Political journalists boost Republican nonsense—and sabotage democracy

Posted on August 28, 2023 by Hunter

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.

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House Republicans swiftly act to obstruct on Trump’s behalf

Posted on August 24, 2023 by Hunter

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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Florida man Matt Gaetz wants to censure judge in Trump case

Bragg lawsuit shreds Jordan's 'constantly shifting' justifications in intimidation campaign

Republicans consider a novel way to obstruct investigations of Trump

Marjorie Taylor Greene's plan to impeach everyone reaches Merrick Garland

House Republican threatens to defund the police if they keep investigating Donald Trump

Go ahead and impeach Biden, House Republicans. See you in 2024

Posted on July 27, 2023 by Kerry Eleveld

Earlier this week, Fox News congressional correspondent Chad Pergram sent out a short thread of illuminating tweets framed as a "User’s Manual To Where We Stand With Possible 'Impeachments' in the House."

It was indeed helpful, since House Republicans are currently plotting several of them. Pergram’s thread noted that the push to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over something nebulous was “furthest along,” according to a senior House Republican source. "Although that doesn’t mean that it’s THAT far along," Pergram added. In other words, it's not like the GOP caucus has nailed down real evidence in support of actionable wrongdoing yet.

But House Republicans are also weighing impeaching Attorney General Merrick Garland or maybe even President Joe Biden, after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy signaled an openness to it in a Fox News interview on Monday night. McCarthy's public flirtation with the topic was framed to Pergram by a Republican source as "high-level 'trial balloons.'"

"The reason is that McCarthy wants to get a sense of what GOPers want to do," Pergram explained. "And most importantly, where the votes may lie for impeaching anyone."

Anyone? Biden, Garland, Mayorkas—who knows? Maybe they should flip a coin; play rock, paper, scissors; or get out the Magic 8 Ball.

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Back in the day, lawmakers used to investigate these things first, but that's so last Congress. Today’s House Republicans just move on to the vote-counting and figure they'll hash out a rationale later.

Anyhow, the caucus must have been hot on targeting the president because by Tuesday, McCarthy was reportedly "moving closer" to opening an impeachment inquiry.

On the one hand, Republicans say they're "sitting on" loads of evidence. On the other hand, they are justifying an inquiry as a way to obtain information they've been blocked from getting. Which is it, geniuses? Pick a lane.

At least some Republicans are trying to pump the brakes on playing a completely absurd impeachment card as the country gears up for the 2024 presidential cycle.

“It’s a good idea to go to the inquiry stage,” former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich told The Washington Post. But he cautioned that “impeachment itself is a terrible idea.”

Gingrich, who helped lead the impeachment crusade against President Bill Clinton in 1998, stepped down immediately after the Republican House suffered huge losses in the midterm elections.

Still, Gingrich was essentially clearing the way for McCarthy to appease the Republican extremists who own his speaker’s gavel while cautioning him against an actual impeachment proceeding. Gingrich knows a thing or two about impeachment fallout.

Meanwhile, several House Republicans beelined to reporters to downplay McCarthy's escalation. The Biden White House happily highlighted the discord within the GOP caucus in a statement to The Hill.

Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado called McCarthy's tactics "impeachment theater."
Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina told reporters, "no one is seriously talking about impeachment."
Rep. Tony Gonzalez of Texas offered that voters in his district are concerned about "real issues," like inflation (which is actually dropping) and the border (where crossings have actually plummeted).

“The American people want their leaders in Congress to spend their time working with the President on important issues like continuing to lower costs, create good-paying jobs, and strengthen health care,” said the White House statement, calling Republican machinations "baseless stunts."

