The GOP internal fight is going to be nasty

We have seen how the GOP has taken revenge on Democrats by various petty acts because of their preposterous belief that the Democrats should have bailed McCarthy out as ‘gratitude’ for bringing the debt ceiling and continuing resolution (CR) to the floor for a vote, even though Kevin McCarthy bad-mouthed the Democrats even after they voted for the CR, and had refused to acknowledge their major role in passing it.

But the minority party in the House is already powerless and there is little other than petty things that can be done to them. But the more significant acts of revenge can be done on the eight Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy, such as congresswoman Nancy Mace.

Elsewhere in the GOP, revenge is on the menu. House Republicans are now weighing whether to expel Mace from at least two centrist-leaning groups she belonged to, as POLITICO first reported. Her staff was quickly removed from several internal GOP communications channels shortly after her vote Tuesday.
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After whipsawing between distance from and embrace of former President Donald Trump, for example, she recently opened the door to backing his primary campaign. Within the Capitol, she’s known as an outspoken critic of party leadership and a frequent guest on cable news shows.

“I’m not sure what the fallout will be. She has no coalition of support,” said one House GOP lawmaker, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal party dynamics.

“I can’t stop her from going on the Sunday shows,” this lawmaker added. “But inside the conference, she is a running joke.”

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McCarthy has only himself to blame for his woes

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Kevin McCarthy loyalists are seething with anger over his ouster from the position of speaker. It would be understandable that they would be angry with Matt Gaetz and the seven other Republican congresspeople who voted for him to go. But they seem to be even more angry with Democrats for not voting to keep him in his position, acting as if it were an unprecedented betrayal, even though it has always been the case that it was up to the majority party to vote in and keep the speaker and that the minority party always voted against.

At his press conference, McCarthy blamed the Democrats for what happened but Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was having none of it.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) railed against former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calf.) for blaming Democrats for being ousted from his leadership role in a historic vote. 

“Does anyone believe for one minute that McCarthy would help elect a Dem speaker ‘for the institution’?” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “McCarthy’s hubris is a theme. He loudly stated he wouldn’t negotiate [with] Dems, called virtually none, trashed those who helped w/ [a continuing resolution], and then expected Dem votes for free?”

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McCarthy loyalist Republicans lash out

After the drama over Kevin McCarthy’s ouster as speaker, the House has adjourned and will meet next Tuesday where the Republicans will meet for a candidate forum and begin voting for the next speaker on Wednesday. This Republican debacle is going to have ripple effects for some time. As is often the case after a humiliating experience like this, the people who come out of it looking bad try to pin the blame on others for their own mistakes and faults. In this case, the reason for the chaos is that the Republican party has ceased to be a party in the traditional sense but is now dominated by angry, unprincipled, attention-craving egomaniacs who have sworn their allegiance to an increasingly deranged cult leader.

For example, we have McCarthy blaming Democrats and former speaker Nancy Pelosi for his downfall, saying that they should have supported him “for institutional reasons”.

McCarthy blamed Democrats for his ouster as speaker — arguing that they should have supported his remaining in the top role for institutional reasons.

McCarthy said he had a discussion with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in the days he was trying to wrangle enough votes to get elected speaker. McCarthy claimed that Pelosi promised to support him if he faced a challenge.

McCarthy then argued that by joining Gaetz and other Republicans, Democrats picked politics over the institution.

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McCarthy ousted as Speaker. Now what?

I watched C-Span today as the House of Representatives voted twice on the issue of whether Kevin McCarthy should retain his job as speaker. The House is currently split 221-212 (with two seats vacant) so if everyone is present, a majority will consist of 217 votes. Since Republicans have just 221 votes, McCarthy could not prevail if more than four Republicans defected, unless Democrats voted in favor or simply voted ‘present’.

The process was triggered by Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz filing a motion to vacate. The first vote was on a resolution by McCarthy supporters to table Gaetz’s motion. If it passed, that meant that McCarthy’s job was saved. It lost by a vote of 218-208, with 11 Republicans joining with Democrats to defeat it. The next vote was on Gaetz’s motion to vacate and that carried by 216-210. The Democrats presented a solid front and, apart from some absences, they all voted against McCarthy on both issues. There had been some reports that McCarthy allies had been begging some Democrats to vote their way but clearly that effort failed.

