Republicans losing patience with House’s halfhearted efforts to impeach Biden

It's too early to tell whether it's a temporary blip or a longer-term trend, but House Republicans vowing to "impeach Joe Biden" seem to be hitting more public pushback than usual from their fellow Republicans. The portion of the party not completely devoted to Rudy Giuliani-style hoax-peddling appears to be getting more and more concerned that holding an impeachment trial of President Joe Biden that includes exactly zero evidence of Biden doing anything wrong would not, in fact, convince Americans that the party can be trusted with government power.

There's probably going to be a real conflict there, because to House Republicans like Jim Jordan and James Comer, the thought of holding off on announcing an impeachment just because they haven't been able to dig up evidence for one appears inconceivable—and to date, it's not clear that anyone will be able to convince the House sedition caucus to back down.

As for the evidence that Republican patience with the impeachment carnival is wearing thin, the most colorful criticism comes from GOP political strategist Susan Del Percio, who allowed herself to be named and quoted by The Messenger as saying, "It's stupid. It's completely made up. They don't have anything," and, "This is not about impeachment for cause. This is a political stunt. And I have a feeling it's going to go very badly for Republicans."

That's the sort of sharp critique that strategists start dishing out when supposed allies start suggesting really bad ideas, ideas on the level of, "Hey, let's put Rep. George Santos in charge of the holiday gift exchange this year."

Then we had the amazing sight of Fox News hosts taking the stuffing out of the still-unindicted Rep. Matt Gaetz's impeachment threats. And not just any Fox hosts, mind you, but the “Fox & Friends” crowd. Do you have any idea how bad your conservative idea has to be to get “Fox & Friends” on the other side of it? These are people who would appoint George Santos chief wallet inspector!

Responding to Gaetz's threat to remove Kevin McCarthy from the House speakership if he stands in the way of an attempted Biden impeachment, host Brian Kilmeade roundly mocked him:

"Who would he put there?" he asked. "[House Majority Leader] Steve Scalise, who's dealing with blood cancer right now? Is there anybody else?"

"Matt Gaetz is just speaking into the wind," Kilmeade added dismissively. "Have Matt Gaetz pick up the phone and call some moderate Republicans and see if he can switch to his side. McCarthy would be more than happy to let him do that."

You have to be way, way over the line to lose Brian Kilmeade. And Kilmeade wasn't the only one dismissive of Gaetz's threats. Noting that Gaetz's fellow Republicans would probably be "all for" a Biden impeachment if Rep. James Comer and the other supposed investigators "can get proof" of Biden’s wrongdoing, co-host Ainsley Earhardt opined that "they definitely need that proof in order to start an impeachment."

That is  not what Comer and the others want to hear. They've been pushing to have an impeachment vote without ever finding proof of what largely at this point has devolved into the usual bizarre conspiracy theorizing. And in doing so, they're going beyond even what the “Fox & Friends” morning crowd can stomach.

Not all signs of chaos in the Republican ranks are from people skeptical of the wisdom of proceeding without actual evidence; among hard-right conspiracy cranks, accusations are flying over Comer's inability to prove claims that started out as hoaxes to begin with. MAGA remora and nationally renowned crappy parker Seb Gorka is fuming over Comer's inability to deliver:

"Another press conference? I've had it, I'm sorry Comer, you don't know how to do a press conference. You have a press conference on 'Romanian businessman gave Hunter Biden $32' [...] And your oxygen thief members of the committee are standing in front of the visual aids! This is what we voted for? It's a joke!"

Yeah, that's what would have sold your press conference, James: being able to better see the visual aids for the $32 check. Forget evidence—first, y'all need to practice your choreography.

So things really do appear to be heating up as Comer and Jordan continue to produce substanceless circus performances with parades of clowns whostill can't come up with even the most basic evidence for the party's conspiracy claims. The far right is mad because they don't understand why Comer can't find evidence that doesn't exist, and the more sedition-agnostic members of the party are increasingly wary of attaching themselves to a show that consists of little more than Comer and Jordan continually tripping over their own feet.

Does it portend a shift in Republican tolerance for the House seditionists obsessed with impeaching Joe Biden out of sheer spite? Hard to say. But it's something to keep an eye on.

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Clarence Thomas definitely not corrupt, say people whose careers he launched

Oh, very big news, everyone. Over 100 former clerks to Justice Clarence Thomas have signed an open letter announcing that Thomas is just great, nothing to see here, no corruption so everyone needs to shut up about that.

Fox “News” is boosting the story, and it helpfully includes the actual letter itself, which is ... wow, a whole lot of not much, actually. In general, when you're defending someone against charges of accepting improper favors from people who, say, purchase his mother's house, fix it up and let her live there rent-free in preparation for turning the site into a museum of Why Clarence Thomas Is Great, you'd want to include some actual defenses.

But the Clarence Thomas Is Great Club skips all of that. Instead, most of the letter is a retelling of Thomas' entire life story. It’s a story of hardship and more hardship and being inspirational until now, finally, he's at the top of the American hierarchy and gets to be friends with people who own yachts.

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"Home was Pin Point, among the Gullah-Geechee and oysters and marshlands. His father left. And a fire took all he had and the shack where he lived." And after a while his grandfather "enrolled him in a Catholic school run by Irish nuns.” Then he went to law school, and "took the road less traveled," which in this case means he "went to work for Republican Jack Danforth in the middle of Missouri.” It's just paragraphs of that rather than anything about the vacations or the yachts or the inability of the Catholic-educated ex-seminary-student-turned-lawyer to properly fill out a gift disclosure form to save his life.

It's all pretty obviously cribbed from a pre-written obituary sitting in a drawer somewhere, but it brings to mind one of the sappier introductions cookbook authors use to tell the story of how they found their favorite recipe.

"When I was seventeen, I was attacked by an ax murderer, who cut off one of my arms. Using the severed arm as a club, I beat him senseless and ran to the nearest house for safety, but the house turned out to be owned by the granddaughter of an old-timey gangster and was haunted by the spirits of three Girl Scouts who refused to let me leave until I purchased all their remaining Thin Mints. After returning home and getting my arm reattached, I was subjected to an IRS audit, which made me so distraught that I drove to the ocean to throw myself off a pier. After tying cement blocks to both feet, I jumped, landing on the sandy seabed. It was there I discovered, lodged between two rocks, the most delightful recipe for this astonishing raspberry tart."