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also weighed in Wednesday, calling impeachment "not good for the country" while also drawing a false equivalency between House Republicans and the two Democratic impeachments of Donald Trump.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says he's not surprised some House Republicans are proposing an impeachment inquiry of Biden, “having been treated the way they were.” “I think this is not good for the country to have repeated impeachment problems,” McConnell adds. pic.twitter.com/rhKbL8xq0U
— The Recount (@therecount) July 26, 2023

Those impeachment proceedings involved tangible evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors. Then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi actually put off impeachment for as long as humanly possible because she knew it would be a divisive proceeding that could blow up in Democrats' faces. Her hand was finally forced in September 2019 by the whistleblower account of Trump's attempt to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And then Trump actually plotted a blood-thirsty coup attempt on Jan. 6, 2021, to disrupt certification of the 2020 election and end the peaceful transfer of power. So that was that.

But keep this in mind: Both of Trump's impeachments were rooted in hard evidence—like the transcript of Trump's 'perfect phone call' with Zelenskyy, while the Jan. 6 insurrection played out live on TV screens across the country. The horror of that day and Trump's role in it was then vividly recreated by the Jan. 6 committee, arguably the most theatrically effective congressional investigation in decades. In fact, without the Jan. 6 hearings, special counsel Jack Smith likely wouldn't be preparing to drop a criminal indictment on the matter any day now.

In stark contrast to Pelosi’s reticence, House Republicans are still chasing their tails on a mystery scandal with supposed mounds of evidence—if only they had the subpoena power to access it.

As White House spokesperson Ian Sams noted on Tuesday of the House GOP's mystifying predicament, "This is literally nonsensical."

This is literally nonsensical On Hannity last night and in a gaggle today, he said he needs an "impeachment inquiry" to have the power to obtain info Now, McCarthy claims his investigations already "are revealing" info Which is it? Will Capitol reporters press him on this? https://t.co/p3XWGjwLyG
— Ian Sams (@IanSams46) July 25, 2023

Go on with that impeachment, Republicans. The already deluded GOP base will eat it up, but the rest of the country will weigh in at the ballot box next year. See you there.

Nancy Mace and the myth of the moderate Republican

Posted on July 14, 2023 (Updated July 15, 2023) by Kerry Eleveld

One of the supposed "moderates" in the House Republican caucus railed on Thursday against several right-wing amendments to the military budget bill. First, she did so privately.

“We should not be taking this fucking vote, man. Fuck,” Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina fumed, venting to her staff about an extremist measure overturning Pentagon policies to facilitate abortion access for service members. “It's an asshole move, an asshole amendment,” she added, according to Politico.

But once on the House floor, the 'moderate' Mace voted to pass the very amendment she had privately blasted. The anti-abortion measure is now attached to the National Defense Authorization Act House Republicans approved Friday, 219-210, with the help of four Democrats.

Since the Democratically controlled Senate will never agree to the GOP's radical provisions, House Republicans' poison pill amendments risk delaying the must-pass funding bill, which includes raises for service members, among other critical needs. In other words, House Republicans are threatening national security and military readiness in order to advance their wildly unpopular culture warring.

Yet after voting in favor of the forced birther measure, Mace got on her public soap box, telling reporters, “We got to stop being assholes to women, stop targeting women and do the things that make a real difference.”

If she felt so strongly about it, reporters wondered, why had she voted for the amendment?

Mace offered the rather thin reasoning that, because the military doesn't reimburse travel expenses for service members getting elective procedures, it shouldn't reimburse troops traveling to get abortion services. She was, in her telling, trying to be "consistent."

Mace justified her decision to vote for the amendment by insisting it is not “military policy” to reimburse for travel expenses for an elective procedure and she is just trying to be “consistent.”
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) July 14, 2023

Kudos to Mace for the spectacular mental gymnastics. To her credit, she is consistent. But Mace isn't alone as a so-called "moderate" who continues to vote for measures advanced by the most radical members of her caucus.

In fact, all but three of 18 Republicans who currently represent districts Joe Biden won in 2020 voted along with Mace to deprive service members of both time off and reimbursement if they have to cross state lines to access standard reproductive care. The three Republicans who balked were:

Rep. Brandon Williams (New York’s 22nd) abstained from voting.
Rep. John Duarte (California’s 13th) voted against the anti-abortion measure.
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (Pennsylvania’s 1st) voted against the measure.

