Letting us sit like fish in a barrel with AR-15s aimed at us

I’ve been avoiding writing about George Santos, the newly elected member of Congress from Long Island who lied about every aspect of his personal biography, though that didn’t come out until after the election. Lots of voices are calling for his resignation – lots, except for McCarthy, the one voice that matters. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos explained why. Republicans have a slim majority in the House and Santos is a Republican. She also reported that before the elections several other Republicans knew some of the parts of his story that were false. And they chose to be complicit in the lies. Because all they care about is power. Joan McCarter of Kos wrote:

One element of that secret deal Kevin McCarthy made with the Freedom Caucus for his speakership has emerged, and it is absolutely bonkers. The plan is to allow the debt ceiling to be breached, and then to direct the Treasury Department on how to prioritize debt payments. The GOP has been promising since before last fall’s midterm election that they would make debt ceiling a fight, and would demand those cuts. They followed through with new House rules to reinforce that. What they hadn’t said out loud was that they were willing to do the unthinkable: Force a debt ceiling breach. ... Prioritizing servicing the interest payments over running the government is not a good look for the GOP. “Any plan to pay bondholders but not fund school lunches or the FAA or food safety or XYZ is just target practice for us,” one senior Democratic aide told the Post. But there’s no indication that this crop of House GOP leadership actually gives a damn about the politics of it. They are all in safe seats and the fact that the minority is tiny and dependent on a bunch of vulnerable members doesn’t deter them. A larger problem for the nation is reality: We were here before in 2011 and 2013 and the Treasury Department was very clear in explaining that it doesn’t work that way—you can’t juggle the payments around when you are making literally millions of separate payments every single day. Then-Treasury Secretary Jack Lew explained that the computer systems that issue those tens of millions of payments simply can’t be updated and reshuffled on an emergency basis, and that “prioritization is just default by another name.”

My friend and debate partner asked a couple weeks ago why don’t a few of the saner Republicans join with Democrats to pass a bill to raise the debt limit? (At least that’s what I remember him asking.) The big problem is the House Rules Committees, now well stocked with maniacs, controls what comes to the House floor. If they don’t approve it then it doesn’t happen. There is a way around that committee, called the discharge petition, but it requires a great deal of work and a great deal of time. Meaning if they don’t start now it won’t happen before Treasury is out of options in June. In a pundit roundup for Kos, Greg Dworkin quoted a bit of Ezra Klein of the New York Times discussing three reasons why the Republican Party is falling apart. I’ll skip the quote and go straight to Dworkin’s summary of the three reasons:

* Republicans are caught between money and media. * Same party, different voters. * Republicans need an enemy.

McCarter summarized what House Republicans accomplished between their week trying to elect a Speaker, and their long break this week and part of next for Martin Luther King Day. I won’t list all the horrors (which won’t get past the Senate), and jump to McCarter’s conclusion:

The House GOP started the week with a plunging favorability rating, and they sure didn’t do anything in the ensuing days to halt that plummet. What they’ve got planned for their return is no less cruel and no more popular than what we’ve seen so far. So, you go guys?

When Marjorie Taylor Greene got to Congress and we saw how obnoxious she was, Pelosi stripped her of committee assignments. But Pelosi isn’t Speaker anymore and McCarthy needed to make deals to get the Speaker job. During that Greene was his vocal supporter. Clawson reported she was rewarded with some plum assignments. One was the Oversight Committee, the gang that will be falsely targeting Hunter Biden. Greene should fit right in. The other is the Homeland Security Committee. That’s a problem, because Homeland Security was created after the 9/11 attacks. And Greene has a record of denying those attacks actually happened. Greene has gone from the maniac fringe to mainstream Republican. Marissa Higgins of Kos wrote Republicans around the country are starting the year with a slew of anti-trans and anti-queer bills. She listed some of these bills. Most are such things as banning trans kids from sports or banning trans kids from getting gender affirming health care. Then there are the bills banning LGBTQ books from libraries. And the worst version of that (no doubt we’ll see copies introduced in other states) is to define “sexually explicit” to include depictions of gender identity and sexual orientation – and imprison librarians who don’t take them off their shelves. Higgins also reported that DeathSantis has been asking some questions that are definitely invasions of privacy and quite vile. Such as: Asking schools and athletic associations about the menstrual cycle of students assigned female at birth to see who might be pregnant and who is receiving gender affirming care. That info is nobody’s business. Asking who is receiving gender affirming care at college campus clinics, even if just to get mental health support, and threatening government funding if he doesn’t get it. Higgins wrote:

“We can see cuts in funding for universities to treat students with this condition,” House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell said, according to the Associated Press. “And I think an all-out elimination of services is certainly on the table.” Driskell went on to say she’s worried about a possible “brain drain” of folks leaving Florida for out-of-state education in response to this clear invasion of privacy and overreach.

That’s enough about Republicans for now. While on the topic LGBTQ people here’s a story of something good happening. The United Methodist Church in Michigan presented a program at the denomination’s North Central Jurisdiction meeting in November. This jurisdiction includes the upper Midwest – roughly Michigan to the Dakotas. The program told stories of the impact of homophobia, transphobia, and heterosexism on individuals. The impact was because of the official denomination policies barring LGBTQ people from becoming pastors and barring same-sex weddings from taking place in denomination churches. Rev. Angie Cox told of being rejected by her family because she and her partner are lesbian. Later a non-denominational church refused to baptize her. She found a reconciling United Methodist congregation and was welcomed. She began to study to be a pastor but each year as fellow students were commissioned by the church her candidacy was not recommended. Kiri Ann Ryan Bereznai isn’t a man and isn’t a woman either. But they insist is a person loved by God. They told the story of having a job within a United Methodist Church and afraid to be authentic. They got tired of hiding. Thankfully, the church leadership was understanding and they kept the job. They now wants to be a model for young queer people, to say there is a place for all of us. Thirty years ago Rev. Mary Ann Moman led a commitment ceremony for Michael and Allen. The church is the closest to Boystown, Chicago, the gay neighborhood, and has always been progressive. This was before an explicit denominational ban on such ceremonies. Even so, she got a deluge of letters saying she had desecrated the altar of her church. Thirty years later we’re still talking about it. After each speaker the audience was asked to think about and discuss such questions as: Are there examples of your congregation participating in or countering homophobia? Is your church addressing the problem of LGBTQ youth being four times more likely to attempt suicide? What could the church learn from transgender people? The Bible tells us to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God, so how does that inform your LGBTQ allyship? What are examples of how the privileges of heterosexism affected your life? Yes, the stories spoke of pain, of being harmed by the church. But this is something good that happened – the church leadership agreed to let the stories be heard and asked the audience to ponder how to make sure all people really are welcomed. X Gonzáles (formerly Emma) is a survivor of the shooting in Parkland, Florida that happened almost five years ago. They wrote an essay for New York Magazine, which is online at The Cut. The essay is about juggling time as an activist for March for Our Lives and student and how draining that was physically, emotionally, and mentally. They had to absorb the stories of other survivors and parents of victims while grieving their own loss then see protests at events where protesters were armed with the same weapons that had cut down fellow students. They went off to college and had to pull away from activism for a while. It was at college they realized they are nonbinary. They are living with parents after college, which means still living in Parkland and all its reminders. Last summer they offered to speak at another gun protest.

I directed my speech at members of Congress. I spoke to the fact that in my time as an activist trying to protect this country from itself, the only thing standing in the way of a life without headlines about mass shootings or the news that a loved one was taken by a gun had been Congress. Those who are currently in office are the only people who can make this change, and it is the sole purpose of their job to pass the laws that the people want them to. I let myself insult, scream, and curse at Congress in this speech for the simple reason that it is unfathomable to me that there would be people in this world who ran for office with the intention of making the world a better place, are presented with the facts about gun violence, and choose to ignore them in favor of making money from gun manufacturers. We are dying. And the people whose job it is to stop it work on Capitol Hill and sit around all day doing nothing, letting us sit like fish in a barrel with AR-15s aimed at us from every direction.