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UPDATED: The Elephant in the Room is no longer being ignored by the Media [1]

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Date: 2023-09-28

The Morning Newsletter at The NY Times has gotten explicit this morning. David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Phillbrick have the latest. The blurb under the headline is the real story.

The situation serves as a reminder that partisan polarization in Washington is not symmetrical.

Two basic facts are central to understanding why the federal government may shut down on Sunday morning: First, the House Republican caucus contains about 20 hard-right members who sometimes support radical measures to get what they want. Many of them refused to certify the 2020 presidential election, for example, and now favor impeaching President Biden. They also tend to support deep cuts to federal spending, and they’re willing to shut down the government as a negotiating tactic. “This is a whole new concept of individuals that just want to burn the whole place down,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — a fellow Republican — said last week. Second, the Republicans’ House majority is so slim that McCarthy needs the support of most of these roughly 20 members to remain speaker. If he passes a bill to fund the government and keep it open without support from the hard-right faction, it can retaliate by calling for a new vote on his speakership and potentially firing him. Nobody knows who would then become speaker.

There you have it: a clear statement that this is NOT a both sides problem, that a handful of Republican radicals are essentially out of McCarthy’s control — and “they just want to burn the whole place down.”

This is a long-overdue article. It’s a primer for people who may have no understanding of just why the government may be forced into a shut-down. (Sorry, I’ve used up all my gift articles for the month, so no link through the paywall.) It doesn’t resort to the usual obfuscation by saying things like “Congress is unable to come to a budget agreement.” This is purely a Republican problem and says so — once you get past the anodyne headline.

I do have a couple of quibbles. The article puts the blame on 20 hard-liners (it refers to The Wrecking-Ball Caucus article from a few days ago), but it never gives a full list of who they are. Here’s a partial list from that earlier article:

Matt Gaetz of Florida

Ralph Norman of South Carolina

Bob Good of Virginia

Matt Rosendale of Montana

Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia

Dan Bishop of North Carolina

Lauren Boebert of Colorado

Andy Biggs of Arizona

Eli Crane of Arizona

Tim Burchett of Tennessee

I’m guessing Paul Gosar of Arizona, Chip Roy of Texas, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, and James Comer could easily be rolled into that bunch of extremists, and there are doubtless more. As long as the rest of the Republicans in the House refuse to rein them in or reach across the aisle to bypass them, they are all complicit .

Second, the Times still can’t completely keep from reflex false equivalence, with this passing observation:

The situation is a reminder that partisan polarization in Washington is not symmetrical. Yes, Democrats have moved significantly to the left on some major issues in recent decades while Republicans have moved significantly to the right. But a large number of only one party’s members — Republicans — is willing to take procedural steps that both parties would once have considered too extreme. It’s true about election certification, the debt ceiling and a government shutdown.

emphasis added

Granted, the article does clearly acknowledge that only one party’s members are willing to go to extremes. You have to go to the link to find that the ‘far left’ positions are on things like student debt relief, healthcare, climate change/energy, guns, etc. — things a majority of Americans support. Conversely, the wrecking-ball caucus is all over the place. “Some want to increase spending on border security while cutting other programs. Others acknowledge that they want to weaponize the threat of a shutdown to force major spending cuts.” That barely touches on just how radical the cuts are that they are demanding — and omits what they are.

The first sentence in the paragraph is the important point.

“The situation is a reminder that partisan polarization in Washington is not symmetrical.”

Another story at The NY Times captures how petty these people are, and how they are playing out a performative charade for right wing media and their base:

Little more than three days before a government shutdown, the Republican-led House spent the day adding hard-right proposals to a series of doomed spending bills.

The Republican-led House voted on Wednesday to reduce the salary of Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III to $1, as right-wing lawmakers tried to transform a Pentagon spending bill and a series of other funding measures into weapons to take aim at President Biden, his agenda and his top officials. There is little chance that Mr. Austin, the first Black defense secretary, will actually see his pay cut. The military spending bill is all but certain to die in the Senate, where it is expected to meet with bipartisan opposition. But the move to strip him of all but $1 of his $235,600 salary, proposed by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, reflected the intensity of the right-wing drive to make the military into a political issue.

