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John,

It’s been a frustrating week in DC, and I want to let you know what’s going on.

It’s not just “congressional dysfunction;” it’s an open civil war within the Republican Party. McCarthy said whatever he needed to say, cut side deals with extreme MAGA Republicans, and made promises he couldn’t keep just to become Speaker. Now, extremist Republicans (think: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Lauren Boebert) are completely running the show and threatening to remove him.

McCarthy will essentially say or do anything to cling to power. That is the sole reason he opened an impeachment inquiry against President Biden, to thwart the calls to remove him. But these extremist holdouts will not be mollified. They want to shut down the government because they think it is a winner politically. They’re preventing us from doing our work, and we are days away from a government shutdown that will hurt Americans.

The dynamics here are different from the usual news stories about “partisan politics.” At the end of May, a majority of Congressional Democrats and Republicans with the White House came together and passed a bipartisan bill ( yes, you read that right — bipartisan ) to save our country from a catastrophic default and agree on how much we would spend to fund the government this year. That bill became law.

But now, extremists are demanding that McCarthy ignore and renege on the bipartisan spending deal we passed and extract more painful cuts to the budget. They aren’t serious about governing, but instead driven by nihilism and adoration of Trump. Just yesterday, the former president posted this encouraging a shutdown for his own protection: “This is the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.”

So, where are the so-called moderates in this? Many of them know better, you can see it in their faces. But they won’t band together and push back because they don’t have the courage to stand up to the extremists or to Trump in fear of retaliation. Democrats are prepared to work with the “so-called moderates” in the Republican Caucus, just like we did to avert a default — BUT they have to want to work with us, and we have not seen that willingness yet.

That’s the view from where I sit here in DC. It’s grim, I know. But I will leave you with one glimmer of hope. This week, one very conservative Republican member, Rep. Ken Buck from Colorado, stood up to his party. He has publicly criticized the impeachment inquiry against President Biden saying the facts don’t merit it. And yesterday he defended Attorney General Merrick Garland in our Judiciary when his Republican colleagues tore into him with baseless accusations.

I’ll take that glimmer of courage and use it to me the courage to keep fighting for this democracy.

Thanks for reading,

Becca Balint

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