For five years, a Justice Department investigation by a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney coupled with an 18 month-long inquiry by the Republican House of Hunter Biden, son of the current president, has yielded nothing in the way of prosecutable offense.
Now, based on all the (lack of) evidence gathered to date, some Congressional Republicans want to go down the rathole of impeaching Joe Biden. The drawn out process, they feel, will serve to wear out Democrats and their voters, making way for a tremendous victory in 2024.
I get it. When you have no ideas or platform except antagonism toward the institutions of democracy, using those institutions to wreak havoc may seem like a prudent course if you’ve drunk the Orange Kool-Aid.
Former President Trump has changed the nickname for his successor from “Sleepy Joe” to “Corrupt Joe” and spent innumerable hours fantasizing about the crimes committed in the White House.
This, of course, is all projection, since Donald Trump is the one facing 91 charges across four jurisdictions. And the effort to recast the President from being a doddering old fool to a criminal mastermind isn’t catching on beyond the hard core NewsMax audience.
While the leadership for impeachment is coming from a far right faction, GOP strategists are noticing that this particular accusation game is helping Trump at the expense of other presidential candidates and down ballot candidates.
The storefront for Republican investigations now has several flavors to offer:
A reason to defund Georgia DA Fani Willis
(sorry, boys and girls, she is a state employee)Defunding Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutions via government shutdown
(oops, trials are considered an essential function exempt from the legislative branch’s silly shenanigans)Leftover swag from Gym Justice’s failed probe of NY Prosecutor Alvin Bragg
(on sale because Bragg told them to take a long leap off a short pier.)And…COMING SOON, the impeachment inquiry aimed at the President.
There is one big problem facing the wanna-be impeachers. Despite their firm grip on Speaker McCarthy’s testicles, too many House Republicans from not-so-solid-red districts aren’t eager to participate in this cosplay.
The propaganda campaign to sway these doubters has taken some bizarre turns. Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene went on Alex Jones’ INFOWARS show and said she had “evidence” to force GOP members to vote for impeachment
She compared her proof to God’s truth causing a “Great Awakening” where believers were rewarded for following Jesus' teachings, referencing the Bible’s Matthew 25, where people were to be divided between the sheep and the goats. .
The sheep represented people who were welcomed into heaven while goats were sent to “eternal fire” for having never helped “the least” in society.
There you have it. God said so.
McCarthy’s grand plan for mollifying Taylor-Green, et.al., is to skip the investigation part and just have a vote to send a bill of impeachment to the Senate. This is like asking a jury to vote on innocence or guilt before either the prosecution or defense has made their case. Or something out of Alice in Wonderland.
Impeaching the President, or any of the cabinet members in House Republicans’ fantasies, is something the Senate won’t want to have any part of. After all, Biden was one of them, and it wouldn’t be polite.
That outcome is okay for the House Freedom Caucus, who’ll take tales of a valiant effort to tackle the deep state to their districts, along with getting plenty of coverage on YouTube channels appealing to nutcases.
Having acted out their impeachment fantasy, the extremists' main act will begin, namely shutting down the government by refusing to approve a short term spending bill. Their justification for taking such a politically risky step will be embedded in a litany of anti-wokeism.
All the petty ante stuff Republicans have been foisting off on state governments will come into play: abortion, social safety net programs, making the military great again, and voter suppression, to name a few. Don’t be surprised if you see an effort to keep the government from mandating two beers a week, taking your gas stove, and banning the sale of incandescent light bulbs.
While historically budget-related government shutdowns have not benefited its initiators, GOP extremists are hoping that the bad taste in voter’s mouths will fade in time for the 2024 general election.
The White House saw this ploy coming months ago. A team of lawyers and political advisors has been quietly gaming out scenarios and a battle plan is ready. Meanwhile, the President and his allies have been touring the country touting the administration’s accomplishments
Via Politico:
Biden and McCarthy hammered out a deal over the debt ceiling earlier this spring precisely to avoid such a battle. But with conservatives now calling for a renegotiation in pursuit of deeper spending cuts, senior Democrats have grown increasingly concerned McCarthy will feel the need to take a hard line against a short-term bill designed to keep the government open into December.
“They want one, and they’re gonna get it,” Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.) said of a government shutdown. “This will be the Freedom Caucus shutdown.”
The White House has no intention of getting Biden personally involved in the day-to-day discussions of this spending battle, aides insisted. House Republicans have far less leverage to extract policy concessions than during a debt ceiling stalemate that put the global economy at risk, one White House official said, meaning the only message Biden will have for McCarthy from here on out is to keep his word and do his job.
“What’s their argument going to be now? The president won’t renegotiate with us?” the adviser to the White House said. “We had a discussion, we cut a deal. Either your word is good or not.”
There are some potential twists in the road ahead for the Biden administration, the most important one being questions about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s health.
Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell understand the long-term harm to the economy that a shutdown would do; Congressional nihilists seem to think burning everything to the ground is acceptable.
