Coop Scoop (resend) Republicans Plunge Deeper into the Big Lie
McCarthy can't take YES for an answer on 1/6 probe. Biden keeps negotiating with a stone wall.
Issue #75
May 21, 2021
By Marc Cooper
Poor Kevin McCarthy. He just could not take YES for an answer. And Democrats, it seems, have trouble digesting a firm NO for an answer.
First, the Republicans.
No matter that McCarthy’s designated Republican negotiator on the January 6 Commission strictly followed his guidance. And to the surprise of some, Democrats agreed with EVERY one of McCarthy’s demands as transmitted to them and signed off on a pretty fair bi-partisan deal set to up a commission.
But nope! The next day, McCarthy tossed his negotiator under the bus and said he was now opposing the commission because its scope was too “narrow” and would not include what he considered relevant and related matters, violence during BLM and ANTIFA protests in the summer, the guy who shot Steve Scalise some yrs. ago and other events including when someone scratched McCarthy’s Porsche in the parking lot of a lobbyist-haunted beltway steak house and when some kid ripped up his garden azaleas.
Over in the Senate, Grim Reaper McConnell, swooped in to put the last nail in the coffin on any upper house approval of the commission. A wonderful humorist, Mitch said hey, no need for another investigation. The DOJ and some house committees are already investigating. Wouldn’t want to confuse anybody.
Oh heavens, no. Republicans have always been quite efficient and modest in their probes. They only used thirty-three congressional hearings over two years to investigate four deaths in the war zone in Benghazi (more time than was spent probing 9/11).
The Republican Party is accelerating its forced march out of any semblance of a functional political system and is determined to lead in a headless manner that denies most all political reality.
Cold stone fear of its members and its imaginary president being further exposed, and perhaps punished for their collaboration and incitement of the attack on congress and the electoral count, is the jet fuel motivating the latest Republican denial, that the Jan. 6 riots were more of a picnic than anything else and it is time to move on.
The political calculation of the Republicans might seem strange if inexplicable for those of us who stand on two legs, but believe it or not, there is a certain logic to it.
It goes like this:
1) In 2020 Trump got more votes than anybody in history except Biden, Trump got 10 million more votes than in 2016. Though he lost the popular vote by some 7 million, Trump came within 50,000 votes of winning the electoral college.
2) The GOP did fine in the midterms. They held Democrats to razor thin margins in the House and Senate and cleaned up down-ballot where Dems faltered.
3) Looking then at the 2020 midterms, and bolstered by gerrymandering now underway, and the historic cross-current against incumbent presidents, the Republicans think they can win back the House and probably the Senate by continuing to do exactly what they have been doing: sucking on Trump’s toes, obstructing all things Biden, and continuing to support the highly corrosive Big Lie.
The GOP knows it is an a lose-lose situation regarding January 6 investigations. Any sort of probe will hurt them. The question before the leadership is what is the least damaging path? Their decision: refuse any commission and this will force Nancy Pelosi to name her own fully Democratic commission using either house committees or by empaneling a select committee.
Republicans know the judgments coming out of some future Democratic only committee will probably be much harsher, but they are ok with that. The strategy seems to be, we will easily deflect all the crap coming out of the investigation by saying it is the biased product of a partisan Democrat panel that only wants to look backward when we want to move America forward. The more severe charges, I guess, the more partisan they will be called.
It’s not a totally crazy strategy, just half so. It will depend on strategic elements of the electorate “forgetting” both the GOP role in the Jan 6 assault as well as Republicans having turned down the exact sort of bi-partisan committee they were offered.
That’s a risky gamble. Certainly, the Zombified Trumplicans in the electorate will immediately buy this latest lie in support of The Big One. I do find it difficult to imagine, however, that the key white suburban vote that is now strategic to Democrats is going to somehow swing back in support of a slowly degrading Trump and of the headless, reckless McCarthy-McConnell leadership. Right know they are rolling in Biden-supplied child tax credits, and supplementary income checks. I doubt if they are much excited to return to the fight for Trump, Giuliani, Sydney Powell, Q and The Kraken.
