The most talked about part of the deal Kevin McCarthy made with Republican radicals to become speaker of the House involved concessions to those members on rules, powerful committee assignments for members of the House Freedom Caucus and the creation of a new select committee on the “weaponization” of government that would give Republicans like Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio an official platform from which they could undermine the investigations into former President Donald Trump and the Jan. 6 insurrection.
And although there has been plenty of chatter about the effect this may have on the basic functioning of government, less remarked on but still significant is McCarthy’s pledge to force major budget cuts using the debt ceiling as leverage with the Biden administration. McCarthy has also agreed to pursue a resolution committing the federal government to a balanced budget within the decade, which could not be done without major cuts to Social Security, Medicare and a lot of what’s left of the American welfare state.
None of this comes as a shock or a surprise. Conservative opposition to social insurance goes back to the New Deal itself, with figures like the previous president Herbert Hoover denouncing Franklin Roosevelt’s policies as “socialism” that would place the nation on a “march to Moscow.” And of course, successive Republican Congresses have, since the 2010 Tea Party wave, tried to pass or force gigantic cuts to federal social spending, with the debt ceiling as their preferred hostage.
This juxtaposition of extreme opposition to social insurance with contempt for constitutional democracy and the rule of law helps illuminate the tight connection between these two strands of contemporary Republican thought. Many of the Republican radicals who seized control of the House last week also voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and they have been vocal apologists for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
One of the key insights driving the creation of the modern welfare state was an adaptation of the older republican idea that self-government could not be sustained in the absence of economic security and independence. In the original conception, to own a farm and manage a homestead was to secure your economic standing and cultivate the habits of citizenship.
The closing of the frontier, the growth of industrial capitalism and the transition to wage labor for most workers forced Americans to rethink the terms of republican freedom. Populism — the insurgent movement that emerged in the late 19th century to put national economic life under democratic control by the “common people” — was one attempt to renegotiate the terms of American freedom. The more elite-driven Progressive movement, coming as it did in the wake of the collapse of the Populist Party, was another.
For the Populists, freedom meant popular control over economic decision-making. For Progressive intellectuals like Walter Lippmann, it meant security from economic want. “Instead of hanging human dignity on the one assumption about self-government,” Lippmann wrote, “you insist that man’s dignity requires a standard of living.” Government, then, is judged according to whether it is producing “a certain minimum of health, of decent housing, of material necessities, of education, of freedom, of pleasures, of beauty, not whether at the sacrifice of all these things, it vibrates to the self-centered opinions that happen to be floating around in men’s minds.”
You can think of the New Deal, in this context, as an attempt to synthesize the Populist and Progressive conceptions of freedom. Organized through industrial unions, workers have the power to shape their collective economic fate and, in turn, use the administrative capacity of the state to secure their economic footing and provide freedom from want and from dependency on the arbitrary power of private employers.
Of course, for the employers, this kind of arbitrary power is just another name for “liberty,” and a large part of the conservative opposition to social insurance and the welfare state stems from the belief that this expansion of state power is a threat to the sanctity of the market and the liberty of individuals to act within it.
But left untouched by a democratically accountable state, the free market is just another arena for the domination of the many by the few, of the subordination of labor to the dictates of capital.
Social insurance and the welfare state are more than a ballast against the winds of capitalism; they are part of the foundation of self-government and the cornerstone of democratic citizenship as we now understand it, where individuals are as free as possible from the arbitrary domination and authority of others.
Extreme opposition to social insurance and the safety net is, in that case, a natural fit for an authoritarian movement that tried to overturn the constitutional order and now wants to use the power it has to clean up as much of the scene of the crime as it can manage.
It is, for that matter, a natural fit for the entire Republican Party. Even after you exclude the MAGA radicals, you find a political party whose hostility to a broader, more equitable democracy is deep-seated and profound. You might even say that the rich tradition of American republicanism deserves a better and more faithful namesake.
... in return, the Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South, marking the end of Reconstruction.
Sometime soon, Joe Biden will announce whether he will seek reelection in 2024. Last year, he said that he’d make a formal declaration of his intention to run in the early part of this year. Over the weekend, The Hill reported that a decision has been made—it’s a yes—and that Biden will likely say so publicly sometime in February, perhaps right before he gives the State of the Union address, for which the date has not yet been set.
