House GOP’s latest attempt to cling to power is just so lazy

Posted on September 25, 2024 by Morgan Stephens

Members of Congress are heading home for the final reelection sprint, and you can almost hear the scurrying footsteps as Republican lawmakers flee from their duties. They’re vacating the Capitol earlier than usual, and that’s not a shock. As Daily Kos reported, House Republicans have trouble with actual governing—but when it comes to vindictive “investigations,” their energy is endless

This exodus will take place after a Wednesday night House vote on a funding bill that will keep the government open through Dec. 20. The continuing resolution is expected to pass, but it’s worth keeping an eye on which Republicans vote against it—and why, other than to throw spokes in the wheels of legislative efficiency.

Congress will return after the November election to a long to-do list, including annual defense authorization funding, a farm bill that needs extending, and tax and health care provisions that need finalizing. As Punchbowl News writes, “all of this is being left undone as lawmakers head home to take care of their ultimate must-have—getting reelected.”

But instead of focusing on, you know, keeping the government running, the House GOP is going after President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and a Cabinet member.

On Wednesday, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee announced it is investigating the Biden-Harris administration for flying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to Pennsylvania ahead of the 2024 presidential election, alleging that he was in effect campaigning for Harris.

“If the Biden-Harris Administration attempted to use a foreign leader to benefit the Vice President’s presidential campaign, this is an abuse of power and misuse of taxpayer dollars,” the committee wrote in a statement on X.

Another misuse of taxpayer dollars would be to use them to fund futile investigations, hearings, and impeachment efforts.

The fractured and feckless House GOP has more lofty plans when Congress comes back in November: Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul on Tuesday announced a resolution to hold Secretary of State Antony Blinken in contempt of Congress for not appearing before the committee on days when Blinken was in Egypt, France, and at the United Nations General Assembly doing his actual job. The committee demanded that Blinken show up to testify on the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The full House could vote to hold Blinken in contempt of Congress, and kick it up to the Justice Department. That seems like an important objective when their efforts to impeach Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Biden all went nowhere.

Republicans’ focus on all the wrong issues highlights their struggle to show Americans that they are actually working to improve their lives. However, this hasn’t stopped them from resorting to familiar obstructionist tactics.

While Wednesday’s stopgap government spending bill may have the votes, the future remains uncertain. House Speaker Mike Johnson has promised to torpedo the so-called Christmas omnibus bill, which has historically been used to fund the government in one fell swoop. His obstinance means Congress members may not be able to return home in time for the holidays. Bah humbug.

“There won’t be a Christmas omnibus,” Johnson vowed at a Tuesday press conference.

As Americans struggle with a housing affordability crisis, slashed reproductive rights, and high food costs, Republicans are running fool’s errands as they keep targeting Biden and administration officials who will be out of office come January.

Who needs to fund the government anyway?

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These swing-state Republicans promise to certify election even if Trump loses

Posted on September 13, 2024 by Oliver Willis

Thirty-two members of Congress have signed a “Unity Commitment” pledging to respect the results of the upcoming presidential election, certify the results, and attend the inauguration while calling for calm and opposing related political violence, according to a copy of the pledge obtained by Politico and released on Friday.

Historically, certifying election results has been a routine function of Congress, conducted without controversy or violence—until supporters of Donald Trump rioted at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Six of the 32 pledge’s signatories are Republicans, with most coming from swing districts. They are Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon, and Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, and Anthony D’Esposito, all from New York. The remaining 26 signatories are Democrats.

Bacon, who represents Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, organized the pledge with Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey. Bacon’s district is of unusual importance to the 2024 election because it exists in one of only two states (along with Maine) that allocates part of its Electoral College vote based on which candidate wins in the district. In 2020, President Joe Biden won one of his 306 electoral votes from the district, defeating Donald Trump. And Bacon was reelected to his seat in 2022 by less than 3 percentage points.