Three of the Republicans who voted with Gaetz on the effort to table the motion, switched their votes on the second vote and voted to keep McCarthy as speaker. Their reasons were not clear, other than perhaps they just wanted a clean vote on the issue rather than a procedural maneuver.
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Shutdown averted – for now. What next?

Although there was a sigh of relief that there was no government shutdown as of midnight Saturday due to a deal that would fund the government for another 45 days through the means of a continuing resolution (CR), that just means that November 17 is the next deadline for this never-ending drama. In principle, the delay is meant to give time for the Congress to decide on the 12 appropriations bills that should have been passed by September 30th. But in reality, from now on we are going to have the drama of whether Kevin McCarthy will continue to be speaker. He was forced to choose between a government shutdown and angering the party extremists and he chose the latter by making a deal with the Democrats.

Under the rules that McCarthy negotiated with the extremists in the Republican caucus, any single member can bring up a ‘motion to vacate’ and Florida congressman Matt Gaetz has already announced that he will do so this coming week.

So what will happen next?
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Prisoner’s Dilemma situation in Georgia

One of the 19 people charged in the Georgia election interference case has pleaded guilty.

Former Republican bail bondsman Scott Hall, one of the 19 people charged alongside Donald Trump for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia, entered into a plea agreement on Friday, becoming the first defendant to plead guilty in the sprawling criminal case.

A live video of the court proceeding showed Hall pleading guilty to five counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with the performance of election duties, a misdemeanor charge.

Hall was sentenced to five years’ probation, a $5,000 fine, 200 hours of community service, and to write an apology letter to the state.

This is a relatively light sentence and there are two possible reasons for that. One is that he is a minor figure in the whole operation. The other is that he has agreed to cooperate with the prosecution in return for more lenient treatment. His testimony is thought likely to cause the most harm to Sydney Powell, whose trial is due to start on October 27.

So we now have a real-life, enlarged version of the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma situation. In that problem, two prisoners have to make a decision. If they stick together and do not cooperate with the prosecutors, they increase their chances of escaping punishment altogether by being found not guilty. But if they are found guilty, they will get stiff sentences. On the other hand, if one prisoner cooperates with the prosecutors and betrays the other prisoner, that prisoner can get a light sentence, while the other prisoner gets a heavy sentence.

In this case, because of the large number of defendants, all the other defendants now have to start making more complex calculations. The earlier they plead guilty and cooperate with prosecutors, the more likely they are to get light sentences as part of a plea deal. As time goes by, the information that any individual can provide gets less valuable because prosecutors would have got most of what they need from the ones who made deals earlier. So each person has to guess whether their co-defendants will cooperate with the other defendants by staying silent and risking stiff sentences if found guilty or betray them by spilling the beans to prosecutors in return for a lighter sentence.

The Biden impeachment inquiry falls flat

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives is thoroughly botching the most important role assigned to it by the US Constitution, that of funding the government. With all the attention focused on that impending disaster, you can be excused for not noticing that that is not all they are bungling. While they play brinkmanship games within their caucus that threaten the livelihoods of vast numbers of people who will be adversely affected by a shutdown, they seem to have the time to waste on pointless activities, such as the impeachment of Joe Biden.

Yesterday saw the opening day of the impeachment inquiry headed by James Comer and it too was a bust, with even their opening witnesses, the people who were supposed to play starring roles, saying that they did not see any evidence on any crimes by Biden.

Forensic accountant Bruce Dubinsky, one of the GOP witnesses, undercut Republicans’ main narrative by saying there wasn’t enough evidence yet for him to conclude that there was “corruption” by the Bidens.
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Conservative law professor Jonathan Turley also said that the House does not yet have evidence to support articles of impeachment against Joe Biden, but argued that House Republicans were justified in opening an impeachment inquiry.

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Let’s stop calling these debates

I did not watch the second Republican debate. I could not watch it because it is on Fox News and its related cable and streaming channels and I do not subscribe to cable. But even if I had access, I would likely not have watched because all indications were that it would have hardly anything of substance.

