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January 10, 2024 (Wednesday)
The Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives was back in session for business today. The day’s events did not bode well for the House’s managing to accomplish more in 2024 than it did in 2023.
Top on the list of things that must get done, and done fast, is funding the government. The continuing resolution currently in place to fund the government expires in two phases: one on January 19 and the other on February 2. The far-right Freedom Caucus Republicans have refused to agree to funding measures without far deeper cuts than former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) agreed to in a long-ago deal with President Joe Biden as part of a package to raise the debt ceiling until 2025. They also want to attach far-right cultural demands to the measures, although traditionally appropriations are kept clean.
On Sunday, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced they had reached a $1.66 trillion agreement to fund the government in 2024. Appropriations break down with about $886.3 billion for defense and about $772.7 billion for nondefense. The measure includes cuts of $20.2 billion to funding the Internal Revenue Service, which Republicans have demanded since Democrats put money for the IRS into the Inflation Reduction Act, and cuts to emergency spending accounts.
Aidan Quigley of Roll Call calculates that “the framework allows for a very slight overall increase in nondefense funding, about 0.2 percent above the previous year or a little more than $1 billion,” while “[d]efense and security-related spending would rise by nearly $28 billion, or more than 3 percent.” It is essentially the deal McCarthy agreed to last year and that the far right used to throw him out of the speaker’s chair (he has since resigned from Congress).
Members of the Freedom Caucus immediately panned the agreement, putting Johnson in the same pinch McCarthy found himself in last fall. If he relies on Democrats to pass the deal, he runs the risk of a challenge to his speakership, while he cannot get the Freedom Caucus on board without significant concessions in the form of poison pills that would dictate their hard-right policy positions, concessions that would kill the measure in the Senate. In addition, in the Senate, members of both parties wanted more, not less, spending.
Juliegrace Brufke of Axios reported this afternoon that in a meeting today, Johnson asked his Republican colleagues to “stop criticizing him and his budget negotiations on social media.” But as Nicole LaFond of Talking Points Memo notes, Johnson has indicated he is worried about his standing with the extremists and has tried to shore up that standing by appealing to Trump. On a right-wing radio show this morning, Johnson told listeners that he was planning to call former president Trump to get him behind the deal.
This afternoon the extremist Republicans made their anger clear when 12 of them opposed the procedural steps required to begin the process of considering three other bills, signaling that they were willing to stop House business to get their way. Further House votes were canceled for the day, but so far, at least, there does not seem to be momentum for removing Johnson from office, at least in part because there is no one else to take his place. “I’m kind of sick of the chaos,” said Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), a key extremist and firebrand who opposes the funding deal. “I came here to be serious about solving problems, not to produce clickbait.”
Both the House Oversight and Accountability Committee and the House Judiciary Committee voted today on whether President Biden’s 53-year-old son Hunter should be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to sit for a private deposition in the House’s impeachment inquiry into President Biden. It did not go well for the Republicans leading the committees. The Democrats came prepared and ready to push back on Republican lawmakers, who seemed more accustomed to appearing on right-wing media channels, where their assertions are not challenged, than to debating colleagues.
Democrats on the committees called out Republicans’ hypocrisy over Biden’s subpoena by noting that various Republicans in Congress had entirely ignored subpoenas themselves. In the Judiciary Committee, Eric Swalwell (D-CA) noted that committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) had been out of compliance for his own House subpoena for 608 days.
In the Oversight Committee, Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) entered into the record the House subpoenas for Republicans Jordan, McCarthy, Scott Perry (R-PA), Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, Mo Brooks (R-AL), and Andy Biggs (R-AZ). Moskowitz told the Republicans on the committee: “You vote to add those names and show the American people that we apply the law equally, not just when it’s Democrats…. It’s a crime when it’s Democrats, but when it’s Trump and the Republicans it’s just fine? No, show that you’re serious and that everyone’s not above the law. Vote for that amendment and I’ll vote for the Hunter Biden contempt.”
Hunter Biden has offered to testify publicly but does not want to testify behind closed doors after Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) misrepresented in public what Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer said in private. The Oversight Committee meeting took a dramatic turn when, while the committee was discussing holding him in contempt for not answering the subpoena, Hunter Biden showed up in person. Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) promptly attacked him, saying: “[Y]ou are the epitome of white privilege. Coming into the Oversight Committee, spitting in our face, ignoring a Congressional subpoena to be deposed. What are you afraid of? You have no balls to come up here.” CNN’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju noted that Mace’s attack on Biden prompted Biggs to tell his colleagues to “not act like a bunch of nimrods.”