Similarly, Fitzpatrick, Lawler, Chavez-DeRemer, and D’Esposito won by just single digits that year, though LaLota won by 11 points. Those who were in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, also voted to certify Biden’s victory over Trump. In total, 147 Republicans—139 in the House, eight in the Senate—voted against certifying the 2020 results.

In all likelihood, the Republicans who signed the Unity Commitment face constituents who are less likely to buy into the election denialism promoted by right-wing figures like Donald Trump.

By contrast, on the same day the pledge was released, Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin said on CNN that he would not commit to certifying the results. Mullin’s home state has strongly supported Trump’s campaigns, with Trump winning it by over 30 points in 2020.

“I’m not going to sit up here and tell you what I’m going to do and not going to do until I see the results,” he told CNN host Pamela Brown.

Mullin’s remarks follow Trump once again lying during Tuesday’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that he won the 2020 race.

Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, similarly said in a recent interview that he would have supported fake electors in 2020 that falsely claimed Trump had won, a process which would have invalidated millions of Biden-Harris votes.

Law enforcement officials recently announced enhanced security procedures meant to prevent another Jan. 6-style event. The Secret Service on Wednesday said it had designated the upcoming certification of the presidential election as a “National Special Security Event,” following a request from Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser.

Seven deaths have been tied to the 2021 attack, as have the assaults of at least 174 police officers. Trump was impeached for a second time and has been indicted for allegedly inciting the incident.

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Biden wins on Ukraine as House GOP faces big decision about its future

Posted on April 22, 2024 by Joan McCarter

President Joe Biden and Democrats won big in the House Saturday, when it voted resoundingly in support of Ukraine aid. This could mark a turning point for Republicans, leaving them with a choice: to admit defeat and start governing, or to keep fighting with each other.

For months, both former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and current Speaker Mike Johnson have catered to Donald Trump and the MAGA wing of the House GOP on Ukraine aid, insisting that it could not pass without a harsh immigration and border security bill. Once they got that, they turned it down at Trump’s request. Now there’s Ukraine aid and no border deal—a big loss for far-right Republicans and Trump.

This could signal that the fever has finally broken among the governing bloc of the GOP … or not. What it has done is unleash a torrent of anger against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and the extremist Freedom Caucus by some non-MAGA members.

Before the vote, Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas slammed his colleagues, saying, “I guess their reasoning is they want Russia to win so badly that they want to oust the speaker over it, I mean that’s a strange position to take … I think they want to be in the minority too, I think that’s an obvious reality.”

Even Biden impeachment zealot Rep. James Comer denounced Greene’s efforts to oust Johnson in an interview on Fox News.

“Now Mike Johnson walked into a bad situation,” Comer said. “It’s gotten a lot worse since he’s been here. But changing speakers is not the right business model.”

Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas completely unleashed his anger toward his MAGA colleagues on Sunday, calling them “scumbags” who “used to walk around in white hoods at night. Now they’re walking around with white hoods in the daytime,” during an interview on CNN.

YouTube Video

But Greene and her accomplices are showing no signs of backing down.

“There is more support,” for her efforts, Greene said Monday. “It's growing. I've said from the beginning, I'm going to be responsible with this ... I do not support Mike Johnson. He's already a lame duck. If we have the vote today in our conference he would not be speaker today.”

Greene’s cosponsor Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky said Friday, "We want Mike Johnson to resign. We don't want to go speaker-less. So the goal is to show him, through co-sponsorship, how much support he's lost and hopefully he'll get the message and give us a notice so that we have time ... to replace him.”

That’s a tacit acknowledgement that they’d lose on the House floor if they tried to force Johnson out, since enough Democrats would vote to keep him now that he’s finally done the right thing. So it’s really up to the rest of the Republicans to decide. Will they squash Greene and her team once and for all? Will they accept that anything they accomplish in the remainder of this election year will have to involve Democrats and finally stop with the ridiculous messaging nonsense? (Fat chance.)

