Category: KevinMcCarthy

The critical moment in the Q&A session was the question Trump’s lawyers kept refusing to answer

Posted on by Mark Sumner

For as much time as was spent with Donald Trump’s legal team trying to erect miles and miles of beautiful wall using nonsense arguments about the First Amendment, or by digging through legalist definitions of incitement, it was all pretty pointless. Sure, Fox News will keep up the pretense that some of that mattered. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz—who consulted with Trump’s attorneys multiple times in the case—will claim that the answers that they wrote, to the questions that they posed, made a difference in their decision. But again and again, Senators in the chamber stepped right up to the biggest gaping wound in everything Trump’s team had to say.

Senators, on both sides of the aisle, quite understandably, wanted to know why when a howling mob of murderous f#ckwads descended on the Capitol, Trump did not do a damn thing to defend them. Trump may have welcomed the “calvary” to Washington D.C., but he certainly did not send it to the Senate chamber even though he knew the building was under assault from his supporters.

And nowhere was that more clear, than how Trump’s legal team responded to questions concerning Trump’s actions regarding Mike Pence.

The sequence of events that happened after Trump’s insurrectionist mob smashed their way into the Capitol was of deep concern to the people on the pointy end of the spears and flagpoles. The sequence of events surrounding Trump’s actions after his speech and before the National Guard finally arrived at the Capitol that evening was the subject of the most serious, and important, questions of the day.

During Friday’s session, Trump’s attorneys tried to build on the objection made by Sen. Mike Lee, to claim that the call between Trump, Lee, and Sen. Tommy Tuberville was “heresay.”That sequence became the direct subject of questioning on Friday evening during Trump’s impeachment trial, when Sen. Mitt Romney and Sen. Susan Collins sent this question to both Trump’s legal team and the House impeachment managers.

Romney and Collins: “When Pres. Trump send disparaging tweets at 2:24 PM was he aware that Pence had been removed from the Senate by Secret Service for his safety.”

While Rep. Joaquin Castro made it clear Trump had to have known that the Capitol had been breached, and that the call to Sen. Tuberville made it clear Pence had been removed from the chamber, the answer from Trump’s legal team was even more telling … they didn’t have one.

Instead, Trump’s lawyers fell back on something they would repeat every time someone asked about Trump’s action or Trump’s knowledge: They blamed the House for “not doing a full investigation.” Which is an astounding claim, because the only one who had the knowledge that could answer the question is their client, Donald J. Trump.

The refusal to answer this question was the loudest silence of the whole impeachment trial. And it wasn’t the only time this happened. Here’s another question, this time from Sen. Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

Donald Trump’s legal team just told senators that they have no idea when their client learned of the attack on the Capitol. They blamed their ignorance on the House managers, saying they should have uncovered what Trump knew, what he did, and when in their investigation. Wow. pic.twitter.com/KsZnG55slK

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) February 12, 2021

Note that Trump’s attorneys also continually acted as if the House managers had access to video or other information that was not provided to them. This is not true. Trump’s legal team had access to the same materials as the House team. Again, the only missing information here is that which could only be found in the skull of their client — a client who was invited to testify, and who refused.

Senators weren’t done poking at this obvious weak point. Sen. Bill Cassidy sent a question to both sides saying “Sen. Tuberville reports he spoke to Trump at 2:15 and told Trump that Pence had just evacuated. Presumably Trump understood that rioters were in the building. Trump then tweeted that Pence lacked courage. Does this show that Trump was tolerant of the intimidation of Pence?”

Trump attorney van der Veen answered, “Directly no, but I dispute the premise of your facts.” He then returned to attacking the House managers for not having information exclusive to their client.

Trump attorney dismisses Tuberville's account as "hearsay" that he spoke with Trump about 10 minutes before Trump attacked Pence on Twitter on Jan. 6. This is what Tuberville said this week: "I said, “Mr. President, they just took the vice president out, I’ve got to go.'” pic.twitter.com/yhnVUZNceq

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) February 12, 2021

As the Senators were leaving the chamber on Friday, Sen. Tuberville underlined the weakness of this point by sticking a fork in the “heresay” argument.