Biden walked out when Greene, who showed naked pictures of him in a previous committee meeting, began to speak. The television cameras followed him rather than recording her speech. Former talk show host Geraldo Rivera posted on social media: “Hunter walks out after hazing. It’s a sh*t show that reveals the Committee is (as [former] President Trump is fond of saying) a witch hunt.”
Astonishingly, that was not the end of congressional Republicans’ performance today. The House Homeland Security Committee today held its first impeachment hearing on Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas as Republicans try to turn immigration into their central election issue.
Only one Cabinet secretary has ever been impeached in U.S. history—Secretary of War William Belknap, in 1876, in the midst of a searing financial scandal—but Republicans maintain that Mayorkas’s adherence to Biden’s border policies is reason to remove him. And yet, despite their focus on the border, House Republicans have rejected Senate negotiations over increased funding. At first they said they would accept only their own policy, put forward in an extreme border measure passed last year that Senate Democrats and President Biden rejected, and then they said they would not pass legislation at all and that the border issue must be solved by the president.
Meanwhile, today former New Jersey governor Chris Christie dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination, digging at his colleagues for refusing to denounce Trump, and Trump backers in Wisconsin filed a petition to recall Assembly speaker Robin Vos from office for not adequately supporting Trump and not impeaching the state’s top elections official, a nonpartisan officer who conspiracy theorists insist was part of a plan to rig the 2020 presidential vote in Wisconsin, and who will oversee the 2024 election.
And news broke today that thanks to the efforts of Biden and the Democrats, a record 20 million Americans enrolled for health care through the Affordable Care Act for this year.
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I would post a popcorn gif if it weren’t so serious that Congress seems poised to literally do nothing this year. People have joked about a “do nothing Congress” forever, but this one might come the closest to literally doing absolutely nothing.
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Of course, I also don’t want the majority party of congress to do anything on their agenda, either, but shit still needs to get done… 
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It strikes me that the problem is that there are really three parties in the House right now: the Democrats, traditional Republicans (who still suck but will compromise to get the necessities done), and the MAGA wing. And since none have a majority, and the GOP gave the keys to the smallest of those groups, they’ll have trouble passing a resolution acknowledging that water is wet.
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It’s true… the “freedumb” caucus is going to ensure that the funding bill won’t pass… And if Johnson does get it out of the house, they’ll probably vote him out… they really are the arsonist party, aren’t they?
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They are, and for some reason, the “freedumb” caucus thinks they’ll be able to blame their inaction on Biden and the Democrats. And I don’t think the majority of the American public is that stupid. Or maybe they are, but in a different way. I think people tend to not be very nuanced in deciding who to blame. They’ll blame the people most directly in charge, and in the House, that’s the Republicans. I hope they don’t keep this up, because we need a funding bill passed, but if they do, they’re going to get destroyed in November.
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Well, the people who follow them on twitter and who donate to their campaigns will eat that shit up… and all too often, the media is complicit in pushing those narratives, too. You’d hope that more people could see through it, but sadly…
I agree, but I also think many people don’t pay as close attention to what’s going on, and often ignore reality for easy to digest talking points, far too often.
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heck. well that’s enough to make me believe in alien abductions and body doubles right there…
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January 11, 2024 (Thursday)
“Today, at my direction,” President Joe Biden said this evening, “U.S. military forces—together with the United Kingdom and with support from Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands—successfully conducted strikes against a number of targets in Yemen used by Houthi rebels to endanger freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most vital waterways.”
The strikes came after the Iran-backed Houthi militia launched 27 attacks on vessels in the Red Sea, including merchant shipping vessels that carry about 12% of the world’s oil, 8% of its grain, and 8% of liquefied natural gas, as well as other commodities.
While the Houthis claim their attacks are designed to support the Palestinians in Gaza, they are also apparently angling to continue and spread the Hamas-Israel war into a wider conflict. Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah, all nonstate actors backed by Iran, would like very much to extend and enlarge the war to enhance their own power and win adherents to their ideologies.