Meanwhile, most of Biden’s major priorities have been successful, including the securing of a debt limit deal with McCarthy. Despite the maniacs’ best effort, the government did not shut down and was funded at adequate levels. Now Ukraine will finally get the critical aid it needs to stave off Russia once the Senate passes the bill on Tuesday.

On top of all that, the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas collapsed, and the Biden impeachment is dead in the water.

House Democrats hold Johnson’s fate in their hands, and everyone knows it—including the majority of Republicans. Has the fever broken in the GOP? Not as long as Trump is alive and kicking, though his political days might be numbered.

There are likely still big fights to come over next year’s budget, and it’s going to be up to the House GOP to figure out how to salvage something out of its tiny majority before the election.

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Republicans get Ukraine demands met, so of course they change their minds

Mike Johnson owes everything to Democrats, and it could cost him his gavel

The House GOP’s margin for error is on track to shrink to just one vote

Posted on March 12, 2024 by David Nir

Hah oh man! House Speaker Mike Johnson’s epic struggles to count votes and keep his caucus in line are about to get a whole lot rougher.

One of Johnson’s least-favorite members, Colorado Rep. Ken Buck, just announced that he’s resigning next week. How least-favorite? Johnson says that Buck—who had already said back in November that he wouldn’t seek reelection—didn’t even inform him ahead of time, reports Politico’s Olivia Beavers.

But intra-party hostilities aside, what matters most is how Buck’s departure affects Johnson’s math. In short, it’s not good.

At the moment, there are 219 Republicans in the House and 213 Democrats. This means that on any given vote, the GOP can afford a maximum of two defections. If three Republicans switch sides to join with Democrats on a particular roll call, then whatever is up for a vote dies, because a 216-216 tie is the same as a loss.

When Buck leaves, that margin will slip to 218-213. But on April 30, Democrats are the heavy favorites to regain one seat in the special election for upstate New York’s vacant 26th District, a solidly blue seat in the Buffalo area. That would take the House to 218-214, and then things get really interesting.

That’s because it would take just two Republicans to tank any vote as long as Democrats stick together, which they have with remarkable consistency. Once again, a 216-all tie sinks any GOP bill, resolution, impeachment—what have you.

In other words, Johnson’s magic number would shrink to exactly one vote. That is to say, if more than one Republican representative has some kind of grievance with the speaker, or the legislation being proposed, or just woke up grumpy that morning, then boom, dead, done. To the extent Johnson has any agenda he might hope to advance, it would take only two dissenters to derail it.

Now, there’s a possible wrinkle: The vacant seat that once belonged to the hapless pol Johnson succeeded as speaker—Kevin McCarthy—will also see a special election next week. However, if no one wins a majority of the vote, then there would be a runoff in late May. And there’s very good reason to think that’s exactly what will happen, because, following last week’s regularly scheduled primary, the first-place candidate (funny enough, a McCarthy protégé) is sitting on just 38% of the vote.

Of course, Johnson will still pray that McCarthy’s seat gets filled as quickly as possible, however poor the odds. Because the only thing worse is the math he’ll face if it doesn’t.

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House GOP votes to impeach Mayorkas, after failing first attempt

Posted on February 14, 2024 by Associated Press

The U.S. House voted Tuesday to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, with the Republican majority determined to punish the Biden administration over its handling of the U.S-Mexico border after failing last week in a politically embarrassing setback.

The evening roll call proved tight, with Speaker Mike Johnson’s threadbare GOP majority unable to handle many defectors or absences in the face of staunch Democratic opposition to impeaching Mayorkas, the first Cabinet secretary facing charges in nearly 150 years.

In a historic rebuke, the House impeached Mayorkas 214-213. With the return of Majority Leader Steve Scalise to bolster the GOP's numbers after being away from Washington for cancer care and a Northeastern storm impacting some others, Republicans recouped — despite dissent from their own ranks.

Johnson had posted a fists-clenched photo with Scalise, announcing his remission from cancer, saying, “looking forward to having him back in the trenches this week!”

The GOP effort to impeach Mayorkas over his handling of the southern border has taken on an air of political desperation as Republicans struggle to make good on their priorities.