Instead of a recipe, though, the former clerks close the section off with an insistence that this is "a story that should be told in every American classroom, at every American kitchen table, in every anthology of American dreams realized.” I get that some people have endured more hardship than others, but the notion that legal dinosaur Thomas is among the most amazing of them all is the sort of claim that will get your lights punched out during Hagiographers Society bruncheons.

More to the point, as historian Kevin Kruse points out, the letter's focus on Thomas' history rather than his conduct is "a rehash of the Bush White House's plan for his confirmation, what they called 'the Pin Point strategy.'" That makes it sound suspiciously astroturf-y.

Not to worry, though: Just look at the names of the former clerks vouching for Thomas. Among the great American legal minds defending Thomas’ integrity are John Eastman, who is currently under indictment in Florida and listed as co-conspirator in the Jan. 6, 2021 attempted coup, as well as prominent war crime proponent John Yoo. If you can't trust Eastman and Yoo to tell you who's got integrity and who doesn't, there's just no pleasing you.

Anyway, after that we get a paragraph reminiscing about how Thomas is just a damn fine fellow to work with, a real pal. "His chambers become our chambers—a place fueled by unstoppable curiosity and unreturned library books, all to get every case just right," wax his old clerks, just casually dropping an anecdote of the oozing-with-integrity Supreme Court justice who can't even return his library books.

It's only at the tail end of the letter we finally get to some vague references to the rude questions the public keeps asking about Thomas and the rest of the court: "Lately, the stories have questioned his integrity and his ethics for the friends he keeps" is the closest the open letter gets to even hinting at the current scandals.

Well, yes. That's accurate, if impossibly opaque. Outside critics are indeed questioning his integrity because of the friends he keeps, most specifically "friends" who are 1) known conservative megadonors linked with Republicanism's long-term plans for packing the courts with hard-right loyalists like several of Thomas' junior peers, and 2) who started plying him with unusually expensive gifts that include lavish vacations and future Museums of Clarence Thomas only after he was presented with his long black robes.

So, fine, let's turn this around: Where were these Republican yacht owners back when Thomas was in Pin Point, among the Gullah-Geechee? Where were they when his home burned down, or when he was in segregated schools, or when he was doing hard farm work, or in the seminary, or working to gain entry to law school?

Oh. Right. They were nowhere. The billionaire class now giving the Supreme Court justice free yacht rides and renovating his mom's house didn't give a flying shit about Thomas through any of that. It was only when Thomas landed his ass in a position of ultimate American legal authority that boy howdy did he make so many new friends. Very, very rich friends with statuary gardens who would have had their security teams shoot Thomas in the head if he appeared on their property during any time of his life when he was not a Supreme Court justice.

This isn't like returning library books, you know. When you're on the Supreme Court, surrounded by supplicating clerks that have fought tooth and nail to be your own personal servants and who will absolutely return your library books for you if you told them to do it, you're supposed to at least pretend to follow the same ethical guidelines as every other last sodding person in government. Even if you, by a strictly technical reading of the laws, don't really have to.

That one vague sentence is the end of talking about the thing Thomas is actually being criticized for. Then we're back to gauzy references to his life story and how even coup plotters like Eastman and international war crime defenders like Yoo find Thomas just so damn "unimpeachable" that it brings tears to their eyes to think anyone would doubt him.

"A bust of his grandfather—himself raised by a grandmother born into slavery—watches over his office," goes one of the closing lines, a line that's both inspirational and that is a reminder that there are very few families in America who can afford to commission a freakin' bronze bust of a grandparent. But there's no actual content to the letter other than, “He's a great guy to work with,” say the people whose careers he helped start.

Just ask Trump Deputy Legal Adviser John Eisenberg, who moved to improperly classify the transcript of the Trump call to Ukrainian officials that would lead to Trump's first impeachment. Just ask Bush-era waterboarding defender Steven Bradbury, or Harlan Crow-linked 5th Circuit Judge James Ho, the judge who recently made news for a laboriously crackpotty dissenting opinion claiming that Catholic doctors had standing to block abortions they had nothing to do with because they suffer an aesthetic injury when women take mifepristone without their permission.

Yeah. Yeah, let's ask all of these people to vouch for the integrity of the guy getting yacht trips from billionaires, said Clarence Thomas' closest allies. That'll work out great.

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Another day, another outright hoax promoted on Fox News

Fox "News" is a propaganda outfit intended to manipulate public opinion by bending the "news" to preferentially be whatever the Republican hard right would most like it to be. Sometimes this means reporting real news with a conservative edge to it; sometimes it means peddling hoaxes, often in tacit coordination with the Republicans who invented them to begin with. We're supposed to believe that if Fox only promotes a certain percentage of fake stories, they still retain legitimacy as a "real" news outlet, but there's never a number put to that. Can a legitimate news outlet run one completely made-up story a day and retain legitimacy? Is it fine if the hoaxes run mostly during prime-time hours? Can a network promote $790 million worth of fake news, but not $795 million?

Do tell, American pundit corps, because the rest of us remain mystified.

Over the weekend, Fox News showed us how they operate—again—with nearly three hours of gaudy coverage of a straight-up news hoax. This one was a throwback to the specific Rudy Giuliani-spread anti-Ukraine, anti-Biden hoaxes that got Donald Trump impeached when Trump attempted to solicit support for the hoax from the Ukrainian government in exchange for an end to his holdup of congressionally mandated military aid to the country.

Remember discredited former Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, the man ousted from the government after international pressure over what was seen as Shokin's, ahem, lackluster interest in fighting Ukrainian corruption? He's back, thanks to Fox News bobblehead Brian Kilmeade.

That it was left to one of the glassy-eyed “Fox & Friends” hosts to interview the disgraced Shokin should tell you just how little appetite there was among Fox’s "legitimate" news team to appear on camera with the buffoon; Kilmeade certainly has no reputation for "journalism" that could be tarnished. This is the conspiracy that resulted in the complete dismantling of conservative faux-journalist John Solomon's waning career, after all, and there's not many media figures outside the “Fox & Friends” lineup who want to be the next John Solomon.