The Arab states do not want the conflict to spread. Neither does the U.S. government, and Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have worked hard to make sure it doesn’t, sending two carrier groups to the region, for example, to deter enthusiasm for such an extension.
On October 19, shortly after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Houthis launched cruise missiles and drones designed by Iran at Israel, but when the USS Carney and Saudi Arabia shot the weapons down, they turned to attacking shipping. Fifty or so ships use the Red Sea waterway every day.
On November 19, Houthis seized a Japanese-registered vessel, the Galaxy Leader, along with its 25-member international crew, prompting the United Nations Security Council to condemn “in the strongest terms” the “recent Houthi attacks” and “demanded that all such attacks and action cease immediately.” The Security Council “underlined the importance of…international law.”
On December 3, Houthis struck another three ships.
On December 19, the U.S., the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and a group representing 44 allies and partner nations condemned the Houthi attacks, noting that such attacks threatened international commerce, endangering supply chains and affecting the global economy. Also on December 19, the U.S. and partners announced a naval protection group for maritime shipping in the waterway, dubbed Operation Prosperity Guardian.
When the attacks continued, the governments of the U.S., Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Singapore, and the United Kingdom warned the Houthis on January 3, 2024, that their attacks were “illegal, unacceptable, and profoundly destabilizing,” delaying the delivery of goods and “jeopardizing the movement of critical food, fuel, and humanitarian assistance throughout the world.” They called for an end to the attacks and the release of the detained vessels and crew members, and they warned that the Houthis would bear responsibility for the “consequences” if the attacks continued.
“We remain committed to the international rules-based order and are determined to hold malign actors accountable for unlawful seizures and attacks,” the statement said.
Administration officials told the press the U.S. would strike the Houthis militarily if the attacks didn’t stop, although Biden has not wanted to destabilize Yemen further than it already is after a decade of civil war. “The president has made clear the U.S. does not seek conflict with any nation or actor in the Middle East,” John Kirby, spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, said. “But neither will we shrink from the task of defending ourselves, our interests, our partners or the free flow of international commerce.” An administration official said: “I would not anticipate another warning.”
On Tuesday, January 9, the Houthis launched 21 drones and missiles in the most significant attack yet—one that directly targeted U.S. ships—and on January 10 the U.N. Security Council passed UNSCR 2722, a resolution condemning the attacks “in the strongest terms.” Eleven members voted in favor and none opposed it. Four countries—China, Russia, Algeria, and Mozambique—abstained, but neither China nor Russia, both of which have veto power, would veto the resolution.
Today the U.S. and the U.K., with coalition support, responded. Military strikes came from the air, ocean, and underwater, according to a defense official, and they hit weapons storage areas and sites from which the Houthis have been launching drones and cruise missiles.
The governments of Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, the U.K, and the U.S. announced the “precision strikes,” saying they were “in accordance with the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense, consistent with the UN Charter” and “were intended to disrupt and degrade the capabilities the Houthis use to threaten global trade and the lives of international mariners in one of the world’s most critical waterways.”
“Our aim remains to de-escalate tensions and restore stability in the Red Sea,” the statement read, “but let our message be clear: we will not hesitate to defend lives and protect the free flow of commerce in one of the world’s most critical waterways in the face of continued threats.” Biden’s statement sounded much the same but added: “I will not hesitate to direct further measures to protect our people and the free flow of international commerce as necessary.”
As the January 3 statement from the governments of the U.S., Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Singapore, and the U.K. made clear, one of the key things at stake in standing against the Houthi attacks is the international rules-based order, that is, the system of international laws and organizations developed after World War II to prevent global conflicts by providing forums to resolve differences peacefully. A key element of this international system of agreements is freedom of the seas.
Also central to that rules-based international order is partnerships and allies. Two days ago, one of Europe’s leading politicians revealed that in 2020, former president Trump told European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen: “You need to understand that if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you.” According to the politician, Trump added that “NATO is dead, and we will leave, we will quit NATO,” a threat he has made elsewhere, too.
In contrast, as soon as he took office, President Biden set out to support and extend U.S. alliances and partnerships. While that principle shows in the international support for today’s strike on the Houthis, it has also been central in the administration’s response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, managing migration, supporting African development, building the Indo-Pacific, and reacting to the Middle East crisis in general.
