You are a true Mistress of Understatement and I, for one, applaud you.
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December 31, 2022 (Saturday)
And so, the sun sets on 2022.
It has been an astonishing year across the board, and I thank you all for, well, everything.
May 2023 treat us all kindly.
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It would be nice if the first four months did too. 
Happy new year, everyone!
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Was waiting for that. Leaving happy (new year).
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January 1, 2023 (Sunday)
I hit “send” on my new manuscript at about 6:00 yesterday evening and have spent the first day of the new year just relaxing and catching up on oh, so many things that did not get done in the last few months.
Often on January 1, I post about the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Abraham Lincoln signed on this day in 1863, but had thought perhaps just to post a photo tonight. It feels like we could all use another quiet day.
But there are three things I didn’t want to let slip by, because they both sum up 2022 and point toward 2023.
First, as of today, January 1, 2023, the out-of-pocket cost of insulin for Medicare recipients is capped at $35 a month. Insulin in the U.S. costs up to ten times as much as it does in other countries, and the Inflation Reduction Act, passed last August, both enables Medicare to negotiate certain drug prices with pharmaceutical companies and caps the cost of insulin.
Unfortunately, more than half the diabetics in the U.S. are under age 65 and thus are not covered by Medicare. This amounts to more than 21 million people. Senate Republicans rejected the Democrats’ attempt to apply the cap to private insurers. The vote was 57 to 43, meaning that 57 senators—including seven Republicans—voted in favor of the cap, but the filibuster means that it takes 60 votes to pass most measures through the Senate, so the cap for those covered outside Medicare failed.
Second, yesterday Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued the 2022 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary. It’s an interesting document, not just for what it says, but also for what it doesn’t say. The introduction is dominated by a discussion of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision in which the Warren court overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision and required the desegregation of the public schools. It was a moment in which the Supreme Court’s stance overturned a long history of discrimination and appeared heroic.
The unstated comparison is to this summer’s decision of the Roberts court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized a woman’s constitutional right to obtain an abortion. The comparison runs aground on the reality that Brown v. Board expanded equality before the law and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health contracts it, but it is interesting that Roberts feels obliged to use the court’s annual report to defend the court’s actions.
The report makes no mention of the leak of the Dobbs decision, a leak that the right wing met with fury but that has come to appear to be associated with right-wing Justice Samuel Alito and thus seems to have fallen off their radar screen. The report does not mention popular demands for justices to have a code of ethics—demands heightened by news that Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni participated in attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election but he did not recuse himself from making decisions about that attempt—but it does demand protection for judges for their safety, despite the court’s recent expansion of gun rights. “A judicial system cannot and should not live in fear,” Roberts wrote.
And third, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, was inaugurated as the new president of Brazil today. Lula replaces Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing ally of former U.S. president Trump. Traditionally, an outgoing Brazilian president is supposed to pass the presidential sash to the incoming president as a symbol of the peaceful transfer of power. But Bolsonaro for weeks refused to accept the outcome of the election, and as he is now under a number of investigations, he flew to Orlando, Florida, Friday night and expects to stay at least a month while he sees whether the new government will pursue the investigations.
In his place, a 33-year-old garbage collector, Aline Sousa, representing “the Brazilian people,” presented the sash to Lula and placed it on him. A software developer at the inauguration told New York Times reporters Jack Nicas and André Spigariol, “Lula’s inauguration is mainly about hope…. I hope to see him representing not only a political party, but an entire population—a whole group of people who just want to be happier.”
Seems like a good note to start 2023.
Happy New Year.
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Here’s a link to an article on that subject:
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January 2, 2023 (Monday)
Members are gathering in Washington for tomorrow’s organization of the 118th Congress. The opening of a new Congress is always an exciting time, and this year is particularly interesting.
It appears that House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) still does not have the votes to become speaker when the Republicans take the majority tomorrow, although he has made significant concessions to the 15 or so far-right members who refuse to back him.
He has agreed to make it a great deal easier for members of the House to throw out the speaker, a concession that will put him at the mercy of the far right, and a concession that he vowed he would never make. He has agreed to put more of the extreme right members on committees, and he has said he will create a select committee to investigate the “weaponization of government against our citizens.”