When REPUBLICANS are attacking the military, it’s clear proof the party has lost its mind and abandoned its ‘traditional values’. (The fact that Austin is Black probably has a lot to do with it as well.) A more accurate headline would be: “House Republicans Vote to Strip Defense Secretary of Salary as GOP Extremists Flex Their Muscles.”

While The NY Times is finally starting to see the Elephant in the Room for what it is, this has been building for a very long time. David Corn’s must-read American Psychosis lays out in detail how the GOP has been heading down this road for 7 decades. John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience examines the authoritarian nature of the Republican Party. Rick Perlstein’s The Long Con: Mail-Order Conservatism shows how the open corruption of the Trump administration is part of conservatism’s DNA predating Trump by a long time. The signs have been there in plain sight, and it’s not a both-sides problem.

January 6 should have removed any doubt about that.

The concluding paragraph of the shutdown article really deserves to be somewhere besides the bottom:

Matt Dallek, a historian at George Washington University, described the rise of this faction as “the fairly logical culmination of an increasingly radical and increasingly extremist Republican Party.”

And here we are.

UPDATE:

Marianna Sotomayor and Theodric Meyer at The Washington Post also takes a look at the shutdown, profiling:

Roughly 10 lawmakers have at various times thwarted Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s proposals for both short- and long-term funding

Moments after a majority of House Republicans hammered out a plan to fund the government in the short and long term last week, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) stood up. Throwing cold water on the discussion in a closed-door meeting in the basement of the Capitol, Gaetz defiantly declared that he and several other House Republicans remained staunchly against a short-term funding solution — and there were enough of them to block it. As frequently as they needed to.

To give the Washington Post credit, they don’t mention Democrats as being part of the problem at all and put Republicans right in the headline. They also point out just how few people the radicals actually represent — although they only go so far as to call them “hard-right”:

Combined, these hard-right holdouts represent about 2 percent of the U.S. population, but they account for 100 percent of the votes halting plans of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to keep the government open. Variations of the group have thwarted McCarthy at every turn during the months-long fiscal fights, turning their distaste for how the House functions and McCarthy’s leadership into a multimedia sideshow of bullhorns, pithy tweets, declarations on the House floor and live streams from the gym.

emphasis added

We’re talking about these people essentially taking the country hostage unless their demands are met.

While The Washington Post suggests there are only 10 people in this group, they add a few more names to the list that can be gleaned from The NY Times:

Cory Mills (Fla.)

Andrew Ogles (Tenn.)

Wesley Hunt (Tex.)

(The Post article also includes Gaetz, Greene, Rosendale, Bishop, Crane, Biggs, Burchett, and Good)

Like the Times, the Post reports there’s a larger group of 20 Republicans beyond the 10 cited here.

Most of the holdouts have specifically called for the passage of all 12 long-term appropriations bills — but those lawmakers have also contributed to inhibiting that process. Roughly 20 holdouts initially blocked leadership from scheduling a vote on a procedural hurdle, known as the rule, to fund the Defense and Agriculture departments for a full year. Those bills eventually moved forward for debate on the House floor as part of a broader package Tuesday, in a win for Republican leaders. Some in the “Never CR” group also intimate “never say never” when it comes to possibly supporting a stopgap bill. But that support largely depends on the contours of a bill, and not all agree on what those contours should be.

The margin of votes that put Republicans in the majority is so small, it only takes a few of these people to make any kind of progress impossible — and half the time they’re busy fighting among themselves. While there are reportedly a number of Republicans who are upset with this, none of them dare publicly take a stand against them and their agenda or reach across the aisle to go around them because it would be career suicide for them politically.

The fact that McCarthy could be booted from the Speakership by any of the radicals calling for a vote on him means he has zero power over them. This continues a recent Republican House trend of Speakers who have to deal with extremists who won’t take either yes or no for answer — the arson caucus keeps getting stronger.

And looming over all of this is the one concern that really gets their attention: What would Trump and his base have them do? How will it play on Fox?

Ten years ago Charles P. Pierce wrote Government Shutdown — The Reign of Morons is Here at Esquire. His words are more timely than ever — as well as calling into question whether or not humans can learn from experience. The whole essay is masterful, but I’ll just quote a bit of it and urge people to READ THE WHOLE THING.

This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way." Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.

Again: and here we are.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/28/2196024/-The-Elephant-in-the-Room-is-no-longer-being-ignored-by-the-Media

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