NEWS: Tuberville speaks to reporters just now and stands by account he gave to @burgessev on Wednesday "I said Mr President, they've taken the vice president out. They want me to get off the phone, I gotta go ... probably the only guy in the world hung up on pres United States"

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) February 12, 2021

The removal of Pence happened at 2:15. It’s recorded on the cameras of the Senate chamber.

Mike Pence taken from Senate chamber at 2:15 PM

Then, just after Trump hung up from his conversation with Tuberville, with full knowledge that his mob was in the Capitol building and that Pence was in danger, Trump tweeted again.

This is just one sequence out of hours in which Trump displayed total disregard for either the security of the nation or the lives of those in Congress. But no other moment may so completely describe his malice and criminal indifference.

Finally, just as the session was ending on Friday, CNN reported on another aspect of Trump’s refusal to act on Jan.6 — his confrontation with House minority leader Kevin McCarthy. That conversation had already been the subject of a report used by the House managers; a report which Trump’s legal team also dismissed as “third hand.”

Now CNN has more details of the phone call between Trump and McCarthy. In that call, Trump told McCarthy that the insurrectionists “cared” more about the election than McCarthy.

"Well, Kevin,” said Trump, “I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”

McCarthy was still begging Trump to do something to call off his supporters when rioters were breaking smashing the windows of his office. Finally, frustrated that Trump was doing nothing to help, leading McCarthy to shout. “Who the f--k do you think you are talking to?" 

Apparently Trump knew exactly who he was talking to … someone who would vote against Trump’s impeachment and come right down to Mar-a-Lago to beg forgiveness for ever raising his voice to his king.

Witnesses. The House managers should demand witnesses. And McCarthy should be at the top of the list.

Republicans ‘big’ tinfoil tent transformation is the gift that will keep on giving to Democrats

Posted on (Updated by Kerry Eleveld

"I've been freed," bragged QAnon Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on Friday, the day after House Democrats forced a vote to strip the reality-adjacent, pugnacious provocateur of her committee assignments because her GOP counterparts refused to do so.

Greene—whose momentary show of near-contrition Thursday melted away by Friday—blasted Democrats as "morons" for elevating her platform, or giving her "free time," as she put it in a tweet. "Oh this is going to be fun!" Greene declared—an apparent threat, now that the shackles of decency are off and she's done pretending she's anything other than a menace to society, not to mention the republic itself.

But Greene isn't the only one who has been freed. After nearly two months of witnessing Republicans spit in the face of democracy, Democrats watched the GOP's depravity sink to a new low this week. Not only are Republicans the party of sedition, by circling the wagons around Greene they have refashioned their so-called "big tent" to include everyone from traditional fiscal conservatives to loathsome Nazis and white supremacists, fanatical militia members and extremists, and wackadoodle conspiracy theorists. In short, the GOP is now a big tinfoil tent—an explosive experiment that could detonate at any moment. 

And guess what—many of those traditional fiscal conservatives are fleeing the tent as fast as humanly possible. In fact, ever since the November election, tens of thousands of conservative voters across the country have been defecting from the Republican Party, a trend that spiked in the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. In Colorado, for instance, the GOP lost about a half a percent of its registered voters in the single week following the riot, according to NPR. Similar trends are taking place in multiple states, including some that will be central to the 2022 battle for control of the Senate, such as Arizona, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania—where nearly 10,000 Keystone State voters dropped out of the Republican Party in the first 25 days of the year, according to The Hill.

The House Democratic campaign arm is already on it, moving aggressively to rebrand House Republicans as the Q-caucus. As Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the new chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told POLITICO, Republicans "can do QAnon, or they can do college-educated voters. They cannot do both."

But as Republicans transform into a tinfoil tent community, Democrats are experiencing an equal and opposite reaction of sorts—an unrestrained clarity of vision and purpose. After all, why bother listening to a party so toxic it just rallied around someone calling for executions of your own members? Not only did House Democrats move without equivocation to strip Greene of her power, House impeachment managers put Donald Trump on the spot by inviting him to testify under oath for his impeachment trial. Trump, ever the coward, quickly declined, but that conversation may not be over, since the Senate could potentially subpoena him. 

And as long as we're on the subject of Trump, President Joe Biden told CBS News he thinks Trump should be stripped of his intelligence briefings, citing his “erratic” behavior. "What value is giving him an intelligence briefing?" Biden said. "What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?"