He has agreed to cuts to the Office of Congressional Ethics and to forcing the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol to turn over all of its documents to the Committee on House Administration, rather than the National Archives, which has sparked concerns that Republican members will reveal the identities of national security personnel who testified before the committee.
And yet, it seems the more he concedes, the weaker he looks. On Saturday night, nine members of the far-right congressional delegation, many of whom are implicated in the January 6, 2021, attempt to overthrow the government, indicated his concessions were still not enough. They issued a letter with the warning: “Time to make the change or get out of the way.” The letter complained of “deficiencies” and “dysfunction” and “Republican failures” but was quite vague about what its authors wanted, except perhaps power.
Meanwhile, after it turned out that his campaign biography was entirely made up, Republican representative-elect George Santos of New York is facing investigations into his finances and his citizenship. Today, Brazilian authorities reopened fraud charges against Santos for a 2008 case in which he apparently stole checks from an elderly man. The case had been dormant because authorities had not been able to find Santos. McCarthy and other Republicans have refused to take a stand for or against Santos; his vote for speaker will be crucial. Santos has denied that he committed a crime.
“We’re supposed to be hitting the ground running here, but instead it’s just a big belly flop,” a Republican lawmaker recently told Politico. “Believe me, it’s not just members of the Freedom Caucus who are aggravated. As the days and hours trickle on, the more aggravated people become.”
As the House Republicans’ infighting threatens two chaotic years, the Democratic-controlled Senate will continue to confirm judges who reject the extremism of the Trump-era appointees, working to restore balance and representation in the judicial system. In the first two years of the Biden administration, the Senate confirmed 97 federal judges. Seventy-four have been women—more female judges than the Senate confirmed in Trump’s four years or in George W. Bush’s eight.
The Supreme Court will be harder to rebalance because of Trump’s three appointments, made possible by the refusal of then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to move forward President Barack Obama’s nominee in March 2016 with the argument that it was too close to a presidential election, and then his rushing through of Amy Coney Barrett in late October 2020 after voting in the presidential election had already started.
While the House struggles and the Senate focuses on judges, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris and members of the administration will greet 2023 by traveling around the country highlighting what the laws passed in the last two years will mean for Americans.
In that effort, they will be joined by leading Republicans, in what amounts to a rebuke of their far-right colleagues. On Wednesday, January 4, Biden will be in Kentucky with McConnell, Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY), and Governor Mike DeWine (R-OH) to talk about how the bipartisan infrastructure law is rebuilding the country, providing jobs that don’t need a four-year college degree. Harris will be in Chicago doing the same; Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg will be in New London, Connecticut; then-former House speaker Nancy Pelosi will be in San Francisco.
The January 6th committee continued to release transcripts over the holiday weekend. Journalists examining those transcripts have uncovered important new information.
Among that information is that an email on January 2, 2021, from January 6 rally organizer Katrina Pierson shows that Trump’s invitation to supporters to march on the Capitol was not spontaneous; it was part of the plan. By January 2, people knew that Trump would urge his followers to march to the Capitol. To another organizer, Pierson wrote: “POTUS expectations are to have something intimate at the ellipse, and call on everyone to march to the capitol. This actually works out, because Ali [Alexander]’s group is already setting up at the Capitol, and SCOTUS is on the way.”
After the riot of January 6, Trump advisor Hope Hicks exchanged horrified texts with Julie Radford, Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff, bemoaning that the Trump family was now “royally fcked.” “In one day, he ended every future opportunity that doesn’t include speaking engagements at the local proud boy’s chapter,” Hicks wrote, “And all of us that didn’t have jobs lined up will be perpetually unemployed…. I’m so mad and upset. We all look like domestic terrorists now.” “Not being dramatic, but we are all fcked,” she wrote.
Conservative Atlantic columnist Tom Nichols tweeted: “Their concern for the Constitution they swore to uphold is so touching.”
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They should be. But she underestimated the fervor with which Republicans want to tear down democracy.
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Yes, and probably as well how many gigs and jobs exist in the Far-right Grifter Industry.