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In the interview, Shokin regurgitated the same conspiracy theory that Giuliani attempted to import to the United States the moment it appeared that Joe Biden would be Trump's presidential opponent: the notion that he was the victim of a Biden plot to oust him when, in fact, his removal was spurred by an international campaign and by official United States government condemnation of his failures. Giuliani sought to boost the theory with the help of pro-Russian (read: treasonous) Ukrainian oligarchs that Ukraine's post-Shokin anticorruption efforts had targeted. That not a shred of this theory turned out to be true—and a whole lot of it was manufactured outright—was hardly a surprise.

That Trump himself would soon attach himself to the hoax, using the powers of his office to demand the Ukrainian government announce they were "investigating" the false charges, was ... also not a surprise.

Media Matters tallies up the Fox promotion of Shokin's completely hoax-premised claims against Biden, and between "teasing, airing, and analyzing" the interview it amounted to "at least 50 segments across 19 different programs." That's a heavy media push, and it coincides with a new House Republican push to mount an impeachment trial against Biden to act as a counternarrative to Trump potentially landing his ass in a prison cell on a host of federal and state charges.

Why would Fox News be resurrecting a Giuliani-boosted hoax immediately after Giuliani himself has been indicted for attempting to corruptly undermine an American election? What's the "news" value in rerunning one of his most notorious anti-Biden campaign scams?

There isn't any, as the interview itself made clear. But it allowed conspiracy-minded Fox News hosts to run the footage as if the claims were new, and to speculate on whether House Republicans would use Shokin's claims to help justify a Biden impeachment. That is of tremendous use to Republicans, even if Shokin himself remains an utterly discredited fraud-promoting huckster.

That brings us back to our original question, then. What percentage of the Fox News day can be booked with actual, known hoax-pushers before the "journalism" side of the business can be discredited? We've been told repeatedly by other media figures that the "news" side of Fox News is on the up-and-up, no matter how many times their anchors make partisan asses of themselves during "real news" hours. It's up to those media figures, then, to share a number with us. For CNN, for NBC, for The Washington Post, for The New York Times: What percentage of completely fake "news" can your journalism include, per segment or per page, and still retain its “real news” label?

Do tell. The rest of us simply don't seem to understand "journalism" with enough nuance to put some numbers to these things, so stop beating around the bush and just give us your answers, straight up. How many intentional hoaxes are "real" news outlets allowed to promote?

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Political journalists boost Republican nonsense—and sabotage democracy

Once again, the fundamental crisis in America’s political journalism is an unwillingness to confront corruption—or even to recognize it. Uncritically repeating politically motivated hoaxes is a corrupt act, one that sabotages democracy by depriving citizens of the facts necessary to make democratic decisions.

A new CNN story is indicative of this very problem, so let’s rip it to pieces and see what we can learn. The article is "McCarthy starts to plot Biden impeachment strategy while GOP skeptics remain,” and it is a bog-standard inside look at the politics of the Republican Party’s attempt to further its propagandistic narratives.

The article tells us that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has "privately told" Republicans he plans to begin an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden "by the end of September." And yet, despite setting up an array of committees and subcommittees for Trump's most-loyal toadies to probe Biden and his family, the vengeance squads continue to present only nebulous theories and claims that have already been disproven. This presents McCarthy with a problem.

The article continues:

But leadership recognizes that the entire House Republican conference is not yet sold on the politically risky idea of impeachment. That’s why one of the biggest lingering questions – and something Republicans have been discussing in recent weeks – is whether they would need to hold a floor vote to formally authorize their inquiry, sources say. There is no constitutional requirement that they do so, and Republicans do not currently have the 218 votes needed to open an impeachment inquiry.

Skipping the formal vote, which would be a tough one for many of the party’s more vulnerable and moderate members, would allow Republicans to get the ball rolling on an inquiry while giving leadership more time to convince the rest of the conference to get on board with impeachment.

In other words, with no clear evidence of wrongdoing, House Republicans in swing districts don't want to commit to an impeachment based on the murky say-so of the chamber’s conspiracy cranks. So, to make his deadline, McCarthy plans to simply skip that vote if he must and launch the inquiry anyway.

The issue with this article is not what it covers but how it covers it. All this information is presented as a problem of political gamesmanship. That Republicans have unearthed no actual justification for impeaching Biden is depicted as a political problem, nothing more.

Another factor that could complicate the fall timeline for an impeachment inquiry: Government funding expires at the end of September. McCarthy has already signaled they will need a short-term spending patch to keep the government’s lights on, which hardline conservatives have balked at.

Officially moving ahead with an impeachment inquiry could help keep angry conservatives off McCarthy’s back. And the speaker himself has linked the two issues publicly, warning that a government shutdown could hinder House Republicans’ ability to continue their investigations into the Biden administration – a direct appeal to his right flank, and a sign of all the competing pressures that the speaker is facing.

Every political journalist in Washington, D.C., knows that House Republicans’ push to impeach Biden exists as a strictly partisan maneuver to (1) retaliate against Trump's impeachments and (2) manufacture an anti-Biden scandal so as to offset the accusations of Trump’s rampant criminality. Republicans want to bend the narrative from "Trump and his Republican allies did crimes" to "Both sides are doing crimes." Their intention is to use the false claims to sway the next presidential race. Again.

But we political journalists are going to ignore all that, studiously, and report on the propaganda campaign as a political tactic. What does this mean to Republicans in vulnerable districts? How will it affect short-term spending battles? Can McCarthy thwart would-be Republican moderates to push the propaganda campaign forward?

It's not until paragraph nine that we get the disclaimer: Republicans’ impeachment rationale is bullshit:

Republicans have pointed to unverified allegations that Biden profited from his son’s foreign business dealings as grounds for impeachment and have also alleged that there was political interference at the Department of Justice in the ongoing Hunter Biden criminal case – neither of which Republicans have been able to prove, which the White House and Democrats have repeatedly stressed.

“Unverified” is the key word, but the paragraph ends with a deflection to "White House and Democrats" who insist on pointing out that Republicans have not been "able to prove" their claims—a deflection that is unnecessary and borders on manipulative. CNN knows these claims are unverified, that Republicans have been unable to prove their accusations, and yet the grounds for this impeachment inquiry gets a passing mention deep in the story.