This should come as no surprise. Biden is a politician; politicians want to seek reelection, and they want to win. Presidents in particular want those four more years: One-term presidents are losers. If Biden chose to retire after one term, that wouldn’t be the same as losing a reelection bid, of course; but he’d still be in the historic company of Buchanan and Taft and Hoover and Carter and Bush Sr., and, most gallingly of all, Trump. You kinda have to win reelection to stand a chance of going down in history as a great or even merely successful president.
There are two arguments against his running, a small one and a big one. The small one is that he’s still underwater in the polls. His approval rating is 43 percent, with 51 percent disapproval. At this point in 2013, Barack Obama was at 52 percent. He won. And at this point in 2019, Donald Trump was at 37 percent. He lost. Biden splits the difference between the two, but 43 is a pretty shaky starting point.
The bigger concern is his age. He turned 80 right before Thanksgiving, meaning that if he runs and wins, he’ll turn 82 shortly after his reelection. One doesn’t want to traffic in age discrimination, but let’s face it: That’s old. He’d be 86 as he was finishing his second term. Voters will have legitimate questions about whether someone of that age can handle a job in which a historic crisis could occur—at any moment, on any of a number of different fronts.
This is probably why most Democrats tell pollsters they’d rather he not run. A December survey found 57 percent of Democrats saying they didn’t want Biden to seek reelection. Sixty-one percent of the Democrats in the “don’t run” camp cited his age as the reason.
I have long felt and suspected, based on my casual conversations with people, party insiders see things differently. In late 2021, say, when the Biden agenda was stalled and co-president Manchin was holding forth, insider opinion was, to my recollection, strongly against Biden running in 2024. But then he passed some things—in fact quite a number of things; he did a terrific job in uniting most of the world against Vladimir Putin’s war; gas prices went down. Has elite opinion changed?
Well, I asked. Last week, I emailed three dozen people I know and would fairly describe as inside observers of Democratic politics. They were a diverse group—in terms of race and ethnicity (16 of the 36 were nonwhite), gender, age, what they do for a living, and ideology, from left-leaning advocates to mainstream liberal party insiders to centrist think-tankers. I asked them two simple questions—should Biden run, and why or why not—and told them they could answer on the record, on background (meaning I could use what they wrote without naming them), or off the record.
Results: Exactly half of the 36 responded by Sunday morning, which might tell us something (that some folks aren’t ready to commit publicly just yet). But of the 18, 16 said yes. I got seven on-the-record responses, eight background replies, and three who asked to stay off the record (but all of whom said yes, interestingly). So, let’s go through them.
Tom Perriello, the former congressman from Virginia and now director of U.S. programs at the Open Society Foundations: “I hope he runs again, because he’s overcome tremendous political odds to deliver the boldest agenda in generations. He has a senior team of brilliant, no-drama veterans ready to translate those policies into a new, more inclusive and resilient American dream.”
Karen Kornbluh, former aide to Senator Barack Obama and ex-ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development under President Obama: “Joe Biden’s continued leadership is essential if the U.S. is to build on the new industrial policy to replace laissez-faire globalization with a new agenda that produces widespread prosperity and addresses the daunting challenges of the 21st century, from climate to the global debt crisis to the rise of authoritarianism.”
Cornell Belcher, Democratic pollster: “Of course he should run. The very question is annoyingly myopic. On the record—the Biden/Harris ticket is our best opportunity. In fact, Biden enters reelection better positioned than either Bill Clinton or Obama,” citing legislative accomplishments, midterm overperformance, foreign policy, and record job growth.
Matt Bennett, executive vice president of Third Way: “He’s earned it with huge legislative and political successes, and incumbent presidents who don’t face primaries (and who aren’t the worst president in American history) tend to win.”
Theda Skocpol, sociologist at Harvard who has done pathbreaking research on the modern right: “If he personally feels committed and healthy, Biden absolutely should run for reelection. He has stellar center-left domestic accomplishments, good political instincts, and foreign policy connections and vision essential in this dangerous global juncture. His administration with just slight fine tuning is good to keep going.”