For reference, here's a chart of the Republican Biden 18, compiled by Daily Kos Elections.

Per @DKElections' calculations, these are the 18 House Republicans who sit in districts that Joe Biden would have carried (Why "would have"? Because of redistricting. We've recalculated the 2020 presidential results for the new districts that have since been adopted) pic.twitter.com/SRjbjUcE5B
— Daily Kos Elections (@DKElections) July 14, 2023

It's worth remembering those 18 because, like Mace, they are often referred to as moderates yet they vote completely in sync with the Republican extremists now running the House. There is little, if any, daylight between them and the far-right extremists in the party when it comes to their votes.

Certainly, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York wanted the public to remember the five GOP members of the New York delegation who failed to vote in favor of preserving service member access to reproductive care. At a Friday press conference regarding the NDAA and the GOP’s poison pill amendments, Jeffries had a helpful visual display of each Republican, in keeping with a specific New York Democratic strategy to unseat every one of them next year.

Jeffries presser prop has an eye towards 2024, singling out NY Rs in Biden-won districts who voted for NDAA amendment on abortion pic.twitter.com/5wTptrppc0
— Nicholas Wu (@nicholaswu12) July 14, 2023

But again, poisoning the NDAA with an anti-abortion measure (along with anti-transgender and anti-diversity provisions) certainly isn't an isolated incident for endangered Republicans in moderate districts.

Last month, all but one of the 18 Biden-district Republicans voted to refer a completely baseless resolution to impeach President Biden to a pair of committees for further investigation. The only Republican in the Biden 18 club who didn't support referring the resolution was Rep. Marc Molinaro (NY-19), who skipped the vote altogether.

Any of those so-called moderates could have voted against referring the resolution, sponsored by extremist Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado. Voting against referral would have been a vote to kill Boebert's harebrained antics, but none of them did.

The fact of the matter is that GOP extremists are now running the House Republican caucus, with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hopelessly trying to mitigate the damage. Because McCarthy owes his gavel to the extremists, he can't risk shutting down any of their maneuvers, no matter how radical, ridiculous, or ruinous they are to the Republican majority.

It follows that the Republican "moderates" exist simply to cast votes in support of the extremists' agenda and complain to reporters while doing it—a role the traditional media clearly relishes. But voters in those moderate districts should take note, because the Republican Party gets more extreme every cycle. There's no room for Republican moderation anymore, except in name only.

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

Posted on July 13, 2023 by Hunter

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?

Matt Gaetz's associate Joel Greenberg sentenced to 11 years for sex trafficking and other crimes

Federal investigation into Matt Gaetz closes without any charges against far-right congressman

Republicans consider a novel way to obstruct investigations of Trump

Posted on July 10, 2023 (Updated July 11, 2023) by Hunter

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.

House Republicans demanding Bragg's evidence against Trump have been coordinating with Trump himself

Republicans use House powers to protect Trump

Republicans use House powers to protect Trump

Posted on June 14, 2023 (Updated June 15, 2023) by Hunter

Every single time we have learned that sedition-backing Donald Trump likely committed a crime, it takes no more than a day for House Republicans to begin planning out how they will best defend him. Every single time, the chosen defense is not that Trump didn't do whatever astonishingly crooked thing investigators have uncovered; instead, they declare that whoever discovered the corruption is part of a vast conspiracy against the career con artist, and that the investigators are the ones who need to be punished and/or jailed.

And every damn time, a coatless Rep. Jim Jordan flings himself in front of the news cameras to be the loudest person whining about it.

Now the House Judiciary Chair, which is about as neat a summation of Republicanism's decline as you could ask for, Jordan is already leading the House Republican charge to sabotage the new federal indictment of Trump under Espionage Act charges. He and his fellow Republicans have settled into a pattern; Jordan is using his perch in Congress to demand that the Justice Department turn over documents about the active criminal case. CNN is now reporting that Jordan is "exploring ways to force [special counsel] Jack Smith to testify or provide information" about the criminal case, and that Jordan has declared that "all options are on the table" when it comes to forcing Smith and others to comply.

