The enemy is within the House

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reviewed the many steps the nasty guy took leading up to the attack on the Capitol on January 6. He then discussed the current state of the GOP:

In the immediate wake of the insurgency, Republicans seemed aghast to find the barbarians weren’t just at the gates, but inside the building. Calls to remove Trump under the 25th Amendment didn’t just come from Democrats. The idea that impeachment might clear the two-thirds hurdle in the Senate were taken seriously. But all it took was the merest glimmer of disapproval from Trump to bring Republicans back in line. … Republican leaders had every opportunity over the last three weeks to finally pry their party away from Trump, and to do so in a way that might have left both them, and the nation, stronger. Instead, they fainted at the first mention of the dreaded “third party.” As with every other Trump outrage, Republicans voiced momentary outrage. Then they backed away just long enough to catch the next hand signal from Trump and from Fox. Reassured, they then stepped forward again to pretend—as they always do—that whatever Trump did was no big deal, not worth raising a fuss about, and after all didn’t Hillary Clinton once something something email? Now we’re at the point where they’re declaring that the real outrage isn’t that armed insurgents broke into the Capitol, spread blood and excrement along the walls, ransacked congressional offices, and went looking for hostages to send to the gallows waiting outside. The real outrage is that anyone is raising a fuss. The next step is the one where Republicans demand an official Trump Bridge to commemorate that patriotic Rubicon crossing. And a Jan. 6 federal holiday for celebrating his triumph. When the next violent assault goes even further, expect Republicans to be momentarily scandalized. But only momentarily.

Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote that since the GOP is not likely to convict the nasty guy the impeachment trial should also present the general GOP complicity.

These people not only supported this lie, they campaigned on it in their own elections. The rot runs right down into the state legislators who wanted to get in on the action. Local party organizations are supporting Trump’s insurrection efforts in state after state, from Wyoming to Arizona. … The cancer cuts down to the bone. It isn’t just Trump, but a culture of Republican-abetted sedition that needs to be presented to the American people on Feb. 8. Call some witnesses from those state legislatures who met with Trump as he hemmed, hawed and threatened them. Call Hawley as a witness and obtain all his contacts and communications with the administration before the insurrection. Same with Cruz. There’s no privilege attached, not when you’re trying to commit a crime, boys. Americans really need to see the big picture. Let’s give it to them. And let Hawley and Cruz—and Trump—squeal their seditious little asses off.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is new to the House. She campaigned on being a QAnon supporter, believing all the stuff about the nasty guy saving the world from child molesters. She has talked about political figures who should be assassinated. She has harassed the teenagers who survived the mass shootings at a Florida high school. She has been generally vile. Laura Clawson of Kos reported the GOP appointed her to the Education Committee. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was appalled with Greene’s appointment (see above about harassing teenage shooting survivors). Pelosi ranted at Republicans, saying Greene is their problem and added Congress …

will probably need a supplemental for more security for members when the enemy is within the House of Representatives, a threat that members are concerned about in addition to what is happening outside. … It means that we have members of Congress who want to bring guns on the floor and have threatened violence on other members of Congress.

Nice rant, Ms. Speaker, but what are you doing about it? You and your caucus could expel Greene for sedition. And while you’re at it you could expel all those other enemies within the House. John Stoehr and his Editorial Board reminds us why the GOP is not going to do anything about Greene. So if something is to be done the Democrats will have to do it. And so far they’ve been mighty wimpy about the enemies in their midst.

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy promised a talking-to. Steve Scalise, the whip, denounced her remarks. Liz Cheney, the conference chair, did too. But unlike King, who was stripped of his committee appointments, Greene has so far gotten off scot-free. The takeaway? Though Trump is gone, his grip on the Republicans remains iron. This takeaway, however, presumes something true about the Republicans that’s false. What presumption? That the Republicans would participate in the governing if they didn’t fear the wrath of Trump, his minions in the Congress, and his network of white-power vigilantes prepared to take the law into their own hands. That totally misunderstands the point of being a Republican. The point of being a Republican is not accomplishing things for the greater good of the country. The point is creating conditions in which accomplishing things for the greater good is impossible. … The Republicans can’t come out and say sabotage is their reason for being. So they became adept at wrapping it in respectable mantles with which to convince the press corps that no, they don’t *intend* to starve poor people to death; they just have a difference of opinion over the responsible use of government funding. Doing all that work surely took the fun out of hurting people. The difference Trump made in the Republican Party is that he took the party’s inherent sadism and went public. Now hurting people is fun! Not only that, it’s rewarding! Greene built a following out of saying the most hurtful things she could, for instance, telling David Hogg, who witnessed the murder of his classmates, that his real motive in seeking gun reform is *canceling* her Second Amendment rights, that his suffering is a fraud intended to *replace* her, that his presence in the world *endangers* her. Sadism is the ability some have of seeing suffering—of recognizing it—but adding to it by denying it. Greene isn’t facing punishment because why should she? She’s doing what she’s supposed to do.