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Most of the claims surrounding Hunter Biden are the product of a Trump-era ratfucking operation by Rudy Giuliani, the now-indicted former mayor of New York City. The operation’s goal was to deflect from Russian election interference with a bizarre theory that, actually, it was Russia’s enemy Ukraine that meddled in our elections and that Hunter Biden, Hillary Clinton, and the Hamburglar were all somehow involved. Republicans’ investigations of the “Hunter Biden” story isn't a case of longstanding suspicions of a Biden crime ring being dutifully probed by public servants; it is a conspiracy-peddling campaign pushed by known liars, several of whom are facing charges for their own roles in an attempted coup.

Republicans’ conspiracy mongering is the far more interesting and important story, and political journalism so often seems uninterested in telling it. It is as if these journalists cannot comprehend conspiracy-peddling as corruption. Surely, by writing such articles, they would invite retaliation from elected officials whom the journalists court for access. Better to have access to those telling lies than to point out the lies.

The article closes out by calling attention to a new social media post by the man at the center of all this. On Truth Social, Trump screeched his frustration at, of all people, his allies in Congress: "You don’t need a long INQUIRY to prove it, it’s already proven. … Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US!"

That is what the article should have focused on: the indicted leader of an attempted coup demanding the impeachment of the man who beat him, all while the indicted leader himself mounts a new bid to retake power. It is the story of one political party mired in corruption and peddling hoaxes. It is the most exciting political story on the planet, the story that happens in nations just before democracy falls and a strongman and his toadies declare elections to be too corrupt to continue and journalists to be enemies of the citizens. It is the last political story a democracy tells, and the political journalists tasked with fetching quotes from the conspirators still avoid telling it.

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We talk about the upcoming Republican presidential debate and how sad a situation it is. The Republican Party shot itself in the foot with a Trump-sized bullet and now it's stuck with him for the foreseeable future. We still try to game out the possible paths the Republican field might take in order to rid themselves of the Donald.

House Republicans swiftly act to obstruct on Trump’s behalf

It's clockwork at this point. Whenever seditionist Donald Trump is accused of another crime, House Republicans rise up to obstruct justice. It's been happening since before Trump's first impeachment. It happened the very moment government agencies began looking into possible connections between Russian hacks of Trump's Democratic opposition and multiple members of Trump's own inner circles. (See: Stone, Manafort.) Trump has been indicted three times now on nearly 100 felony charges, and House Republicans have immediately jumped in to crookedly target his prosecutors every time.

CNN reports that the House Judiciary Committee, led by professional crime enabler Rep. Jim Jordan, is expected to open an investigation into Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis "as soon as Thursday." The reasons are as shallow as the ones given for the attempts to obstruct the criminal cases levels against Trump in New York and by special counsel Jack Smith. Jordan and the rest of the House organized crime bunch say they want to know whether Willis used federal money to investigate Dear Leader or whether her office was secretly conspiring with Smith in filing the charges against Trump.

But the real reason for House Republican interference is spelled out just as boldly: Jordan is again demanding that law enforcement turn over evidence in the case to Jordan and other Republicans who have remained in contact with Trump after his coup attempt.

That those Republicans have been coordinating with Trump himself is already known. The purpose of demands that prosecutors hand over their evidence is, of course, so that Trump's seditionist allies in Congress can leak the prosecution's evidence to Trump directly.

It's the same play these same Republicans have used throughout each of Trump's numerous scandals. They use their government powers to uncover the witnesses and agents who brought evidence against Trump, then publicly demonize those witnesses to the point of fomenting death threats.

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Jordan's been running an organized crime ring from inside Congress for a good long time now, inheriting the role from Rep. Devin Nunes, who ducked out of Congress under suspicious circumstances only to turn up in a cushy Trump-provided job. The players include the alleged coke orgy guy, otherwise known as Rep. Matt Gaetz; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene; and the whole assortment of House Republicans who sought to invalidate Trump's reelection loss with an assist from a Trump-provided rioting mob.

I'm not sure what it's going to take for journalists to start treating Jordan as the chief toady of an organized attempt to sabotage law enforcement from inside Congress itself. None of it is being hidden: We know House Republicans are coordinating with Trump in attempts to sabotage the criminal cases against him.

This is how CNN puts it, and it sure doesn't illuminate much:

It all amounts to a familiar playbook for House Republicans, who have been quick to try to use their congressional majority – which includes the ability to launch investigations, issue subpoenas and restrict funding – to defend the former president and offer up some counter programming amid his mounting legal battles. But they’ve also run into some resistance in their extraordinary efforts to intervene in ongoing criminal matters, while there are questions about what jurisdiction they have over state-level investigations.

Yes, the "some resistance" part of "some resistance in their extraordinary efforts to intervene in ongoing criminal matters" part is because such interference is brazenly illegal, and Jordan and team are skirting a very fine line in relying on congressional protections to dodge prosecution for what would have already landed them with felony indictments themselves if anyone not in the U.S. Congress was foolish enough to try it. It is broadly known that Congress does not have jurisdiction over state-level investigations, which is why the only real threat Jordan can make is to defund any law enforcement office that investigates potential Trump crimes.

But there's simply no question that it's all very crooked, and that the crookedness is specifically aimed at letting an indicted political ally skate free if there's any skating to be done. Jordan's been staking most of his political power on extended efforts to make sure Republicans can commit felonies without repercussions. It's what he wants to be known for. His signature accomplishment.

CNN also obliges the Republican narrative with a now-rote section about how all of this is meant to be "keeping the spotlight on Biden," and as usual doesn't point out that the Republican "spotlight" on Biden is overtly another tactical move to allow Republicans to get away with felonies.

What are Republicans "investigating" Biden over? Well, they've charged him with having a son with addiction struggles who has used his proximity to his important father to land some too-sweet gigs or sell some paintings for more than his talent deserves, while being simultaneously unable to prove that the aforementioned father had a damn bit to do with any of it. It's an unusual focus for a party brushing off a $2 billion foreign investment in another struggling failson, one simultaneous to big foreign gifts to the ex-president who carted the failson into international politics.