Democrats also greased the legislative skids this week for passage of President Biden's American Rescue Plan by a simple majority vote in the Senate, sidelining the necessity of winning GOP votes. Democrats might still lamentably trim back who is eligible for the $1,400 direct payments, but overall, this is the relief package Biden and Democrats promised on the campaign trail. And despite an incessant drumbeat of questions from reporters about the quaint notion of bipartisanship, Biden hasn't blinked.

"If I have to choose between getting help right now to Americans," Biden said Friday, "and getting bogged down in a lengthy negotiation or compromising on a bill that's up to the crisis, that's an easy choice. I'm going to help the American people who are hurting now." Biden also invoked the Defense Production Act and mobilized more than 1,000 active duty troops to help increase the rate of vaccinations and make 61 million more coronavirus tests available by summer. 

Overall, Biden's White House and Congressional Democrats have taken a muscular no-nonsense approach to getting the nation back on its feet and providing quick relief to the Americans who need it most.

In some ways, progressives owe a debt of gratitude to Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell, who burned the bridge of good will beyond recognition in the last Democratic administration, and Kevin McCarthy, who has turned the GOP into a haven for the dangerous and unmoored. Democrats will spend the next several weeks making that transformation abundantly clear to the American people during a vivid recreation of the deadly Capitol riot that was inspired by Trump and underwritten by his GOP enablers. 

And just as soon as Trump’s Senate impeachment trial concludes, Democrats will likely be in position to punctuate the differences between the two parties by delivering a desperately needed relief bill to the American people.

It's a promising start—a foundation from which to build. Success begets success. But the stickier issues are yet to come. Even Biden admitted to CBS that he doesn't think his $15 minimum wage proposal will "survive" in the rescue package given the Senate rules on reconciliation. At some point, the rubber is going to have to meet the road on eliminating the filibuster so Democrats can continue delivering results at a time when Americans need their government to go to bat for them. But building momentum is at least a good place for Democrats to start. 

House Republicans became the Party of Q this week. Democrats won’t let voters forget it in 2022

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

The word "nightmare" is trending in Republican circles lately. Thursday Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina characterized the idea of Donald Trump testifying at his impeachment trial as "a nightmare for the country." Or as a Politico headline put it, "Trump's allies fear the impeachment trial could be a PR nightmare"—which is what Graham really meant.  

Democrats agree, and the House Democratic campaign arm is moving quickly to bring that nightmare home to the House GOP, which officially declared itself the QAnon caucus this week when 199 of its 211 members voted against stripping its chief Q adherent, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, of her committee assignments. 

In its opening salvo in the 2022 battle for control of the House, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released a campaign ad indicting House Republicans for standing "with Q not you." The ad places the conspiracy cult at the center of the deadly Jan. 6 riot, saying that QAnon "with Donald Trump, incited a mob that attacked the Capitol and murdered a cop."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi previewed the strategy this week when she referred to GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy as "Qevin McCarthy, Q-CA" in a tweet. McCarthy helpfully lived up to the moniker by refusing to remove Greene from her committee assignments and forcing his caucus to go on record in support of someone who not only espouses QAnon, but has also endorsed the execution of Pelosi and other Democrats and has verbally assaulted survivors of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. And frankly, that's just a small taste of Greene's abhorrent quackery.

House Democrats are betting that won't play well in the very districts that will likely decide control of the House for the second half of President Joe Biden's term.

"If Kevin McCarthy wants to take his party to ‘crazy town’ and follow these dangerous ideas, he shouldn't expect to do well in the next election,” Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the new chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told Politico. "They can do QAnon, or they can do college-educated voters. They cannot do both."

According to Politico, the DCCC's $500,000 TV and digital ad campaign will run in the districts of seven vulnerable Republicans: Reps. Mike Garcia, Young Kim and Michelle Steel of California; Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida; Don Bacon of Nebraska; Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania; and Beth Van Duyne of Texas.

Democrats' early decision to nationalize the race is a notable departure from their strategy in 2018, when they deployed a hyper-localized message around health care that ultimately netted them an historic 41 seats. Of course, the backdrop to that strategy was the GOP's repeated efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would have stripped millions of Americans of their coverage.

