Strike Two And A Half— What Happened To The Honeymoon?
MAGA Mike has been spending a lot of time explaining his flip flops— on blurring insurrectionists' faces, on FISA and the whole Defense Budget, on impeachment— as the House just keeps lurching from one legislative and political disaster to another. Meanwhile, his majority is about to shrink from 4 votes to 1 (or 2)… Santos is gone and likely to be replaced by a Democrat in a special election. McCarthy won’t be replaced at all and Bill Johnson… oh wait— someone talked him into staying around “for several more months,” whatever that means.
Not everything is MAGA Mike’s fault, but he’s getting the blame… from the facsists and from the conservatives. Yesterday, Warren Rojas and Lindsey McPherson reported that the Freedom Caucus has lost faith in him already. By leaving their insane ideological demands out of the Defense Budget, the members feel that they’ve been sold a bill of goods… and some of them speak for Trump. Another Louisianan, violent, corrupt fascist Clay Higgins, says MAGA Mike got “an ass whooping” in the negotiations with the Senate. The deal “stripped an abortion leave policy ban and other changes Johnson's far-right flank sought and provides a clean extension of a foreign surveillance law they wanted to overhaul.”
Eric Burlison (R-MO) isn’t from Louisiana and he was willing to speak more frankly than Higgins, telling Rojas and McPherson he isn’t seeing the “fight” he was expecting… presumably from anyone whose first name in MAGA. He “said Johnson’s reluctance to let the defense bill falter or to allow government funding to expire has left House Republicans in a ‘you’re going to take what the Senate gives you’ situation. ‘When you have decided that those options are not on the table, you've already lost,’ Burlison said... ‘We hold the House, yet we're not accomplishing anything. I mean, the most that we've actually accomplished this year is kicking out George Santos… I've not given up hope on him. But right now, it looks pretty bleak.’”
Burlison is a career politician but new to the House. He served in Missouri, where all the fighting is among Republicans and Democrats don’t figure into the equation. “He doesn’t understand how anything works around here,” one of his Republican colleagues told me yesteday. “He’s kind of an idiot and should have never left the Missouri Senate… it’s more his speed… His positions are very extreme and he expects he can get his way on everything. He should see a head doctor.”
Warren Davidson (R-OH), up to his ears in stolen FTX bribes and also a member of the Freedom Caucus, “criticized Johnson for waffling over how to handle reauthorizing the foreign surveillance law, noting that he’s both advocated for a clean short-term extension in the defense bill and separately pushed for standalone consideration and backed his members insisting on a broader overhaul. ‘He's had all the positions possible on it so far,’ the Ohio Republican told The Messenger. ‘So maybe he'll go back to, like, not having it included in the NDAA.’” Davidson, as extreme as Burlison, said he’s not voting for the bill.
I can see just where this is headed. The extreme right fringe will oppose the defense budget, leaving MAGA Mike no choice but to beg Hakeem Jeffries for the votes to pass it— further angering his conference. I doubt they’ll oust him… but they will probably tell him if he does anything “wrong” again, he’s out.
And speaking of extremists, Bob Good (R-VA)-- who claims he's never said a bad worst about Trump-- was taped saying a lot of them, emphasizing he would only speak ill of Trump privately and never say publicly why he doesn't support his party's presumptive nominee. Watch; it helps explain what these Republican nuts are all about.