Unless, of course, you're trying to blur the lines of "corruption" so that the public considers one to be equivalent to the other, just politics as usual as opposed to post-coup foreign purchases of loyalty.

C'mon. It's been self-evident from the first moments Rudy Giuliani oozed his way through Europe looking for "evidence" that it was Ukraine and Biden who were crooked, not Russia and Donald. The media has been in broad agreement from the first day that Giuliani's push was a transparent stunt, dishonest in premise and vouched for by international criminals. What's with this media insistence on hiding information from the public under layers of fawning quotes and cheap mental shrugs?

More than anything else, this latest House Republican attempt to intervene on behalf of a Trump-led criminal conspiracy should be a reminder that among House Republicans, there are many co-conspirators who assisted in a plan to nullify a United States presidential election rather than abide by a temporary loss of party power. Many. They promoted hoaxes to discredit the election's valid and certified results. They pushed state legislatures to override the vote totals in their states and declare Trump to be the winner by fiat. They supported the plan to "object" to the electoral counts from Biden-won states, a plan that would have seen the fraudulent slates prepared by Republican co-conspirators introduced instead if Trump's vice president could have been convinced to present the forged versions.

This isn't a case of House Republicans looking to let Trump skate from a crime they were uninvolved with. The majority of the caucus were in on the very conspiracy they're now obstructing the prosecution of.

You'd think that'd be front and center in these stories. "House Republicans still working to cover up their own criminal conspiracy" is a hell of a lot bigger a story than whatever bluster Jordan might be offering up to keep his cover-up going.

Everyone always talks about redistricting, but what is it like to actually do it? Oregon political consultant Kari Chisholm joins us on this week's episode of “The Downballot” to discuss his experience as member of Portland's new Independent District Commission, a panel of citizens tasked with creating the city's first-ever map for its city council. Kari explains why Portland wanted to switch from at-large elections to a district-based system, how new multimember districts could boost diversity on the council, and the commission's surprisingly effective efforts to divide the city into four equal districts while heeding community input.

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Co-conspirator 5’s memos show that Jan. 6 was a planned coup

On the heels of the public exposure of a memo from lawyer Kenneth Chesebro proposing what would become the central strategy of Donald Trump's attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021, Politico has a new overview of Chesebro's role in the conspiracy that's worth a read.

Chesebro only made it to Co-Conspirator 5 status in Trump's newest federal indictment, overshadowed by figures such as hoax architect Rudy Giuliani and lawyer John Eastman, but in memos it was Chesebro who laid out each of the core elements of the plan for then-Vice President Mike Pence and Congress to simply nullify the election's results come Jan. 6. Eastman appears to have been the one who packaged it all up for sale to Trump and the rest of the White House team.

In the Dec. 6 Chesebro memo revealed Wednesday, he proposes a plan to create fake, uncertified electoral slates in multiple Joe Biden-won states that would then be passed to Pence, who would announce them as the "true" electors using an allegedly unilateral constitutional power that allows the vice president to count up the electoral votes literally however he or she wants. That version of the plan was the one the co-conspirators and conspiring Republican members of the House and Senate worked towards, creating the fake electoral slates. It was Sen. Ron Johnson who appears to have been the volunteer who would smuggle the fake electors to Pence on the day of the vote.

Pence foiled the scheme by refusing to be a part of it even though Trump and Trump's team had pressured him intensely. He was retaliated against on Jan. 6 when Trump singled out Pence as his enemy even as violent pro-Trump insurrectionists hunted for targets in the halls of the Capitol.

But Chesebro had alternative plans as well. All of them hinged on the conservative Supreme Court being sufficiently crooked enough to come up with a legal facade for ignoring the certified electoral slates of multiple states purely on Republican say-so. Or at least for the court to put a pause on the electoral counting that would, in the eyes of the public, help justify other extreme actions to overturn the results.

A week after the Dec. 6 memo proposing the original plan of Pence unilaterally altering the counts himself, Chesebro had already brainstormed a fallback position that would have the same effects.

On Jan. 6, Chesebro said, Pence would announce his recusal from presiding over the joint session of Congress, citing the unconstitutionality of the Electoral Count Act as well as a conflict of interest because of his candidacy for reelection. This, Chesebro contended, would “insulate” Pence from charges of making a self-serving decision and leave the matter ostensibly in the hands of a senior Republican senator. Then, after beginning to count electoral votes from an alphabetical list of states, that senator would refuse to count the votes from Arizona, citing the competing slates of electors. If Arizona wants to be counted, this senator would say, it would either have to “rerun” its election or allow for more judicial review of the outcome.

It's important to acknowledge here that this plan, too, was absolutely batshit crazy. The plans concocted by Trump's alleged "legal" team all hinged on a supposed ability for a vice president or temporary acting Senate president to simply declare that they weren't going to count the votes of states that the Republican candidate didn't win because fuck you, that's why. This was in accordance with the theory that power is unilaterally invested in the vote-counter and there is not a damn thing anyone else in the entire country can do about it.

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This was entirely batshit crazy for a whole host of reasons, and perhaps especially for the complete indifference shown towards what 330 million people might think—or do—when they learned that their entire constitutional democracy was a fiction. Chesebro himself continued to recognize that his plan was so destructive and batshit crazy that the Supreme Court could very well not go along with it. Again, this is a plan that would end with Chesebro and the others facing a firing squad at pretty much any other point of history or in any other country. At some point even the Supreme Court would have to decide whether this was a stunt worthy of forcing the most powerful military on the planet into choosing sides.

But Chesebro still held out hope that the resulting batshit chaos would somehow result in a miracle occurring. Perhaps the election would be thrown out, making House Speaker Nancy Pelosi the acting president. Or perhaps not. Spin the wheel and take your chances, America. The rancid sacks of shit proposing this plan were willing to risk everything for the slightest chance to erase an election.

But another outcome, he said — one that appears even more far-fetched in hindsight — might play out: Trump could quit the race in exchange for a negotiated deal to make Pence president.

“In this situation,” Chesebro wrote, “which would be messy and unpalatable to many … it doesn’t seem fanciful to think Trump and Pence would end up winning the vote after some legislatures appoint electors, or else that there might be a negotiated solution in which the Senate elects Pence vice president and Trump agrees to drop his bid … so that Biden and Harris are defeated, even though Trump isn’t re-elected.”