You get the idea. Don Baer, a former Clinton White House communications chief and speechwriter, said that the Biden administration “has strengthened our country’s faith in itself and shown it is still possible to use the Presidency in an effective way to produce results for the American people.” And John Halpin of The Liberal Patriot said that “the last thing Democrats need is a replay of the 2020 primaries (before Biden won) with months on end of weirdo base politics broadcast daily to voters.”*
The pro-Biden sentiments were basically the same among the people who preferred to be on background. A former Clinton aide and Obama appointee: “He’s been effective, steady, and sane—and with what the House is about to be like, the country needs and will want more of what he’s been.” A Democratic strategist: “If any other president had his record of accomplishments, this wouldn’t even be a question. He has proven to be capable and up to the job, and his policy achievements speak for themselves.” A progressive policy leader: “His policy proposals have led, under very difficult political and social conditions, to significant and potentially transformative legislative progress.”
A funder of the progressive ecosystem said Biden should run because “(a) he has a good record to run on, but only he can run on that (witness Gore in 2000), and (b) the next wave of D candidates will be ready for prime time in ’28 (Whitmer, Newsom, Shapiro, Warnock); Harris will be an even more worrisome candidate if Biden doesn’t run, her primary race was not inspiring.” And a former Obama administration official said: “Biden should run again, and I would not have said that last year. He definitely faces some deficits with the younger generation, but overall, his record is as strong or stronger as any Democratic president in my lifetime. He is getting things done that we have wanted to get done for a long time—above all on infrastructure and climate change, laying the foundation for a new American economy. And his handling of the war in Ukraine has been outstanding.”
Here were my two dissenters. A longtime Democratic operative: “I agree with the majority of Democratic voters and say that Biden should not run for re-election—simply because of his age. I know the other side argues that he is the only one who has beaten Trump. But the biggest mistake in politics is to prepare to fight the last war.” And a former Democratic member of Congress who was in the House when Biden was a senator and remains active in party politics: “We have finally shown America that we can have a seamless and even inspiring changing of the guard in the House. Why shouldn’t we do it in the White House as well? We’re making great progress with getting young people to vote Democratic, but not for president until we have young candidates.” He was referring there to Nancy Pelosi passing the leadership baton to Hakeem Jeffries, not to Kevin McCarthy and his 15-rounds-of-voting flop era.
I should note that I heard back more from insiders than from activists. My sense of the progressive activist world is that they’re pleasantly surprised by Biden’s accomplishments and appointments and will support him ungrumpily if he runs. But as a group, they’re probably not as enthusiastic as party insiders.
What do I think? I’m a big yes. I was not in late 2021. But he’s turned me around. The legislative accomplishments are bigger than any in my adult lifetime. There will be no more of those in these next two years, but the Justice Department and the Labor Department and the Federal Trade Commission and other executive agencies can still do a lot. And if the Democrats hit a trifecta in 2024—Biden is reelected, they recapture the House, and somehow hang onto the Senate—then I would anticipate some form of filibuster reform that will enable the party to pass voting rights legislation, raise the minimum wage, do more on climate, and increase taxes on the wealthy to finance various policies to support working people. If that happens, 2025 could look like a replay of 1933 and FDR’s Hundred Days.
There’s also a good non-Biden reason he should run: If he doesn’t, there will be a potentially divisive, multicandidate primary. His administration has done a staggeringly good job of holding the party together. The left wing of the party is pretty happy with Biden’s economic direction and with appointments such as Ketanji Brown Jackson, and the centrists aren’t whining that he’s gone “too far left.” Neither Clinton nor Obama was able to pull this off the way Biden has.
Why the chasm between insiders and the rank and file? I suspect because insiders sit around obsessing about things like the possibility of a divisive primary and regular people don’t. Regular-people Democrats just see a guy they basically like but fear is too old for the job, and they probably blame him at least a little bit for inflation. My guess is that rank-and-file support for Biden among Democrats will grow as 2024 becomes more real. But if even one-third of the party electorate opposes him running, that’s a lot, and he’ll have some convincing to do.