This is the now-standard means by which House Republicans look to undermine all investigations into Trump's various acts of corruption; Jordan and House Republicans turned to it immediately after Trump's indictment in New York for cooking Trump Organization books to hide hush money payments during his 2016 campaign. It quickly came to light that House Republicans were coordinating with Trump himself in their efforts to discredit the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

The reasons House Republicans have been demanding investigators turn over their evidence are, of course, obvious. The intent is to share that evidence with Trump, either directly or by leaking it to the general public, and to identify key witnesses against Trump so that they can be publicly marked and demonized, and to tease out the direction of any ongoing investigative threads so that those, too, can be leaked and Trump's team alerted. All while undermining federal prosecutors and the judicial system itself.

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The House Republican pattern is now rote, in fact. Rep. Devin Nunes made a name and career for himself before Jordan took the reins; this was the go-to Republican plan during the Robert Mueller investigation into Russian espionage and election interference and during Trump's first impeachment, as well as during every other lesser scandal.

The catch now, however, is that Jordan is not attempting to sabotage a federal probe or an impeachment trial. Jordan and his fellow House Republicans are attempting to sabotage state and federal criminal cases against Trump; in demanding that the indicting prosecutors turn over their notes, their witnesses, and their evidence, Trump's Republican allies are plainly attempting to obstruct prosecutors, not investigators. And that is usually something that is a really top-notch, prison-worthy crime for anyone who is not a sitting member of Congress.

There's really no question that the intent is obstruction, either. CNN also notes that sedition-backing House Republicans like Jordan and Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz are pushing colleagues to defund the special counsel's office and otherwise strip funding from the Justice Department in order to pressure the department into dropping the charges against Trump.

As for why attempting to obstruct an ongoing criminal probe and indictment isn't illegal if you're a member of Congress, that's a hell of a question. Republicans are relying on congressional speech and debate protections to blur the lines, but those protections wouldn't protect Matt Gaetz or the others if they were, say, indicted on federal drug charges or for participating in a sex-trafficking ring, or for taking bribes or punching reporters or any number of other actual crimes. Demanding prosecutors expose their case strategies, evidence, and path of their ongoing investigations isn't a criminal act of obstruction, though? We'll have to have the experts explain that one to us all.

It needs to be again emphasized, though, that Republicanism now defines itself around the notion that Republicans get to do crimes. The latest Trump indictment is the most serious charge against him so far; Trump was caught hoarding an array of classified documents describing some of the country's most closely guarded national security secrets and, when federal officials attempted to get them back, took repeated steps to hide the documents from the government and his own lawyers so that he could keep them. At Mar-a-Lago. In publicly accessible rooms.

This is an extraordinary crime no matter who was doing it; it is one thing to misplace such documents, but it is unquestionably a crime to intentionally attempt to keep them by lying to the federal government about their whereabouts. It's also a much more straightforward crime than "seditious conspiracy" might be, and is trivial to prove compared to charges that might revolve around "intent" when pressing state election officials to "find" new votes on Trump's behalf.

It is a big-boy crime, a big-boy federal crime that prosecutors appear to have caught Trump and his aide dead to rights on, and one that may very well be amended in the future with actual espionage charges, if Trump had the sheer audacity to share the documents not just with aides and ghostwriters but to Saudi or other foreign officials he was trying to impress. That is the investigation and indictment that House Republicans are attempting to obstruct.

They're not doing it for Trump. Nobody gives that much of a damn about Trump, not really. Jordan and the others leap to the same defenses and the same obstructive acts whenever any powerful or half-powerful Republican faces a new corruption scandal. House Republicans are devoted to the idea that Republicans get to commit crimes and get to charge their political opponents with false ones, and they've got an entire fascist movement egging them on with that.

