Yesterday, the House of Representatives succeeded in their second attempt at impeaching homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas after they botched the first attempt last week. This time, they passed it by the narrowest of margins if 214-213. Two Republicans and two Democrats did not vote, for reasons that I have not been able to learn. Three Republicans voted with the Democrats. The impeachment effort is expected to meet a swift death in the Senate.
Republicans wanted to have this vote yesterday because the special election to fill the seat formerly held by the disgraced and expelled congressperson George Santos was also held yesterday and they feared that it would be won by a Democrat and thus their attempt would fail again if they voted after he was sworn in. Their fears were justified because Tom Suozzi won easily over his Republican rival Mazi Pilip by a margin of 54-46%, in a race that was expected to be much closer. So now the House is split 219-213 in favor of Republicans with three seats vacant, allowing them to have at most two defections if they want to pass anything.
Immigration was supposed to be a big issue in the race and favor the Republicans so Democrats are heartened by the result.
In what had become an increasingly bitter campaign, the inexperienced Pilip attempted to tie Suozzi to the immigration situation at the US-Mexico border.
…The seat, in Long Island, was seen as a key indicator of voter sentiment before the expected Biden-Donald Trump election in November. Biden won the district in 2020, but the area swung Republican in the 2022 midterm elections, when Santos was elected.
…Pilip, a relatively unknown local politician who was criticized for avoiding the press during the campaign, sought to tie Suozzi to Biden, claiming the pair had “created the migrant crisis”.
In an unexpected turn of events, Pilip conceded the race and congratulated Suozzi in a phone call, surprising because we have reached a new norm in US politics where if a Republican loses an election, they immediately claim that the process was rigged against them by a shadowy cabal intent on subverting democracy and creating a government run by Communist radical pedophiles.
While most of them file frivolous lawsuits to try and overturn the result or try to get election officials removed, one such loser in New Mexico took denialism to new levels, even though he lost his race by nearly 50 points, not exactly a close race.
A New Mexico man has said he was hired by a failed Republican candidate for political office to carry out drive-by shootings targeting the homes of Democrats who would not abide by false election-rigging claims.
Demetrio Trujillo, 42, indicated in federal court documents filed on Friday that he had been hired for the spate of attacks by Solomon Peña, whose run for a seat in the New Mexico state legislature in November 2022 ended in defeat.
…Peña, 40, stands charged with lying about how the race he lost had been fraudulently stolen from him, which then fueled a plot to shoot up the houses of New Mexico Democrats, among them the state’s house speaker.
…He has pleaded not guilty and awaits a trial set for June 2024.
Peña approached members of the commission that certifies election results, told them the race he had lost by nearly 50 percentage points had been rigged against him, and asked them to reject its results.
…The drive-by shootings unfolded in December 2022 and January 2023 shortly after officials certified Peña’s electoral loss. No one was wounded in any of the shootings, though authorities have noted that – in one instance – bullets cut through the bedroom of a state senator’s 10-year-old daughter.
Trujillo later told investigators that he knew Peña through acquaintances. Peña hired him to fire bullets at three officials’ homes to intimidate them, Trujillo reported. Investigators charged Peña with carrying out the spree’s fourth drive-by shooting by himself.
Ultimately, smartphone communications from Peña, including texts, tied him to the attacks, according to prosecutors. The communications not only pinpointed the targeted officials’ homes. They also purportedly spelled out allegations of election-rigging, and plans to “press the attack” and rage over how voters overwhelmingly rejected him for a seat in New Mexico’s statehouse.
“We have to act. … The enemy will eventually break,” Peña is charged with saying in a text to a fellow Republican hours before the series of shooting began. He sent a separate message reading: “It is our duty … to stop the oligarchs from taking over our country.”
Pilip does not have a future in the MAGA Republican party if she accepts the reality of losing.
It looks like Rep. Judy Chu, Democrat from California, was not present due to COVID.
I was quite pleased and surprised by this win: this is the district that was told by the local newspaper exactly who Santos was before the election, and decided, “Yup, that’s the guy for me!” I figured they’d go with the unhinged immigrant again.
The more I read about US politics, the more I think of cricket.
Totally opaque rules and unfathomable strategies that eithe one must be born into or which require a PH.D and a few decades to master.
What Would Happen If Biden Stepped Aside? Bloody @##$%^.
Clearly your early training in cricket help you master the US political morass, Mano.
[OT]
Nope. You can’t judge others’ competence by yours, you know. I can follow it perfectly well, and was neither born into it nor have spent decades to master. I just watched a fair bit of it with my mates and a few bottles of beer when I was in my early 20s.
Rules are relatively simple, it’s the terminology that mostly bamboozles people; for example, cricket has laws, not rules — once you get the knack of it, the field positions and the types of stroke and so forth become evident. The strategies are also time-honoured, though as with any professional sport, the meta changes over time, and of course teams play to their strengths.
In fact, what you see as opaque arcana actually were very handy before TV was a thing; one could literally envisage exactly what the play on the field was by the commentator describing it.
Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlvxSOx575A
John @#4,
Thanks for that clip. I had never heard about synthetic cricket commentary before. Pretty impressive, considering the state of technology at that time.It does show the power of cricket vocabulary to accurately convey what happens on the field.
@ 4 Joh
Sorry but that film does not really help though the riot scene is reminiscent of a of a hockey game.
Mano’s comment made me wonder: is the place that cricket is played called a “field”? I have a vague memory of it being called a “pitch”.
I have the same question about association football (a.k.a., soccer). We have a brand new stadium in St. Louis and a team that made it all the way to the playoffs in their first season of existence, so maybe I should learn some of the jargon. 😎
That was an illustrative snipped to substantiate my claim, not an instruction manual, jrkrideau.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Cricket
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_cricket_terms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leg_side#/media/File:Cricket_fielding_positions2.svg
Basically, fielding positions are relative to the batsman (batter, these days); the on side is the half of the field matching the batsman’s dominant hand, the leg side is the half of the field that corresponds to the batsman’s non-dominant hand, point and square leg are the perpendicular lines matching the batsman’s position, forward and backward are the halves of the field in front of the batsman and behind the batsman.
Slips are the close-in fielders on the batsman’s off side, and there are also terms for the various cardinal directions, and distances, such as mid-on or long-off.
A similar thing applies to strokes; unlike baseball, the batsman can hit the ball anywhere on the field with any type of motion or just block, so there are things like drives and pulls and cuts, and they can be off the front foot or the back foot (that’s the stance) and so forth.
Anyway. It works, and it’s not that inscrutable. More-so than its simplistic cousin, baseball, but not that much.
billseymour @#7,
As I understand it, the cricket ‘field’ (or ‘grounds’) is the entire playing area while the ‘pitch’ is the narrow strip between the two sets of wickets at the center of the field.
If you want to know what cricket is really about, watch the Bluey episode.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j7Z8jYiAEfs
Naah, the game is a racial memory of the galactic Krikkit War (see the Hitch-hiker quadrology by Douglas Adams).
“It is our duty … to stop the oligarchs from taking over our country.”
The maga heads keep saying stuff like this but they never, you know, go after the actual oligarchs. I can’t decide if they believe it when they say things like that or if it is just bullshit all the way down.