First off, fuck this dude sincerely for his willingness to throw all of democracy against a wall in the off chance that the debris would make a pretty pattern that he, personally, might like. But the notion that Donald Trump would "quit the race" in a ploy to make Pence president may be more delusional than the plan to assert dictatorial Pence powers. Trump has never done anything in his life unless it would benefit Trump. Just how were Giuliani, Eastman, and the other seditionists going to convince Trump to drop his claims of winning the election so that Pence could sit behind his desk? Were they going to offer him Alaska? Delaware? Agree to convert our newest aircraft carrier to a floating Trump-branded result?

And no matter how many Trump lawsuits fell because each of them were based on craptacular hoaxes that fell apart upon even the most cursory examination—which has landed multiple lawyers in Trump's orbit in deep professional trouble, and that is putting it mildly—Chesebro and Eastman and the others just kept pressing forward. As the House select committee that investigated the coup discovered, Justice Clarence Thomas was widely seen as the coup's most likely Supreme Court ally. As Trump pressured Pence, the coup's architects hunted for cases that might give Thomas the means to at least temporarily block a state's results from being counted.

“Possibly Thomas would end up being the key here — circuit justice, right? We want to frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue some sort of stay or other circuit justice opinion saying Georgia is in legitimate doubt,” Chesebro wrote. “Realistically, our only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion by Jan. 6, which might hold up the Georgia count in Congress, is from Thomas — do you agree, Prof. Eastman?”

This was just one week before Jan. 6, after courtrooms across the country had thrown out the team's farcical "evidence" of fraud over and over again, leaving the seditionists with no remaining legal fig leaves that would justify their plan. But when not even Thomas gave them the justification they sought, the plan didn't change.

Trump and his allies even scheduled a "march" on the Capitol to coincide with the counting of electoral votes, another means of potentially delaying the vote or creating enough chaos to justify throwing out or "redoing" the election's results.

The reason Trump stood by as the violent mob attacked police and ransacked the building is self-evident: This was the delay the team had been trying to make happen. Trump and the coup planners indeed used the delay caused by the evacuation of Congress to again work the phones, pressuring individual lawmakers to go along with the plan.

What the Chesebro and Eastman memos have spelled out, much too plainly, is that from at least Dec. 6 the plan was to nullify Trump's presidential election loss through Republican fiat, either through Pence or through other House and Senate accomplices, and the co-conspirators all recognized that a likely result of their plan would be massive public unrest and almost certain violence. And they did not care. At all! The "plan" was for Trump to declare that the Insurrection Act allowed him to put down public protests by military force, and he was to give those orders, and the coup planners were willing to spin the wheel on what would happen after that as well.

There was seemingly no jumping-off point where Trump's team of true believers proved unwilling to risk mass violence, military violence, or a new civil war on the vaporous chance that they could erase a Republican election loss. The memos are banal in tone: Things might get "messy" after their "bold" strategies were employed, but oh-fucking-well, those were simply the risks of overturning a democratic election and installing a Republican winner regardless.

It was seditionist from the start. The plan was never to prove actual fraud in any state, it was to unilaterally declare "fraud" and announce that the results were invalid because Pence said so. The Supreme Court would hopefully declare the moves "nonjusticiable" because it was Congress doing them, after which the only remaining concerns would be enforcing order as the public objected.

These ratbastards and their allied Republicans intended a coup from the beginning. It was a stupid plan, mind you. It was premised on a great deal of wishful thinking, and with never a thought to what would happen if Trump called up the military and some member of the military dropped a missile onto the White House in response, but it was a coup by design.

It's hard to imagine what justice can even be meted out here against a team of conspirators whose communications show complete indifference to the damage caused by their schemes.

Conservatives cried about how the “woke” (whatever that means) “Barbie” movie would fail. It didn’t. In fact, the film has struck a chord with American and international audiences. Daily Kos writer Laura Clawson joins Markos to talk about the film and the implications of the Republican Party’s fixation on mythical culture wars, which is failing them in bigger and bigger ways every day.

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Still at the top of Trump’s agenda: Sabotaging Ukraine to benefit Russia

Over the weekend Donald Trump held a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania. It was noteworthy for a few reasons: It got Donald to actually leave his house, which was an impressive feat by his aides considering that Trump has been obsessively toilet-tweeting insults about his current indictments, expected future indictments, and everyone even tangentially involved with his indictments.

Also of note was his usual grifting podium sign, one telling the crowd to "Text PENNSYLVANIA -----" to give him money. This means Trump's campaign team genuinely believes Donald's rally crowds have the attention span to phone-thumb their way through all the letters of “Pennsylvania” without losing interest, so you can't say they've lost their optimism.

Then there was the part where he demanded all of the Republicans competing for the nomination besides him should drop out so that all the money they spent on their own campaigns could instead be given to him. Ah, classic Trump. I imagine he thinks he's being charitable by not demanding they all hand him the keys to their homes as well.

But the weirdest part was probably when Trump once again pressed his bizarre crusade against Ukraine, the same one he got impeached over the first time around, the same one that turned out to be a Rudy Giuliani snipehunt backed by crooked European oligarchs boosting crooked Russian disinformation. Trump once again really, really wants Republicans to block all military help to Ukraine—and this is apparently urgent enough that Trump doesn't think it can wait until his own theoretical second term. It's got to happen now.

"He's dragging into a global conflict on behalf of the very same country, Ukraine, that apparently paid his family all of these millions of dollars," Trump alleged. "In light of this information," Congress, he said, "should refuse to authorize a single additional payment of our depleted stockpiles ... the weapons stockpiles to Ukraine until the FBI, DOJ and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden crime family's corrupt business dealings."

Oh. My. God. See, what's amazing about Trump is that the man's brain is impervious to new information. It might be laziness, or he might just have too much grass and dirt lodged up there from all the holes he's knocked out of golf courses in his lifetime, but that could be a direct quote from any one of his speeches from his first two campaigns. It's only the fact that he's ranting about Joe Biden and not Hillary Clinton that gives it any context at all.