Mayorkas faced two articles of impeachment filed by the Homeland Security Committee arguing that he “willfully and systematically” refused to enforce existing immigration laws and that he breached the public trust by lying to Congress and saying the border was secure.

But critics of the impeachment effort said the charges against Mayorkas amount to a policy dispute over Biden's border policy, hardly rising to the Constitution's bar of high crimes and misdemeanors.

The House had initially launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden over his son’s business dealings, but instead turned its attention to Mayorkas after Trump ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia pushed the debate forward following the panel’s months-long investigation.

The charges against Mayorkas would next go to the Senate for a trial, but neither Democratic nor Republican senators have shown interest in the matter and it may be indefinitely shelved to a committee.

Border security has shot to the top of campaign issues, with Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination, insisting he will launch “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” if he retakes the White House.

Various House Republicans have prepared legislation to begin deporting migrants who were temporarily allowed into the U.S. under the Biden administration’s policies, many as they await adjudication of asylum claims.

“We have no choice,” Trump said in stark language at a weekend rally in South Carolina.

At the same time, Johnson rejected a bipartisan Senate border security package but has been unable to advance Republicans’ own proposal which is a nonstarter in the Senate.

Three Republican representatives broke ranks last week over the Mayorkas impeachment, which several leading conservative scholars have dismissed as unwarranted and a waste of time. With a 219-212 majority, Johnson had few votes to spare.

Mayorkas is not the only Biden administration official the House Republicans want to impeach. They have filed legislation to impeach a long list including Vice President Kamala Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Never before has a sitting Cabinet secretary been impeached, and it was nearly 150 years ago that the House voted to impeach President Ulysses S. Grant’s secretary of war, William Belknap, over a kickback scheme in government contracts. He resigned before the vote.

Mayorkas, who did not appear to testify before the impeachment proceedings, put the border crisis squarely on Congress for failing to update immigration laws during a time of global migration.

“There is no question that we have a challenge, a crisis at the border,” Mayorkas said over the weekend on NBC. “And there is no question that Congress needs to fix it.”

Johnson and the Republicans have pushed back, arguing that the Biden administration could take executive actions, as Trump did, to stop the number of crossings — though the courts have questioned and turned back some of those efforts.

“We always explore what options are available to us that are permissible under the law,” Mayorkas said.

Last week's failed vote to impeach Mayorkas — a surprise outcome rarely seen on such a high-profile issue — was a stunning display in the chamber that has been churning through months of GOP chaos since the ouster of the previous House speaker.

One of the Republican holdouts, Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, who had served as a Marine, announced over the weekend he would not be seeking reelection in the fall, joining a growing list of serious-minded Republican lawmakers heading for the exits.

At the time, Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, who had been hospitalized for emergency abdominal surgery, made a surprise arrival, wheeled into the chamber in scrubs and socks to vote against it — leaving the vote tied, and failed.

“Obviously, you feel good when you can make a difference,” said Green, describing his painstaking route from hospital bed to the House floor. “All I did was what I was elected to do, and that was to cast my vote on the issues of our time, using the best judgment available to me.”

Republicans are hopeful the New York special election will boost their ranks further, but the outcome of that race is uncertain.

Trump allies ridicule GOP impeachment inquiry for failing to find dirt on Biden

Posted on January 25, 2024 by Kerry Eleveld

As he closes in on the Republican nomination, Donald Trump needs House Republicans to deliver an equalizer for him in the general election: an impeachment of President Joe Biden.

But after a yearlong investigation led by the House oversight committee chair, Rep. James Comer, Republicans seem no closer to digging up any actionable dirt on Biden. That leads to two conclusions:

If the pro-Trump House GOP conference hasn't found anything on Biden, it's unlikely anything legally actionable exists.
It becomes even more imperative for House Republicans to scrape together something Trump can work with.

