January 10, 2024
The Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives was back in session for business today. The day’s events did not bode well for the House’s managing to accomplish more in 2024 than it did in 2023.
Top on the list of things that must get done, and done fast, is funding the government. The continuing resolution currently in place to fund the government expires in two phases: one on January 19 and the other on February 2. The far-right Freedom Caucus Republicans have refused to agree to funding measures without far deeper cuts than former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) agreed to in a long-ago deal with President Joe Biden as part of a package to raise the debt ceiling until 2025. They also want to attach far-right cultural demands to the measures, although traditionally appropriations are kept clean.
On Sunday, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced they had reached a $1.66 trillion agreement to fund the government in 2024. Appropriations break down with about $886.3 billion for defense and about $772.7 billion for nondefense. The measure includes cuts of $20.2 billion to funding the Internal Revenue Service, which Republicans have demanded since Democrats put money for the IRS into the Inflation Reduction Act, and cuts to emergency spending accounts.
Aidan Quigley of Roll Call calculates that “the framework allows for a very slight overall increase in nondefense funding, about 0.2 percent above the previous year or a little more than $1 billion,” while “[d]efense and security-related spending would rise by nearly $28 billion, or more than 3 percent.” It is essentially the deal McCarthy agreed to last year and that the far right used to throw him out of the speaker’s chair (he has since resigned from Congress).
Members of the Freedom Caucus immediately panned the agreement, putting Johnson in the same pinch McCarthy found himself in last fall. If he relies on Democrats to pass the deal, he runs the risk of a challenge to his speakership, while he cannot get the Freedom Caucus on board without significant concessions in the form of poison pills that would dictate their hard-right policy positions, concessions that would kill the measure in the Senate. In addition, in the Senate, members of both parties wanted more, not less, spending.
Juliegrace Brufke of Axios reported this afternoon that in a meeting today, Johnson asked his Republican colleagues to “stop criticizing him and his budget negotiations on social media.” But as Nicole LaFond of Talking Points Memo notes, Johnson has indicated he is worried about his standing with the extremists and has tried to shore up that standing by appealing to Trump. On a right-wing radio show this morning, Johnson told listeners that he was planning to call former president Trump to get him behind the deal.
This afternoon the extremist Republicans made their anger clear when 12 of them opposed the procedural steps required to begin the process of considering three other bills, signaling that they were willing to stop House business to get their way. Further House votes were canceled for the day, but so far, at least, there does not seem to be momentum for removing Johnson from office, at least in part because there is no one else to take his place. “I’m kind of sick of the chaos,” said Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), a key extremist and firebrand who opposes the funding deal. “I came here to be serious about solving problems, not to produce clickbait.”
Both the House Oversight and Accountability Committee and the House Judiciary Committee voted today on whether President Biden’s 53-year-old son Hunter should be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to sit for a private deposition in the House’s impeachment inquiry into President Biden. It did not go well for the Republicans leading the committees. The Democrats came prepared and ready to push back on Republican lawmakers, who seemed more accustomed to appearing on right-wing media channels, where their assertions are not challenged, than to debating colleagues.
Democrats on the committees called out Republicans’ hypocrisy over Biden’s subpoena by noting that various Republicans in Congress had entirely ignored subpoenas themselves. In the Judiciary Committee, Eric Swalwell (D-CA) noted that committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) had been out of compliance for his own House subpoena for 608 days.
In the Oversight Committee, Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) entered into the record the House subpoenas for Republicans Jordan, McCarthy, Scott Perry (R-PA), Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, Mo Brooks (R-AL), and Andy Biggs (R-AZ). Moskowitz told the Republicans on the committee: “You vote to add those names and show the American people that we apply the law equally, not just when it’s Democrats…. It’s a crime when it’s Democrats, but when it’s Trump and the Republicans it’s just fine? No, show that you’re serious and that everyone’s not above the law. Vote for that amendment and I’ll vote for the Hunter Biden contempt.”
Hunter Biden has offered to testify publicly but does not want to testify behind closed doors after Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) misrepresented in public what Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer said in private. The Oversight Committee meeting took a dramatic turn when, while the committee was discussing holding him in contempt for not answering the subpoena, Hunter Biden showed up in person. Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) promptly attacked him, saying: “[Y]ou are the epitome of white privilege. Coming into the Oversight Committee, spitting in our face, ignoring a Congressional subpoena to be deposed. What are you afraid of? You have no balls to come up here.” CNN’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju noted that Mace’s attack on Biden prompted Biggs to tell his colleagues to “not act like a bunch of nimrods.”
Biden walked out when Greene, who showed naked pictures of him in a previous committee meeting, began to speak. The television cameras followed him rather than recording her speech. Former talk show host Geraldo Rivera posted on social media: “Hunter walks out after hazing. It’s a sh*t show that reveals the Committee is (as [former] President Trump is fond of saying) a witch hunt.”
Astonishingly, that was not the end of congressional Republicans’ performance today. The House Homeland Security Committee today held its first impeachment hearing on Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas as Republicans try to turn immigration into their central election issue.
Only one Cabinet secretary has ever been impeached in U.S. history—Secretary of War William Belknap, in 1876, in the midst of a searing financial scandal—but Republicans maintain that Mayorkas’s adherence to Biden’s border policies is reason to remove him. And yet, despite their focus on the border, House Republicans have rejected Senate negotiations over increased funding. At first they said they would accept only their own policy, put forward in an extreme border measure passed last year that Senate Democrats and President Biden rejected, and then they said they would not pass legislation at all and that the border issue must be solved by the president.
Meanwhile, today former New Jersey governor Chris Christie dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination, digging at his colleagues for refusing to denounce Trump, and Trump backers in Wisconsin filed a petition to recall Assembly speaker Robin Vos from office for not adequately supporting Trump and not impeaching the state’s top elections official, a nonpartisan officer who conspiracy theorists insist was part of a plan to rig the 2020 presidential vote in Wisconsin, and who will oversee the 2024 election.
And news broke today that thanks to the efforts of Biden and the Democrats, a record 20 million Americans enrolled for health care through the Affordable Care Act for this year.
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Notes:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/affordable-care-act-record-enrollment-20-million-americans-2024/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/01/07/congress-budget-deal/
https://rollcall.com/2024/01/07/deal-reached-on-appropriations-toplines-sources-say/
https://www.axios.com/2024/01/10/mike-johnson-budget-republicans-social-media
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/where-things-stand/johnson-forced-to-beg-for-trumps-mercy
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/08/us/politics/congress-spending-deal.html
https://rollcall.com/2024/01/10/republicans-defeat-another-rule-in-house-over-spending-deal/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/10/politics/speaker-johnson-funding-fight-right-flank/index.html
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Devon-Archer-Transcript.pdf
https://www.meidastouch.com/news/speaker-mike-johnson-is-in-trouble
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2024/01/10/hunter-biden-house-walkout-gop-reax-nc-vpx.cnn
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/10/us/politics/chris-christie-drops-out.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/10/politics/house-impeachment-hearing-mayorkas/index.html
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“I’m kind of sick of the chaos,” said Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), a key extremist and firebrand who opposes the funding deal. “I came here to be serious about solving problems, not to produce clickbait.”
Wait, what???
I really don't care anymore about breaking taboos. The "defense" budget is a crime against the American people, let alone humanity. 700 military bases in 80 countries? Damn near a trillion dollars in PEACETIME? It is a criminal conspiracy on the part of the military industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about, joined to the hip with Democrats and Republicans. In the midst of a true existential emergency that desperately needs our funding - alternative energy research to fight global warming - we are pissing our resources away to enrich god knows how many armchair corporate Daddy Warbucks.