House Republicans demanding Bragg's evidence against Trump have been coordinating with Trump himself

New York Times whitewashes Jim Jordan's part in wrestling scandal

Donald Trump is facing even more legal jeopardy and the sharks in the Republican Party seem to sense there is some blood in the water. Chris Christie has made his campaign all about going directly at Trump, and Ron DeSantis seems to be closer and closer to becoming completely isolated from the field.

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Trump’s taint is scaring off Republican candidates

Posted on May 24, 2023 (Updated May 25, 2023) by Kerry Eleveld

Donald Trump's much-discussed CNN “town hall” may have drawn cheers from his deplorable MAGA base, but congressional Republicans are already shedding tears over it.

Not only did Trump's gross display of misogyny-laden grievances arm Democrats with 70 minutes’ worth of attack ads on both Trump and Republicans, it's also killing the Republican Party's ability to recruit candidates with any reasonable shot at winning over swing voters, according to Politico.

In Colorado, House Republicans are currently trying to recruit construction executive Joe O'Dea to take on freshman Democratic Rep. Yadira Caraveo in a swingy district that went for Joe Biden by 5 points in 2020. In Pennsylvania, Senate Republicans are urging former hedge fund manager David McCormick to make a bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Bob Casey.

The two Republicans have a lot in common. O'Dea was much ballyhooed in 2022 for his moderate crossover appeal to swing voters, but still lost to Democratic Sen. Michael Bennett by a whopping 15 points. "Joe O'Dea lost BIG!" celebrated Trump, who was irked by O'Dea's refusal to say the 2020 election was stolen.

O'Dea would face two serious deficits in a Republican primary: his refusal to back Trump's stolen election lie about 2020 and his pretzel-twisting on reproductive freedom. But even if O'Dea somehow survived the Republican primary, Trump's MAGA brand in blue-leaning Colorado will likely be toxic—just like it was when O'Dea face-planted in last cycle's Senate race. After all, just last week, independent candidate Yemi Mobolade won the race for Colorado Springs mayor, becoming the first Black mayor in the conservative city’s history and ending decades of Republican-only rule.

One O'Dea ally laughably posited: “The question is: Does the party want to move on and win and govern or do they want to look backwards?”

Judging by this recent poll from Morning Consult on the 2024 Republican primary, a majority of Republican voters are not ready to move on just yet. Trump’s domination is largely unchallenged, winning 58% of the vote with No. 2 Ron DeSantis trailing Trump by 38 points at 20% (consistent with other recent surveys).

McCormick, who made a midterm run for the Keystone State's open Senate seat, was the Mitch McConnell-wing's preferred candidate but didn't even make it past the primary. Instead, Trump's handpicked candidate, TV huckster Mehmet Oz, edged out McCormick by a razor-thin .1% (951 votes) before losing to the Democrat John Fetterman in the general election.

Trump's death grip on the Republican Party arguably sealed the fate of both candidates. Now, as congressional Republicans go back to the well, both candidates share the same chief concern: Donald Trump, the scourge that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his allies failed to neutralize when they had the chance following his impeachment for stoking the Jan. 6 insurrection. The CNN special served as a trenchant reminder of the mountain they will have to climb in 2024 to prevail.

For McCormick, Trump is "the only thing that they’re talking about,” one Republican close to the campaign anonymously told Politico.

Not issues, not policy ideas, just Trump.

.@MorningConsult 2024 Republican Primary Poll: Donald Trump 58% Ron DeSantis 20% Mike Pence 6% Nikki Haley 4% Vivek Ramaswamy 4% Liz Cheney 2% Tim Scott 2% Greg Abbott 1% Kristi Noem 0% Asa Hutchinson 0% Someone else 1% May 19-21, 2023https://t.co/QBhEnUJzrU pic.twitter.com/nLLhlLvTOn
— Aron Goldman (@ArgoJournal) May 23, 2023

One Republican willing to talk on the record was anti-Trumper and former Rep. Barbara Comstock, a onetime Republican rising star whose career was kneecapped in 2018 when she lost her battleground suburban district in the blue-wave backlash to Trump.

