Adolescent Minds in the Republican Party

As we drove the family Christmas tree to its final resting place on Golden Hill this morning, my wife reacted to an NPR rundown of the latest news about the Congress by pointing out that Republicans on the Hill are acting as if controlled by adolescent minds.

I confirmed her observation upon arriving back to my writing perch. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry says there is a biological reason for (young) people’s behavior in an impulsive, irrational, or dangerous way:

• The frontal cortex, the area of the brain controlling  reasoning and helping people think before they act, develops later than the part of the brain –the  amygdala– responsible for immediate reactions including fear and aggressive behavior. 

This, I think, explains the adult appearance and childish actions of many GOP Congresscritters.

It’s as if they gave up using the reasonable part of the brain when they swore an oath of allegiance to the MAGA cult.

Drives toward impeaching President Joe Biden, Secretaries of Homeland Security and Defense are all in motion, based on imagined evidence and ignorance of the law. None of these hearings will result in something the Senate will want to consider.

Republicans are re-writing the constitution to say it doesn’t require “high crimes and misdemeanors” to impeach. They have impeach fever because their Dear Leader, who’s facing actual 91 criminal charges in four jurisdictions, has said to make it happen.

These excuses for not engaging in law making and actual oversight do result in free media for those willing to step away from reality, and the unfortunates who attempt to correct the record. Let’s hope some future president doesn’t decide that a Kennedy Center-style awards program is appropriate for performative bullshit on Capitol Hill.

Last year’s Congress was the least productive in modern history, passing roughly two dozen bills for the President to sign.

Via Axios:

• The 104th, 112th and 113th Congresses, in which Republicans controlled one or both chambers with Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in the White House, passed between 70 and 73 laws.

• 2023 also marks the low point in a years-long trend toward gridlock: Five of the six most unproductive first years have been since 2011.

• When you dig into the laws passed by this Congress, the picture becomes even more bleak.

• The vast majority were uncontroversial bills that passed either by unanimous consent or with minimal opposition, including multiple measures to rename Veterans Affairs clinics and another to mint a coin commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Marine Corps.

This year isn’t looking promising. There’s already a revolt going on the far right in the House of Representatives over a top line budget agreement hashed out with the Senate. With nine days left before the Concurring Resolution expires, there may not be enough time (they’re busy with impeachments!) to gain approval.

Extending the deadline for government funding once again may be enough to unseat Speaker Mike Johnson, and there are no promising candidates on the horizon. Back in October a similar standoff resulted in weeks of inaction.

The border crisis is potentially the only non-silly thing Republicans have for a campaign issue, and they’re making damn sure nothing will get done.

From the David Dayen at the American Prospect:

• Maybe this can be explained by the words of Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) to CNN during the field trip: “I’m not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden’s approval rating.” In other words, a deal that Democrats can accept, even a deal that bends pretty far in the direction of a restrictionist border policy, is a deal House Republicans are unwilling to contemplate. In order to keep the border issue alive in 2024, they’d rather blow up the Senate negotiations. They see this as a win even if they lose on government funding, because it keeps immigration and the general aura of crisis on the front pages.

• I predicted last month that these White House–Senate border policy talks would go nowhere, because House Republicans were already signaling pretty loudly that they didn’t want anything to do with them. Two weeks ago, Johnson sent Biden a letter saying that he should use executive authority to shut down the border, implicitly rejecting the possibility that Congress would agree to legislate changes.

Now, I may be stretching things a bit, it seems to me that Democrats running for Congress ought to be shouting from the rooftops about their willingness to get stuff done beyond naming Post Offices.

How about “will work for democracy” campaign signs?

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Speaking of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” former president Trump had a bad day in three separate courts yesterday:

• His entire legal team was banned from denying he raped E. Jean Carroll, as the second defamation case against Trump continues. Why? Because proof of his guilt has already been established. Having no way of weaseling out of what he said publicly, Trump hoped to muddle the case with yet another rendition of “poor, pitiful me, I ain’t done nuttin.’”