Today, Secretary of State Blinken finished a week-long trip to Türkiye, Greece, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the West Bank, Bahrain, and Egypt, where he met with leaders and reaffirmed “the U.S. commitment to working with partners to set the conditions necessary for peace in the Middle East, which includes comprehensive, tangible steps toward the realization of a future Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel, with both living in peace and security.”
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January 12, 2024 (Friday)
Last week, after President Joe Biden went to Valley Forge and then spoke in Pennsylvania, I got a chance to sit down with him to ask a few questions.
What I wanted to hear from him illustrates the difference between journalists and historians.
Journalists are trained to find breaking stories and to explain them clearly so that their audience is better informed about what is happening in the world. What they do is vitally important to a democracy, and it is hard work. One of the reasons I always try to call out the names of journalists whose articles I’m describing is to highlight that there are real people working hard to dig out the stories we all need to know and that we are all part of a community trying together to figure out what’s happening in this country.
Historians do something different than journalists. We study how and why societies change. We are trained to see larger patterns in the facts we find in documents, speeches, letters, and photographs…and in the work of journalists. Some historians believe that mass movements change society, and so they focus on such movements; others believe that great figures change society, and they focus on biographies. Still others focus on economic change. And so on.
In my case, I am fascinated by the way ideas change society, and I am especially interested in the gap between what people believe and what is actually happening in the real world. That interest means that I always want to know how people think and especially how their worldview informs the way they act. Then I compare that worldview to the real-world policies they are putting into place. I sometimes think of what I study as the place where the rubber of ideas meets the road of the real world.
I have twice now been able to interview President Biden. (And let me tell you, it is an odd experience to have your historical subject be able to talk back to you!) The opportunity to ask a historical figure how he thinks, after I have spent years studying his policies, is mind-blowing.
To that end, I wanted to know why he chose to go to Valley Forge, where General George Washington quartered his Continental Army troops for six months in the hard winter of 1777–1778, to start his 2024 presidential campaign. Valley Forge looms huge in American mythology, but most people probably can’t say why. So what did it mean to him to launch his 2024 presidential campaign from there?
I also was deeply interested in what he means when he says he has great faith in the American people—something he says all the time but usually without much context. So what exactly is it about the American people that gives him such faith?
The answers are important, I think, and I found at least one of them surprising.
As I say, it is an odd thing to have a historical subject who can talk back to you, but in all the right ways: it forces you to adjust your understanding of our historical moment. That’s the sort of information that will make the historical record clearer and that, when today’s society has itself become history, will help historians in the future better understand how and why it changed.
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January 13, 2024 (Saturday)
Last night a woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande that marks the border between the U.S. and Mexico near Eagle Pass, Texas.
U.S. Border Patrol agents knew that a group of six migrants were in distress in the river but could not try to save them, as they normally would, because troops from the Texas National Guard and the Texas Military Department prevented the Border Patrol agents from entering the area where they were struggling: Shelby Park, a 47-acre public park that offers access to a frequently traveled part of the river and is a place where Border Patrol agents often encounter migrants crossing the border illegally.
They could not enter because two days ago, on Thursday, Texas governor Greg Abbott sent armed Texas National Guard soldiers and soldiers from the Texas Military Department to take control of Shelby Park. Rolando Salinas, the mayor of Eagle Pass, posted a video on Facebook showing the troops and saying that a state official had told him that state troops were taking “full control” over Shelby Park “indefinitely.” Salinas made it clear that “[t]his is not something that we wanted. This is not something that we asked for as a city.”
The Texas forces have denied United States Border Patrol officials entry into the park to perform their duties, asserting that Texas officials have power over U.S. officials.
On December 18, Abbott signed into law S.B. 4, a measure that attempts to take into state hands the power over immigration the Constitution gives to the federal government. Courts have repeatedly reinforced that immigration is the responsibility of federal, not state, government, but now, according to Uriel J. García of the Texas Tribune, “some Texas Republicans have said they hope the new law will push the issue back before a U.S. Supreme Court that is more conservative since three appointees of former President Donald Trump joined it.”
On January 3 the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the new law, saying: “Texas cannot run its own immigration system. Its efforts, through S.B. 4, intrude on the federal government’s exclusive authority to regulate the entry and removal of noncitizens, frustrate the United States’ immigration operations and proceedings, and interfere with U.S. foreign relations.”
