House Fascist Fringe Cashes In
All that bad behavior on the part of the GOP’s fascist fringe… it sure paid off— in spades. A year ago, members of Congress and their staffers were taking bets on when Matt Gaetz (R-FL) would go to prison for child sex trafficking. Yesterday he, the last holdout to agree to let McCarthy become Speaker-in-Name-Only, was given another plum assignment on the House Judiciary Committee— along with 2 other extremist hold-outs, Chip Roy (R-TX) and Andy Biggs (R-AZ) plus quirky “present” voter Victoria Spartz (R-IN).
There was also a big payoff for several of the holdouts looking for positions on Congress’ most lucrative committee, House Financial Services Committee, a fount of free flowing bribery. Ralph Norman (R-SC), Byron Donalds (R-FL), Andy Ogles (R-TN).
The House Oversight Committee is going to look like a nut house, graced with the presence of 7 certifiably insane QAnon grade conspiracy theorists: Scott Perry (R-PA), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Byron Donalds (R-FL), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Marjorie Traitor Greene (R-GA), Gary Palmer (R-AL) and Anna Paulina Lunatica (R-FL). NOTE: I’m looking for clarity on Gosar. It appears that Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) has said the 2 members of Congress he will not countenance on his committee are Gosar and Santos.
And speaking of Santos, perhaps this interview that Anderson Cooper did last night with Santos’ former roommate inspired McCarthy to put him on the Small Business Committee (which is chaired by one of Congress’ most corrupt members, Texas used car dealer and multimillionaire Roger Williams). Or maybe this story about how shrewdly serial kleptomaniac Santos swindled GoFundMe donors out of $3,000 meant for a disabled veteran’s dying service dog that inspired McCarthy to give Santos that particular committee assignment. He was also place don the Space, Science and Technology Committee— which does regularly get classified briefings— despite the promise McCarthy made that Santos, a probable Kremlin agent, would not be ablate access any of America’s secrets.
Late last night, Heather Cox Richardson noted that McCarthy’s bills— all the promises and deals he made to become Speaker— are coming due. “McCarthy,” she wrote, “promised the far-right members of his conference committee seats and far more power in Congress to persuade them to vote for him. Now they are collecting.” Traitor Greene and Gosar who were removed from their committee assignments for being too overtly Nazi were given several plum spots— Homeland Security and Oversight for Marge and Natural Resources and Oversight for Gosar.
House Republicans also appear to be prepared to move forward with an impeachment of Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. This is part of the Republican focus on applications for asylum at the southern border despite their recent refusal to consider updating legislation, as Mayorkas has repeatedly asked them to. Only once before has a Cabinet secretary been impeached— in 1876— and he was acquitted by the Senate. Two others resigned before impeachment votes were taken, the most recent in 1932.
Greene has her sights set even higher. She called today for the impeachment of President Biden, advising him on Twitter to “resign now.”
McCarthy also agreed that he would not agree to raise the debt ceiling unless Congress cuts $130 billion in spending for next year, a demand that amounts to taking the nation and the world economy hostage to overturn measures that Congress has already agreed to. Once again, the debt ceiling is not about future spending, it is about paying the debts Congress has already incurred. Refusing to raise the debt ceiling means the United States will default, wreaking havoc on international markets and our own global standing.
But the right wing appears willing to burn down the global economy and to destroy our place in it to impose their will on the country.
Emboldened, the far right is already insisting it will not raise the debt ceiling. Today, Andy Biggs (R-AZ), who was involved in the planning for January 6, tweeted, “We cannot raise the debt ceiling. Democrats have carelessly spent our taxpayer money and devalued our currency. They’ve made their bed, so they must lie in it.”
In fact, the national debt skyrocketed under Republican president Donald Trump even before the pandemic, thanks to the big tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated would increase deficits by almost $2 trillion over eleven years. In 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic hit, the debt had grown to $22 trillion. Trump called it a crisis, but his budget that year increased the debt to $23.2 trillion. The CBO warned that the U.S. had never seen deficits so large in a time of high employment.
And then the coronavirus hit, and the debt jumped to $27.75 trillion.
At 5.2% of GDP, the growth of the deficit under Trump was third largest in our history, behind only that under Presidents George W. Bush—who launched two unfunded wars after passing a tax cut and thus presided over deficit growth of 11.7%— and Abraham Lincoln, whose Treasury had to invent a way to pay for a civil war out of whole cloth, resulting in the deficit growing by 9.4% of GDP.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says the Treasury will hit the debt ceiling on Thursday but can extend extraordinary measures to keep functioning until June. McCarthy has called for Democrats to talk with him about a plan that will permit an increase in the debt limit while cutting Medicare, Social Security, and federal agencies.
Biden and administration officials say they will not negotiate with the right-wing Republicans who are trying to get their way not through normal legislative channels, but by holding the government— and the global economy— hostage.
Republicans want to make taxation more regressive than it already. And they have a plan— and McCarthy has green-lighted it as part of the deal that put the gavel in his hands. Semafor reported this morning that he “promised his party’s conservative hardliners a vote on legislation that would scrap the entire American tax code [and the IRS] and replace it with a jumbo-sized national sales tax. The assurance got relatively little attention at the time, drowned out by the many other concessions McCarthy made to win his gavel. But with Democrats already attacking the proposal, some conservatives see it as a political headache in the making. ‘This is a political gift to Biden and the Democrats,’ Grover Norquist, the dean of D.C. anti-tax activists, said in an interview. ‘I think that this is the first significant problem created for the Republican Party by the 20 people who thought that there was no downside to the approach they took.’ The idea of a ‘fair tax’ that would replace our current IRS code with a single sales tax was popularized on conservative talk radio in the late 1990s. It has kicked around Washington ever since, popping up in the occasional presidential platform, but never received a vote.” Georgia crackpot Buddy Earl wants to get rid of income taxes, payroll taxes, estate taxes and corporate taxes and replace them with a 30% sales tax on everything. Even some of the most greed-oriented Republican conservatives oppose Carter’s bill, although many of the psychopaths in the House Freedom Caucus are co-sponsoring it.
Outside the deepest trenches of conservatism, a 30 percent sales tax is mostly seen as an obvious political loser. Democrats, for their part, can hardly seem to believe their luck that their opponents might attach themselves to it.
"Great idea,” Biden deadpanned during a speech Monday. “It would raise taxes on the middle class by taxing thousands of everyday items from groceries to gas, while cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans."
It’s still unclear how many Republicans actually support the Fair Tax Act, or even want it to get a vote. Carter said the bill’s debut on the House floor was secured as part of negotiations among 20 conservative holdouts that eventually gave Speaker McCarthy the gavel by a slim margin. But he was uncertain when it would be put to the floor, however, and said he wasn’t “privy” to those talks.
Critically, Ways and Means GOP members already appear opposed to the plan, at least in its current form. None are co-sponsoring the plan.
“I would almost expect it to be in [Carter’s] interest to pull that bill rather than have a vote on it in committee,” a tax lobbyist in touch with House Ways and Means Republicans told Semafor. “I don't think there's any favorable people on the committee with an opinion in support of the Fair Tax.”
…Some top Republicans are saying there’s at least a possibility the bill will get a vote. “A lot of people wanted to vote on that for quite a number of years so this might be the Congress when it happens,” Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC), a top McCarthy ally, told Semafor last week.