Trump was going on about "depleted stockpiles" throughout his 2016 campaign. It was his version of the Republican talking point that's been used without fail by each of their candidates of the past 40 years. Every time, the Republican says that our troops are suffering from a lack of readiness, or that the Navy doesn't have enough ships, or the Army doesn't have enough tanks, and it's because a stupid jerk not-Republican is in charge and only a Republican can fix the problem.

Then, if the Republican wins, the problem magically goes away and we don't hear about it again until the next time a Democratic president appears. Trump was very big on the "our troops have no bullets" nonsense. It vanished when he won, and we're possibly supposed to believe it was because he chipped in bullet money out of his own pockets or something. Eight years later, the problem has subtly changed: Now it’s that we're giving Ukraine all our bullets and missiles and phased-out stockpiled vehicles, which means we're not going to have any bullets or missiles or mothballed vehicles left over for ourselves, and our troops will have to train using water pistols and tactical assault bicycles.

What might be most on Trump's mind, however, is that he still really, really wants to build a new hotel in Moscow or God knows where, and it's very hard for him to suck up to Russian mob boss Vladimir Putin when he is unable to stop the United States from arming Ukraine.

So what does he do? Well, this is Donald we're talking about, so he repeats the same bullshit-premised propaganda Giuliani delivered to him the very first time around. It’s a theory about how Russia was completely innocent of both conducting espionage operations against the United States with the aim of making Trump president, and of attempting to seize control of Ukraine.

In the Giuliani-Russia retelling, it was Trump's political enemies who did the real "hacking," and they did it with the help of "Ukraine” (because sure why the f--k not), and Russia was framed for all the rest of it by Hillary Clinton. And, uh, then-Vice President Joe Biden's shiftless adult son. And the former comedian-turned-new-Ukrainian-president.

And Trump is still pushing this completely insane counternarrative, one in which the Democratic National Committee apparently hid (?) a secret server in Ukraine and leaked their own information to frame Russia. Then Hunter Biden got a consulting gig in Ukraine. He claims that unlike Paul Manafort and Giuliani's aggressive humping of European strongmen and criminals, that was actually the real scandal here. And when you say it all at once, it's so painfully stupid that you can see why the masterminds of these theories would find themselves accidentally booking press conferences in the Four Seasons Landscaping driveway just a few effing months later.

That is what Donald Trump has on offer as the seditionist coup leader scrapes together a post-treason, post-indictments second act: retreads. The man is still clinging to the original, Giuliani-authored plan that resulted in his damn impeachment!

Donate to help those escaping Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine.

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Ken Paxton is suddenly worried about ‘impartiality’ in his Texas impeachment trial

Suspended Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton remains indicted on account of crimes, but his more urgent problem is his recent impeachment at the hands of his fellow Republicans. The state Legislature voted to impeach Paxton after his history of crookedness in the attorney general's office became impossible for even Texas Republicans to ignore. Paxton will now face an impeachment trial in the state Senate.

Paxton, however, remains an enormous whining baby and is still trying to stack the deck in his own favor with a new demand that not all of the Senate be allowed to vote in his trial. Paxton's lawyers are now asking Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to bar three Democratic state senators from the trial because those lawmakers have said very mean things about him and are therefore not impartial.

A basic principle of due process is that the accused is entitled to an unbiased jury. Like numerous courts around the country, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has held for almost a century that potential jurors with a bias or prejudice against the accused are disqualified from serving on his jury as a matter of law. Jurors José Menendez, Roland Gutierrez, and Nathan Johnson have such a bias and have proclaimed it loudly, time and again. Gutierrez, for example, has said that the evidence against the Attorney General “could not be refuted.” But that is the purpose of a defense—to attempt to refute the prosecution’s evidence—and the function of a trial—to determine whether that evidence has proven charges beyond a reasonable doubt. No one who has publicly declared the charges against a defendant irrefutable can even play at impartiality, let alone serve in an impartial manner. And Menendez and Johnson are no better.

Blah blah, whine whine, blah blah blah.

Now, all of this is very interesting or whatever but Paxton's entire letter goes to great lengths to dodge the core point of the matter: Ken Paxton ain't facing the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. He may have forgotten, but right now he's facing an impeachment trial run by the Texas Senate, not a criminal trial in a criminal courtroom, and all this whining about how dare state senators have opinions about the evidence in his trial is nothing but a gigantic bullshit fountain premised on pretending that the two things are the same.

Did Paxton's lawyers write this up for Paxton's eventual upcoming criminal trial, but accidentally stick it in the wrong envelope? Since when did Republicans give a shit about enforcing "impartiality" in an impeachment trial?

Yeah, that's what we all remember most about Donald Trump's two separate impeachment trials—all of the Republicans refusing to render early judgment about Trump’s guilt because of the impartiality of the process. We can't even count all the Republicans who recused themselves from the proceedings due to their inability to be impartial except oh wait—we can, it was zero. Zero Republicans.

What's really going on here is that Ken Paxton is a uniquely gutless sack of corruption still looking to game the system however he can, and removing three Democratic senators from the voting pool would mean that the 21 votes for Paxton's removal from office would have to come from just 27 eligible senators instead of 31. That's a much tougher hurdle, even if a good chunk of Texas Republicans are finally sick enough of Paxton's crookedness to want to be rid of him.

As for evidence of how shallow Paxton’s alleged desire for fairness is, one of Paxton's activist buddies has filed a lawsuit demanding that Paxton's wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, be allowed to vote in the impeachment trial. That’s because the state Senate passed rules requiring her recusal due to her being married to the man being impeached for, among other things, arranging a cushy new job for a woman he had an affair with.

Oh no, three Democratic senators have expressed their belief that the evidence shows Ken Paxton to be a crooked sack of crookedness. However will the impeachment trial go on when such injustice is at play?

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CNN: House Ethics Committee is interviewing witnesses in revived Matt Gaetz probe

There are new signs today that the House Ethics Committee investigation into Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz may not be as dead in the water as most of us assumed it was, with Republicans in control of the House and laser-focused on obstructing investigations into Republican corruption rather than furthering them.

Gaetz must have royally pissed someone off, because CNN is now reporting that Ethics Committee investigators "have begun reaching out to witnesses as part of a recently revived investigation" into the Florida man. The original investigation began in 2021, when Democrats were still in control of the House.

