Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
– Macbeth after he hears of Lady Macbeth’s death, in Act 5, scene 5, lines 16–27.
The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
WASHINGTON, D.C. — For all the fear and loathing and bloviating on the House floor by the MAGA Republicans, now in charge of the agenda at least for awhile, fear not that much will come of it.
Every word out of their mouths is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury” and fodder for Fox News, “signifying nothing” for the country. None of it will ever make it to the floor of the Senate. And even if something did somehow pass, it would be vetoed by the president.
So go on with your lives. Take a break from social media and cable news talk. We will get through this together.
The Facts
As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote this week, in a post on Facebook I labeled “IDIOCRACY at WORK: “The people who will be running the House of Representatives for the next two years — a group that does not, as far as anyone can tell, include Kevin McCarthy, who seems set to be speaker in name only — believe a number of untrue things.
“Many, perhaps most, believe that the 2020 election was stolen, or at least that Joe Biden is somehow not the legitimate president. Many believe that Covid vaccines do more harm than good, a belief that has contributed to thousands of excess deaths among Republican partisans. Quite a few either subscribe to or are at least friendly to beliefs of the QAnon cult, which claims that the world is run by a vast conspiracy of pedophiles. (Never mind that most pedophiles seem to be Republicans, like Judge Roy Moore from Alabama, Donald Trump’s pimp Jeffery Epstein, Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz himself, and Southern Baptist preachers).
“You’ve probably read a lot about the political delusions of Republican extremists — and these days a vast majority of Republicans in the House are either extremists or opportunists willing to go along with whatever the extremists want. It’s important, however, to realize that G.O.P. economic views are almost as divorced from reality as their political fantasies are.”
Another New York Times columnist, Jamelle Bouie, explained what’s going on in a post I labeled on Facebook:
POPULISM v. PROGRESSIVISM “… 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.”
As for Speaker McCarthy, who is destined to be the weakest Speaker in the history of the House because of his back room deal with concessions to get votes from the likes of Matt Gaetz of Florida and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, with possibly the shortest tenure ever, the House floor fight only made him even more unpopular with the American people, according to Morning Consult polls.
Half the American public, 49 percent, hold unfavorable views of McCarthy, up from 43 percent in a week. Even 35 percent of Republicans don’t like him now, up from 29 percent.
House Rules
As for the so-called House rules package that passed Monday night, it’s patently clear that Republicans have no idea what rules are. What they passed was not a list of rules for operating the House. It was a 55-page document of radical, conservative ideology and goals, which might effect how the House operates for the next few days, weeks or months. But again, it’s all sound and fury signifying nothing, a tale told by idiots with no education to speak of, or any idea how a democratic republic is to be governed.
Perhaps that’s the point. They weren’t elected to govern. They came here to tear up the government and try to prevent it from working. Too bad they just won’t come out and say that. We could have an actual debate to see if the American people are really ready to abandon democracy and install an unelected authoritarian dictator instead. Would the American people really substitute Putin for Biden if given the chance? No, they rejected Trump for Biden in 2020 by a large margin.
What the MAGA Republicans passed on Monday was so confusing that it was hard to find a daily deadline report that adequately explained it. I think it was confusing for many reporters, who were scanning the document to find actual rules.
As much as I don’t like Politico, it seemed to come the closest to understanding what was in the 55 pages.
The so-called and misnamed Freedom Caucus (Republicans these days always say the opposite of what they actually mean, which is a classic case of George Orwell’s “double-speak”), successfully pushed through a measure to allow a single member of Congress to propose what’s known as a “motion to vacate the chair,” a vote that would effectively topple a sitting speaker.
By the way, this rule does not just apply to Republicans. Just to show how ignorant these bastards are, this would allow any one Democrat to do the same thing. Democrats, now led by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, are laughing their asses off over strong drinks about this all over Washington.
Wait until you see the look on Matt Gaetz’ face when Jeffries uses this against them in the coming days. Marjorie Tailor Green is going to piss her pants right on the House floor. It is tantamount to allowing any single member of Congress to mount a one person filibuster of anything.
You thought the filibuster in the Senate was arcane and stupid, designed by Confederate Rebels in the era of slavory and the Civil War? Watch this at work. It guarantees that the House will get nothing done.
It will be a challenge for McCarthy to even get a budget passed when the time comes. Luckily, Senators Dick Shelby of Alabama and Pat Leahy of Vermont got a bipartisan funding package through Congress before Christmas, hopefully keeping the government open at least until September. Maybe this MAGA caucus will be diminished by then. Some of them may be in jail by then.
The MAGA Caucus, a radical subset of the Freedom Caucus, also negotiated themselves three seats on the previously powerful Rules Committee, handing McCarthy’s right flank de facto veto power over any bill that comes to the floor. Meaning nothing much will make it to the floor. Again, this is not about governing. The whole point is NOT to govern.
That’s apparently what the money behind this movement wants. No government.
MAGA Republicans are also trying to claim victory for enshrining a rule first put in place by Democrats, requiring bills to be released at least 72 hours before a floor vote. But the package approved Monday night includes no new language to enforce that mandate. Again, it was just something they could brag about on Fox News and Twitter, maybe Trump’s Truth Social.
“At the heart of the rules pushed by rank-and-file conservatives, including many in the Freedom Caucus, is a desire to shape a more inclusive legislative process that concentrates less power with leadership,” Politico reports. “To that end, they have secured promises from leaders that aren’t formally written down in the rules (enshrined in an unpublished addendum to the rules Republicans deny exists), such as allowing more amendments to be considered on the floor and more widely distributing committee positions” (to people like Marjory Taylor Green, who had all her committee assignments stripped in the previous Congress for her public language denying the outcome of the 2020 election and inciting violence).
