Send in the Clowns!

Every circus needs clowns, isn’t that correct?

Now I am not inviting the ghost of Emmett Kelly or the spirit of Ronald MacDonald to visit the House floor, but that sorry bunch of House Republicans showed us this week that they do not understand how to govern. If one looks at the bills submitted this first week alone, one would get an idea that their platform is more social engineering than real policy. Their plan remains to help the rich get richer and to let the middle class fend for itself, and to forget the poor. I saw a lot of bobbing and weaving, ducking and covering, posturing and mumbling happening, but no legislative initiatives for the people they were elected to serve.

You can find here a recent summary of all bills introduced so far in this first week of the new Congress here:

Oh, sure, they passed a bill providing criminal charges for any provider who allows an aborted fetus that was alive, to die, but that is already the law. Of course, they knew it as the “Born Alive Act”.

They introduced another bill that banned insurance coverage or state Medicaid payments for abortions. The ban on Medicaid coverage had been in effect for a long time. It even already prohibited states from using their own money for this purpose in specific circumstances. Services vary from state to state.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation:

It depends on where you live. Because federal law only allows the use of federal funds for abortion in cases of rape, incest, or life endangerment of the pregnant person, in most states, Medicaid coverage for abortion is limited to these circumstances.  Many of these states have banned abortion and it may be difficult to locate a provider to obtain an abortion even in cases of rape and incest. 

Maryland law allows for some Medicaid funding, but it is income based.

Yet, a third banned the Federal Government from prohibiting the use of gas stoves. (This was apparently based on rumors after Governors in New York and California mentioned phasing out the use of gas stoves in coming decades.) The uproar, that this is happening now, fanned by Fox News, of course, was untrue. Some states were planning a gradual phase-out by partially disallowing new hookups in future years. (I have never understood why an earthquake-prone state such as California allowed home use of gas lines.) President Biden even denied that his administration was even considering this at a press opportunity recently.

We can see some of the upcoming administrative changes in the rules rescinding some powers of the former bi-partisan Ethics review committee that would make referrals to the House Ethics Committee. The January 6^th committee referred several members of the current House leadership (McCarthy and Jim Jordan were two who ignored the committee subpoenas) to the full Ethics Committee of the previous Congress, but this leadership will probably ignore those referrals.

There is now talk from McCarthy and others that they are out for revenge. After first saying that he would allow Democrats to select their committee members, McCarthy now says he will strip the Select House Committee on Intelligence of two long-term members,. Both Congressmen from California who served on the impeachment committees for the former president, Adam Schiff, and Eric Swalwell, were mentioned. And, in payback for the Democrats taking committee assignments away from Marjorie Taylor Greene for her offensive behavior, he plans to remove Congresswoman Ilhan Omar from her committee seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Does anyone know if these steps result from promises McCarthy made in his play for the post of Speaker? No, we, the general public, do not know and probably won’t get to know just how much of his authority was bartered away in his power quest. So, who is actually running this session of Congress? Is it Matt Gaetz who is now roostering his way onto the airways? Or perhaps Marjorie Taylor Greene, who went from opposing McCarthy to being a huge booster for his speakership? What role was she promised, aside from a return to having committee assignments? Will Qanon advocates now be running the place? Does anyone know just what the new rules for Congress are? As I noted earlier, only one week in, and already it is a three-ring circus.

There are bills, of course, to reduce taxes and defund the FBI and IRS. Republicans claim that both Federal agencies are out to get ordinary Americans. Erroneously they state that the additional employees at the IRS are going after the average Joe and will audit his taxes when what the employees are needed for is to upgrade the departments, deal with the backlog of returns, answer the phones, and yes, go after the top 1% who evade taxes year after year because the IRS doesn’t have enough staff to chase them down. They accuse the Department of Justice of weaponizing the FBI such as in its actions at Mar-a-Lago, and will try to defund certain aspects of that agency. Some members promise to target specific employees and negate their salaries.

Now, we all know that most of these wild schemes will go nowhere in a Democratic Senate and that a lot of rhetoric is being tossed around for the Republican base. Even so, all of this further serves to divide Americans and make finding common ground more difficult. The New York Times carried a recent discussion between two of its conservative columnists today, (David Brooks and Bret Stephens), where they discussed why they cannot support this current Republican Party. It provides some very good perspectives on how America got to this point. They point to the actions of Newt Gingrich, CPAC members, and Pat Buchanan as some people who started the demise of the party as they once knew it.

Bret says: What’s different this time is that populist feelings were never harnessed to pragmatic policies. As you say, it’s just populism in the service of nihilism.

As Brooks puts it: “then the congressional Republicans began to oppose almost every positive federal good, even George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism. Trump brought the three horsemen of the apocalypse — immorality, dishonesty, and bigotry.”

While both saw some good in the populist movement, they both also decried the Republican move toward authoritarianism and could not support that.

Of course, the Santos problem will not go away, it just gets murkier and murkier. The public does not know if anything he said is true. Generally, no one is sure of his name, his job, his education, or even his address. The campaign finance report he submitted where he loaned himself $700,000 is thought to have major errors in the required reporting, which is against the law. Some have questioned whether it was money laundering or came from a donor PAC to shield major Republican donors who had maxed out their party contributions. That, also, could be illegal. Hopefully, someone somewhere is investigating these issues. I don’t see how he might bully his way through these messes and stay for his full two-year term. Time will tell. McCarthy will not consider kicking him out unless he is criminally charged; he needs his vote to stay in his position.

The debt ceiling is a topic for another night.

I guess I can’t leave without mentioning the Biden classified documents issues. I think it is a shame that this happened. Biden claims that the document removal was an error by his staff when his materials were being packed up or stored, at either his home or former office, so I'm pretty sure that's probably what happened. These concerns are not parallel at all to the incident of the Mar-a-Lago documents. DJT refused for months and months to turn over a significant number of vital and classified documents, while Biden’s papers were few and were turned over to the Archives when found. They were not important enough to even have been missed by the department. I do not believe that this issue is a major concern or threatens national security as many of the papers are several years old or date from the Obama administration. Consequently, I do not believe that this issue needed a special prosecutor, even if the man chosen is upright and impartial. AG Garland probably thought that since there was a special prosecutor for DJT, he could not avoid one for Biden. I disagree, but he probably did this to reduce Republican criticism. These two cases are as different as apples and elephants. As always, the proof of the pudding is in the eating as they say; I know Democrats do not want SP Hur to turn into Ken Starr, which is what they fear unless his powers are limited somehow.

A few words of congratulations for the new and returning legislators who took their seats in Maryland last week. I wish them an interesting and productive session. Our new governor and his administration take office this week. Governor-elect Wes Moore has chosen a diverse cabinet and staff and has an ambitious agenda. I hope that they all succeed in these new roles and with their new ideas. I thank Governor Hogan for his eight years of service; I shall not miss him.

“Til next week-Peace!