As for which House "ethics" Gaetz is accused of, breaching, the CNN story evades the details so that stray internet children don't get an eyeful of them, but Gaetz was caught up in the corruption scandal centered on ex-Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, who was sentenced last year to 11 years in prison for sex trafficking of a minor, wire fraud, bribery, and other crimes. That investigation resulted in accusations that Gaetz had, with Greenberg's assistance, paid at least 15 women for sex, including at least one who was underage at the time. Reporters soon found enough witnesses to report Gaetz's 2019 use of an Orlando hotel room for a cocaine-fueled sex party. Gaetz has also been caught in a bizarre bit of apparent campaign money laundering and, well, take your pick.

The Department of Justice originally asked the House Ethics Committee to suspend its own investigation while federal law enforcement investigated those and other charges, but eventually decided to close the investigation without charges. That frees House investigators to resume their work, and apparently they ... might actually be doing it now?

Before you get carried away, note that CNN reports House investigators focused their questions on "possible lobbying violations" in their interview with CNN's anonymous source. That doesn't necessarily mean that House Republicans are still holding off on investigating the charges that one of their most notorious members is a sex-trafficking cocaine fiend, but a cynic might point out that a Republican-neutered Ethics Committee might be more eager to launch a hard-nosed probe of financial violations than to poke the hornet's nest of who, in their House Republican ranks, is spending their off time attending conservative coke orgies.

We shall see. In the meantime, Gaetz himself seems quite eager to divert attention elsewhere. On Tuesday he appeared on conspiracy network Newsmax, where he engaged in another bit of Russian boosterism while sniffling at Ukraine's bid for NATO membership.

"Why would you pick Ukraine? Why not extend NATO to Russia and make it an anti-China alliance?" Gaetz asked stupidly. "Are we really thinking that we're more afraid of the broke-down tanks from Russia than the fact that China is building a secret military base on the island of Cuba, 90 miles away from the United States?"

I'm not sure he's going to win any Putin Points for mocking the Russian army as "broke-down," as accurate as that may be. But does Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida really not know why NATO might not be eager to add a kleptocratic mob state to the alliance's rosters? A kleptocratic dictatorship that is currently engaged in an attempted European war of conquest, no less?

Look, I think we can all understand why the alleged cocaine orgy guy still has a soft spot for Vladimir Freaking Putin, but he might want to rein it in a bit while his fellow Republicans are deciding what to do about him. It's still likely that Republicans will sweep every ethics allegation against Gaetz back under the rug, once they've done enough due diligence to assure themselves that his scandals remain sweepable, but Gaetz has clearly pissed enough of his colleagues off that it's not a sure thing.

It'd be a real hoot if House investigators decided to interview former Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn for his thoughts on Washington, D.C., cocaine orgies, while they're at it. Wouldn't you love to be a fly on that wall?

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Republicans consider a novel way to obstruct investigations of Trump

Well, here we go again. House Republicans have been shrieking that they're going to impeach a whole passel of top officials in the Joe Biden administration for supposed crimes that include investigating seditionist Donald Trump too much and investigating Hunter Biden too little, but every once in a while one of them remembers that Congress also has the power to simply zero out the salaries of any executive branch employees they don't particularly like.

It's akin to a bill of attainder targeting a particular executive official's career. Frustrated congressional cornballs have been sporadically remembering the power for years now, especially whenever some government agency does something that they really super do not like but can't muster the legislative votes to actually change.

Politico reports that House Republican cranks are again threatening to use this power, probably after someone in the Freedom Caucus sobered up long enough to remember it existed. The possible targets reportedly include Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and "some are hoping to use the procedure on investigators working for special counsel Jack Smith."

That last part is another bit of nice, clean proof that at least "some" House Republicans are eager to use their positions as U.S. congresscreatures to interfere specifically with the ongoing investigations and criminal charges against the coup-attempting, document-stealing Donald Trump. As House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's bag of deplorables prepare to begin impeachment proceedings against Garland for not finding anything except petty crimes to indict Hunter Biden on, yet again disrupting one of Rudy Giuliani and Republicanism's most grand pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine conspiracy theories, and enraging the petty fascists of the party beyond all hope of reason, there are at least some bozos in the caucus eager to target the Jack Smith investigation specifically.

It’s a simple enough strategy: Zero out the salaries of any Department of Justice or FBI official involved with prosecuting Trump for lying to federal officials about stolen national security documents, and you'll neatly empty out the offices of anyone willing to pursue Trump's crimes. It's a gleefully corrupt act, all premised on the House Republican insistence that the government must arrest their enemies for committing crimes they can't prove while letting powerful Republicans get away with crimes even if they're caught in the act.

And this is why it's perfectly reasonable to conclude that the Freedom Caucus and allies are not so much a political caucus as an organized crime ring. Not a well-organized crime ring, mind you, but organized enough.

Now that Politico has brought us this news, it's time for the usual caveats. Guess what? House Republicans won't actually be able to zero out salaries whether they "want" to or not, and that's because the whole scheme has the same flaw that supposed impeachment of federal officials does. The Democratic-held Senate would have to agree, and the Senate has no interest in helping Jim Jordan's crime spree along. A bill to do this would go nowhere.

It's also an arcane enough move that one imagines it wouldn't be worth all that much for House Republicans to try it for the sake of campaign trail bragging rights: "I tried to take away Merrick Garland's paycheck but it didn't work" isn't the best bullet point for a campaign flier. House Republicans will instead probably keep moving forward with a Garland impeachment "investigation," solely because it would be an opportunity for an extended, months-long spectacle. Jordan and other House Republicans are still clamoring for revenge against House Democrats who had the audacity to impeach Trump twice: once for attempting to extort the Ukrainian government for personal gain, and once for that whole "attempting to violently overthrow the United States government" thing.

Remember, too, that Jordan's been demanding state and federal prosecutors turn over their case materials to him in the cases where Trump has already been indicted. House Republicans aren't just interfering with the multiple criminal investigations of Trump, they're doing it repeatedly, continually, and as an explicit strategy. And why wouldn't they? They were willing to obstruct investigations of an attempted Republican coup, they're hardly going to recoil at this sort of old-school corruption.

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