The backdrop to this decision were the horrific events of Jan. 6, an insurrection at the Capitol that Americans couldn’t have even imagined before they watched in horror as it played out in real time on screens across the country. A Yahoo News/YouGuv survey released this week found that 81% of Americans said the attack wasn't justified. And more than 9 in 10 Americans expressed revulsion about the attack, saying it made them feel “angry,” “ashamed” or “fearful.” 

Democrats will now have several weeks worth of a Senate trial to remind people of that revulsion and how the GOP underwrote that deadly attack before, during, and after it took place through its unyielding support of Trump's lies and its embrace of extremist groups like QAnon.

Democrats’ bet is that after they deliver results on COVID-19 relief, they will be able to head into 2022 saying that Democrats stood with the American people while Republicans stood with QAnon.

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy gushes about ‘unity’ as he embraces extremism

Posted on by Laura Clawson

Top Republicans are looking for big gains in the House in 2022, and they’ve decided that their best path to those gains is to welcome extremists to their party. Make that: to keep welcoming extremists to their party.

That’s the message they sent when House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy first refused to discipline Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for her violent rhetoric, anti-Semitism, and embrace of conspiracy theories, and it’s the message they put an exclamation point on Thursday night when all but 11 Republicans voted to keep her in her committee assignments. Those assignments included the education committee, despite Greene’s harassment of survivors of the Parkland school shooting and her claims that the Parkland and Sandy Hook shootings had been hoaxes.

To McCarthy, the fact that Republicans voted both to keep Rep. Liz Cheney in leadership despite her vote to impeach Donald Trump and to protect Greene’s committee assignments is big evidence of the unity that will carry the party through 2022 successfully. “The number one thing that happened in this conference was unity,” he said after the five-hour meeting to fight over two women’s political fates. “Two years from now, we are going to win the majority.”

Both Democrats and Senate Republicans think McCarthy might be making the wrong bet in keeping the QAnon, insurrectionist far-right under the tent of the Republican establishment.

”House members never like us judging them, but I do think as a party we have to figure out what we stand for,” Republican Sen. John Thune said. “I think we’ve got to be the party, as I said, of ideas and policies and principles, and get away from members dabbling in conspiracy theories.”

”It’s only going to get worse unless we do something about it,” an unnamed adviser to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told The Washington Post. But McCarthy doesn’t think the direction of his caucus is bad and getting worse, apparently. He didn’t have to make a decision between Cheney and Greene this time, and he seems to see that as a road map for the future.

The question is whether Democrats—facing the traditionally very difficult midterms for a party with a first-term president—can find the right message to voters. One Democratic group is already running ads saying “The QAnon conspiracies sound wild. But the danger is real” as they tie McCarthy to Greene’s offensive statements, including her denial of 9/11.

”You can do QAnon, and you can do swing districts, but you can’t do both,” said Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. His Republican counterpart, Rep. Tom Emmer, though, said “This is the same QAnon playbook they tried in 2020, and they lost 15 seats.”

A few other things happened in the 2020 elections, mind you. And it’s not just QAnon. It’s Proud Boys and other hate groups. It’s the non-Q things Greene and Rep. Lauren Boebert and Donald Trump himself will do and say between now and November 2022. QAnon is an easy shorthand, but the full constellation of awful things that shorthand encompasses is pretty staggering, and not terribly popular with voters.

But it should be undeniable that Democrats need a message beyond QAnon. Passing a strong COVID-19 relief package, including a minimum wage increase, would be one great message. Competently administering vaccinations and getting the country back on track would be another. Democratic policies are popular. Get them into place now and then spend the next 20 months or so hammering the contrast between those accomplishments and Republican efforts to block those popular polices and Republican embrace of extremism. There should be plenty of material to work with on the Republican side—it’s getting the material on the Democratic side in place that’s the priority right now.

Lindsey Graham’s latest defense of Donald Trump is a racist attack on Kamala Harris

Posted on by Mark Sumner

As Donald Trump’s second impeachment approaches, Lindsey Graham has made a series of extremely odd threats. On Tuesday, he suggested that should Democrats call a single witness, Republicans would call in the FBI to give a full accounting of how white supremacist groups had planned for weeks to carry out violent acts on Jan. 6. The reason that Graham thinks that this is a threat which should concern Democrats is because Fox News and other right-wing sources have been working hard to convince their viewers that the entire impeachment is just about things Trump said at the “Stop the Steal” rally just before the assault on the Capitol. So if anyone was doing pre-planning for the insurrection, that lets Trump off the hook. Except that’s not at all what the impeachment documents actually say. 

