News bits: McCarthy becomes House Speaker, etc.

McCarthy is Speaker, so now what?: To me, the situation has gone from seriously bad to significantly worse. The NYT sums it like this:

As the Republican leader has made concessions to the far right, he has effectively agreed to give them carte blanche to disrupt the workings of the House — and to hold him hostage to their demands

The United States should brace for the likelihood of a Congress in perpetual disarray for the next two years.

The recipe for the chaos already existed: A toxic combination of the Republicans’ slim governing majority, an unyielding hard-right flank that disdains the normal operations of government and a candidate for speaker who has repeatedly bowed to that flank in his quest for power.

In a recent comment PD argued that, lacking an iron fisted leader, GOP elites are not fascist, but instead constitute a toxic political force driven mostly by “good old American nihilism and avaricious individualism.” Trump has fallen from the position of iron-fisted tyrant-leader to a person with less power. Regardless of what the Republican elites are, and maybe they are two or more different things, the road ahead looks bad for democracy, civil liberties, social spending, and a reasonably functioning federal government. 

The ~20 holdouts are rabidly anti-government opportunists. Unless the other Republicans choose to work with Democrats and commit the treason they call compromise, the 20 have veto power over whatever the House does. They intend to gut social security, Medicare, Medicaid and other domestic spending programs when the current spending authorization runs out next September. They claim to be willing to refuse to increase the debt limit when necessary. That gives them the leverage to gut domestic spending programs when the time comes next fall.

Q: Should House Democrats have voted for McCarthy, thereby avoiding the transfer of power to the 20 radical anti-government extremists, or would that have made no difference?

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Corporations quietly sneak back to the GOP: In the wake if the 1/6 coup attempt, CREW writes on Jan. 6, 2023 about where corporate sympathies currently lie:

• In the days after January 6th, at least 231 corporations and industry groups pledged to stop, pause, or re-evaluate their political giving to the 147 members of the so-called Sedition Caucus. Two years into their commitments, 65 companies have kept their promises not to give, while the rest have resumed giving.
• 1,345 corporate and industry group PACs have given $50.5 million directly to the campaigns or leadership PACs of members of the Sedition Caucus, and $18.9 million to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).
• The top 5 corporate PAC donors since January 6th are Koch Industries ($1,374,500), Boeing ($936,500), Valero Energy ($827,500), Home Depot ($790,000), and AT&T ($786,900).

In the days that followed, at least 231 corporations and industry groups pledged to stop, pause, or re-evaluate their political giving to the 147 members of the so-called Sedition Caucus. CREW has been tracking all corporate PAC contributions to these members since then, from companies that made a commitment and companies that did not. By January 6th the following year, 130 of the companies that had made commitments, including many that strongly condemned the violence and attack on our democracy at the time, had started giving again through their affiliated PACs. Two years into their commitments, 65 companies have kept their promises not to give, while the rest have resumed giving, often quietly and without making a public statement.

For brass knuckles capitalism and capitalists money talks, while inconvenient truth, democracy, the public interest, the environment, civil liberties and most everything else walks.

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From the land of no gun safety laws: The NYT writes about another sad school shooting:

A 6-year-old first-grader at an elementary school in Newport News, Va., shot a teacher on Friday afternoon during an altercation in a classroom, the authorities said, leaving her with “life-threatening” injuries and renewing calls for greater gun restrictions.

The boy, who shot the teacher once with a handgun at about 2 p.m., was in police custody on Friday evening, Steve Drew, the chief of the Newport News Police Department, said at a news conference.

Will something be done to control this kind of senseless violence? Other than sending out useless thoughts and prayers, can anything be done now that the radical right Supreme Court has made it almost impossible impose gun safety laws? There is plenty of public support for reasonable gun safety laws, but the Republican Supreme Court opposes gun safety and does not care about public opinion.

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Additional commentary on the House Speaker position and the Republican Party: A NYT opinion piece opines:

Why the Fringiest Fringe of the G.O.P. 

Now Has So Much Power Over the Party

This Washington drama reflects larger structural forces that are changing American democracy.

Revolutions in communications and technology have transformed our democracy in more profound ways than just the more familiar issues of misinformation, hate speech and the like. They have enabled individual members of Congress to function, even thrive, as free agents. They have flattened institutional authority, including that of the political parties and their leaders. They have allowed individuals and groups to more easily mobilize and sustain opposition to government action and help fuel intense factional conflicts within the parties that leadership has greater difficulty controlling than in the past.

Through cable television and social media, even politicians in their first years in office can cultivate a national audience. When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez entered Congress, she already had nine million followers on the major social media platforms, more than four times the number for Speaker Nancy Pelosi and an order of magnitude more than any other Democrat in the House. Recognizing the power social media provides, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida and a provocateur in the opposition to Kevin McCarthy’s speakership bid, has said he wants to be the A.O.C. of the right.

The internet has also generated an explosion of small-donor donations, which enables politicians to raise large amounts of money without depending on party funds or large donors.

Once again, one can see that social media exerts a major influence on politics. It conveys both honest, unifying speech and dishonest, divisive speech. Unfortunately in view of how the human brain-mind works, the latter is a lot more influential than the former. That’s probably why is it so popular and persistent.

I wonder if AOC’s social media speech is as divisive and dishonest as what Matt Gaetz puts out. In view of modern circumstances, maybe a politician has to be aggressive and opportunist. Does that mean they also have to rely heavily on deceit, lies, slanders, fomenting irrational emotion, and crackpot reasoning, e.g., like the fabulist liars George Santos and Trump?