News digest

Republicans tone down talk of impeaching Biden

We all know that once they retake the House, Republicans want to impeach, impeach, and impeach some more. Democrats of course, not their own. The NYT writes: 

With Majority in Sight, Republicans Hush Talk of Impeaching Biden

Since the day President Biden took office, Republicans have publicly called for his impeachment, introducing more than a dozen resolutions accusing him and his top officials of high crimes and misdemeanors and running campaign ads and fund-raising appeals vowing to remove the president from office at the first opportunity.

But in the homestretch of a campaign that has brought the party tantalizingly close to winning control of Congress, top Republicans are seeking to downplay the chances that they will impeach Mr. Biden, distancing themselves from a polarizing issue that could alienate voters just as polls show the midterm elections breaking their way.  

“Joe Biden is guilty of committing high crimes and misdemeanors,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, wrote in a recent fund-raising email. “And it’s time for Congress to IMPEACH, CONVICT, and REMOVE Biden from office.”

Ms. Greene has already introduced five articles of impeachment against Mr. Biden, including one the day he took office, when she accused him of abusing his power while serving as vice president to benefit his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine.

Those sneaky Repubs. They tone down their crackpot anti-democracy and hyper-radicalism just in time for the elections to deceive as many voters as possible about what they really stand for. Moral cowards.

From the radicalization of politics files

The WaPo writes:

Attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband follows years of GOP demonizing her

In 2010, Republicans launched a “Fire Pelosi” project — complete with a bus tour, a #FIREPELOSI hashtag and images of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) engulfed in Hades-style flames — devoted to retaking the House and demoting Pelosi from her perch as speaker.

Eleven years later, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) joked that if he becomes the next leader of the House, “it will be hard not to hit” Pelosi with the speaker’s gavel.

And this year, Pelosi — who Republicans have long demonized as the face of progressive policies and who was a target of rioters during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — emerged as the top member of Congress maligned in political ads, with Republicans spending nearly $40 million on ads that mention Pelosi in the final stretch of the campaign, according to AdImpact, which tracks television and digital ad spending.  

The years of vilification culminated Friday when Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was attacked with a hammer during an early-morning break-in at the couple’s home in San Francisco by a man searching for the speaker and shouting “Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?” according to someone briefed on the assault.

This blind, unwarranted rage, hate and deranged violence is the new normal. The radical right Republican Party and its propaganda Leviathan mostly created it. They get ~90% of the credit if you like it, or ~90% of the blame if you don’t like it. Repubs and the radical right love it. I hate it. 

Tyranny of the minority?

Your friend and mine, Fareed Zakaria, writes in an op-ed for the WaPo:

America is now a tyranny of the minority

 

History and current polling both tell us that the House of Representatives will likely flip over to Republican control in the November midterms. What happens then? Actual governance will come to a standstill. There will be a flurry of investigations on everything from the Justice Department to Hunter Biden to the border crisis. The Jan. 6 committee will almost certainly be disbanded. And it’s not implausible to imagine that President Biden will be impeached.

The primary system American parties use to choose their candidates is extremely unusual; no other major democracy has one quite like it. Primaries ensure that the candidates chosen are selected by slivers of the parties — around 20 percent of all eligible voters. And this selection is not at all representative — these are the most intense, agitated activists, often far more extreme in their views than run-of-the-mill registered Republicans or Democrats. Add to this decades of sophisticated, computer-enabled gerrymandering, and you get extreme candidates who run in safe districts where the only threat to them is a primary candidate who is even more extreme.  

While the problem is far worse and much more dangerous on the Republican side, these pressures also affect Democrats.

It is not an accident that Germany and France have both been run largely by solid centrists in a time of populism. They have chosen to keep to the old system of democracy based on the principle of majority rule. In the United States, and to an extent in Britain, democracy has become minority rule, and the minority holding power is unrepresentative, angry and increasingly radical.

Fareed argues that democracy has become minority rule with an unrepresentative, angry and radical minority holding power. As time passes, it is now almost certain that the minority rule will be even more unrepresentative, angry and radical than it is now. The anger and radicalism have been encouraged and are now freely welling up and manifesting as violent rhetoric and sometimes behavior.