It’s not clear if someone actually made that point to Graham, but when he was questioned about the impeachment on Wednesday, Donald Trump’s most loyal senator was ready to voice an even more obscure response—one that involves a long-running, and racist, Republican lie. If Democrats call even a single witness to discuss events on Jan. 6, Graham promised that Republicans would turn the table and … use the impeachment trial to attack Vice President Kamala Harris.

How would anything happening on Jan. 6 relate badly on the vice president? It wouldn’t. But the statements, which Graham made—where else?—while speaking with Sean Hannity on Fox News don’t actually have anything to do with the assault on the Capitol or Trump’s impeachment. As Yahoo News makes clear, Graham is really speaking to an existing Republican theme claiming that Democrats have encouraged violence by Black Lives Matter protesters.

"If you're going to pursue this, and you wanna start calling witnesses, and you want to drag this thing out, it would be fair to have Kamala Harris' tape play where she bailed people out of jail,” said Graham. “What more could you do to incite future violence, than to pay the bail of the people who broke up the shops and beat up the cops. How's that not inciting future violence? Be careful what you wish for my Democratic colleagues, be careful what you wish for."

The thing about the “Kamala Harris’ tape” is that it would be very difficult to play. Because there is no tape. Instead, there appears to be nothing behind this by a single tweet from  Harris in which she encouraged contributions to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which helps to address inequities in America’s often crushing cash bail system. Harris’ tweet was made on June 1, placing it less than a week after Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis Police, and at a time when over a hundred nonviolent protesters had been arrested. 

The claim that Harris was encouraging violence became a recurring theme on the right. In August, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton tweeted that Harris “helped violent rioters in Minnesota get out of jail to do more damage.” Donald Trump recycled that information the next day, except that Trump—as he does so often—expanded on the lie to make it not just about Harris, but “thirteen members of Biden’s campaign staff” as well as “his running mate, Kamala” bailing “rioters” and “looters” out of jail.

Now, almost six months later, Graham is reviving this claim against Harris as if it represents some sort of defense of Trump. It’s a mirror of how Republicans have been reacting to criticism of QAnon Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene by waggling fingers at Rep. Ilhan Omar. In both cases, Republicans are trying to equate racism, anti-Semitism, and white supremacist violence with Black Americans asking for justice. 

As The Washington Post pointed out back in September, this whole line of attack isn’t just racist, it’s also simply wrong. Of the 170 arrested in connection with the protests between Floyd’s murder and the date of Harris’ tweet, 167 were released without bail or with only a small fee. About a third were arrested without charges. Minnesota Freedom Fund definitely benefited from the attention, and their contributions went way up. But it seems that none of the money actually went to bail out anyone charged with either rioting or looting. Some of the money collected did later go toward people charged with serious crimes, even murder. But that’s an indictment of the cash bail system, and the massive inequality it generates in the justice system. It’s not a mark against Kamala Harris.

In any case, what Graham is proposing is the kind of testimony that would not be allowed in any court. It’s pointing a false finger of blame at someone else in a completely different situation. It’s a third grade idea of justice where “she did it too” is supposed to be an excuse for doing something wrong.

On top of all that, Graham’s finger pointing at Harris is deeply racist. Not only is it built on false racist claims about protesters in Minnesota, it’s absolutely no coincidence that Graham was signaling toward Harris and not other people who have been vocal about the need to abolish the cash bail system—including President Biden.

Unable to defend Greene, Republicans have resorted to attacking Omar or Maxine Waters, as Republican leader Kevin McCarthy did in his statement on Tuesday evening. Unable to defend Trump, Graham instead lodged a completely false claim at Kamala Harris. 

Those targets are not a coincidence.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is all ‘I won’t back down’ in public. House GOP meeting was a different story

Posted on by Laura Clawson

Wednesday was coward night for the House GOP Conference. Republicans met for five hours to vote on whether to strip Rep. Liz Cheney of her leadership position and to talk over whether to take action against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. A secret vote gave Cheney a big win, with 145 Republicans voting to keep her as their conference chair, and just 61 voting against. In other words, many of the Republicans who not only voted against impeachment but voted to overturn election results in the hours after the attack on the Capitol also voted to keep Cheney in leadership. That gives some credence to claims that there were Republicans who were motivated solely by fear to give Donald Trump the votes he demanded on those. Cowards.