“Some people have asked me, ‘Should I run next year?’ If you’re in a swing district, I said, ‘No,’” Comstock advised. “If he’s going to be the nominee, you are better to wait and run after he washes out. Because you won’t have a prayer of winning.”

In fact, Politico noted some Republican operatives are telling candidates to take a pass on this cycle and instead opt for a 2026 run "when Trump may be done seeking elected office."

It's almost as if Republicans, who keep hoping Democrats would neutralize Trump for them, have set their sights on a possible criminal conviction to save them from their cowardice two cycles down the road.

In the meantime, Trump is still killing another cycle for Republicans—even in a year when the Senate map should be rife with Republican pickup opportunities.

Hell yeah! Democrats and progressives simply crushed it from coast to coast on Tuesday night, so co-hosts David Nir and David Beard are devoting this week's entire episode of "The Downballot" to reveling in all the highlights. At the very top of the list is Jacksonville, where Democrats won the mayor's race for just the second time in three decades—and gave the Florida Democratic Party a much-needed shot in the arm. Republicans also lost the mayor's office in the longtime conservative bastion of Colorado Springs for the first time since the city began holding direct elections for the job 45 years ago.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene’s plan to impeach everyone reaches Merrick Garland

Posted on May 18, 2023 (Updated May 19, 2023) by Hunter

A House Republican is now introducing articles of impeachment against Attorney General Merrick Garland, but before anyone gets too worked up about that, just know that the House Republican is walking medical-grade conspiracy theory dispensary Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, that she's got a loooong history here, that it's just the warmup to her again vowing to write up similar articles against President Joe Biden, and that her "new" articles of impeachment are all plucked directly from of the Fox News Extended Universe of lore and characters and subplots.

You cannot understand any of Greene's documents unless you are nigh on addicted to Fox shows from the likes of Maria Bartiromo or The Artist Formerly Known As Tucker. Greene is that addicted, and she's going to make sure we're all going to hear about it.

Our story today comes to us from Fox News (link grumblingly provided).

"In a press release exclusively obtained by Fox News Digital, Greene accused Garland of"—all right, stop. Hold up right there.

How do you "exclusively obtain" a press release? Somebody want to explain that one? The "reporter" here is someone by the name of Houston Keene. Is Houston trying to breaking-news-story us about getting a press release?

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All right, fine, let's put that out of our heads. Never mind. Greene's office tried to make some cheap political hay out of filing her second attempt at "articles of impeachment" against Garland because reasons, called up Fox News to get it done, and is now waving around a document that looks like a AI bot's attempt at drafting a House resolution based solely around transcripts of Fox News primetime shows.

Greene's would-be resolution is premised on Garland "facilitating the weaponization and politicization of the United States justice system against the American people," a phrase that Jim Jordan spent two bucks to win out of a Dave & Buster's Arcade claw machine.

From there, all we get is Fox News crankery.

Garland "issued an October 2021 memorandum directing the targeting of parents by the Federal Bureau of Investigation," screams the document. She's referring there, yet again, to FBI investigations into a string of death threats against school board members from anti-maskers, "critical race theory" opponents, and other conservative sources.

That immediately ballooned into Fox News and House Republican outrage that the FBI was daring to investigate death threats, turning it into an attack on conservative parents. Because, of course, Greene and every other Republican is quite sure that if the FBI targets such death threats, they're going to find Republican supporters behind most of them, and how dare they target Republicans who threaten political violence.

The rest is all the same language. Greene wants to impeach Garland for not prosecuting "leftist extremists" who peacefully protested outside Supreme Court justice's homes. She's very mad that Garland is not "prosecuting Antifa and Black Lives Matters rioters that have desecrated American cities and caused billions of dollars worth" of damage, a confusing line that can only be interpreted when you remember that according to Fox News, numerous American cities have been razed to the ground and the reason none of the rest of us know about that is, uh, because Democrats are keeping it a secret from you.