After all, when pundits call him the twice-impeached, four-time indictee, Trump has to be able to point at Biden and say he's the one who's really corrupt. Just look at what Congress found on him. It's very reminiscent of Trump attempting to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into opening a bogus investigation into Biden. Only now, Trump has so many legal liabilities, he needs more than just the specter of wrongdoing—he needs the goods. And according to some fascinating reporting from The Messenger's Stephen Neukam, Trump has taken note of the fact that he's currently got nothing on which to spin a corruption narrative.

“Comer has cast a wide net and caught very little fish. That is a big problem for him,” one ally of Trump told The Messenger.

The reporting is informed by more than a dozen anonymous interviews, including a House Republican colleague who calls Comer's inquiry a "parade of embarrassments."

“One would be hard pressed to find the best moment for James Comer in the Oversight Committee,” the GOP lawmaker said.

But in many ways, the leaks seem specifically designed to put Comer on notice that he not only needs to produce, but he'll be singularly on the hook if he doesn't.

“James Comer continues to embarrass himself and House Republicans. He screws up over and over and over," said a source identified as "close" to House GOP leadership, who appeared to be playing CYA for the leadership team. The source's big fear was that Comer would ultimately fail to provide the foundation necessary (i.e. evidence) to follow through with impeaching Biden.

“I don’t know how Republicans actually impeach the president based on [Comer's] clueless investigation and lack of leadership,” said the source.

The quotes had the feel of a failed campaign staff pointing fingers at each other as the ship goes down, only the campaign in this case is the Republican effort to impeach Biden.

Publicly, of course, House leaders are expressing full confidence in Comer.

"I am grateful for the superb efforts of Chairman Comer," Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement, while House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Comer had "worked tirelessly" on the investigation.

But Comer's misfires have become legendary: providing nothing substantive, just a series of accusations and innuendo that don't amount to a hill of beans. In fact, Comer's investigation has become a punch line in the media. As Daily Kos' Mark Sumner wrote in November, Comer had uncovered another "smoking water pistol."

In fact, just last month, CNN's Jake Tapper mocked Comer during a live interview.

Watch only Jake Tapper for the entire 45 seconds of this ridiculous interview with James Comer Pyle. The facial expressions are classic. The GOP deemed THIS guy as their best person to get Joe and Hunter Biden. Republicans embarrass the U.S. daily.pic.twitter.com/eR0jN5odc5
— BigBlueWaveUSA® 🇺🇸🌊🇺🇦 (@BigBlueWaveUSA) December 8, 2023

And when the oversight committee met earlier this month to debate holding Hunter Biden in contempt for refusing to give closed-door testimony, the younger Biden made a laughingstock of House Republicans by staging a surprise press conference in which he volunteered to provide public testimony.

“It seems like they got played by Hunter Biden,” a senior House GOP aide told The Messenger. “It was a disaster. They looked like buffoons.”

To sum up, the boss needs production, Comer has become a national joke, and the House leadership is happily hanging him out to dry.

In response, Comer issued a statement through a spokesperson saying that oversight, along with the Judiciary and Ways and Means committees, are coordinating to "determine whether President Biden's conduct warrants articles of impeachment."

Yeah, that's not gonna cut it.

"You have to start producing," one Trump ally said. "The base is starting to get more and more frustrated with him because they see all this smoke but they don’t see the movement.”

If that sounds like a mob-boss threat, that’s because it is.

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House GOP kicks off a new year of dysfunction with another impeachment

Posted on January 3, 2024 by Joan McCarter

Trust the Republican House to make a difficult situation exponentially worse. Not content with establishing a new record of dysfunction and ineffectiveness in the first session of the 118th Congress, they’re kicking off the second year with another waste of precious time: a second baseless impeachment, this time against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. It’s basically the first thing on their agenda when they return to work next week, with the first hearing scheduled for Jan. 10.

Never mind that the first deadline for a partial government shutdown is Jan. 19, and the House has made zero progress in meeting it. Instead, Republican leadership has chosen to start impeachment proceedings against Mayorkas for his “decision-making and refusal to enforce the laws passed by Congress, and that his failure to fulfill his oath of office demands accountability,” according to Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green of Tennessee.

