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**APRIL 18, 2024**

On the Prospect website

Hospital Lobbyists Fought to Cut Penalties for Cybersecurity Breaches

Amid the Change Healthcare ransomware attack, a law signed the day
before the January 6th riot shows that the industry is more interested
in limiting liability. BY DAVID DAYEN

Reviving an Unenforced Amendment

Will a constitutional promise to protect the right to vote get buried
again? An appeals court in Washington is about to tell us. BY MICHAEL
MELTSNER

Gun Bans Gear Up at Polling Places

Addressing fears of violence, states see a path to keeping guns away
from the polls. BY GABRIELLE GURLEY

Meyerson on TAP

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**** A House Party Divided Against Itself

That's the House of Representatives and the Republicans, in case you
were wondering.

The day after tomorrow,

**Saturday Night Live** will have some competition, as C-SPAN will have
a similarly farcical show running in prime time.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has scheduled votes on four bills-a $60
billion appropriation to Ukraine, $26 billion to Israel, $8 billion to
Taiwan, and the GOP's perennial military-to-the-border bill-for
Saturday night as well. The first three have already passed the Senate
in slightly different forms, and President Biden has said he'd sign
them into law forthwith.

But it's the overture to this performance, rather than the debates and
votes on these four bills, that should be the comedic highlight.

The show must begin with voting on a rule to permit those bills to come
to the floor. The Freedom Caucus, home to the greatest collection of
strategic buffoons in modern American history, will oppose that rule in
itself, and may also try to derail it by challenging Johnson's
Speakership. In turn, they may be subjected to a counterattack by fellow
Republicans, who, while sharing much of the Freedomniks' Trumpian
impulses, don't like being jerked around by the dozen or so
Freedomniks who insist on ultra-Trumpism at every turn. A number of
those fellow Republicans-perhaps even a majority-would like to undo
the deals Kevin McCarthy cut with the Freedomniks as the price for his
winning the Speakership. Those deals enabled a single member to compel a
vote of confidence on the Speaker (which currently endangers Johnson),
and put three of those Freedomniks on the House Rules Committee, where
they have the power to permit or block a bill from coming to the House
floor. Fearing that their fellow party-mates, including Speaker Johnson
himself, will turn against them, trying to pass, say, a revocation of
those deals by a sudden floor vote, the Freedomniks have today created
their Floor Action Response Team (immediately rebranded as FART by
aficionados of le mot juste) to defend their hard-won
teensy-tiny-minority rule.

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Not all these intraparty fights may come up on Saturday night; fight
fans may be teased by the spectacle of Johnson's continuing struggle
to keep his job to keep watching C-SPAN-much as moviegoers in the
early days of silent films were prodded, by a film's closing shot of a
beautiful young woman tied to tracks as the speeding train bore down on
her, to return to the theater the following week to see the next episode
in the serial. Those beautiful young women had (and deserved) a lot more
fans than Johnson, but as with McCarthy's struggle to win and retain
his Speakership, it's not the protagonist of the fight that matters,
it's the absurdity of the spectacle and its sundry participants.

By compelling Johnson to rely on the Democrats to come up with the votes
to pass the rule to proceed, to approve those three aid packages, and
perhaps, to keep him as Speaker, the Freedomniks have enabled the
Democrats to effectively become the sometime co-governors of the House,
at least on its most important decisions (hence, the "strategic buffoon"
prize I awarded them in a previous paragraph). Using that power, the
Democrats have already compelled Johnson to add $9 billion in U.S. aid
to Gaza's literally embattled and famished citizenry as a separate
part of its Israeli aid package. With their majority in the House now
down to just two, which will go down to a bare one in a couple of days
when one Republican has said he'll resign, and given the
Freedomniks' opposition to legislation per se, Johnson can do nothing
without Democratic support. That gives the Democrats some real
leverage-but only on bills that at least nine Republican senators
support, since that's the number of Republicans required if Senate
Democrats are to surmount the 60-vote hurdle that any significant Senate
legislation needs.

No matter who guest-hosts

**Saturday Night Live** this week, they can't possibly be as
whacked-out as Marjorie Taylor Greene and company. C-SPAN may want to
run some ads between now and Saturday night.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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