"Attorney General Garland has refused to prosecute the Biden family and its associates for the crimes they have committed at the expense of the American people," she scrawls, with nobody to this day being able to come up with a damn bit of evidence for these supposed "crimes" or even explain what the actual "crimes" are supposed to be. Sure, impeach Garland for not taking Rudy Giuliani seriously. God help us all if we strip the government of anyone who doesn't take Rudy Giuliani's bug-eyed rants seriously; there wouldn't be anyone left to empty the House cafeteria trash cans.

There's also a bunch of generic rants that don't accuse Garland of anything at all, just some word salad thrown in so we can get to the only part of it that matters: The Fox News Extended Universe belief that the government is "persecuting" Donald J. Seditionboy Trump in allowing the government to go find and return classified government documents Trump stole from the White House after the failure of his coup attempt.

Or, as Greene would have it, "documents he legally declassified," which is yet another Fox News and Trump lawyer wackadoodle claim, based on Trump’s assertion that can and did automatically pre-declassify whatever classified documents the FBI might have discovered in his Mar-a-Lago resort. Oh, and that he did it without telling anyone, using only the powers of his mind.

It is May of 2023 and Trump's allies are still pushing this secret-mind-powers explanation, and the federal government is still having to explain to these puddingheads that no, actually, there's a very specific procedure for declassifying government documents, one Donald Trump himself knew about this whole time, and "I did it secretly when you weren't looking" is not an actual defense.

I do not know how many decades it will take to explain this to Greene and the other Republicans who believe a reality television host obtained fully autocratic powers upon sliding into the White House on his own slick film of lies, but it will still not be a thing even if Greene spends the next 40 years of her life not understanding it.

Again, this is all part of the same pattern from House Republicans, and the important part is that none of us living normal lives are supposed to understand it; if Greene's rantings look like a string of unconnected buzzwords plucked out of right-wing conspiracy circles it's because that is exactly what they are. She doesn't care if everyone in Washington, D.C., who is not Jim Jordan, James Comer, or an OAN host looks at her like she's grown two heads when she presents this stuff.

Everything Greene and her associated Republicans do is meant to appeal to the small set of Americans who live and breathe Fox News conspiracy claims. It's not the Biden administration, in her scribbled-up document, it's the Biden "regime." It's not an American writing a pro-choice message in chalk on a sidewalk near a Supreme Court justice's house, it's a "leftist extremist" who "harassed" the justice with her chalk-based opinions.

Garland "has declared war on American parents"! Garland has "weaponized" the justice system! How dare he prosecute those who violently attacked police officers in the U.S. Capitol, while not similarly prosecuting Black Lives Matter protesters who "desecrated" our cities!

And, above all, it is not that Donald Trump took boxes of classified and other government-owned documents from the White House and put them in a Mar-a-Lago storage room, or that he lied about it to investigators, or that he took steps to hide them from investigators, it is that Merrick Garland wants to "persecute" His Royal Highness as a means of "silencing" the Fox News base!

All of it is premised on the notion that the government should be focused on prosecuting conservatism's enemies more, and should be focused on prosecuting conservatives themselves not at all, not for death threats, or making off with classified documents, or an attempted coup, or anything else. Greene may simply not be bright enough to realize her beliefs align one-to-one with fascism's own, but it doesn't matter. She and Republicanism's other loudest voices have cribbed its major themes and techniques with precision.

Rep. Greene's 'bipartisan' visit to Jan. 6 insurrections in D.C. jail gets the response it deserves

Marjorie Taylor Greene again argues 'red states' should separate themselves from federal government

Jennifer Fernandez Ancona from Way to Win joins Markos and Kerry to talk about the new messaging the Democratic Party’s national candidates are employing going into 2024. Ancona was right about the messaging needed to win the midterms, and we think she’s right about 2024.

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Kevin McCarthy’s allies have spent big bucks to retaliate against Republicans who oppose him

Posted on September 27, 2022 (Updated September 28, 2022) by Hunter

We've got another press dive into the world of House Republican minority leader Kevin McCarthy, and once again, it manages to be darkly, unintentionally hilarious. The political press just cannot help but paint every politician's personal acts of revenge as Machiavellian strategery, weaving a grand basket of complications around an egg of a premise that would otherwise look tawdry, just lying there on its own.