Mayorkas’ team at DHS slapped back. “The House majority is wasting valuable time and taxpayer dollars pursuing a baseless political exercise that has been rejected by members of both parties and already failed on a bipartisan vote,” spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg said in a statement.

The White House was equally scathing. “Actions speak louder than words,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement. “House Republicans’ anti-border security record is defined by attempting to cut Customs and Border Protection personnel, opposing President Biden’s record-breaking border security funding, and refusing to take up the President’s supplemental funding request.”

“After voting in 2023 to eliminate over 2,000 Border Patrol agents and erode our capacity to seize fentanyl earlier in 2023, House Republicans left Washington in mid-December even as President Biden and Republicans and Democrats in the Senate remained to forge ahead on a bipartisan agreement,” Bates said.

That Senate effort—which aims to find a compromise on immigration that will get enough Republican votes to allow aid to Ukraine to continue—is ongoing, though its success is far from certain since the House GOP is working to poison it. Senate Republicans will point to the House GOP’s opposition to justify their refusal to support any agreement. To that end, House Speaker Mike Johnson is spearheading another stunt, leading a delegation of about 60 Republican House members to visit a border facility near Eagle Pass, Texas, on Wednesday.

Johnson’s trip is fueling the hard-line stance on immigration, but he’s also painting himself into a corner with the House extremists. Catering to the hard right on immigration is extremely unlikely to help him avert a government shutdown—since a government shutdown is what the Freedom Caucus wants.

Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, a prominent member of the caucus, made that clear enough in a letter Tuesday, writing that he was skipping this trip to the border because it is not enough. "Our people—law enforcement, ranchers, local leaders—are tired of meetings, speeches, and press conferences,” he said, adding that the House should be “withholding funding for the vast majority of the federal government until it performs its basic duty to defend the borders of a supposedly sovereign nation."

The more Johnson bends to extremists on immigration, the more emboldened they will be to force a shutdown over the issue. He’s setting himself up for failure, for the very same trap that every Republican speaker since John Boehner has fallen into. Either Johnson bucks the Freedom Caucus and risks being ousted like former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, or he allows a disastrous shutdown.

Meanwhile, there’s reality: In the past week, illegal border crossings have decreased. But reality isn’t likely to make any difference to Republicans; it rarely does.

It's official: GOP House did a whole lot of nothing this year

White House engages on Ukraine/immigration stalemate

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House Republicans hand Democrats an early 2024 gift: A fact-free impeachment inquiry

Posted on December 14, 2023 by Kerry Eleveld

House Republicans voted unanimously Wednesday to open an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. They will live to regret it.

Even under the best and most convincing of circumstances, impeachments are typically unpopular. After Donald Trump sicced a violent mob on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, only a slender majority of Americans supported impeaching him. A Monmouth University poll conducted shortly after Trump's impeachment on Jan. 13 found that 56% of Americans favored his impeachment and Senate conviction, including 92% of Democrats but just 52% of independents, despite the Jan. 6 insurrection unfolding on live television for all of America to see.

Fast forward to this week, with Republican Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado telling CNN Monday, "This is not the way to run a Congress. This is not the way to run a House. We should not be engaging in retribution politics, in retribution impeachments.”

Still, Buck couldn’t bring himself to buck his fellow Republicans on the party-line vote.

Republican Rep. Ken Buck: “This is not the way to run a Congress. This is not the way to run a House. We should not be engaging in retribution politics, in retribution impeachments.” pic.twitter.com/YgJJFRpRz8
— Ian Sams (@IanSams46) December 12, 2023

Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa admitted Wednesday that Republicans had "no evidence" on which to conclude the president is guilty of any high crimes or misdemeanors.

"I'm going to follow the facts where they are, and the facts haven't taken me to that point where I can say the president is guilty of anything," Grassley told CNN's Manu Raju.

