Republican Negotiation

Plus Justice Alito's litany of grievance, unrest in Russia, and other observations

Quelle coïncidence! Raging moderate Norm Ornstein’s primer for Staying Clear-Eyed About Republican Radicalism on the Debt Ceiling (The Bulwark, May 1, 2023) hit the internet aether mere hours before Janet Yellen warned that the US could crash through the debt limit by June 1. The response from the blockhead caucus in the House is a resounding "Bring it on!" This is yet another fine mess in a seemingly endless succession of them.

In 1996 Mom voted for Bill Clinton. She did not approve of aspects of his personal life, but she believed that policies Republicans wanted to pursue would harm a lot of people. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

The GOP, writes Ornstein, "is using the possibility of devastating cuts to programs on which millions of Americans rely—eviscerating crucial public services and safety net protections—as a kind of symbolic gesture for the purposes of negotiation."

How radical is the proposal that House Republicans passed? You can read the bill for yourself here, but Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell summarized it well: Under the plan, "most overall nondefense discretionary spending would be slashed by nearly one-third on average in 2024, after adjusting for inflation. The cuts would then expand to roughly 59 percent, on average, by 2033, according to estimates from both the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Center for American Progress."

Democrats insist rightly that there should be a clean increase in the debt limit followed by negotiations to address spending and the deficit in the annual budget.

Biden offered his own budget proposal in March that would cut deficits by about $2.9 trillion over a decade. It would raise $4.7 trillion from higher taxes on corporations and wealthy households, with an additional $800 billion in savings from changes to programs. Accompanying that would be $2.6 trillion worth of new spending. There would be a $35-a-month cap on insulin prices and restoration of the expanded child tax credit that would give families as much as $3,600 per child, compared with the current $2,000. (Josh Boak, AP, As Biden, McCarthy clash on a federal debt plan, what are the key differences?, NPR, April 26, 2023)

Republicans respond with deadpan insistence that a debt limit increase to pay for expenses previously incurred be contingent on negotiation over the debt ceiling bill passed by the House even as Kevin McCarthy promises hard-liners that the House bill "was a floor, not a ceiling." According to Freedom Caucus member Ralph Norman (SC), McCarthy told them "he would personally oppose and fight against any debt ceiling agreement that doesn’t include all of the red-meat provisions in the House bill" (Rachel Bade, Eugene Daniels Ryan Lizza, et al., Playbook: How Kevin McCarthy proved his naysayers wrong, Politico, April 27, 2023). Negotiation, right. What Republicans have in mind is for Biden to capitulate to their demands, then negotiate about how much further he will roll over for them.

The blockhead caucus does not want a resolution to the crisis. Ornstein rightly notes, "A hard core of the House GOP extremists would be fine with a default. For many, blowing up government would make the price of economic chaos worth it." Terms accepted by the feckless McCarthy when he groveled for the speaker’s gavel put the blockheads in possession of his manhood. Who is truly running the show in the House? As Adam Driver put it in The Dead Don’t Die, I’m thinkin’ zombies. You know, the undead. Ghouls. This isn’t gonna end well.

Last year Samuel Alito charged that the leak of his draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade made himself and fellow justices on the Supreme Court targets for assassination. Alito now says he has "a pretty good idea" who leaker is but does not have the level of proof needed to name someone. He can only add that it is not a conservative, implying that the unnamed accused must be one of the liberal justices or one of their clerks. I believe the technical term for this is smear.

Alito is further aggrieved by reports of alleged ethical violations by some of his colleagues: "We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us." Gee, no one ever hammered the court’s liberal majority when decisions related to civil rights, voting rights, and abortion were unpopular within certain corners of the political realm.

The possibility of assassination should not taken lightly. In the present environment public officials at all levels can find themselves in the crosshairs. Reports of threats and intimidation directed at local school board members, election official, judges, and others in government are all too common and come from across the political spectrum. It is not, however, out of line to observe that Alito and his fellow conservative justices have done everything in their power to enable any individual inclined to assassination to acquire the means to carry it out.

• Robert Barnes, Alito thinks he knows who Dobbs leaker is—and says it’s not a conservative, Washington Post, April 28, 2023

• Andrew Chung, Supreme Court's Alito says abortion draft leak made justices 'targets,' Reuters, October 26, 2022

• Ruth Marcus, The aggrieved Justice Alito points fingers but offers no proof, Washington Post, May 2, 2023

Russian train derailments. A drone strike on the Kremlin said to be an attempt to assassinate the tyrant Putin. Are Ukrainian special forces behind these incidents? The Russian opposition? Or are they false-flag operations carried out by the Russian Federal Security Service? Cathy Young discussed this and related issues in today’s column at The Bulwark. Her account of growing unrest within the country is especially interesting:

The war in Ukraine may not have sparked mass protests in Russia, but it is certainly creating instability. The veneer of normality in Russia is wearing thin. Fear of Ukrainian strikes is causing cancellations of Russia’s hallowed Victory Day parades on May 9; the accompanying "Immortal Regiment" processions in which people carry portraits of dead war heroes in their families have been canceled ostensibly for security reasons, but perhaps because of concerns that too many photos of soldiers killed in Ukraine will make for unwelcome optics. Explosions attributed to antiwar subversives, including train derailments, are becoming common. The economic damage from the war and the sanctions is making itself felt. Rumblings of discontent in the elites are surfacing as well: for the second time in two months, a leaked recording of a phone conversation shows high-level Russian businessmen bemoaning the war, cursing the Putin regime (“Russia is in the clutches of a bunch of assholes”), and predicting disaster (“It ends in hell”). (The Russian Opposition: Bloodied But Unbowed)

Russia is in the clutches of a bunch of assholes. They could be speaking of the US House, the states of Florida and Texas, and too much of other parts of our country.

Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels, capitalist, Republican.

Part of Trump’s political persona is that of a very rich man with the same tastes as his much less wealthy followers. He connects to many of his voters through a shared love for things that liberal sophisticates disdain: fat-rich fast food, pro wrestling, trash TV, NASCAR, and, as it turned out, porn stars. Daniels is a product of that universe. She is a Republican who insists that "Part of the American dream is making money. I am a firm believer in capitalism." (Fintan O’Toole, Bump and Grind, The New York Review, May 11, 2023 issue)

Ron DeSantis, B.A., Yale, Harvard Law School. Josh Hawley, B.A., Stanford, Yale Law School. Rafael Edward "Ted" Cruz, B.A., Princeton, Harvard Law School. Maybe conservative critics are onto something when they question the quality of education provided by elite academic institutions.

Stand with Ukraine.

Keep the faith. Yr obdt svt.