His age will be a fair issue to both Democratic and swing voters; he’ll have to show them he’s up to doing the job. There’s also this so far mostly overlooked point: In 2020, because of the pandemic, he didn’t have to campaign much. That will be different in 2024. It’s unknown whether he’ll be up for a rigorous campaign schedule. If the Republican nominee is not Donald Trump but a younger person like Ron DeSantis (44) or Glen Youngkin (56), it’s hard to know how Biden will look compared to them in the home stretch of a tough campaign. (There are some advantages to his age: He’s experienced, and he’s old enough to have outgrown the desperate need for personal glory that oozes out of every pore of DeSantis’s body.)
There’s never been a perfect candidate for president. Still, while we can acknowledge some of Biden’s shortcomings, he nevertheless ticks a lot of boxes. A party that’s united behind a competent leader who’s a decent and compassionate human being who is also embracing a more populist economic agenda than the party has in decades? I’ll take that in a heartbeat. Now he just has to win.
Last week, I emailed three dozen people I know and would fairly describe as inside observers of Democratic politics. They were a diverse group—in terms of race and ethnicity (16 of the 36 were nonwhite), gender, age, what they do for a living, and ideology, from left-leaning advocates to mainstream liberal party insiders to centrist think-tankers. I asked them two simple questions—should Biden run, and why or why not—and told them they could answer on the record, on background (meaning I could use what they wrote without naming them), or off the record.
I voted against Trump...
National security scholar Maria W. Norris of Coventry University, who is covering events in Brazil, reports that today, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva gathered around him the president of the supreme court and the governors or vice-governors of each state, the senators, the attorney general, and congressional representatives, all of whom condemned the coup. Many had been staunch supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro, but since the coup failed, they have thrown their lot behind Lula. After they declared their support, Lula led them through the vandalized buildings, symbolically reclaiming them.
Lula and his administration say that police worked with the rioters, and a judge has approved warrants for the arrest of two key law enforcement officials close to Bolsonaro: Anderson Torres and Colonel Fábio Augusto Vieira. Police have also searched Torres’s home. Pro-Bolsonaro groups have been camped near military posts and buildings since the election; it appears the insurrectionists’ plan was to induce the military to join them.
In the wake of the unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the government, Bolsonaro supporters are claiming that the attack was by leftists who infiltrated a peaceful protest. Police have so far arrested about 1500 participants.
Bolsonaro left Brazil for Florida before Lula took office, while he was still president. That status apparently enabled him to enter the U.S. on an A-1 visa, reserved for heads of state. That visa is normally canceled when the person holding it leaves office, but since he is already in this country, it is not clear what its status is. Normally, anyone on an A-1 visa who is no longer on official business must leave the country within 30 days, but if Brazil tries to extradite him, the process could stretch on, putting the Biden administration in an awkward position.
In contrast to the Bolsonaro supporters running from the coup, from his perch in the U.S., former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who insisted all along—without evidence—that the election in Brazil was fraudulent, remained adamant that Lula must be replaced. “I’m not backing off one inch on this thing,” he said to Politico. Bannon is close to Bolsonaro’s son, who has been seen hobnobbing with Trump-affiliated people, including Trump’s daughter Ivanka.
Observers have noted the many similarities between the attack on the Brazilian government on January 8 and the attack on the U.S. government almost exactly two years earlier. But there are differences, too, and one of the big differences is that power had already changed hands in Brazil, and President Lula has compelled other leaders into a show of support even as the government is arresting rioters.
In the U.S., Trump was still in office when his supporters tried to overthrow the government, and there was neither a house cleaning nor a demand for lawmakers to declare their support for the duly elected government.
Many of those who supported Trump in the events of January 6, 2021, are still in Congress. At least six Republican congress members asked Trump for a preemptive pardon, and four of them are still in office. They make up the core of the far-right Republicans House speaker Kevin McCarthy had to bargain with to win the speakership: Representatives Scott Perry (R-PA), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) was also part of the group that pressured McCarthy, and he, too, appears to have been deeply involved in the events of January 6: just days afterward, Trump awarded Jordan the Presidential Medal of Freedom with a somewhat generic citation that raised questions about why Trump was really giving Jordan the award.
Today the House voted on the rules package McCarthy promised to the far-right Republicans. As expected, it contained a threat to McCarthy: any single member can force a vote to toss out the House speaker. This rule was in place in 2015, when then-representative Mark Meadows (R-NC) invoked it against Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), who resigned rather than face a vote.