I may be wrong about her in particular, but I don’t imagine Hope Hicks and her ilk are hard up for work and funding right now.
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Anyone willing to sacrifice any trace of morals and ethics can find a home in that circus. But I have to hope there is a special place in Hell for the ones who have to know that they will be next against the wall as soon as their usefulness is over.
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Yep, if Hell is a place, that certainly does seem to be where such folks are headed. And if purgatory is one too, then I imagine they’d be shuttled right past it.
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I like to think that Heaven and Hell are both just places where you are face to face with your own actions and the consequences thereof. Not scriptural in any way, of course, but the poetic justice would be nice.
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Nope. You are domestic terrorists because you took actions to subvert and overthrow the US Govt. You look like tools because you failed. You should be imprisoned where there is no need to worry about job security.
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There’s even a niche for “only half of all kittens in the blender” self-styled “reasonable ones” like Hicks in the RWNJ media grift.
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I liked an idea I heard once that both are just other people. You want to be a dick to everyone? All right then, have fun with the company of other dicks. No worse punishments – or better rewards on the other side – really needed.
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interestingly, it only takes a simple majority to overturn the filibuster. manchin was against it, and he’s not needed now. i doubt the democrats would do it, but i definitely think they should. fixing the supreme court would be more than worth it
( the republicans will anyway if they ever claw back both the senate and whitehouse )
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They already did under McConnell. That’s what made Manchin’s objections about bipartisanship so absurd. That ship had already sailed and hit an iceberg. It was always just a transparent veil failing to obscure Manchin’s greed and narcissism.
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January 3, 2023 (Tuesday)
Today, the Republicans took over the House of Representatives.
The first thing they did was to remove the metal detectors that were installed after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The removal was one of the things Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) promised far-right Republicans in hopes of winning their votes to elect him speaker. The House has not yet voted on the rules package that ends “Democrat fines for failure of Members to comply with unscientific mask mandates and security screenings before entering the House floor,” but the metal detectors are gone, just three days before the second anniversary of the January 6 attack.
So far, the removal of those metal detectors is the only concrete outcome of McCarthy’s attempt to woo the extremist members of his conference.
McCarthy failed today to win the House speakership. For the first time since 1923, the speaker was not decided on the first ballot.
The reason for the failure is that the Republican conference in the House is feuding internally. On the one hand are the extremists who maintain the reason the Republicans lost ground in the last three elections is that party leadership has not gone far enough in dismantling the government. They are led by lawmakers who were key in former president Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, men like Scott Perry (R-PA), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Jim Jordan (R-OH). “I stand firmly committed to changing the status quo no matter how many ballots this takes,” Perry tweeted. “If…McCarthy had fought nearly as hard to defeat the failed, toxic policies of the…Biden Administration as he has for himself, he would be Speaker of the House right now.”
Politico’s Heidi Przybyla recalled that in his 2021 memoir, former Republican speaker John Boehner said of this faction: “What they’re really interested in is chaos.… They want to throw sand in the gears of the hated federal government until it fails and they’ve finally proved that it’s beyond saving.” And they are tied tightly to right-wing media: “Every time they vote down a bill, they get another invitation to go on Fox News or talk radio,” he said. “It’s a narcissistic—and dangerous—feedback loop.”
On the other hand are Republicans like the one who spoke to CNN’s Jake Tapper last night, saying that the holdouts want “procedural trickery that no one in America gives a damn about, but that might give these few loudmouths just a little bit more of the attention and power they crave…. None of these narcissists—and that’s what they are, pure narcissists—did a damn thing to help us win the majority. Nothing. If anything, many of them were liabilities, requiring outside help from Kevin McCarthy, ironically. So they contribute nothing to the team, and then have the audacity to demand outsize influence and power.”
The statement is important; equally important is that the source wanted to stay anonymous.
Before today, there were plenty of signs McCarthy did not have the votes he needed to become speaker. About five extremists had made it clear they would not vote for him, and another bloc of about nine Republicans had waffled. McCarthy tried to bluster his way through the uncertainty, beginning the process of moving into the speaker’s office last night.