Abbott and MAGA Republicans are teeing up the issue of immigration as a key line of attack on President Joe Biden in 2024, but while they are insisting the issue is so important they will not agree to fund Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s 2022 invasion until it is solved, they are also unwilling to participate in discussions to fund more border officers or immigration courts. Today, once again, Biden reminded reporters that he has asked Congress to pass new border measures since he took office, but rather than pass new laws, Republicans appear to be doubling down on pushing the idea that migrants threaten American society and that an individual state—Texas, in this case—can override federal authority.
Abbott has spent more than $100 million of Texas tax dollars to send migrants to cities led by Democrats. These migrants have applied for asylum and are waiting for a hearing; they are in the U.S. legally. In September 2023, Texas stopped coordinating with nonprofits in those cities that prepared for migrant arrivals.
Yesterday, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker wrote to Abbott, calling him out for choosing “to sow chaos in an attempt to score political points.” Pritzker noted that Abbott is “sending asylum seekers from Texas to the Upper Midwest in the middle of winter—many without coats, without shoes to protect them from the snow—to a city whose shelters are already overfilled with migrants you sent here.” Chicago’s temperatures are set to drop below zero this weekend, Pritzker wrote, and he “strongly urge[d]” Abbott to stop sending people to Illinois in these conditions. “You are dropping off asylum seekers without alerting us to their arrivals, at improper locations at all hours of the night.”
Pritzker wrote that he supports bipartisan immigration reform but “[w]hile action is pending at the federal level, I plead with you for mercy for the thousands of people who are powerless to speak for themselves. Please, while winter is threatening vulnerable people’s lives, suspend your transports and do not send more people to our state. We are asking you to help prevent additional deaths. We should be able to come together in a bipartisan fashion to urge Congress to act. But right now, we are talking about human beings and their survival. I hope we can at least agree on saving lives right now.”
Speaking on the right-wing Dana Loesch Show last week, Abbott said, “The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”
On January 13, 1833, President Andrew Jackson wrote to Vice President–elect Martin van Buren to explain his position on South Carolina’s recent assertion that sovereign states could overrule federal laws. “Was this to be permitted the government would lose the confidence of its citizens and it would induce disunion everywhere. No my friend, the crisis must be now met with firmness, our citizens protected, and the modern doctrine of nullification and secession put down forever…. [N]othing must be permitted to weaken our government at home or abroad,” he wrote.
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do the border areas already vote blue? because i so often read how the border towns hate what abbott is doing. it’s got to be costing him politically…
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My opinion as a Texan who pays attention: The border area of Texas, usually called the valley, is a complicated political landscape. They tend to vote blue but have very low turnout. There is a high impression of political corruption and uselessness. Partly because the GOP controls state politics, so the valley isn’t getting the things they need. The GOP simultaneously hates and courts that area. Voter suppression efforts have been very successful throughout the state but especially there. For reasons I don’t understand, the GOP has made inroads in the area. Despite all the chaos and suffering Abbot’s actions at the border have caused. And all the money wasted, over 5 billion. The national Democratic party has also been complacent about votes in the area for a few decades.
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January 14, 2024 (Sunday)
You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.
When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.
It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself, in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.
It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.
It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold print, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.
It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.
Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.
None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that, when they had to, they did what was right.
On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.
After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”
Dr. King told the audience that, if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.
He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”
People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.
Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.
Wishing you all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2024.
[Image of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., by Buddy Poland.]
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So, you are not murdering people only because some entity whose authority you question would try to bring you to justice to - in due process according to the law and generally accepted ethics and morals.
Noted.
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January 15, 2024 (Monday)
Last night, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) announced they have agreed to another continuing resolution that will fund the government until March 1 and March 8. Schumer said he will begin the process of passing the continuing resolution when the Senate reconvenes tomorrow.
The first part of the current continuing resolution that funds the government will run out Friday, and Schumer warned that “[t]o avoid a shutdown, it will take bipartisan cooperation in the Senate and the House to quickly pass the CR and send it to the President’s desk before Friday’s funding deadline.”
Schumer is sending a message to the House, since far-right Republican extremists there threw former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) out of the speakership for adhering to the budget spending agreement he made with President Joe Biden in June 2023. Now Johnson has agreed to what is essentially the same deal.