The deal cut with the far-right group gives them plum committee assignments, including a number of seats on the House Rules Committee. The deal required McCarthy to permit a number of symbolic votes on things important to that far-right group, and it appears to have promised to cap government funding at 2022 levels, worrying both those who want more defense spending and those who want to protect Social Security and Medicare. It also appears that McCarthy said he would not agree to raising the debt limit—that is, honoring the debts the country has already incurred—without “fiscal reforms.” That promise seems to hold the threat of a showdown over a national default.
And there are rumors of a secret agreement that has not been disclosed, an unfortunate start for the Republican majority, which promised to be transparent. Even some Republicans are demanding more information.
One of the things McCarthy did agree to was the creation of a select subcommittee in the Judiciary Committee to investigate the “weaponization of the federal government.” By a party line vote, the House today approved that committee to investigate what Republicans insist is an anti-Republican bias in the FBI and the Department of Justice. Jim Jordan will chair the committee, which theoretically can review ongoing criminal investigations, pretty clearly to protect Republicans in trouble. Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance points out that the Department of Justice will never allow such a thing but dealing with the committee will waste time and resources. The Democrats will not boycott the select committee as the Republicans did the January 6 committee, suggesting that Jordan will not reign unchallenged.
Republicans clearly intend the committee to spread a narrative that will undermine the one established so powerfully by the Mueller investigation, the Trump impeachment committees, and the January 6 committee. The modern Republicans have always been closely tied to right-wing media, and nothing made that clearer than Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity’s broadcast tonight. He did his show from the Rayburn Reception Room of the House of Representatives, “interviewing” Republican congress members so they could repeat talking points.
Yesterday, news broke that in November, President Joe Biden’s lawyers found “a small number” of classified documents from his vice-presidential years in a locked closet in Biden’s former office at Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. They immediately contacted the National Archives and Records Administration, which retrieved the documents the same day. Biden said that he did not know the documents were there and that his lawyers “did what they should have done” when they called NARA. Attorney General Merrick Garland assigned a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, John R. Lausch Jr., to see if he should appoint a special counsel.
Trump and his supporters immediately tried to suggest Biden was getting better treatment than he did, but journalist Matthew Miller notes that classified documents often get taken from government facilities by accident. Those errors are reported, the documents recovered, and a damage assessment made to determine whether further action needs to be taken.
In Trump’s case, NARA repeatedly asked him simply to return the documents it knew he had. He refused for a year, then let them recover 15 boxes that included classified documents, withholding others. After a subpoena, his lawyers turned over more documents and signed an affidavit saying that was all of them. But of course it wasn’t: the FBI’s August search of Mar-a-Lago recovered still more classified documents. Trump is being investigated now for obstruction and violations of the Espionage Act, which makes it a crime to withhold documents from a government official authorized to take them.
Today, New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan sentenced former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg to five months in jail at New York’s Rikers Island complex and five years probation after he pleaded guilty to 15 felonies in a scheme to provide Trump Organization employees direct benefits to avoid paying taxes. Weisselberg was the key witness in the trial last fall of the Trump Corporation and the Trump Payroll Corporation for tax fraud and falsifying records. A jury found the entities guilty of all charges, meaning the Trump Organization has been found guilty of criminal conduct, likely impacting its ability to do business and hurting Trump’s defense in other cases.
For decades, conservative values have been central to Bret Stephens’s and David Brooks’s political beliefs, and the Republican Party was the vehicle to extend those beliefs into policy. But in recent years, both the party and a radicalized conservative movement have left them feeling alienated in various ways. Now, with an extremist fringe seemingly in control of the House, the G.O.P. bears little resemblance to the party that was once their home. Bret and David got together to suss out what happened and where the party can go.
Bret Stephens: Lately I’ve been thinking about that classic Will Rogers line: “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” A century or so later, it looks like the shoe is on the other foot. Is it even possible to call the Republican Party a “party” anymore?