But as former White House press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted: “politics 101 rule—avoid going into a vote not knowing if you have the votes….” McCarthy revealed that he had not mastered that rule when the House began to vote. It turned out that he was down not just the five promised “no” votes, but a full 19 votes as extremists threw their support to members who share their ideology. Meanwhile, the Democrats united around Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the House minority leader.
The results of the first ballot had Jeffries in the lead with 212 votes and McCarthy second with 203; Representative Andy Biggs (R-AZ), who was part of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election, had ten votes. Nine votes went to miscellaneous others.
A second ballot again saw Jeffries and McCarthy at 212 and 203 respectively. But extremists concentrated around Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), giving him 19 votes.
A third ballot had Jeffries holding steady at 212, while McCarthy dropped a vote to stand at 202. Jordan picked up that vote to stand at 20. A dropping vote is never a good sign for a frontrunner.
And with that, the House adjourned about 5:30 p.m., sending representatives off to negotiate behind closed doors.
At stake is the direction of the Republican Party. While extremists blame their recent losses on the leadership that will not, they insist, go far enough, observers note that Republicans have lost voters who see the party as far to the right of the mainstream. Moving the party farther right is the last thing less extreme Republicans want, especially those 18 new Republican representatives from districts President Joe Biden won in 2020. An extremist House speaker will almost certainly kill their careers as two years of headlines feature members like Lauren Boebert (R-CO) lecturing and Jim Jordan yelling.
So, as McCarthy’s bid for speaker bogs down, the question is whether they will accept the extremist Jordan—who is deeply implicated in the January 6, 2021, attempt to overthrow the 2020 presidential election—as speaker, or whether they will work to find a compromise candidate by working either with Democrats or with Republicans who regroup around someone who isn’t Jordan. Former Republican governor of Ohio John Kasich has already called on House Republicans to work with Democrats “to pick a speaker to run a coalition government, which will moderate the House and marginalize the extremists.”
But which way they will go is unclear. As congressional reporter for Punchbowl News Max Cohen reported tonight, the Republicans still have to defer to their media for direction. Representative Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA), who expects to be in the House leadership, said of the 19 voters who swung to Jordan: “We’ll see what happens when Tucker and Sean Hannity and Ben Shapiro start beating up on these guys. Maybe that’ll move it.”
As for the man who sparked this meltdown, NBC’s Garrett Haake tweeted an exclusive story: “Former President Trump declined to say if he’s sticking by his endorsement of Kevin McCarthy for speaker tonight, telling me in a brief phone interview he’s had calls all day asking for support, and ‘We’ll see what happens. We’ll see how it all works out.’”
People are comparing this multiple-ballot contest to that of 1923, when Progressive Republicans forced incumbent speaker Frederick Gillett, a Republican, to accept rules changes that gave them more power before they would put him back in office. Perhaps more instructive, though, was the speaker’s contest of 1855–1856, when a struggle over the future of the country created shifting coalitions that crossed party lines until, after two months and 133 ballots, representatives put Nathaniel Banks, who had ties to most of the different factions, in the speaker’s chair.
Conspicuously excluded from the talking and visiting on the House floor today was newly-elected George Santos (R-NY), whose lies about his education, employment, financing, and so on would lead any healthy political party to demand an investigation of him before he took office. In this case, though, his vote for McCarthy was too important to pass up, so he sat shunned by his colleagues, alone and silent, except when called on to vote.
The House Democrats, meanwhile, organized without a hitch, putting together a leadership team that consists of Hakeem Jeffries (NY), Katherine Clark (MA), and Pete Aguilar (CA). With quite a bit of enthusiasm, the Democrats voted as a bloc to give Jeffries more votes than McCarthy, whose party is in the majority.
The Senate, too, organized easily and with what looked like a good deal of fun. Vice President Kamala Harris swore in the senators, then chatted with families and posed for pictures.
Tonight, Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) wrote to the Architect of the Capitol complaining that McCarthy had occupied the office of the House speaker without having been elected. “How long will he remain there before he is considered a squatter?” Gaetz asked. “Please write back promptly as it seems Mr. McCarthy can no longer be considered Speaker-Designate following today’s balloting.”
The first day of Republican control of the House of Representatives does not bode well for the next two years.
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