Suicide Is Painless, It Brings On Many Changes
The sword of time will pierce our skins
It doesn't hurt when it begins
But as it works its way on in
The pain grows stronger, watch it grin
No doubt you already heard how the extremists in the GOP flipped out over the passing of a budget that keeps the government running and doesn’t outlaw wokeism or whatever random crackpottery they were demanding be attached to it. First they were just ranting and raving. But then Marjorie Traitor Greene filed a vacate the chair resolution. That caused an explosion of tempers and pent up hatred between the conservative and fascists.
Mychael Schnell and Mike Lillis reported that Traitor Greene “Greene told reporters she is not bringing her motion to vacate resolution to the floor immediately— ‘I don’t have a timeline’— but the mere idea of removing another Speaker has infuriated many fellow Republicans, who are aiming their fire at Greene. ‘It’s not only idiotic, but it actually does not do anything to advance the conservative movement. And in fact, it undermines the country, and our majority,” said Rep. Mike Lawler, [an establishment] Republican who’s facing a tough reelection contest in New York. It’s not only vulnerable centrists who are up in arms. Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA), a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus, is also rushing to the defense of Johnson, a fellow Louisianan, warning that Greene’s resolution attempts to remove the only House Republican capable of steering the GOP conference ‘through these very dark and challenging times. I consider Marjorie Taylor Greene to be my friend. She’s still my friend. But she just made a big mistake,’ Higgins said in a video posted on Twitter. ‘To think that one of our Republican colleagues would call for his ouster right now— it’s really, it’s abhorrent to me and I oppose it.’”
Traitor Greene, a Trump puppet, who would never do anything without his approval, was infuriated that MAGA Mike worked with Hakeem Jeffries on a funding deal to avert the shutdown Trump was demanding. She also kvetched that by bringing the bill to the floor even though more Republican opposed it than backed it, he violated the GOP’s “Hastert rule.”
She told a gaggle of reporters on the Capitol steps, “Today I filed a motion to vacate after Speaker Johnson has betrayed our conference and broken our rules. This is basically a warning, and it’s time for us to go through the process, take our time, and find a new Speaker of the House that will stand with Republicans and our Republican majority instead of standing with the Democrats.” She claimed other members are encouraging her but none came forward to support her and she couldn’t name a single member who agrees with her lunacy. “I’ve talked to many who probably won’t go public, but silently, they’re breathing a sigh of relief.”
Not even Matt Gaetz (R-FL), the Dennis the Menace of Congress, told Politico “I’m not going to question her decision, I’m just not ready to support a motion to vacate.”
Rep. Greg Pence (R-IN), an institutionalist conservative, said Greene’s gambit is another self-imposed bruise for the GOP.
“This isn’t good for the party,” he said. “When I go home, people are tuning out what’s going on in the House because of the lack of progress, the chaos that’s happening. And I’d like us to get together and work together.
“We’re moving in the wrong direction of getting together.”
Even if Greene does take the dramatic step of forcing a vote on ousting Johnson, Democrats could swoop in and save the Speaker— a possibility that some are already forecasting.
In the weeks leading up to Greene’s announcement, several Democrats have said they would consider protecting Johnson, largely hinging their support on the Speaker moving aid for Ukraine, which has stalled in the House for months. Democrats want Johnson to bring the Senate-passed foreign aid bill to the floor for a vote, which he has refused to do, instead saying the House will craft its own legislation to send assistance overseas.
Republicans are also attacking each other over the House Republicans’ foolish plan to cut Social Security by raising the retirement age. Even as reactionary a Republican as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley was aghast. “What a terrible idea. If Republicans want to be in the minority party forever, then go ahead and endorse that. Republicans are so stupid. If they want to go to working people and say, ‘Congratulations, you have paid into this your whole life— your payroll taxes— and now we’re going to take part of it away from you. We’re going to make you work even longer than we said beforehand,’ I just think that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”
Mitt Romney doesn’t agree with Hawley on much, but he sure did about this idiocy, although his objection was not with the idea of shredding the social safety net— he’s always been for that— but just about the way it’s being brought into public view. “Putting out proposals on a piecemeal basis is going to do nothing but get political arrows fired at it. Talk about a gift to the Democrats. Seems like people have lost their political ear if they think any adjustments to the benefits of Social Security makes sense to talk about at any time, let alone during an election year.”
John Thune (R-SD), who’s running for Senate GOP leader, is all for raising the retirement age… Medicare too. I suggest you can help make sure he never becomes majority leader here.
This is all part of the GOP’s “Age of Trump,” which, alas, impacts normal people too. The other day, Tom Nichols wrote, for example, that Trump’s vow to pardon the violent insurrectionists is dangerous for the country. Not one Republican in Congress— including none of the ones the media pretend are “moderates”— has said a word against it.
Nichols wondered if Trump had these violent criminals in mind when he was threatening a bloodbath. “Trump’s threats and violent language,” he wrote, “are nothing new. But while the nation’s pundits and partisans examine what it means for a presidential contender to mull over ‘getting slaughtered socially,’ Trump has added a much more disturbing project to his list of campaign promises: He intends to pardon all the people jailed for the attack on the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection. Trump once held a maybe-sorta position on pardoning the insurrectionists. He is now, however, issuing full-throated vows to get them out of prison. On March 11, Trump declared on his Truth Social account: ‘My first acts as your next President will be to Close the Border, DRILL, BABY, DRILL, and Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned!’”