It is unclear what actions the funding measure will prompt in the House. According to Marianna Sotomayor and Leigh Ann Caldwell in the Washington Post yesterday, extremist Republicans remain angry enough at their inability to dictate terms to the government that they are, once again, threatening to halt the House’s business in protest, to challenge Johnson’s speakership, and/or to shut down the government. At the same time, other Republicans are angry that Johnson appears to be caving to the extremists, who have made the House a bit of a laughingstock as they made it almost impossible last year for the House to get anything done. More obstruction, another speakership fight, or a government shutdown would hurt the Republicans’ image even more.
Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reported that Johnson told the House conference that with Kentucky representative Hal Rogers hospitalized after a car accident on Wednesday, and Louisiana representative Steve Scalise out of Congress until February for a stem cell transplant to treat his blood cancer, the Republican majority is so slim there isn’t time for anything other than a continuing resolution.
Perhaps to appease the extremists, on the same call, Sherman reported, Johnson told the conference that the bipartisan immigration measure being negotiated in the Senate was “DOA in House.” House Republicans have insisted they will not pass additional funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan without a measure addressing the border. At the same time, they have also refused Biden’s offer to negotiate, clearly trying to preserve the immigration issue to whip up voters before the 2024 election. Johnson told his conference that Congress “can’t solve [the] border until Trump is elected or a Republican is back in the White House.” In Iowa, Trump promised: “As soon as I take the oath of office, I’ll…begin the largest deportation operation in American history.”
We got a taste of what those policies will look like over the weekend when on Friday a woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande and two other migrants were in distress after Texas soldiers prevented Border Patrol officers from entering Shelby Park, the area where the migrants were crossing. A lawyer for the Department of Health and Human Services wrote to Texas attorney general Ken Paxton on Sunday, demanding that Texas stop blocking Border Patrol officers.
Meanwhile, the image of the migrant woman and children drowning is so damaging that Texas troops claim they didn’t see any distressed migrants and Texas governor Greg Abbott today insisted that the migrants were already dead when his troops stopped the Border Patrol from helping, although that claim does not address the fact that the Texas troops had blocked the Border Patrol’s normal surveillance of the river and had assumed responsibility for it. Abbott tried to argue that the deaths were not his fault but rather Biden’s because, he said, Biden’s policies encouraged migrants to attempt the crossing.
For their part, Senate Republican negotiators pushed back on the news that Johnson was preemptively tanking the immigration measure, saying that rumors about what’s in it are inaccurate and that Republicans should withhold judgment until they see it. Members of the Senate are eager to pass aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.
Today, Nahal Toosi explored in Politico how the domestic political infighting in the United States is undermining faith in American democracy around the world. Toosi explained that current and former diplomats pointed to concerns that U.S. foreign policy will change based on the demands of a radical base, and they pointed to Trump’s abrupt exit in 2018 from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, more popularly known as the Iran nuclear agreement, that significantly restricted Iran’s nuclear development. In the wake of that withdrawal, Iran resumed the previously prohibited uranium enrichment.
“Foreign relations is very much based on trust, and when you know that the person that is in front of you may not be there or might be followed by somebody that feels exactly the opposite way, what is your incentive to do long-term deals?” a former Latin American diplomat asked of Toosi. A former Mexican ambassador told Toosi that if a Republican takes the White House in 2024, countries will not be able to trust the U.S. as a partner but will instead operate transactionally.
“The world does not have time for the U.S. to rebound back,” a former Asian ambassador told Toosi. “We’ve gone from a unipolar world that we’re familiar with from the 1990s into a multipolar world, but the key pole is still the United States. And if that key pole is not playing the role that we want the U.S. to do, you’ll see alternative forces coming up.” Toosi noted that Russian diplomats were “among those delighting in the U.S. chaos (and fanning it).”
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Jeffries’ involvement in this is telling. That means all Democrats likely will vote for the resolution, so it will only take a handful of the non-radical Republicans in Congress to get this passed, regardless of the MAGA wing’s objections. What will be interesting to see is if the Democrats will then save Johnson’s job if those same extremists try to do to Johnson what they did to McCarthy.
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Assuming that was part of the deal? Johnson is a piece of shit, but I guess the “best” piece of shit we are gonna get as a negotiating partner from that festering pile of shit that is the GQP.
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Yeah, at this point, I don’t think it benefits anyone to have another Speaker battle. Assuming the Dems get something out of the deal, I’m ok with them saving Johnson’s job…for now.
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