Amazing. Chuck Grassley admits "I have no evidence ... the fact haven't taken me to that point where I can say the president is guilty of anything." pic.twitter.com/fCuVcNLTB0
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 13, 2023

This impeachment should be embarrassing to Republicans, and yet the bubble of far-right politics has given them the courage of their fact-free convictions.

Democrats should thank them. After months of polling showing a tight 2024 presidential contest with whiffs of sagging Democratic enthusiasm for Biden's reelection, Republicans have handed Democrats a base-energizer.

Democratic voters will be rightfully outraged that Republicans would launch an inquiry when they have zero supporting evidence despite a year-long investigation into Biden’s supposed misdeeds that turned up squat.

Just wait for the polling. Republicans may be hermetically sealed from reality, but the majority of voters are not—particularly those in some 17 Biden-won swing districts that are currently represented by Republicans.

Need detailed info on the 18 Biden-Republican districts in the House? We've got you covered at this link! https://t.co/lEcCvxvfqi (Trump-Democratic districts are on a second tab) pic.twitter.com/i3aXnHzUys
— Daily Kos Elections (@DKElections) October 18, 2023

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Are the handful of GOP impeachment holdouts ‘centrists’?

Posted on December 12, 2023 by Hunter

A new Politico story gives a sliver of fresh information on House Republicans' push to impeach Joe Biden: Not only has just one Republican member announced he will vote “no” on a planned vote to formally authorize the so-far unofficial impeachment inquiry, but of the entire caucus, all except "about a half-dozen" members are now supporting the vote.

The opposing vote is from Rep. Ken Buck. He is nobody's idea of a moderate, but he has expressed repeated unwillingness to support efforts by his own party to nullify an American election and propagate hoaxes meant to delegitimize it. (Buck is also retiring from Congress at the end of his term.)

It's Politico's framing of the half-dozen holdouts that's a bit galling.

"House GOP chips away at centrist resistance on Biden impeachment inquiry," says the Politico headline.

Not sure how you can call the half-an-egg-carton of holdouts "centrists" on this one, Politico. Those six or so representatives hail from swing districts, the site reports, so the more appropriate designation might be "cowards."

It's not centrist to be undecided on whether or not an impeachment inquiry based on not even a shred of evidence of actual wrongdoing (but a whole lot of unhinged and provably false conspiracy theories) should go forward solely because the coup-attempting Donald Trump, now indicted in four separate jurisdictions, was impeached twice and Trump's also-coup-supporting admirers have been obsessed with inflicting revenge on everyone who ever caught Trump committing alleged crimes. No, it's just cowardice. The undecided members are trying to gauge which will cost them more votes: supporting a clearly spurious and revenge-based impeachment and infuriating swing voters, or not supporting impeachment, which will infuriate the far-right elements of their base.

It's a tough call for sure, but it's not centrist. It's just a craven attempt to govern based not on principle but instead on what will best boost their own personal interests. By the same token, you could call a pickpocket who made off with their wallets a "centrist" because they ignored laws and morality to squarely focus on "What should I do if I want to have more money?"

And this bit is just maddening:

But some moderate Republicans argue that a lack of cooperation from Hunter Biden and other family members has forced the GOP’s hand. Formalizing the investigation would boost the GOP’s leverage in its pursuit of documents and witnesses, they say, and represents just one step in the process.

Come again? Hunter Biden is showing a "lack of cooperation" in disproving an ever-shifting range of conspiracy theories, most of them disprovable by even the most basic fact-checking?

How is he supposed to "cooperate" to disprove theories that have no supporting evidence to begin with? Republican hearings have brought forward "evidence," like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's public display of Hunter nudes almost certainly obtained through criminal hacking efforts in attempts to prove who-knows-what.

How is Hunter supposed to more fully "cooperate" with that probe? Do Republicans believe he must now strip naked in front of them, live and in person?

Well, Rep. Jim Jordan probably does.