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In other impeachment news, the Texas Attorney General’s trial on 16 charges begins in the State Senate today. He is alleged to have used his office to cover for his mistress while benefitting a rich donor in trouble with the law.
From Politico:
At trial’s end, two-thirds of senators will have to vote to sustain at least one article to remove Paxton from office, effective immediately, as The Texas Tribune lays out in a handy guide. It promises to be a sordid affair, potentially revealing details of Paxton’s extramarital affair — as his wife, state Sen. ANGELA PAXTON, sits right there (though she won’t vote), the Trib’s Robert Downen and Zach Despart preview.
The trial has ballooned into one with national implications, as factions of the GOP squabble over the party’s future and Paxton’s role until now as the far right’s “legal standard-bearer,” NYT’s J. David Goodman reports from Houston. STEVE BANNON and other Paxton supporters have mounted a well-funded public relations campaign to urge Republican state senators to acquit. And they’re threatening primary challenges against state House Republicans who voted to impeach. But in Austin, the far right doesn’t always prevail — as evidenced by the lopsided, bipartisan House vote.
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Tuesday’s Tidbits of News
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Climate change is coming for your olive oil, too Via Grist
Olive oil is one of many foods — one of many condiments, even — that are threatened by the severe and unpredictable weather brought on by climate change. As the global temperature ticks up, droughts are occurring more frequently, heat is getting harder for farmers to manage, and wildfires and floods are becoming more menacing to growers around the world. As a result, grocery store shelves aren’t getting stocked and food prices are going up. Ultra-dry conditions in Mexico have withered peppers, leading to a sriracha shortage in the United States. Record warming has decimated Georgia’s famed peaches, which require a few weeks of cool weather each winter to blossom. Ketchup, coffee, and wine all could end up on the chopping block, too.
Olive trees are no strangers to heat, and they don’t need much water compared to other crops, like tomatoes. Humans have been cultivating them in the Mediterranean’s warm climate — and crushing them for oil — for at least 6,000 years. But even hardy olives have their limits.
Temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit can impair their ability to convert sunlight into energy, and prolonged dry spells can keep them from producing shoots, buds, flowers, and fruit.
Growers in the Mediterranean, a region warming 20 percent faster than the rest of the world and the source of 95 percent of olive oil production, are especially vulnerable. Drought caused Tunisia’s grain harvest to decline by 60 percent this year. And dry conditions led to poor yields for wheat and rice farmers last year in Italy, whose produce has helped build the country’s legacy of pizza, pasta, and risotto. This summer, they’ve had to contend with extreme heat, historic floods, and freak hailstorms, according to Davide Cammarano, a professor of agroecology at Aarhus University in Denmark. With such variability in weather, “it becomes very hard to manage a crop in the Mediterranean,” he said.
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Doing the Work: Unions, wealth inequality, and leveling the playing field by Mary L. Trump. (Slapping the Union Label on Labor Day)
Generally speaking, the richest 1% of people on earth own approximately half of the world’s wealth. There is no universe in which this is either sane or healthy. What’s worse, of course, is that the vast sums of money possessed by a tiny number of individuals affords them an almost unlimited power that dwarfs that possessed by average mortals.
Unless we want oligarchy and a permanent underclass, this is unsustainable. And it is so unfair on its face that it’s hard to believe that all working people in America aren’t rising up and standing in solidarity to demand fair wages just as, in the past, they have demanded child labor laws, week-ends, workers’ compensation, and forty-hour work weeks.
We know collective action can be incredibly effective. In July, UPS agreed to a deal with the Teamsters Union in which, on average, the annual salary of full-time drivers will be raised to $170,000, including healthcare and other benefits.
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Disney tickets, PS5s, and big-screen TVs: Florida parents exploit DeSantis' school vouchers ByJudd Legum at Popular Information. (Fun and games while destroying public education.)
The Florida voucher program for homeschooled students is part of a larger and rapidly expanding state voucher program. Doug Tuthill, President of Step Up For Students, posted on August 26 that his organization had already awarded vouchers to 410,000 full-time students.
With an average award of about $8,000, that means Florida is spending over $3.3 billion on these student vouchers. And there are many more students who receive vouchers through AAA Scholarship Foundation. Many students will use their vouchers to pay for private school tuition. Beneficiaries include wealthy families who have sent their children to private schools for years without subsidies.
Holly Bullard, Chief Strategy Officer for the Florida Policy Institute, told Popular Information that the "real scandal" is that, while DeSantis pumps billions into vouchers, Florida teachers are grossly underpaid compared to their counterparts in other states.
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Lead image credit: DonkeyHotey / WhoWhatWhy (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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This is revenge for Trump's impeachment just as Clinton's was revenge for Nixon.
The Guns Over People party disgusts me. They claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility, yet they profligately waste taxpayer dollars in all sorts of lies and friviolous wastes of time instead of doing what they were elected to do: govern.