Perils Ahead

Insurrection Blues: To no one’s surprise, most Republican Senators heeded Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s “personal” request and voted  against legislation creating a January 6^th commission even though the legislation was negotiated by House Republican John Katko and was passed in the House with the support of 35 House Republicans though with no support of anyone in Republican leadership in part because Qevin McCarthy fears having to testify under oath about what he knows.  Six Republican Senators including Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Ben Sasse, Rob Portman and Bill Cassidy did vote for the commission with Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey, who was absent for personal reasons, saying that he would have voted for it if he’d been there. Toomey’s absence didn’t affect the outcome because had he showed it still would have taken three more Republicans to overcome the sixty vote filibuster hurdle.  With the outcome certain a number of Democrats were also absent for the vote including eccentric Arizonan Kyrsten Sinema who, given her support for maintaining the filibuster, appears to be increasingly raising the ire of those on the left.  As to the filibuster, those critics have a point, if the Republicans who spent years investigating Benghazi can’t get behind a 9.11 like commission to investigate a home grown insurrection, it’s hard to believe that they’ll get behind anything else that needs sixty votes.  By the way, Joe Manchin is also disturbed, he and his across the aisle buddy Susan Collins tried really hard to get more Republicans on board for the commission, however, despite his distress Manchin is still not on board for getting rid of the filibuster either. The ball is now in Nancy Pelosi’s court, odds are she’ll set up a committee to investigate January 6^th but it won’t get the respect nor have the power that an independent commission would have had.

Politics as Usual:  Though Biden’s team continues to negotiate an increasingly shrinking infrastructure package with a team lead by West Virginia Republican Shelly Moore Capito and Democrat Cory Booker and Republican Tim Scott appear to be closing in on a police reform package, or at least that’s what we keep on been told, it’s hard to believe that much if anything substantive will pass through the Senate as long as the filibuster remains intact.  That matters for so many reasons, not just because the country’s physical and social infrastructure is crumbling but because wherever they can pull it off Republican legislators are passing voter suppression legislation and, absent the passage of one or the other of the Democratic proposals advancing fair voting practices, may well make it easier, if not inevitable, for Republicans to retake the House and possibly the Senate in 2022.  On the suppression front, the Republican dominated Texas legislature failed, at least for the moment, to pass their latest efforts to squelch votes in their increasingly diverse state after state Democrats played hardball, staging a walk out that prevented Republicans from having the quorum needed to move forward with legislation that among other things would have made obtaining absentee ballots more difficult, criminalized sending out some ballots applications, limited voting locations in minority dominated cities, made it illegal to drive too many people to voting locations, and worst of all, made it easy for judges to overturn undesirable, or at least undesirable to Republicans, election results.  The Texas legislature doesn’t spend much time in session and still hasn’t addressed the state’s power problems,  but Governor Abbott who is as all in on suppressing blue votes as he is on no permit gun ownership is expected to call a special session to restart the voter suppression efforts.  For the record, Texas already has the most restrictive voting rules in the country and has virtually no voter fraud but Republicans assert even more restrictive procedures are needed to give voters more confidence in election results.  Of course, they fail to mention that to the extent confidence is low, it’s because the Former Guy and his fans keep pushing his big lie BS. As to those fans, one of the Former Guy’s biggest advocates, former national security advisor Michael Flynn, spent part of his weekend calling for a Myanmar like coup in the US because as far as he and his innumerable Q followers are concerned, the FG won the election and needs to be put back into the oval office ASAP.  That may explain why President Biden included a warning about the future of democracy here and abroad being in peril in his Memorial Day speech.   

Viral Musings:  New COVID cases and deaths are way down but not as low as they should be largely because of the number of  people who still haven’t been vaccinated. Though a few more states are closing in on reaching Biden’s goal to have 70% of adults at least partially vaccinated by July goal so far only ten states are there. Notably though New York State’s 0.65% positivity is among the best, it remains five points away from reaching the July goal.  While over 45% of adults are fully vaccinated in many states, there are still far too many laggards including the usual largely “red” suspects Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia, Tennessee, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, South Carolina, West Virginia and Missouri, which all fall below 35%. Though efforts to get more people vaccinated remains a priority a considerable amount of attention has shifted to figuring out how the virus originated.  The lab hypothesis appears to be gaining steam, again only the most ardent conspiracists think that the Chinese intentionally created COVID-19, but a significant number of experts now believe that the theory that the virus was accidentally leaked from China’s Wuhan bat lab is credible, that the Chinese are doing their best to make uncovering the source of the outbreak difficult if not impossible and that the World Health Organization has not been able to solve the puzzle because they are afraid of losing Chinese support.  If any of that sounds familiar, it’s because it is as a number of FG fans have been pushing the lab leak theory for a while. However, since some, though not all of those FG guys are the same crowd who also believe that he won the election or in the case of Senator Tom Cotton because they also believe that militia takeovers of certain states would be okay, their theories haven’t been taken seriously until now in part because of the political divide but also because a lot of their theories weren’t based on what they really knew, just on their suspicions.  With more information surfacing they, or at least their theories, are being taking seriously now; Biden has told the intelligence agencies that he wants as deep a dive as possible undertaken, with an answer on his desk in 90 days.      

More:  Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz remains unindicted though he appears to have been scammed out of some money he and his fiancée Ginger Luckey spent on a yacht that he had prematurely rechristened the “Thirsty. “ Either that or he redirected the funds to pay his mounting legal bills.  Congresswoman Margie Q is still all in and not suffering any punishment from Republican leadership for equating mask mandates with the yellow stars that the Nazis forced Jews to wear during the Holocaust before they were sent to death camps though one of her fans, a Nashville hat shop owner, who was selling “not vaccinated” yellow stars is suffering some consequences for her actions. A significant number of her hat suppliers, including Stetson, are no longer providing the newly nefarious Nashville numbskull with their products. At a speech at the Reagan Library, former House Majority Leader Paul Ryan called for the Republican Party to end its obsession with the Former Guy. Nice thought, but first of all what took him so long and second, if he truly believes that, why does he remain on the board of Fox Corp? Hypocrite much?

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