• Special prosecutor Jack Smith notified the court that Trump and his defense team had  failed to produce a single document of discovery in the classified documents case. Apparently they’ve decided that bluster won’t work in this case and are hoping to throw sand into the gears of justice in the hope they can delay resolution until after the general election.

• Oral arguments in an appellate court hearing on claims of presidential immunity went poorly for Team Trump. Although a decision hasn’t been rendered, the judges were unimpressed with arguments in favor of immunity. The case kinda blew up when his lawyer implied that, as president, Trump could use Seal Team 6 to assassinate his rivals.

Greg Sargent, now writing for the New Republic, explained the larger ramifications of this near-absolute immunity defense:

• This has been widely depicted as a Hail Mary effort to scuttle special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump for conspiracy to obstruct the official proceeding of Congress’s count of presidential electors—otherwise known for nearly 250 years in this country as the peaceful transfer of power.

• But there’s another way to understand Trump’s move: It’s about what comes next. If he wins on this front, he’d be largely unshackled in a second presidential term, free to pursue all manner of corrupt designs with little fear of legal consequences after leaving office again.

• That Trump might attempt such moves is not idle speculation. He’s telling us so himself. He is openly threatening a range of second-term actions—such as prosecuting political enemies with zero basis in evidence—that would almost certainly strain the boundaries of the law in ugly new ways.

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So there you have it folks. All you need to prevent Trumpian nightmares is to vote against Republicans running for the House of Representatives and for incumbent Joe Biden.

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Wednesday Substackers: Stuff You Oughta Know

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Florida school district removes dictionaries from libraries, citing law championed by DeSantis Via Judd Legum at Popular Information

• Along with dictionaries, the books removed from Escambia County school libraries as a result of this process include eight different encyclopedias, two thesauruses, and five editions of The Guinness Book of World Records. Biographies of Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, Nicki Minaj, and Thurgood Marshall are also locked in storage.

• Classic texts like Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, The Adventures and the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile are no longer available to Escambia County students. Twenty-three novels by Stephen King have been removed. The dragnet has also swept up books popular with the political right including Atlas Shrugged and two books by conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly. 

• The reality in Escambia County serves as a rejoinder to DeSantis, who has described concerns about book removals as a "leftist activist hoax" and a "false political narrative." 

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"Swatting" is a Sign of Declining Democracy and Illuminates Pathologies of US Society Via Ruth Ben-Ghiat at Lucid

• Swatting shines a light on several pathologies of American politics and society. As the examples above suggest, domestic violence and fantasies of killing women seem to be prominent in the swatter universe. And where would the swatter be without guns? Shooting is the murder method of choice for such threats.

• Anti-government extremism also factors in, given that swatting aims to disrupt the smooth functioning of law enforcement and emergency services. Such extremists have been tolerated and accepted within America to a degree very rare in other countries.

• Swatting increases in a declining democracy because it is what chaos agents do: it is the equivalent of the information warfare tactic of “flooding the zone with shit,” to quote Steve Bannon. The goals are to debase the truth (is this a real emergency, or a fake one?), expose the swatter’s targets to psychological duress and possible physical harm; smear their reputations; and exhaust the resources of law enforcement officials, who are distracted from other operations and investigations.

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People have tuned out the GOP debates. And for good reason. By Aaron Rupar and Stephen Robinson at Public Notice

• It’s not surprising that Haley and DeSantis have proven incapable of doing better. Haley after all was Trump’s ambassador to the UN, where she worked against human rights, and DeSantis’s rise to the governorship in Florida began with him shamelessly embracing the Trump cult of personality.

• But their refusal to take the gloves off is made all the more pitiful by the fact that Trump has no qualms trashing them as “birdbrain” and “DeSanctimonious.” That sort of one-sided fight doesn’t make for a compelling campaign, much less an entertaining debate.

• The polling backs up that Republican voters just aren’t into what the GOP also-rans are selling. For all the debating they’ve done since last August, their polling has been stuck in the mud while Trump, who hasn’t debated at all, has held steady far above them.