Legislative victories can’t answer the party’s underlying discontent

Continuing with the first week of the US House under the control of Speaker McCarthy. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos discussed one of his giveaways so he could get the job. He promised a vote for the Fair Tax Act, which as usual for Republicans, has nothing to do with what its title says. This bad bill has been floating around Republicans for 20 years. It has the following provisions: * Abolish the IRS * Eliminate income, payroll, estate, and gift taxes. * Institute a national sales tax of 23% that gets funneled into the general budget and a few trust funds for pensions, health insurance, and disability insurance. Not a surprise that the taxes eliminated benefit the rich and a high sales tax hurts the poor. Yeah, the poor are supposed to get a monthly tax rebate, but with no IRS there is no one to tell who. Eliminate those taxes also means eliminating charity donations. Lots of nonprofits that help the poor will close. And that sales tax is to disappear by 2030. Yeah, that means the federal government has income from tariffs, but little else.

And it’s getting a floor vote. Because of Kevin McCarthy’s desperate need to be called speaker. Because the GOP of 2023 has no clue how any of this works. The bill, if it passes in the House, will get laughed out of the Senate and has no hope of passing. Which makes it a poison pill for the not-maniacs in the House GOP. One of the other reasons it’s never advanced to the floor is that leadership never wanted to force their members to have to vote on something so ridiculous, a vote that could either alienate the core Tea Party base on the one hand or their corporate funders on the other. Business does not like this idea. So thanks Kevin for yet another gift to Democrats in 2024.

Mark Sumner of Kos reported the House are considering the idea of expunging either or both of the nasty guy’s impeachments. Perhaps they can fit it in between investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop and pretending to build a wall. Protecting the nasty guy’s ego is, gosh, naturally the top priority of the country. But can they really do that?

There is no mechanism in the Constitution that allows an impeachment to be expunged. Yes, say Republicans, but there’s also nothing in the Constitution that says an impeachment can’t be expunged. So there. This is true, precisely because the authors of the document likely recognized the boneheaded uselessness of any such expungement. Any impeachment is, by necessity, an expression of the will of the sitting House of Representatives in the current Congress. A new Congress can certainly issue a statement disagreeing with the opinion of a past House, but that new statement in no way invalidates the opinion of the House that issued the impeachment in the first place. ... The fact that Republicans are even talking about this makes it likely that they’re going to try it. In fact, Republicans put even more pointless bills before the House twice already that would have expunged both impeachments, even though they knew those bills would go nowhere. Because this isn’t about justice. It’s about show.

McCarter wrote that the House maniacs will hold the debt ceiling hostage. She then discussed ways to get around it: Moderate Republicans can join with Democratss to use a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill – but it is a process that can take months (so better get started already). Another is to invoke the 14th Amendment, section 4 that says, “the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law … shall not be questioned” – which means declaring the law that defines the debt limit to be unconstitutional. An idea has been floated that is legal to mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin and use it to repurchase debt (I’ll let economists explain it). Congress has passed laws to spend money and issue debt to have that money to spend, to tell how much tax is to be collected to pay the debt, and also to put a limit on that debt. That puts the president in a bind, to spend what Congress has ordered, to tax only as much as Congress has ordered, yet borrow no more than Congress has permitted. The president must follow the least unconstitutional path, which is ignore the debt limit. If the House insists on being dysfunctional the White House needs to be able to take care of the problem without them. McCarter reported that today Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said the national debt will reach its statutory limit next Thursday, January 19th. She will then begin “extraordinary measures” that will keep the government going until summer. Yellen, the White House, and various economists are now beating the drum on how disastrous defaulting on the debt would be to the economy. Will Biden, Democrats, and reasonable Republicans in the House plan now for catastrophe? Or will they let the maniacs take the nation up to the brink and perhaps cross it? I had mentioned that House Republicans have already declared they won’t be able to meet the budget deadline of the end of September. Georgia Logothetis, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Ed Kilgore writing for New York Magazine:

One compromise basically promised that the House would never pass an omnibus appropriations bill again, holding votes on 12 separate appropriations bills instead. The problem here is that Congress has routinely relied on omnibus bills in recent years not just to “hide” controversial spending items but because it has proved impossible to get separate bills through Congress by the end of each fiscal year. ... It’s a recipe for fiscal gridlock, government shutdowns, and, at best, a system in which the government chugs along on the power of “continuing resolutions” — stopgap spending bills that keep spending levels the same — which is likely what the MAGA conservatives want. So, ironically, instead of the deep and thoughtful review of federal spending the rebels claim to want, this promise will probably produce at least two years of keeping the federal government on automatic pilot when it comes to spending priorities.

David Horsey of the Seattle Times tweeted a cartoon showing a dog with McCarthy’s face whose leash is being held by Matt Gaetz, walking with Lauren Boebert. Gaetz says, “Heel, Mister Speaker!” Steve Breen of the San Diego Union-Tribune tweeted a cartoon of elephants tangled in a power cord as they are trying to plug in a speaker. Adam Zyglis of the Buffalo News tweeted a cartoon of an elephant very much afraid of a mouse labeled “Freedom Caucus.” Greg Dworkin, in another pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Peter Beinart of the New York Times:

The problem isn’t that Republicans don’t win legislative victories. It’s that legislative victories can’t answer the party’s underlying discontent, which is less about government policy than about American culture. Democrats worry about voting rights, gun control, climate change and abortion — enormous challenges, but ones that congressional leaders can at least try to address. What Republicans fear, above all, is social and demographic changes that leave white Christian men feeling disempowered, a complex set of forces that Republicans often lump together as “wokeness.” ... That’s not the kind of problem a Republican speaker can fix.

