The bullying backfired

I came home Monday. The church conference was great! I plan to report on it soon. I had a good time with my cousin and his family and visited his mother, my aunt. Flights were on time and unremarkable (always a good thing). And I’m ready to get back to discussing the news. The two big news stories when I left are the same two big news stories on my return – the lack of a Speaker in the House and the Hamas attack on Israel. On to the first of those. Back on Monday Laura Clawson on Daily Kos reported that Jim Jordan, leading (actually, only) candidate for Speaker, was trying to round up votes. Republicans held a secret ballot and Jordan got 55 no votes. To be Speaker he must have only 4 or fewer no votes. To get the needed 51 more votes Jordan began threatening his colleagues. To me that is a sign of how much Jordan is a supremacist with strong authoritarian tendencies. Clawson wrote that even some of Jordan’s supporters think his bullying campaign is a bad idea. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Jordan supporter, said, “the dumbest thing you can do is to continue pissing off those people.” News stories out there reported that Jordan held a vote on Tuesday and 20 of his colleagues (and all the Democrats) voted against him. There was another vote today. Joan McCarter of Kos did a liveblog of the voting and reported Jordan lost that one by 22 votes. There is now talk of giving Speaker Pro Tempore McHenry enough interim power so the House can function leading up to the next budget deadline in a month. McCarter also noted Democrat Hakeem Jeffries again got more votes (as he did for 14 rounds last January), but didn’t get a majority of those voting. Ten days ago Pat Chappatte posted a cartoon with Matt Gaetz saying, “This time, the insurgents did take the Capitol.” In a pundit roundup for Saturday (I did read some news while gone) on Kos Greg Dworkin quoted John Harris of Politio Magazine. The important bit:

So far, no Republican has managed to emerge as a genuine leader in the Trump era — not by seeking alliance with him, nor by standing up to him, nor by trying keep a safe distance from him. If Trump is a would-be authoritarian, the House drama shows that he is not the kind who cares much about exercising authority beyond himself. To the contrary, he seemed to regard the turmoil and ritual humiliations — first McCarthy, then Jordan, now Scalise — as a sideshow. In important respects, he is right.

In today’s pundit roundup Dworkin had a few good quotes. The first is from Politico that says the bullying backfired.

The arm-twisting campaign, which in many cases included veiled threats of primary challenges, was meant to help rally support behind Jordan’s candidacy. Instead, it has put the Judiciary chair’s bid on life support and threatened to plunge House Republicans deeper into turmoil with no clear way out… Some Republicans chalked up the frustration to a lack of understanding, on the part of both Jordan and high-profile conservatives off the Hill, about how less conservative colleagues operate. Some Jordan opponents said they hadn’t received a call from him directly about their concerns with his potential leadership, particularly on government funding.

To that Dworkin responded:

That last paragraph is the most interesting. ‘We’re cowards with no moral compass, and don’t care a whit about policy, why aren’t they?’ And if you think that means they understand Democrats any better...

Dworkin quoted a tweet from Josh Huder:

McCarthy struggled to get 20-ish right-wing votes. Jordan struggles to get 20 moderates + some. Opposition votes are almost a mirror image of one another. Perfect illustration of any GOP leader's conundrum attempting to unite this majority.

Dworkin quoted Peter Hamby of Puck discussing the rise and fall of GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. The nail in the coffin appears to have been struck by Sean Hannity of Fox News. Hannity’s complaint is that Ramaswamy would say something, then when asked about it in an interview would deny he had said it. And Hannity was tired of those games. In the comments are cartoons by Denise Oliver Velez. One of them is by Pat Bagley of the Salt Lake Tribune and speaks to the other big issue. On the edges are people looking over their shoulders at those on the opposite edge. The text between says:

All the Israelis and Palestinians I know are lovely people worthy of a future. Don’t choose a side. Choose a solution.

Another cartoon from a separate roundup, this one by Rob Rogers, shows ruined landscape on either side of an Israel/Gaza border. The family on one side holds the sign, “We are not Netanyahu.” The sign held by family on the other side says, “We are not Hamas.” An Associated Press article posted on Kos reports that the nasty guy is using donations to pay his huge legal bills. This is money donated to his campaign, which means it shouldn’t be used for personal expenses. But since the money is going through a “leadership political action committee” the Federal Election Commission has ruled the ban doesn’t apply. So the nasty guy’s PAC has paid nearly $37 million to more than 60 law firms and individual attorneys since January 2022. This raises ethical questions, even if technically legal. In these sorts of cases the little guys are persuaded to testify against the big guys. What if the big guys are paying for the little guy’s lawyers? This sounds like the nasty guy is fleecing his base to pay his bills to defend against the crimes he’s allegedly committed. But many of his base are fine with that. He’s convinced them that he’s the target of political persecution. Meteor Blades of Kos, in an Earth Matters report, shared a pretty good idea, one I’ll be sharing with my state legislators. Forty-five years ago solar cells cost more than $30 a watt. They’re now down to $0.20 a watt and are a lot more efficient. A big need is a place to put them. The idea is to put solar panels along America’s highway rights-of-way. That includes the land within freeway interchanges. There are several advantages. There would rarely be local opposition, as there would be for panels on farm land or ecologically delicate public lands. No easements need be purchased from hundreds of individual landowners. There is less need for environmental impact studies. Along highways is also a good place for the transmission lines. That can cut the whole approval process from 3-5 years to 1 or 1½ years. Finally, it is a boost in income for the state’s Department of Transportation. Wisconsin passed this idea way back in 2003. And California has passed a bill, which is awaiting Gov. Newsom’s signature. But that’s only two of fifty. I’ll be adding this to the idea of putting solar panels over parking lots (especially over stadium lots and big box store and mall lots).