“No matter the size of their victories on their side of the Capitol, though, House conservatives are soon to meet up with a harsh reality: Most legislation that passes their chamber is expected to be dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate.”
Yes, ladies and gentleman, they can scream and whine, pass all kinds of crazy crap, and know that it will go nowhere. The sad part is, every time they advocate this crazy crap, Trump and his followers just drop more money into their campaign finance accounts. They know they can pocket that money later on when they decide to walk away from this shit show. It’s a political retirement account for anyone willing to stand up in public and lie like a mangy dog denying that it has the mange.
Oh, and they also gutted the Ethics Committee in these so-called new rules, making it nearly impossible for the full House to hold them to account for anything. And that includes perhaps the most unethical liar ever elected to Congress, George Santos. He might even somehow keep his seat for a few months, before an actual legal investigation forces him out. It’s kind of hard to hold a seat in Congress from inside a jail cell.
Republicans also killed Democrats’ “pay-as-you-go” rule, often shorthanded as PAYGO. It had required legislation that would add to the deficit to be offset with tax increases or spending cuts.
The Republican majority replaced it with CUTGO, which requires mandatory spending increases to be offset only with equal or greater decreases in mandatory spending, with no new taxes allowed UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES! Republicans put a similar rule into place in the 112th Congress. It wasn’t really a rule then either.
This has many Republicans who always side with the military in spending bills alarmed, since these MAGA MORONS are already threatening to cut defense spending by 10 percent. Hey, they could probably find a majority of Democrats on their side in a stand alone bill that would just do that. Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont would love to pass a bipartisan bill to gut spending for the “military industrial complex.” Maybe he can make a deal with Matt Gaetz?
Unfortunately, they are going to make sure any cuts in defense spending are matched by “entitlement” spending cuts, meaning cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
Don’t worry. This will die in the Senate.
While the MAGA methheads are trying to claim they are worried about the national debt and deficit, they also made a game of gutting the Internal Revenue Service. The first bill Republicans are bringing to the floor once the rules package is adopted comes from Adrian Smith, a Nebraska Republican, which would roll back about $80 billion in IRS funding and decrease revenues by nearly $186 billion. This would increase the deficit by more than $114 billion over a decade, according to a nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analysis released Monday.
Sound and fury. Signifying nothing. The IRS funding bill was already approved by both houses of Congress and signed by the president.
House Republicans’ historically slim majority will, in its rules package, constrain itself severely on tax rate increases — requiring a three-fifths supermajority vote to pass any, according to Politico.
“In practice, however, that’s more of a statement of ideology than a policymaking gesture. Unlike in the Senate, where 60 votes are needed to steer most bills past a filibuster, in the House Republicans will have nearly total control over what legislation and amendments are considered on the floor. And, of course, they aren’t interested in moving proposals to increase tax rates.”
The package purges the Democrats’ so-called “Gephardt rule,” which had allowed the House to automatically send a measure extending the debt limit to the Senate when it adopts a budget resolution. That maneuver had been used to let the House avoid a direct vote on lifting the debt ceiling, taking some of the partisan politics out of keeping the government open.
“There is broad agreement that the U.S. defaulting on its debt would trigger unprecedented fiscal calamity, but the return of this rule could bring back the debt ceiling brinkmanship that took hold on the Hill in 2011 when the U.S. credit rating was downgraded for the first time,” Politico says.
Congress is expected to have to act on the debt ceiling sometime by spring. This is one place where the House could throw a monkey wrench into the works.
Republicans also revived the “Holman rule” originated in the 19th century that allows Congress to amend spending bills with the intent of salary reduction or employee termination, or cutting a specific program. In recent years the rule was used to reduce the salary of the administrator of the Western Area Power Administration to $1 and to eliminate 89 positions at the Congressional Budget Office’s Budget Analysis Division.
Both proposals failed to become law, however.
But Democrats are raising the alarm about the Holman restoration nonetheless. Virginia Democrat Gerry Connolly warned last week that Republicans could use it to “dismantle the federal workforce and carry out political vendettas at the expense of career civil servants.”
That’s a scary thought. But again, these Republicans don’t seem smart enough to know how to use this, unless Trump is whispering in their ears. Again it seems just for show, more fodder for Tucker Carlson.
Finally, in the effort to try to make good on their campaign pledges to make the federal government more accountable, Republicans are requiring every committee to submit a plan for authorization and oversight to the Oversight and House Administration Committees by March 1. They also want a full accounting of any unauthorized federal programs and agencies that received funding in the last fiscal year. The rules package further requires committees to weigh whether any programs should be moved from mandatory funding to discretionary funding, which would force that spending out of an automatic process every year and into one controlled by Congress.
Of course they made sure the House Appropriations, Ethics and Rules Committees are exempt from that mandate.
So much for honesty and integrity in government, much less accountability or transparency. This was a deal made behind closed doors in secrecy with some of the most radical, anti-government nitwits to ever get elected to public office in America.
It’s less than funny that Trump liked to try to compare himself to Lincoln. What a bad joke.
But something Lincoln said is relevant here.
“You can fool some of the people all the time; you can fool all the people some of the time; but, you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
I’m not fooled. My friends are not fooled. The Democrats are not fooled. The American people were not fooled enough to hand the Senate and the White House over to these MAGA nitwits.
Sit back and watch the show. Or better yet, go on about your business and ignore it. Obviously even Elon Mush on Twitter is not firing up the platform to support this bullshit. He has gone silent in recent days, except for using his $44 billion overvalued platform to promote Tesla and Space X.
Trust me. Nothing much will come of this. Yawn. Back to bed.
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