Yes, The Washington Post has a look at "How Kevin McCarthy's political machine worked to sway the GOP field," and the answer is "with money." What the Post has discovered is a devoted effort by McCarthy and his wealthy allies to sabotage the careers of would-be House Republicans who don't back McCarthy's leadership ambitions. Most of it is through the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC, but because this is American politics and American politics is deeply crooked, an assortment of other billionaire-backed PAC names pop in and out to help the cause as needed. There is no part of our election system that is not either controlled outright by money, or that cannot be tweaked by a single anonymous rich person so that it better aligns with their own anonymous interests. We do the voting, but it’s anonymous rich people that decide which names are on the ballots.

Mind you, there's a bunch of blowhardism thrown in from the parties involved about how no, no, McCarthy and his allies are just trying to make sure the party presents more "electable" Republicans than what they've currently been dredging up, to form a "more functioning GOP caucus." And it’s a pretty damn thin case: McCarthy and allies are still backing, for example, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a sedition-backing one-person wrecking crew making her way through every pretense at decency her party once tried to maintain, even as they spent freely (though secretly!) to sabotage Madison Cawthorn after Cawthorn let slip that Washington, D.C., Republicanism was a cesspit of cocaine and sex parties.

I dunno here, but let's see if we can tease out what the difference is between the pro-sedition treasonbastards that McCarthy's money team is willing to embrace and the pro-sedition treasonbastards that go too far.

"In safe Republican districts, controversial Republicans like former New York State party chair Carl Paladino, Florida state Rep. Anthony Sabatini and Trump-endorsed congressional candidate Joe Kent have been targeted after distancing themselves from McCarthy’s leadership ..."

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Oh. There it is right there. Well hell, why'd we need any of the rest of it?

Take, for example, the case of Rep. Jamie Herrera Beutler, who voted for Trump's impeachment—the sin that turned other members of the caucus into pariahs. The intolerable sin. And yet, McCarthy's allies spent big against her Trump-backed opponent, Joe Kent:

"Kent, her Trump-endorsed challenger, opposed McCarthy as speaker ..."

It does feel like a pattern:

"Sabatini, a friend of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), had been an outspoken critic of McCarthy."

So what we have here is a Republican would-be majority that is willing to tolerate political positions from pro-sedition to pro-impeaching the people who tried to do the sedition, so long as you don't tick off that one little box that will irritate Kevin McCarthy on a, shall we say, professional level.

And here we thought Republicanism didn't have coherent policy stances. Look! We just found a big one! Bow to the guy who controls the money, or get the snot kicked out of you!

As I said at the beginning, there's something deeply funny about this reporting. The whole premise is that rich people close to Kevin Owen McCarthy are trying to filter out some of the most conspicuous Nazi-loving or pro-sedition wackadoodles from Republican ranks. The people behind the PACs are trying to sell it as a noble effort to pull Republicanism back from, at the least, openly supporting the democracy-ending rebellion.

But even on its own terms, it’s inconsistent with reality as we know it. McCarthy continues to make very nice with the head seditionist who got people killed inside the Capitol as part of an attempted overthrow of the government. McCarthy keeps vowing to restore the committee assignments one of the most brazen pro-seditionists of all if voters put him in charge. House leadership has specifically worked to defend avid seditionists while punishing members who spoke out to condemn Trump for the attempted coup.

Instead, the most aggressive moves McCarthy and his allies have made against any House Republican were reserved for the one irritant who mentioned, on tape, that boy howdy there are a lot of coke orgies going on behind House Republican scenes.

THAT SEEMS VERY RELEVANT SOMEHOW. Can't put my finger on why. But yeah, sure, these are some bold moves by Kevin McCarthy and his biggest fundraisers to, uh, kneecap the political careers of anyone who badmouths Kevin McCarthy.

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