The coverage of the Republican "impeachment" drive continues to be risible because journalists continue to note the utter lack of evidence as an aside or afterthought in stories that otherwise treat the Republican effort as a credible political process simply by virtue of Republicans willing it to be.

The story here is that despite a lack of evidence that the sitting president has done even a single untoward thing in relation to his son and despite increasingly circus-like efforts to promote hoaxes after Republican investigators could find nothing else, all but seven or so House Republicans support opening an impeachment inquiry anyway in a brazenly dishonest, politically crooked attempt to redirect attention from the unequivocal crookedness of their own coup-attempting, indicted, and openly fascist party leader.

The six or so possible holdouts aren't the story. The uniform corruption that has strangled nearly the entire Republican caucus, though, continues to be the story that will best predict the possible demise of American democracy itself.

Comer's latest bombshell may be his worst dud yet

Hunter Biden asks to testify publicly. House Republicans scurry away in a panic

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Markos and Kerry give their thoughts on what the country is facing in 2024. The Republican Party is running on losing issues like abortion and repealing the ACA—with no explanation of what they plan on replacing it with. Trump has a lot of criming to atone for, and the Republican platform remains set on destroying democracy.

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Disarray alert: House Republicans struggle with slim majority and chaos

Posted on December 7, 2023 by Kerry Eleveld

With the exit of Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the ejection of George Santos, and the impending resignation of Rep. Bill Johnson, House Republicans' bare majority is getting delectably precarious.

Daily Kos Elections political director David Nir games it all out, concluding that Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson will likely end up having a two-vote margin of error on any given measure.

Wherever the numbers end up, Republicans' exceedingly thin majority throughout the 118th Congress has proven to be a blessing in disguise, despite Democrats' failure to keep the majority last cycle. Rarely, if ever, has America seen a more pathetic display of governance than that offered by House Republicans this Congress. The chaos of multiple leadership battles amid the daily display of internecine warfare within the GOP caucus has been both instructive for voters and good for America heading into, yet again, the most consequential election of our lifetimes.

As former Rep. Liz Cheney bluntly noted this week, “A vote for Donald Trump may mean the last election that you ever get to vote in. ... People have to recognize that a vote for Donald Trump is a vote against the Constitution.”

Liz Cheney: “A vote for Donald Trump may mean the last election that you ever get to vote in...People have to recognize that a vote for Donald Trump is a vote against the Constitution.” pic.twitter.com/ryynyn3kE7
— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) December 4, 2023

Cheney also called the prospect of Mike Johnson still being speaker in 2025 "terrifying" in an interview with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.

One of the reasons the race for control of the House is so critical is because it's the 119th Congress that will certify the 2024 election, and House Democrats can serve as a backstop to any Republican election-stealing efforts if Democrats control the chamber.

To the benefit of the pro-democracy side, House Republicans have revealed themselves as completely incapable of leading anything. The message appears to be sinking in, based on Navigator Research polling of roughly 60 battleground districts that will decide control of the House in next year's elections, with nearly 7 in 10 respondents recently saying Republicans have prioritized "the wrong things."

Last month, pro-Trump Rep. Chip Roy of Texas summed up House Republican rule nicely.

“Explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done," Roy said during a floor speech.

Last week, Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries happily riffed off Roy's rant in a press conference during the debate over expelling Santos from his seat.

"House Republicans have now been in the majority for a little under a year—they have nothing to show the American people that they have accomplished.," Jeffries said, mentioning Roy's assertion. "Nothing to meet the needs of the American people," he continued.

“House Republicans have now been in the majority for a little under a year. They have nothing to show the American people that they have accomplished … Don’t take my word for it. Just ask Chip Roy.” — Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries slams House GOP pic.twitter.com/sZqRmt6Cj6
— The Recount (@therecount) November 30, 2023

Fortunately for Democrats, that dynamic won't be changing anytime soon. House Republicans’ next debacle is already in process, with Johnson preparing to hold a vote as soon as next week on initiating a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.

Not only will it not be popular with voters, it's the perfect way for House Republicans to kick off 2024

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