David: My thinking about the G.O.P. goes back to a brunch I had with Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza in the ’80s that helps me see, in retrospect, that people in my circle were pro-conservative, while Ingraham and D’Souza and people in their circle were anti-left. We wanted to champion Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and a Reaganite foreign policy. They wanted to rock the establishment. That turned out to be a consequential difference because almost all the people in my circle back then — like David Frum and Robert Kagan — ended up, decades later, NeverTrumpers, and almost all the people in their circle became Trumpers or went bonkers.
Bret: Right, they weren’t conservatives. They were just illiberal.
David: Then in 1995 some friends and I created a magazine called The Weekly Standard. The goal was to help the G.O.P. become a mature governing party. Clearly we did an awesome job! I have a zillion thoughts about where the Republican Party went astray, but do you have a core theory?
Bret: I have multiple theories, but let me start with one: The mid-1990s was also the time that Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House and Fox News got started. Back then, those who were on the more intelligent end of the conservative spectrum thought a magazine such as The Weekly Standard, a channel such as Fox and a guy like Gingrich would be complementary: The Standard would provide innovative ideas for Republican leaders like Gingrich, and Fox would popularize those ideas for right-of-center voters. It didn’t work out as planned. The supposed popularizers turned into angry populists. And the populists turned on the intellectuals.
To borrow Warren Buffett’s take about investing, the conservative movement went from innovation to imitation to idiocy. It’s how the movement embraced Donald Trump as a standard-bearer and role model. All the rest, as they say, is Commentary.
Your theory?
David: I think I’d tell a similar story, but maybe less flattering to my circle. The people who led the Republican Party, either as president (Ronald Reagan through the Bushes), members of Congress (Jack Kemp, John McCain, Paul Ryan) or as administration officials and intellectuals (Richard Darman, Condi Rice) believed in promoting change through the institutions of established power. They generally wanted to shrink and reform the government but they venerated the Senate, the institution of the presidency, and they worked comfortably with people from the think tanks, the press and the universities. They were liberal internationalists, cosmopolitan, believers in the value of immigration.
Bret: I’d add that they also believed in the core values of old-fashioned liberalism: faith in the goodness of democracy, human rights, the rule of law, free speech, political compromise, the political process itself. They believed in building things up, not just tearing them down. I would count myself among them.
David: Then the establishment got discredited (Iraq War, financial crisis, the ossifying of the meritocracy, the widening values gap between metro elites and everybody else), and suddenly all the people I regarded as fringe and wackadoodle (Pat Buchanan, Donald Trump, anybody who ran CPAC) rose up on the wave of populist fury.
Everybody likes a story in which the little guy rises up to take on the establishment, but in this case the little guys rode in on a wave of know-nothingism, mendacity, an apocalyptic mind-set, and authoritarianism. Within a few short years, a somewhat Hamiltonian party became a Jacksonian one, with a truly nihilistic wing.
Quote:blatham wrote:
Quote:
You see? She sees every interaction as win or lose, zero sum. She CANNOT simply be mistaken. That would mean < insert dramatic flourish here> she lost!!
I think that if we all agreed with her, she'd go somewhere else.
Hey…🤔
Tom Perriello, the former congressman from Virginia and now director of U.S. programs at the Open Society Foundations: “I hope he runs again, because he’s overcome tremendous political odds to deliver the boldest agenda in generations. He has a senior team of brilliant, no-drama veterans ready to translate those policies into a new, more inclusive and resilient American dream.”
She comes here to wage war.
Watching the news today, I suspect I am not always going to report all the twists and turns of the House Republicans for the next two years. They campaigned in the midterm elections on so-called kitchen-table issues—inflation, primarily—but upon taking control of the House, they instantly reverted back to the culture wars that are their bread and butter. This is largely performative for their base, since the Democratic-led Senate will never pass their extreme measures.
On Monday evening the new Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill to cut funding for the Internal Revenue Service that the previous Congress included in the Inflation Reduction Act, funding intending to add workers to clear a big backlog of unprocessed returns, overhaul technology, and improve customer service. Republicans insist that funding the IRS will send bureaucrats to hassle ordinary Americans, but in fact, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has directed that none of the new resources will be used to increase audit rates for small businesses or households with an annual income below $400,000.
If the House measure were to become law—which it will not because the Senate will not pass it—it would add significantly to the deficit. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that the Republicans’ bill would increase the deficit by nearly $115 billion over ten years.
