|
- Tucker Carlson, confirming what we've always known about him
|
|
|
Days of voting to elect a new Speaker of the House: Four. (4.) Speakers of the House elected: Zero. (0.)
-
Friday marked the two-year anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, which Congress commemorated with a moment of silence on the Capitol steps amid brief remarks from Democratic leaders new and old praising Capitol police, and, if you can believe it, none from Republicans. Only one Republican bothered to attend at all. Can’t imagine why! To be fair, House Republicans were very busy commemorating the day’s events by holding the government hostage.
-
When we left off yesterday, the world’s thirstiest legislator Kevin McCarthy had failed to garner enough support among Republicans to become House speaker 11 times, before eking out just enough votes to adjourn for the night to briefly halt his merry-go-round of humiliation, and wheel it behind closed doors. But it fired back up again today, with McCarthy losing, wait for it, twelfth and thirteenth ballots—this time by closer margins, after giving in to some of his far-right detractors’ more outlandish demands. For instance: McCarthy has agreed to reinstate a House rule that would allow a single member to call a no-confidence vote to oust the speaker (him) from office. Matt Gaetz would never abuse that rule, right?
-
It’s worth reiterating that McCarthy is already extremely right wing himself—a die-hard loyalist to disgraced former president Donald Trump and an early proponent of the Big Lie. But now, he has allowed the craziest, fringiest members of his caucus to take the wheel, signaling that even if he does manage to get enough votes for speaker, he will have traded away nearly all of the power of the office. This man is deeply unwell (and did we say thirsty?) but McCarthy personally having a bad time once he becomes speaker is really not our concern, giving a bunch of lunatics control of the House is.
|
|
|
For now, the House is adjourned until 10 p.m. Eastern, but the broad strokes of McCarthy’s “deal” with these devils are becoming clear.
-
The full proposal hasn’t leaked, but parts of it have, and as you can probably guess, it’s not good, folks. McCarthy has also agreed to give three seats on the powerful House Rules Committee to members of the hardline Freedom Caucus (enough for them to block legislation from coming to the House floor), and promised to force the United States government into default on its debt if at all possible. Super.
-
Not since the Civil War has a prospective speaker been dragged through this many rounds of voting, and it’s unlocked a new level of embarrassment for a party we thought couldn’t possibly top its last few years. Apart from the fact that freshmen members of Congress in the lower chamber have not yet been sworn in, without a speaker the House’s usual legislative and oversight powers have ground to a halt, which means the body can not respond to any prospective l crisis like a natural disaster or, oh I don’t know, a global pandemic.
Two years after the horrific events of the insurrection, and just two months after losing the 2022 midterms, the Republican Party has unsurprisingly learned nothing, and is letting its most extreme members set the party’s agenda, and we’re all paying the price for it.
|
|
|
Police in Newport News, VA, took a six-year old child into custody after the student shot an elementary school teacher, who was rushed to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. The police chief said that a call initially came in for an active shooter, but upon arriving at the scene, it became clear that this was not an instance of an individual firing off rounds around a school, but a shooting in an isolated location. Police stated that the shooting was not accidental, and resulted from an altercation between the six-year-old boy, who had a handgun, and his teacher. They also confirmed that no other students at Richneck Elementary School were harmed, and that the commonwealth’s attorney was contacted once the boy was in custody. As Republicans like to say, guns don’t kill people, people kill people, including six-year old children, and they’re fine with that.
|
|
|
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian forces in Ukraine to observe a unilateral, 36-hour cease-fire, starting Thursday, January 5. Ukrainian officials dismissed the order, but did not clarify whether their troops would follow suit. After 11 months of the conflict, Putin’s announcement was unexpected. It came after Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, proposed a cease-fire for the Christmas holiday, which in the Orthodox calendar is celebrated on January 7. United Nations staffers on the ground in Ukraine reported having not seen evidence of major fighting, but Russia’s Defense Ministry continued to depict Ukraine as an aggressor and accuse Ukrainian forces of multiple attacks that are currently not possible to verify. Mutual distrust runs so deep between the two countries that it’s unclear whether the cease-fire will actually hold.
|
|
|
|
|