The next coward was Marjorie Taylor Greene herself. After days of hardcore Twitter posturing about how “I won’t back down. I’ll never apologize,” she … backed down and apologized. That was the right thing to do all along, but doing it in private to keep her colleagues from taking action against her while saying the opposite in public to keep the base riled up and the campaign contributions flowing? Dishonest coward. Not that we’d expect better of someone with her abysmal morals.

Greene expressed “contrition for some of her most outrageous comments made on social media—including questioning the 9/11 attacks, blaming a space ray directed by a Jewish cabal for a deadly wildfire and doubting school shootings,” The Washington Post reports. “She also, according to Republicans in the room, apologized for putting her colleagues in a difficult spot.” 

The next coward is House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who orchestrated the whole thing, and who defended Greene’s position on the education committee despite her claims that school shootings are hoaxes and her harassment of a survivor of the Parkland shooting. McCarthy is approaching peak wanting to have it both ways, saying he disapproves of Greene’s comments, hailing her for apologizing in secret, and most of all being angry that Democrats would dare take action where he won’t—Democrats have a vote planned to strip Greene of committee assignments.

McCarthy also came out of that long GOP meeting and lied to reporters, saying “I think it would be helpful if you could hear exactly what she told all of us. Denouncing Q-on, I don't know if I say it right, I don't even know what it is—any from the shootings, she said she knew nothing about lasers, all of the different things that have been brought up about her.” McCarthy knew how to say QAnon, and what it was, perfectly well last summer when he denounced Greene—then not yet part of his caucus—for her promotion of it. And going with Greene’s denial that she said the things she said? Uber-coward.

McCarthy’s big pitch to Republicans to support Cheney but also Greene was that “We need to unite for us to take the majority and govern.” It’s the Republican version of a big tent: You can promote insurrection or oppose insurrection, as long as you’ll vote to slash government spending, cut taxes for the wealthy, and support punitive policies toward marginalized communities. 

The full House will vote on Greene’s committee assignments on Thursday. It is an unprecedented step. But so is having a member saying the kinds of things she’s said while having helped to incite an insurrection that left five dead at the U.S. Capitol, and their party refusing to take action of its own against them.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the sponsor of the resolution, said earlier in the week, “I am in the process of talking to Republicans, and although I don't have a lot of hope that I will attract Republican co-sponsors, I do expect that when we bring the resolution to the floor as a privilege resolution that it will attract Republican support, but not much.” After Wednesday night’s rallying-the-troops moment for Republicans, we’ll see about that.

QAnon extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene moves up as Trump’s House allies fixate on ousting Liz Cheney

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

The news isn't good for Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who dared admit the truth that Donald Trump's insurrection at the Capitol was the greatest "betrayal" by any commander in chief in American history.

On Thursday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy traveled to Mar-a-Lago to suck up to the guy who tried to have him and his fellow lawmakers killed. “United and ready to win in ’22,” McCarthy tweeted following his meeting with Trump, referring to the GOP effort to reclaim the House majority.

As McCarthy chummed it up with Trump in Florida, pet Trump seditionist and Sunshine State representative Matt Gaetz jetted off to Cheney's home state to rail against her reelection. "Defeat Liz Cheney in this upcoming election, and Wyoming will bring Washington to its knees," Gaetz told hundreds of mostly maskless attendees. 

Gaetz topped off his Cheney hate tour Thursday night with a hit on Fox News in which he urged McCarthy to put Cheney's leadership post within the GOP caucus up for a vote.

“Kevin McCarthy needs to hold a vote on Liz Cheney,” Gaetz told Fox host Tucker Carlson. “And if he doesn’t, the Republican Conference is a total joke. More than half of the Republican conference has said that this person does not speak for us.”

But while McCarthy and Gaetz line up to do Trump's revenge bidding, House Republicans have been burying their heads in the sand about their very own pro-assassination QAnoner and 'space laser' enthusiast Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

Greene has been trying to systematically erase her dark trail of social media posts in which, for instance, she promoted executing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and called Parkland school shooting survivor and gun control activist David Hogg a "coward," suggesting he was being "paid to do this." Greene is also a Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting denier, claiming the horrific mass shooting that took the lives of 27 victims—including 20 children—was staged.

