Is Putin Eligible?
House Foreign Affairs Chair Mike McCaul told Annie Grayer of CNN that MAGA Mike had a hard to coming to his decision to break with the Russo-Republicans in his conference. “I was with him the night before he made his decision,” said the Texas conservative, “and I know he takes it very personally and he is a man of faith... he got on his knees and he prayed for guidance.” Meanwhile Matt Gaetz was speaking on camera with another CNN reporter, Manu Raju, who he told that he sees MAGA Mike’s decision as “abject surrender… There is no other way to describe it, it is surrender, it is disappointing. I won’t support it.” Raju then spoke with Arizona neo-fascist freshman Eli Crane, who was on the same page with Gaetz: “It’s disappointing; it’s completely detached from what our base wants, what our voters want.” Raju also reported that Chip Roy (R-TX) is getting close to joining Moscow Marge, Thomas Massie and the others from the Putin-wing of the conference. Another Georgia crackpot besides Moscow Marge seems on board as well, Andrew Clyde, an anti-Ukraine imbecile.
The Republican extremists seem suicidal, although it’s important to remember that none of these far right nuts are in districts where they need swing voters. They can all win with Republicans alone. Here are the partisan leans of each of their gerrymandered districts:
Moscow Marge- R+45
Thomas Massie- R+34
Matt Gaetz- R+38
Eli Crane- R+15
Chip Roy- R+24
Andrew Clyde- R+46
And then crack-smoking Colorado crackpot Lauren Boebert weighed in too: “It’s a red line for me, for sure.”
If Republicans dump another Speaker, the incumbents who will suffer include some of the ones the extremists don’t like anyway and wouldn’t mind seeing defeated (even by Democrats). These are the 20 incumbents most likely to lose their seats if swing voters decide the GOP is too dysfunction and chaotic to run the House:
Tom Kean (NJ)- R+3
Brian Fitzpatrick (PA)- even
Mike Lawler (NY)- D+7
Mike Garcia (CA)- D+8
Lori Chavez-DeRemer (OR)- D+3
Don Bacon (NE)- R+3
David Valadao (CA)- D+10
John James (MI)- R+6
David Schweikert (AZ)- R+7
Anthony D’Esposito (NY)- D+10
Maria Salazar (FL)- D+1
Brandon Williams (NY)- D+2
Michelle Steel (CA)- D+5
Nick LaLota (NY)- R+5
Juan Ciscomani (AZ)- R+7
John Duarte (CA)- D+7
Marc Molinaro (NY)- D+3
Young Kim (CA)- R+4
Derrick Van Orden (WI)- R+9
Jen Kiggans (VA)- R+6
Yesterday, the Washington Post’s early morning team noted that two dead British prime ministers, Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain, are having a moment on Capitol Hill. Hakeem Jeffries made the analogy with MAGA Mike’s painful decision. So Minority Whip Katherine Clark and Republican Michael McCaul. MAGA Mike “hasn’t talked publicly about Chamberlain or Churchill, but he leaned into the analogy by describing himself as ‘a wartime speaker.’ The phrase ties the effort to send more aid to Ukraine to Churchill, who is revered by many Republicans for defying the Nazis during World War II and for promising in 1940— more than a year before the United States entered the war— to ‘defend our island, whatever the cost may be.’ It’s also a warning to Republicans who oppose the Ukraine legislation. Jeffries and others are tacitly saying that history might remember the lawmakers working to block the bill like Chamberlain, who struck a deal with Adolf Hitler in 1938 that handed over part of Czechoslovakia to Germany in a failed effort to prevent a war. Even former House speaker Newt Gingrich— who once warned that a meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was ‘the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Chamberlain’— said he thought the comparison had merit. ‘I think we’re in a Churchillian moment, and that Churchill would tell us stopping Putin and stopping Iran are central to the survival of the West,’ Gingrich said. ‘But I don’t know that the Chamberlain half of it quite works.’”
The first member to urge Johnson to emulate Churchill by bringing Ukraine aid to the floor was probably a Republican— Omaha’s Don Bacon. “He’s got a gun to his head right now,” Bacon told CNN nearly two weeks before Jeffries debuted the phrase. “But we need to have a Churchill, not a Chamberlain right now. He could be on the right side of history.” Bacon says Jeffries stole the idea from him. DWT has been using the analogy all year.