Republicans don’t fear the nasty guy. They have been doing his bidding because they want the same thing, which is power and white supremacy. Pam Keith, a Democratic nominee for Florida’s 18th Congressional district, tweeted a question to Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa (both of Gaslit Nation), and Malcolm Nance:

Guys, back me up here. My view is that Trump needs to be indicted & arrested NOW! He is posturing himself to claim an “alternative presidency” from Mar-a-Lago and at least half the GOP will go along with it. We have to contain him NOW and make it clear that what he has done is CRIMINAL, not political. What say you?

Chalupa and many others agreed with this assessment. Joan McCarter of Kos reported President Biden has created a commission to reform the Supreme Court. A lot of us progressives are eager for an expansion of the court to counteract the current 6-3 conservative majority. The co-chairs have been named. There is even a token conservative. They are to give recommendations of what to do in six months. Progressives wonder whether this is a commission where great ideas go to die while the boss can say, “See, I’m doing something!” They also say six months gives the current members of the court plenty of time for some horribly regressive decisions, including blocking what Biden is doing. Hunter of Kos wrote that after four years of the news media fawning over the nasty guy, normalizing the crimes he committed, and not having much bad to say about the insurrection, it took them a while to figure out how to treat Biden. Yeah … about a week. There are now editorials out saying Biden is moving too fast or too slow or too … something. Besides, both sides did it. After listing some of the nasty guy and GOP corruption Hunter wrote:

But none of that is quite as important as the press getting back to the routine of pretending that none of that, really, is important or should take precedence over ephemeral notions that if the supporters of fascist coups and the supporters of competent technocracy can just find a middle ground, we can all shake hands and decide to cap things off at perhaps 2 million dead, and only some regions and states rendered unlivable, and a new arrangement that allows for democracy within limits, and assassinations or state-by-state coups here and there. Just wait. It'll get worse. Our American press has largely decided to deal with the radicalization of the Republican Party and the propagation of hoaxes not simply as a fringe propaganda tool but a party propaganda tool by pretending that it does not exist.

Laura Clawson of Kos reported that Sen. Tom Carper introduced a bill to grant statehood to the District of Columbia. It was introduced with 38 cosponsors and 46 senators have now indicated support. Yeah, they’re all Democrats. The GOP knows that the two DC senators will be Democrats. And they wouldn’t want that. This is important because (other than giving Dems a slightly better position in the Senate) the 700,000 residents of DC do not have representation in Congress, even though it has more people than Vermont and Wyoming. So this is taxation without representation. Meteor Blades, in his night owl column for Kos, quoted Ciara Nugent of Time who discussed the true price initiative in Amsterdam. Grocery price tags now include such things as a few cents for the toll farming takes on the land and a few cents to fairly pay workers. This, and several other initiatives, is a way to reassess capitalism. It’s being done in the city that was the origin of the first stock exchange in 1602. Nugent then discussed the theory of doughnut economics as laid out by Kate Raworth in a 2017 book. I’ve heard about it (probably on NPR) but didn’t remember it to blog about it. Raworth said we should not judge an economy by its Gross Domestic Product and whether that is growing. Instead, an economy should be judged by how close it gets to the sweet spot between a social foundation and the environmental ceiling. This space in between is the doughnut. People in rich countries live above the environmental ceiling. Their lifestyle damages the environment and is not sustainable. People in poor countries live below the social foundation. Citizens don’t have enough food, clothing, and shelter. Some, like the US miss both. We need to do better. This doughnut is a way to describe how.