Hogg had urged McCarthy over Twitter to deny Greene any committee placements given her reprehensible behavior, not to mention her unfitness for office. In a separate post, he also explained the horror of a group of teenaged shooting survivors being harassed by a 44-year-old woman. 

”In that video you see a group of people most of whom are 18 or 19 acting calm cool and collected,” he wrote, “what you don't see are the sleepless nights, the flashbacks, the hyper vigilance and deep pitch black numbness so many of us feel living in a society [where] we are told our friends dying doesn’t matter.”

House Republicans' abhorrent response was to assign Greene to the House Education and Labor Committee—a move Pelosi called "appalling."

"What could they be thinking?" Pelosi asked on Wednesday. "Or is thinking too generous a word for what they might be doing? It's absolutely appalling, and I think the focus has to be on the Republican leadership of this House of Representatives for the disregard they have for the death of those children."

Mark Barden and Nicole Hockley, who lost their children Daniel Barden and Dylan Hockley respectively in the Sandy Hook shooting, called Greene's placement on the committee "an attack on any and every family whose loved ones were murdered in mass shootings that have now become fodder for hoaxers."

Any party that hadn't been infiltrated by homegrown domestic terrorists might be turning its attention to expelling Greene from their midst rather than giving her a bigger platform. Instead, House Republicans are fixated on a debate around demoting Cheney for telling the truth and ousting her from Congress altogether.

It’s not good news for Cheney—but it’s even worse news for America. 

Trump plots death-by-a-thousand-cuts for Republican Party

Posted on (Updated by Kerry Eleveld

Aides to Donald Trump have apparently jingled some keys in front of him just long enough to divert him away from forming his own party, but that has only renewed his focus on torturing what remains of the Republican Party. First and foremost, that means figuring out how to exact revenge on Republicans who crossed him on impeachment, such as Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. 

But Trump's dark cloud extends far beyond some dozen or so GOP congressional lawmakers all the way into the states, where parties are veering far right. Arizona is perhaps the best example, where the Republican Party voted to censure former GOP Sen. Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain for opposing Trump, and Republican Gov. Doug Ducey for failing to steal the election for Trump (i.e., certifying the election results).

At the same time, Trump also plans to meddle in the GOP's effort to retake the U.S. Senate. In fact, he's already arguably hobbled the party's efforts—after being censured, Ducey decided not to run for the state’s Senate seat in 2022, where newly elected Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly will be trying to win a full term following his special election victory last November. 

But Arizona's Senate race is just the beginning. Republicans are now facing 2022 battles for open seats they currently control following Republican Senate retirements in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina—a list that could easily expand. And this is where Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Trump will almost surely be at loggerheads over who the party should nominate to run for those seats. In Ohio, for instance, Trumper and seditionist Rep. Jim Jordan seems like a shoo-in for backing by Trump. But while Jordan's radical stances and questionable personal history are a perfect fit for his district, he's likely not the strongest statewide candidate. 

More broadly, McConnell surely wants to claim ownership over the center of gravity of the national party, but that will be impossible as long as Trump is squatting on his turf. That is particularly true because Trump remains a fundraising juggernaut at the moment, with tens of millions in PAC money at his disposal and almost no limitations on what he can do with it. And as we all know, Trump has zero allegiances to achieving real goals for the party, such as winning back the Senate or retaking the House. Trump's only real goal is getting revenge and maintaining his stranglehold on the GOP. If Trump blows a few elections in the process, meh—that's of little concern to him as long he can throw his weight around. 

Speaking of which, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is still trying to claw his way back into Trump's good graces after admitting on the House floor that Trump played a role in helping to incite the Capitol riot. Of course, McCarthy also went full seditionist, opposing certification of the election results and voting against Trump's impeachment. But Trump only ever fixates on the negative—it's part of his charm. 

So state Republican parties are severing their ties to the moderating forces that once made the GOP safe for suburban voters, Trump and McConnell are about to go to war on Senate candidates, and McCarthy is chasing his own tail in the House and coming up short every time. On top of that, an ominous fundraising cloud continues to hang over the seditionist caucus.

Other than that, everything's perfectly copacetic. Oh, and if you want some insight into how those warring factions have been working out electorally for Republicans, look no further than Georgia, where twin GOP losses just handed control of the Senate to Democrats.