Trump isn’t the first to use the loaded expression hostages in this context: The one-term member of Congress Madison Cawthorn— an embarrassment even by MAGA standards—used it in 2021 before many of those arrested in connection with January 6 were even convicted, and current member and House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, whose nucleonic decay from establishment Republican to right-wing extremist is fundamentally complete, has also used it.
Back in 2021, Trump claimed to be appalled by the violence at the Capitol, but that didn’t last long (and there is no reason to assume Trump was sincere in the first place). Semafor’s Shelby Talcott on Monday detailed how Trump went from “outraged” in 2021, promising that “those who broke the law … will pay,” to offering blanket pardons in 2024. As Talcott wrote, Trump’s “evolution” began with “instinctive support for some of the most hardcore members of his own MAGA movement” and is now “a semi-formal alliance” with the Patriot Freedom Project, which claimed in December to have raised almost $1 million to free people convicted of crimes related to the insurrection.
This is not evolution so much as it is a kind of synergy, however, in which Trump and the right-wing fever swamp feed on each other’s manic energy. The QAnon conspiracy theorists, for example, anointed Trump as their champion, and Trump responded by eventually embracing them in return. When Trump goes to rallies and bellows for two hours at a time while using words such as vermin, or when his response to a question about the Proud Boys is to tell them to “stand back and stand by,” the MAGA ecosystem amplifies him and organizes his sentence fragments into something like guidance.
The only surprise here is that it took Trump this long to adopt a radical position supporting the people who were willing to do violence on his behalf. According to the House Select Committee’s investigation, his own staff had trouble getting him to call off the January 6 mob, to whom he said “We love you.” Many of those convicted for various crimes committed on that day went off to prison convinced they’d done the right thing, and Trump— a sucker for sycophancy— must have been moved by such shows of support, which included people singing to him in jail.
Trump has also shown, both as president and as a businessman, that he has an innate disgust with the whole idea of the impartial rule of law. He’s in serious financial trouble for (among other reasons) lying about the value of his properties when it suited his interests; he has always seemed to believe that rules are for chumps, and that people— especially people named Donald Trump— should be free to enjoy the benefits of whatever they can get away with, legal or otherwise.
Indeed, the whole idea of “legality” doesn’t seem to permeate Trump’s consciousness, unless it is applied to Trump’s enemies or other people, especially those of color, who he thinks deserve punishment. (Trump is the embodiment of the famous statement attributed to the Peruvian strongman Óscar Benavides: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”) In his handling of classified materials as well as in his attempt to pressure Ukraine to aid his campaign, Trump has shown that he thinks that laws don’t apply to him if they hinder his personal fortunes.
But in promising pardons, Trump may have a motive even darker than his general hatred for rules and laws. As he makes his third run at the presidency, Trump no longer has a reservoir of establishment Republicans who will support him or serve him. He distrusts the U.S. military, not least because senior officers and appointees thwarted his efforts to use the armed forces for his own political purposes. And although he may yet win reelection, his MAGA movement is now dependent on the kind of people who will go to his rallies and buy the trinkets and hats and shirts that go on sale whenever he speaks.
Where, then, can he find a truly loyal cadre willing to offer unconditional support? Where might he find people who will feel they owe their very lives to Donald Trump, and will do anything he asks?
He can find many of them in prison, waiting for him to let them out.
As the historian and scholar of authoritarian movements Ruth Ben-Ghiat has noted, would-be dictators deploy such promises to build groups that will ignore the law and obey the leader. “Amnesties and pardons,” she told me earlier today, “have always been an efficient way for leaders to free up large numbers of the most criminal and unscrupulous elements of society for service to the party and the state, and make them indebted to the rulers in the process.”
The damage to the American constitutional order and the rule of law would be immense if Trump used his power to pardon people such as Enrique Tarrio (the former leader of the Proud Boys, sentenced to 22 years) and the Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes (who drew an 18-year sentence). Hundreds of others are now serving time, many of whom might be more than willing to do anything for a president who’s called they answered that winter day and who would now be the patron of their freedom.
Trump is no longer flirting with this idea. The man whose constitutional duty as president would be to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” is now promising to let hundreds of rioters and insurrectionists out of prison with full pardons. And eventually, he will make clear what he expects in return.
This morning, Zach Basu, Juliegrace Brufke and Andrew Solender reported that the GOP House majority is in tatters. “Dysfunction,” they wrote, “doesn't even begin to cover it… Republicans were left fuming over the early resignations of Gallagher and Buck, with some suggesting it's now within the realm of possibility for the House majority to flip to Democrats mid-Congress… Frustrated lawmakers told Axios that burnout from the historically chaotic 118th Congress— which has featured multiple speaker's races, derailed spending bills and constant infighting— is very real. ‘Normally they're trying to talk people out of retirement," one member said. "Now we're at a point where we're trying to talk them out of leaving early.’… Jamie Raskin (D-MD) noted that Gallagher timed his resignation to ensure his seat would go unfilled until November: ‘Another sharp rebuke to the chaos-and-cannibalism caucus of Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene.’”