Gabe Ortiz of Kos used a swear word when describing the ongoing game that Sen. John Cornyn is playing. Ortiz calls him the Troll Senator. Cornyn gets that name because he calls, as he did this week, for “safe, orderly, humane and legal” immigration reform, then is instrumental in derailing reform packages when they are proposed. One of those came in December. It was supported by both parties – measures to restrict who can come across the border for Republicans and permanent protections for DACAs for Democrats. But now that the House is controlled by Republicans it is safe for Cornyn to again call for immigration reforms he knows won’t happen. Of course, Cornyn had help. However, he seems to be the leader in this way of doing business. And, as I mentioned before, it shows Republicans don’t want to solve the immigration issues. They want to campaign on blaming Democrats for them not being solved. Meteor Blades of Kos discussed a report from the Rhodium Group that shows greenhouse gas emissions rose by 1.3% in 2022. Yeah, a lot of things aiming to reduce emissions have gone right. But...

In other words, they concluded, the world needs to be on a trajectory to carbon neutrality by 2030, and at carbon neutrality by 2050. As the IPCC reported several months ago in its 2022 Emissions Gap report and in its 2021-2022 Sixth Assessment Report on the climate, with less than a decade left to get on that trajectory, we’re nowhere near where we need to be in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The reason? Like nearly every nation on the planet, U.S. pledges under the Paris Agreement don’t cut emissions deeply enough quickly enough to reach the trajectory scientists say we need to be on. And, oh, by the way, barely a handful of nations are fulfilling even those inadequate pledges. Despite the pleas of activists and national vows at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021 to come to the COP27 talks in Dubai with stepped-up pledges, none of the major emitters did so.

We have to let go of the idea that we can tweak things around the edge and that will be enough. Blades listed a half-dozen recent articles out of a great many highlighting that more needs to be done. Blades asked:

Why wouldn’t this deluge of news put the spurs to everyone with the clout to have an impact? Instead of so few?

He concluded:

This is why we need more candidates who put climate near the top of their priority lists even though most of the general public does not. It’s just seven years until 2030. Seven years to get on the necessary trajectory, say scientists. What’s that old expression? Do or die?

When I lived in Germany more than thirty years ago when I took the autobahn from Cologne to Aachen I would pass near an open pit coal mine. Later I saw photos of a gigantic machine that scooped away at the dirt to get to the coal underneath. Luisa Neubauer tweeted about a second open pit coal mine, this one near the highway between Aachen and Düsseldorf. In her thread she has photos of these big machines. She wrote:

The Green party in the German government has made a deal with RWE, the largest coal company of Germany (and single largest polluter of Europe), to quit coal by 2030. The price: RWE will destruct #Lützerath. Sounds good, yet it turns out to be a dirty deal. ... If RWE gets access to the coal under Lützerath (and burns it), there is barely any chance for Germany to stay in line with its CO2-budget that was agreed to with the Paris Agreement. At the same time, this very coal is not needed for our energy supply. That's what studies say.

On Wednesday police came from across Germany to force the eviction of Lützerath. Climate activists are also there trying to stop the eviction and keep the coal in the ground. Five hundred climate scientists are petitioning the government.

Also today, 200 public figures from Germany, actors, singers and writers and many more have demanded the eviction to be stopped. Christian churches from around the region have spoke out too. And @GretaThunberg has announced to come to join a massive protest there on Saturday. Not all things around the climate crisis are black and white, but this is. If we want to see a world with less crisis, we need the fossil fuel destruction to be stopped. And we need governments to hold fossil fuel companies accountable, to put people over fossil fuel profits. All of this tells so much: The single winner of all of this is RWE, they are expected to make several billions € additional profits through the intensification of coal burning, they receive 2,8 Bn € compensation for an earlier coal exit, plus additional subsidies. Germany, the 4th country most responsible for the climate crisis, is not just failing the climate movement, by violating its 1,5°- promises. It's failing everyone else too. The emissions from Lützerath will not stay in Lützerath. They'll increase climate effects everywhere. If we want to have the slightest chance to get off the road towards climate collapse, the rules for the energy transition must be informed by the science and the Paris Agreement, not by fossil fuel companies. So we keep fighting.

Leah McElrath tweeted several videos of what was happening in the town on Wednesday. Joanie Lemercier, a climate activist, also posted videos of the protest, which appears to have been going on for a couple weeks. She also has a video of one of the big machines in action. Feeling helpless? Join them. I did a search about this situation. Reuters reported this morning that the protest has been going on, not for two weeks, but for two years. And DW reported that most of the protesters have been cleared from the village. It also said most of the residents had abandoned the place and it was now occupied by protesters. Shabnam Nasimi tweeted:

The Taliban have reportedly ordered male doctors NOT to treat female patients. So, if women are BANNED from university & can’t study to become doctors, and now can’t be treated by male doctors, then what are they supposed to do? Die from sickness?