And some cracks, significant cracks, have shown up this week in the twisted GOP strategy.
Most strikingly, the events out of New York where the state attorney general has upgraded her civil investigation into the Trump organization into a criminal probe. Further, that probe has now officially joined the investigation by Manhattan D.A. Cy Vance Jr. into the Trump dumpster fire. Vance is leaving office at the end of the year and there is every expectation the Trump case will be resolved before then.
Just about every legal expert consulted says this smells like an indictment rumbling down the road. And while Trump and/or his cronies will wear it as a badge of honor, I can’t imagine such stigma boosting his electoral popularity, except in the nether regions of Appalachia and a few state mental hospitals here and there.
My sense and that of others is that Rep, Matt Gaetz will also soon be taken off the board by a criminal indictment. Gaetz serves much more of a symbolic role in the party (he actually DOES nothing) as the smirking face of the new Fuck You Republicanism. I’m speculating but I think his probable arrest and indictment will set off More Crazy in the Republican Party and drag it further into the abyss. Ditto for Rudolph Giuliani.
The third significant stress indicator is that 35 Republicans congress members defied and ignored McCarthy’s order to kill the Jan 6 commission and voted with the Democrats. That’s only 16% of the Republican conference but it is nevertheless of importance. The January 6 Commission vote was “whipped” by the GOP leadership, meaning they told their members this was a must party-line vote.
The three dozen who voted with the Democrats constitute an open rebuke to McCarthy. And if you figure that there’s several other dozen members who privately despise Trump and McCarthy it does not bode well for the latter.
The great irony here is that McCarthy has made a public spectacle of himself, debasing himself, tying himself in knots, hiding in Trump’s ass, all to secure the speakership if the GOP takes the House in 2022.
The GOP is favored to win at this point, but not guaranteed. Just as tenuous is McCarthy’s future position. Having 35 members or more of your own party resisting you is not an easy way to win the speakership. A lot can and will happen before the midterms and if Trump continues his downward trajectory it could have some major effects on congress.
Now, about those Democrats. Patience is wearing thin over their continued mumbling about bipartisanship. For fuck’s sake, Joe, NOBODY gives a hoot if good legislation is or is not bipartisan except for maybe Wolf Blitzer and Jonathan Karl.
Shall we very briefly summarize:
Republicans will give NOTHING on infrastructure,
Republicans will not approve the Jan 6 commission.
Republicans are blocking crucial electoral and voting reform.
Republicans will block any higher taxes on the rich.
Republicans will oppose immigration reform.
Republicans will block policing reform.
Republicans will block labor law reform.
Republicans in their majority will uphold the Big Lie,
Have I missed anything?
Michael Corleone imitating Mitch McConnell (come to think of it, the Democrats might want to adopt the posture of the Nevada Senator in this scene).
Oh yeah, just one thing. I have little understanding on just what the Democrats expect to get from their continuing imaginary minuet of “negotiations.” We already know what the Republican counteroffer is on anything: nothing to 25% of what was asked. Crumbs, at best.
If there was ever a time to strike down the hated filibuster it is right now.
We must stop focusing less on what the Republicans are doing and much more on what the Democrats are and are not doing. This game of stretching things out by pretending that the party of sedition is somehow a legit junior partner must end immediately.
Democrats have enough votes to pass every period and comma of the Biden agenda and much much more. It’s hard to blame the Republicans for obstruction when you cannot undo the blockage in your own party,
I think Schumer should call the Manchin-Sinema bluff and call the key democratic bills to the floor. If these right wing Democrats want to sabotage their own party’s program and guarantee that the US misses a rich opportunity for change, then goddamnit, force them to do it in public. And then we’ll see what everybody is made of.
NOTE: We are approaching the mid-year subscription drive and fundraising period. Can we please just shorten it or short-circuit it? Easy to do. Email this to five friends and ask them to subscribe for free. And/or upgrade your own subscription. Here’s the button for that. You can also give a paid gift subscription.
You can also make a one time donation that will be recorded as a subscription. You can do that here thru PayPal.
Or become a monthly sustainer for $4 or any other level you please. Do that here via Patreon.