Trump supporters continue to plot violence as second impeachment trial approaches

Posted on by Laura Clawson

Thousands of National Guard troops will remain in Washington, D.C., through the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump thanks to continuing threats of violence against lawmakers. The number of troops has already dropped and will continue to drop from a high of around 25,000 to below 20,000 now. It is slated to drop to 5,000 in February.

In addition to the threat of armed protesters returning during the impeachment trial, law enforcement agencies are looking into threats that were “Mainly posted online and in chat groups” and “have included plots to attack members of Congress during travel to and from the Capitol complex during the trial,” the Associated Press reported based on information from an unnamed official who “had been briefed on the matter.”

These threats are not hard to imagine. Indeed, one of the alleged Capitol attackers already faces charges for threats against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and for saying it’s “huntin[g] season” with respect to the officer who fatally shot rioter Ashli Babbitt as she tried to climb through a broken window to get to where lawmakers were evacuating the House chamber.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has been flailing in his response to the Capitol attack, but even he has been very clear about the threat to members of Congress, telling his caucus not to attack any of their colleagues by name because “it's putting people in jeopardy.” 

Saying he had reached out personally to some Republicans—we can guess which offenders those might have been—McCarthy emphasized, “Do not raise another member's name on a television, whether they have a different position or not. Let's respect one another and you probably won't understand what you're doing, and I'm just warning you right now—don't do it.”

The insurrection Donald Trump incited isn’t going to go away all at once. The threats continue, and they’re not just threats to individual members of Congress—they’re threats of continuing attacks on our democracy.

House Republican leader flails after blaming ‘everybody across this country’ for Capitol attack

Posted on by Laura Clawson

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is finding out that it’s tough to strike the right balance between supporting leaders of your party who incited a violent insurrection and criticizing the violent insurrection. It turns out that there’s no “right balance” when it comes to supporting violent insurrection, go figure.

McCarthy has ping-ponged from admitting that Donald Trump “bears responsibility” for his supporters’ attack on the U.S. Capitol that left five dead, including a police officer beaten to death by the mob, to stumbling backward to insist that “I don’t believe [Trump] provoked it, if you listen to what he said at the rally,” because oh noes, Trump supporters get mad if you say he ever bears responsibility for anything at all. Next McCarthy careened over to the insistence that “I also think everybody across this country has some responsibility.”

Everybody! Across the whole country! People who battered down windows at the Capitol and chanted “Hang Mike Pence” and people who watched in horror on their televisions as that happened. Politicians who, like Trump, told the mob to march on the Capitol while saying “you’ll never take our country back with weakness,” and politicians who went from trying to fulfill their constitutional duty to count the electoral votes to hiding in secure rooms while the screaming mob tried to find them. And, of course, President Biden bears responsibility for trying to unite the country by only pursuing policies Republicans like, and if he tries to do any Democrat-type things, then it’s all his fault, too.

McCarthy also went on to whine about Rep. Liz Cheney's impeachment vote, saying “Look, I support her, but I also have concerns.” He’s concerned she didn’t run her stand by him first, but again, Kevin McCarthy is not trying to be the guy taking a firm position on anything, so “I do think she has a lot of questions she has to answer to the conference.” He’s just concerned, himself, and disappointed she didn’t communicate better. But hoo boy, that conference is going to have some questions.

Next, McCarthy came out with an ass-covering tweet about how he doesn’t support the domestic terrorists, but “it is incumbent upon every person in America to help lower the temperature of our political discourse.” Again, everybody. No special responsibility to the people who are carrying out the violence. His staff even emailed other Republican communications staffers asking them to please please please retweet this masterful piece of statesmanship.

Or, more privately, ”We're eating sh*t for breakfast, lunch and dinner right now,” a McCarthy aide told Axios. Yeah, well, your boss is spewing sh*t every time he opens his mouth, then backtracking to eat his own words, so that makes sense.

There just isn’t a comfortable “both sides” on a violent mob attacking the seat of government to prevent lawmakers from formalizing an election result the mob doesn’t like. Until McCarthy realizes that and commits to a side—for violent insurrection or against it—he’s going to keep taking incoming from all directions. Forget the single violin, break out the entire tiny orchestra for this poor guy.