The Biden administration has focused on tax evasion among the wealthy and has sought since the beginning of Biden’s term to crack down on tax cheats.
The administration responded to the House measure with uncharacteristic saltiness. “With their first economic legislation of the new Congress, House Republicans are making clear that their top economic priority is to allow the rich and multi-billion dollar corporations to skip out on their taxes, while making life harder for ordinary, middle-class families that pay the taxes they owe,” responded the Office of Management and Budget.
“That’s their agenda; not lowering costs or cutting taxes for hard working Americans—as President Biden has consistently advocated. If the President were presented with H.R. 23—or any other bill that enables the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations to cheat on their taxes, while honest and hard-working Americans are left to pay the tab—he would veto it.”
Today the House followed up on its IRS bill with two antiabortion measures. With only three Democrats joining the Republicans, they adopted a resolution condemning attacks on “pro-life facilities, groups and churches.” Democrats pointed out that abortion providers and women seeking to obtain abortions have suffered deadly attacks, including the 2009 murder of Dr. George Tiller of Kansas.
Mini Timmaraju, the head of NARAL Pro-Choice America said: “If you’re going to put a resolution out on violence against churches and fake pregnancy centers, why are we not also addressing violence against abortion providers and violence in general?”
The second measure is called the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act and requires doctors to care for infants who survive an abortion. Opponents of the measure point out that such a scenario is exceedingly rare and that doctors are already required to do what the bill requires. The new measure adds new penalties for doctors.
The first of these measures is not a law; the second will not pass the Senate. Still, both are much less extreme than what Republicans planned to offer when they expected the 2022 elections to go their way.
A week ago, Bloomberg’s editors blamed the Republican Party’s dysfunction on the fact that the party has ignored public policy. “After a campaign in which culture-war issues took the place of an actual governing agenda—and in which the GOP nominated numerous on-message candidates who were clearly unfit for office—House Republicans have found themselves in power without a plan,” they wrote.
Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin today called out the elephant in the room when she wrote that “there are no moderate House Republicans.” The positions of the extremist Republicans in the fight over House speaker often made people talk of the rest of the party as “moderate,” but in fact, as Rubin points out, they all supported Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for speaker, and McCarthy is an election denier. They also voted for the extremist rules package that threatens to bring the country to the unthinkable: a financial default.
Rubin pointed out that with the House as closely divided as it is, a few of these so-called moderates could defeat the radicals and force the party closer to the mainstream. So far, though, they have shown no inclination to do so.
But there has been a sign that a new crop of Republicans might someday demand the party clean itself up (which doesn’t sound like much, but a fight against corruption was what launched Theodore Roosevelt’s political career in 1884). Today, four new Republican representatives from New York called on Representative George Santos (R-NY) to resign. During his campaign, Santos lied about his education, work experience, and also apparently about his finances, which could involve him in legal trouble.
Republican officials in New York’s Nassau County also demanded Santos resign, saying: “This scandalous behavior does damage to all of our reputations because there is a part of our public that is cynical about politicians and public officials.”
But Republican House leadership, including McCarthy and Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who is the third most powerful Republican in the House and was a key endorser of Santos, have stayed silent. For his part, Santos vows to stay in office.
As I say, I may well not follow all the performances of House members going forward unless a performance seems like it will change the larger story of the country, in part because I worry that letting them take up all the oxygen will crowd out other crucial stories, like this one:
Since late last year, California has been pummeled by storms traveling in what are known as “atmospheric rivers,” powerful bands of water-filled clouds that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) describes as “rivers in the sky.” These storm systems have created floods and mudslides, especially on land scarred by recent fires, and brought 70-mile-per-hour winds to Sacramento, knocking out power for more than 345,000 people.
More than 4.5 million Californians have been under flood watches, and at least 17 people have died. According to San Francisco area meteorologist Jan Null, this has been the third rainiest period in San Francisco since the 1849 Gold Rush.
On January 4, California governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency, and Biden issued an emergency declaration on January 8.
The warming climate is intensifying both droughts—which feed fires—and storms like those currently creating such destruction.
In Norway, electric vehicles now represent four out of every five new cars sold
Today, four new Republican representatives from New York called on Representative George Santos (R-NY) to resign.
