding cuts the Freedom Caucus is demanding before they’ll allow that continuing resolution, and the impeachment. “So you take those things put together, and Kevin McCarthy, the speaker, has made promises on each of those issues to different groups. And now it is all coming due at the same time.”

Time for the voice of experience to weigh in—namely, former Rep. Eric Cantor, the Republican majority leader during the 2013 shutdown. You might remember Cantor as one of the “Young Guns” trio, who were, according to the press copy for their book, “changing the face of the Republican Party and giving us a new road map back to the American dream.” The other “guns”? McCarthy and former House Speaker Paul Ryan. In retrospect, how hilarious is this video?

YouTube Video

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That’s two down so far: Cantor was soundly and shockingly defeated in his primary in 2014, and Rep. Paul Ryan retired in 2018, after a thankless stint as speaker. He took over from former Speaker John Boehner, who resigned in 2015 after the Freedom Caucus seemingly wore him down.

You might think, given that experience, that Cantor would tell the last Young Gun standing to finally cut off the Freedom Caucus and work with the majority of Republicans—along with Democrats—to avoid a shutdown. In a new interview with Politico, he doesn’t do quite that. He told them that he learned the lesson from 2013 that “individuals would be willing to embark upon a plan that was so poorly conceived that there was no exit strategy at all — and that that would be appealing.” He added, “A lot of people were just fine with being able to vent their anger and frustration, go into the shutdown and leave it to leaders to figure out how to get out of it. I think that politically, that’s not a winner — but perhaps that will be what happens again.”

So Cantor’s advice to McCarthy is basically to find an “exit strategy.” That’ll work!

Buck is a little more realistic about it. McCarthy likely will have to pass the continuing resolution with Democratic votes, which will enrage the Freedom Caucus and almost certainly result in their trying to oust McCarthy with a motion to vacate the chair. That’s not something that Buck says McCarthy should be too worried about, though. “I think there will be challenges, but I don’t see anybody stepping up and say, I’ll take Kevin’s job,” he said. “So I think that’s really what saves Kevin is the lack of enthusiasm from anybody else to do the job.”

Gosh, what a ringing endorsement for keeping the House in Republican hands.

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Sen. John Fetterman is back—and telling it like it is

Posted on September 8, 2023 by Joan McCarter

Sen. John Fetterman rightfully earned headlines earlier this year for publicly dealing with his mental health struggle. He has used his experience to try to destigmatize mental illness, openly talking about his treatment and recovery as a way to “pay it forward” and make mental health recognition and treatment a national issue.

The Pennsylvania Democrat definitely appears to be recovered, and he’s bringing the no-bullshit fire that supporters expected when they elected him last year. He’s taking on Republicans with all the ridicule and disdain they deserve.

House Republicans trying to gin up a ridiculous impeachment investigation of President Joe Biden? “Go ahead. Do it, I dare you,” Fetterman said, speaking to reporters Wednesday. “If you can find the votes, go ahead, because you’re going to lose. It’s a loser.”

“It would just be like a big circle jerk on the fringe right,” Fetterman continued. “Sometimes you just gotta call their bullshit. If they’re going to threaten, then let’s see it.” Yep, that’s telling it like it is, in the kind of language it demands.

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He isn’t saving his candor for just the House assholes, either. He has a few choice observations about Republican freshman Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, the faux-populist and former venture capitalist with a law degree from Yale University and an estimated net worth of $7 million in 2022. A bipartisan group of senators, including Fetterman and Vance, has been working on rail safety legislation following the disastrous derailment of a train carrying hazardous substances in East Palestine, Ohio, earlier this year.

Fetterman is directly questioning Vance’s commitment to that legislation and to working in a bipartisan manner to get it done. He told reporters that they could be as close as just one vote away from having the 60 they need to get the bill to the floor, but instead of focusing on that, Vance is spending his time on a MAGA-friendly bill to ban mask mandates on public transportation, airplanes, and in public schools.

Vance is "fixating" on "silly performance art," Fetterman said. "You know, 'breathe free' or whatever it's called.” He added that Vance should be "focusing on getting [the train safety bill] finished and taken care of.” He continued by saying Vance "wants to put up an act that's going to go nowhere" rather than "something that really can be transformative for rail safety."

"It's bizarre," Fetterman said. "No one is trying to force masks back on." It’s bizarre both from a policy standpoint and as a waste of the Senate’s time, but it’s also totally performative and a middle finger to the Democrats that Vance is supposedly working with to pass the rail bill. He’s putting MAGA nonsense ahead of critical work.

Fetterman is absolutely right in calling that out. More of that please, Democratic senators.

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The Senate appears to be uniting against right-wing House extremists

Posted on September 7, 2023 by Joan McCarter

The Senate appears to be uniting against right-wing House extremists, subjecting Speaker Kevin McCarthy to possibly the biggest test to his leadership to date: averting a government shutdown while responding to this year’s catastrophic natural disasters and maintaining assistance to Ukraine. The two top Senate appropriators have an agreement on a spending bill that will come to the floor next week, and Republican leader Mitch McConnell has been using his bully pulpit to keep aid flowing to Ukraine.

Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who together lead the Appropriations Committee, announced Wednesday that they have reached a deal on a spending package that will include funding for Military Construction and Veterans Affairs; Transportation; Housing and Urban Development; Agriculture, Rural Development, and the Food and Drug Administration, as well as agencies under those larger umbrellas.

That could be the first of a handful of “minibus” bills the Senate pushes in the next few weeks, Sen. Jon Tester told Politico on Tuesday. If the Senate shows a united front on passing these funding bills, it would significantly increase pressure on McCarthy to pass a stopgap funding bill and avoid a government shutdown. That’s not a sure thing: The Senate is famously slow when it comes to legislating. To get these bills considered quickly, they’ll have to be advanced by unanimous consent. That avoids the lengthy process of cloture votes and hours of debate time. Any single senator—like the infamously obstructionist Republican Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, for example—could derail that with a simple objection.

So far, however, there hasn’t been much in the way of government-shutdown cheerleading from the usual subjects in the Republican Senate conference. In fact, as Murray and Collins noted in their announcement that “we worked with our colleagues in a bipartisan way to draft and pass out of Committee all twelve appropriations bills for the first time in years—and did so with overwhelming bipartisan votes.” There appears to be little appetite among Senate Republicans for picking this particular fight.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is intent on keeping the conference united on this one. Last week, he reiterated that the Republicans in the Senate were not going to emulate the House and renege on the budget deal that McCarthy struck with President Joe Biden earlier this year to resolve the debt-ceiling standoff. “The House then turned around and passed spending levels that were below that level,” McConnell said. “Without stating an opinion about that, that’s not going to be replicated in the Senate.”

McConnell has also set down a marker on continuing funding for Ukraine, another factor in a potential deal to avert a shutdown. The administration’s request for supplemental funding to Ukraine will likely be attached to a short-term funding bill, as would its request for emergency disaster relief. Funding for disaster relief should be a no-brainer for Republicans politically, as well as a top priority. Tying it to Ukraine assistance and keeping the government open should keep a healthy majority on board.

McConnell is doing his bit to keep up the drum beat. He has spent the last two days hammering on the need to keep funding flowing to Ukraine. “It is certainly not the time to go wobbly,” he said in a floor speech Wednesday. “It is not the time to ease up."

McConnell from Senate floor on more Ukraine aid:“Helping Ukraine retake its territory means weakening 1 of America’s biggest strategic adversaries w/o firing a shot & deterring another one in the process. It means investing directly in American strength,both military & economic." pic.twitter.com/7Z19j3HORs
— Craig Caplan (@CraigCaplan) September 6, 2023

The stakes are high for McConnell. He wants Republicans to regain the majority in 2024, and avoiding a government shutdown is vital to that goal. He’s walking the usual tightrope between keeping the increasingly MAGA-like base happy, while not giving Democrats any additional fodder to hammer Republican opponents.

That’s nothing compared with what McCarthy faces, however. For him, the outcome is more politically existential: whether he keeps his speakership. He’s getting pressure from his supposed ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who won’t vote for any government funding, or support for Ukraine, or really anything until she gets an impeachment inquiry, as she recently detailed in a long, unhinged tweet thread.

McCarthy’s more vocal adversaries are taking direct aim at his speakership. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz threatened a challenge in a tweet Tuesday, writing, “We’ve got to seize the initiative. That means forcing votes on impeachment. And if @SpeakerMcCarthy stands in our way, he may not have the job long. Let’s hope he works with us, not against us.”

Texas Rep. Chip Roy, a Freedom Caucus leader, has piled on with a series of tweets, retweets, and replies firing up the MAGA base for a shutdown. That includes retweeting a post exclaiming, “Chip for Speaker!!!”

That’s a direct message to McCarthy that either of them—or anyone else in the extremist bunch—would be willing to use the tool they extorted from him in his leadership bid in January: the motion to vacate the chair. That allows any single one of them to bring the equivalent of a no-confidence vote to the floor at any time. It’s not the first time Roy has made this veiled threat.

This is the biggest test for McCarthy’s ability to lead, one that everyone paying attention knew would happen if he didn’t stand up to the extremists at some point. He scraped by in the first test on the debt ceiling by striking a deal with Biden—the deal which the extremists forced him to renege on. He’s facing a choice again: Will he stick with the Trump MAGA minority, or try to protect his slim majority—particularly the “Biden 18,” the freshmen Republicans holding districts Biden won in 2020?

It’s also, of course, a test for those supposed moderates, one they’ve failed before. They have the power to block the minority of extremists, if they’re willing to use it.

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House Republican extremists look like they want a government shutdown

Posted on September 5, 2023 by Joan McCarter

We are in September now, which means the government-shutdown stopwatch is ticking. This congressional calendar is even more fraught than usual because there’s just so much that Congress needs to do—and yet, House Republican extremists remain intent on creating chaos. Making matters worse, the House remains on vacation this week, and has scheduled only 12 legislative days before the fiscal year ends and government funding expires on Oct. 1.