And so it proved. In reading about the debate afterwards, it looks like it was a shambles.

It took about a half hour for the Republican Presidential debate on Wednesday night to descend from merely being very boring to unrecoverable chaos.
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This was the “thank you for speaking while I’m interrupting” debate, the event at which the confusion and aimlessness of the Republicans challenging Trump for the Presidential nomination became apparent to all. Trump, far ahead in every poll, had opted out of the event, held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in Simi Valley, California, a venue whose leadership he has sometimes sparred with. In his absence, the debate was billed as a chance for the other Republicans on the ballot to change their fortunes: for Haley to establish herself as the mainstream alternative to Donald Trump, for Scott to make clear what he is campaigning for, and for DeSantis to find a way to reverse his slide in the polls, which has now lasted several months and still defines the campaign.

On that count, DeSantis failed from the beginning, when it took a full fifteen minutes for the moderators to call on him. When he did get a chance to speak, generally looking a little glum, he tended to rattle off some suspiciously rehearsed-sounding lines. Of his plans to expand domestic oil drilling, DeSantis said, “We’re going to choose Midland over Moscow. We’re going to choose the Marcellus over the Mullahs. We’re going to choose the Bakken over Beijing.” Stop this man before he alliterates again.

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Trump loses again in fraud lawsuit

New York’s attorney general Letitia James had brought a lawsuit contending that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and two officers of his companies Allen Weisselberg and Jeffrey McConney and the various Trump organizations engaged in systematic fraud by inflating the value of their properties by outrageous amounts.

New York State Supreme Court justice Arthur Engoron yesterday awarded summary judgment to James on the first and most important claim. This means that the claim was established already and that it did not need to go to trial and the trial could go straight to the penalty phase which will undoubtedly include monetary damages but may also strip the family of control of the properties.

A judge ruled Tuesday that Donald Trump committed fraud for years while building the real estate empire that catapulted him to fame and the White House, and he ordered some of the former president’s companies removed from his control and dissolved.
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Engoron ordered that some of Trump’s business licenses be rescinded as punishment, making it difficult or impossible for them to do business in New York, and said he would continue to have an independent monitor oversee Trump Organization operations.

If not successfully appealed, the order would strip Trump of his authority to make strategic and financial decisions over some of his key properties in the state.

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Republicans get slapped down on gerrymandering efforts

Ever since the US Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 that Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was no longer constitutional because more than 40 years had elapsed since the law was passed, Republican controlled states had felt that they were now free to gerrymander electoral districts to minimize or even eliminate districts that had majority Black populations which were more likely to elect Democratic candidates. And they proceeded to do so, with Alabama being one of the first off the mark.

They drew a map that had just one Black majority district even though Alabama has 25% Black population. An Appeals Court rejected that map and Alabama appealed to the US Supreme Court.

A three-judge panel struck down the map last year, deciding the state could have easily drawn a reasonably configured district that gave Black voters a majority in a second district. The supreme court agreed with that determination in June, with chief justice John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh joining the three liberal justices to form a majority.

Although that verdict surprised most observers, you would think that it would have ended settled the issue. But no. Republicans drew another map that still did not have two Black majority districts. It was clear that they were trying to run out the clock, and squeeze in the 2024 election under the old map before being forced to redraw it. They were promptly sued again and the Appeals Court had had enough of Alabama’s shenanigans and scolded the state for ignoring the Supreme Court order and went even further and took away the map drawing ability from the legislature and gave it to a special master.

Alabama then sued to prevent that but today, the Supreme Court rejected that appeal so the special master will draw the map.

“It has been a long and frustrating battle holding the Alabama legislature accountable, but today it is a rewarding one,” lawyers from a coalition of civil rights groups, which represented the plaintiffs in the case, said in a joint statement. “Even after the highest court in the land sided with Black voters in June, our elected officials still chose power over people by outright defying multiple court orders and the loud cries of their constituents to do the right thing.”

In the age of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), Republicans have become increasingly shameless in trying to ignore court rulings that go against them. Once priding themselves on being the party of law and order, they are now a party of scofflaws..