Government funding isn’t the only thing that’s supposed to be accomplished in the next three weeks. The end of September is also the deadline for the high-stakes farm bill and a reauthorization bill—the legislation that governs how funds are supposed to be spent by agencies—for the Federal Aviation Administration. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is running out of money and needs a cash infusion to keep responding to the recent disasters in Hawaii and Florida, much less what the remainder of hurricane and wildfire season may bring.

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A few weeks ago, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy floated a possible deal with Democrats to pass a short-term funding bill to keep the government running while Congress continues to work on the regular appropriations bills. At least one hard-line Republican, Georgia’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, has declared she won’t vote for it unless the House first votes to begin impeaching President Joe Biden.

Rep. Chip Roy of Texas is joining in, not necessarily on impeaching Biden as a condition of funding the government, but more so in opposition to having a functioning government. On Monday, Texas Sen. John Cornyn tweeted about the impending shutdown, obliquely chastising the House Republicans for being “universes” apart from Senate Republicans on funding government. Roy quickly responded by saying that Republicans shouldn’t fund “the things they campaign against - and then just shrug… border… DOJ weaponization… DOD wokeness… IRS abuse… COVID tyranny.”

That’s left McCarthy weakly arguing that if they shut down the government, then they won’t be able to keep investigating Biden. “If we shut down, all of government shuts down — investigation and everything else. It hurts the American public,” he said.

The White House has asked for a short-term continuing resolution, which is the only viable solution at this point to keep the government open. The Senate—Democrats and many Republicans—are on board. So now it all boils down to whether McCarthy will finally buck Republican extremists and work with Democrats on a stopgap bill to extend current levels of funding and likely add additional funding for disaster relief and Ukraine support.

The far-right justices on Wisconsin's Supreme Court just can't handle the fact that liberals now have the majority for the first time in 15 years, so they're in the throes of an ongoing meltdown—and their tears are delicious. On this week's episode of "The Downballot," co-hosts David Nir and David Beard drink up all the schadenfreude they can handle as they puncture conservative claims that their progressive colleagues are "partisan hacks" (try looking in the mirror) or are breaking the law (try reading the state constitution). Elections do indeed have consequences!

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Moderate House Republicans: We’re ready to fight back. House Democrats: Sure, Jan

Posted on August 5, 2023 (Updated August 7, 2023) by Joan McCarter

This time they really mean it, swing district House Republicans tell Punchbowl News. They’re ready to start working on bipartisan issues and legislation and beat back the extremist Freedom Caucus so they don’t have to keep taking miserable, unpopular votes that will hurt them.

“There’s a lot of opportunities for bipartisanship,” said Rep. Nick LaLota of New York, Meanwhile, Rep. Mike Garcia of California said his group can have real leverage. “The majority is only five seats, so really every faction has the same amount of power, it’s just a matter of strategy and tactics we choose to deploy as a result of that,” the Republican said. “At some point, we need to ease up some of our positions to get to solutions.”

Both are among the 18 Republicans representing districts where a majority voted for President Joe Biden in 2020.

Moderate House Democrats will believe it when they see it.

“For 11 years I have worked in a bipartisan way on bipartisan bills on important issues,” Democratic Rep. Annie Kuster of New Hampshire, told Punchbowl News. “Now, I find it very difficult because if I try to approach them on a bill that I know we’ve worked on together for years, we get to committee and someone wants to throw a [controversial] amendment on there,” Kuster added.

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The part she didn’t say is that the so-called moderate Republicans don’t fight to keep those amendments out of bills—and worse: They vote for them.

Consider the traditionally bipartisan National Defense Authorization Act that passed in the House last month. It includes amendments to: ban books in military base school libraries; end the Pentagon’s policy of allowing service members leave to obtain abortions; ban gender-affirming health care for people serving in the military and their families; and ban race, gender, religion, political affiliations, or "any other ideological concepts" as the basis for personnel decisions. Those amendments all passed, with votes from most of these same GOP moderates, known as the Biden 18.

Moderates are also apparently shocked that the Freedom Caucus, the extremist Republican group currently running the show, is “selfish and short-sighted and only care about pushing their own agenda in the media instead of working with us to govern.” That quote is from Republican Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia. He’s mad that the extremists are “taking advantage” of the small Republican House majority to force their will on the rest of the conference.

And it only took him seven months to figure that out. By the time we get through August and Congress is back in session, he might have done the math to figure out 18 is bigger than five, so his team can do the same thing.

He and the rest of the Republican moderates will have a chance to put all that tough talk into action when they return in September. If they really want to help themselves and act like real representatives, they’ll figure out how to leverage that bipartisanship they long for and keep the government from shutting down.

It’s a joyous week in Wisconsin, where Janet Protasiewicz’s swearing-in means that the state Supreme Court now has its first liberal majority in 15 years. We’re talking about that monumental transition on this week’s episode of “The Downballot,” including a brand-new suit that voting rights advocates filed on Protasiewicz’s first full day on the job that asks the court to strike down the GOP’s legislative maps as illegal partisan gerrymanders.

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