Washington

Culture wars, not kitchen-table issues, are the Republicans actual “bread and butter”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

January 11, 2022

Watching the news today, I suspect I am not always going to report all the twists and turns of the House Republicans for the next two years. They campaigned in the midterm elections on so-called kitchen-table issues—inflation, primarily—but upon taking control of the House, they instantly reverted back to the culture wars that are their bread and butter. This is largely performative for their base, since the Democratic-led Senate will never pass their extreme measures.

On Monday evening the new Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill to cut funding for the Internal Revenue Service that the previous Congress included in the Inflation Reduction Act, funding intending to add workers to clear a big backlog of unprocessed returns, overhaul technology, and improve customer service. Republicans insist that funding the IRS will send bureaucrats to hassle ordinary Americans, but in fact, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has directed that none of the new resources will be used to increase audit rates for small businesses or households with an annual income below $400,000. 

If the House measure were to become law—which it will not because the Senate will not pass it—it would add significantly to the deficit. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that the Republicans’ bill would increase the deficit by nearly $115 billion over ten years.

The Biden administration has focused on tax evasion among the wealthy and has sought since the beginning of Biden’s term to crack down on tax cheats. 

The administration responded to the House measure with uncharacteristic saltiness. “With their first economic legislation of the new Congress, House Republicans are making clear that their top economic priority is to allow the rich and multi-billion dollar corporations to skip out on their taxes, while making life harder for ordinary, middle-class families that pay the taxes they owe,” responded the Office of Management and Budget. 

“That’s their agenda; not lowering costs or cutting taxes for hard working Americans—as President Biden has consistently advocated. If the President were presented with H.R. 23—or any other bill that enables the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations to cheat on their taxes, while honest and hard-working Americans are left to pay the tab—he would veto it.”

Today the House followed up on its IRS bill with two antiabortion measures. With only three Democrats joining the Republicans, they adopted a resolution condemning attacks on “pro-life facilities, groups and churches.” Democrats pointed out that abortion providers and women seeking to obtain abortions have suffered deadly attacks, including the 2009 murder of Dr. George Tiller of Kansas. 

Mini Timmaraju, the head of NARAL Pro-Choice America said: “If you’re going to put a resolution out on violence against churches and fake pregnancy centers, why are we not also addressing violence against abortion providers and violence in general?”

The second measure is called the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act and requires doctors to care for infants who survive an abortion. Opponents of the measure point out that such a scenario is exceedingly rare and that doctors are already required to do what the bill requires. The new measure adds new penalties for doctors.

The first of these measures is not a law; the second will not pass the Senate. Still, both are much less extreme than what Republicans planned to offer when they expected the 2022 elections to go their way. 

A week ago, Bloomberg’s editors blamed the Republican Party’s dysfunction on the fact that the party has ignored public policy. “After a campaign in which culture-war issues took the place of an actual governing agenda—and in which the GOP nominated numerous on-message candidates who were clearly unfit for office—House Republicans have found themselves in power without a plan,” they wrote. 

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin today called out the elephant in the room when she wrote that “there are no moderate House Republicans.” The positions of the extremist Republicans in the fight over House speaker often made people talk of the rest of the party as “moderate,” but in fact, as Rubin points out, they all supported Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for speaker, and McCarthy is an election denier. They also voted for the extremist rules package that threatens to bring the country to the unthinkable: a financial default.

Rubin pointed out that with the House as closely divided as it is, a few of these so-called moderates could defeat the radicals and force the party closer to the mainstream. So far, though, they have shown no inclination to do so. 

But there has been a sign that a new crop of Republicans might someday demand the party clean itself up (which doesn’t sound like much, but a fight against corruption was what launched Theodore Roosevelt’s political career in 1884). Today, four new Republican representatives from New York called on Representative George Santos (R-NY) to resign. During his campaign, Santos lied about his education, work experience,  and also apparently about his finances, which could involve him in legal trouble.

Republican officials in New York’s Nassau County also demanded Santos resign, saying: “This scandalous behavior does damage to all of our reputations because there is a part of our public that is cynical about politicians and public officials.” 

But Republican House leadership, including McCarthy and Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who is the third most powerful Republican in the House and was a key endorser of Santos, have stayed silent. For his part, Santos vows to stay in office. 

As I say, I may well not follow all the performances of House members going forward unless a performance seems like it will change the larger story of the country, in part because I worry that letting them take up all the oxygen will crowd out other crucial stories, like this one:

Since late last year, California has been pummeled by storms traveling in what are known as “atmospheric rivers,” powerful bands of water-filled clouds that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) describes as “rivers in the sky.” These storm systems have created floods and mudslides, especially on land scarred by recent fires, and brought 70-mile-per-hour winds to Sacramento, knocking out power for more than 345,000 people. 

More than 4.5 million Californians have been under flood watches, and at least 17 people have died. According to San Francisco area meteorologist Jan Null, this has been the third rainiest period in San Francisco since the 1849 Gold Rush. 

On January 4, California governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency, and Biden issued an emergency declaration on January 8. 

The warming climate is intensifying both droughts—which feed fires—and storms like those currently creating such destruction.  

GOP choose their obstructionist Speaker, yet Americans have seen that government can work for them. What comes next?

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

January 7, 2022

The Republicans won a narrow majority in the House of Representatives in 2022—aided by gerrymandering and new laws that made it harder to vote—but they remain unable to come together to elect a speaker. In three ballots yesterday, Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) could not muster a majority of the House to back him, as a group of 20 far-right Republicans are backing their own choices. The saga continued today with three more ballots; McCarthy still came up short.

In contrast, the Democrats have consistently given minority leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York 212 votes, more votes than McCarthy received but not a majority of the body. When former Speaker Nancy Pelosi nominated Jeffries yesterday, she blew him a kiss and the caucus rose up in a standing ovation.

Because it is still unorganized, the House technically has no members. No one is sworn in, and so they cannot perform their official duties or hire staff. About 70 new members brought their families to Washington, D.C., to watch their swearing in, and the extra days as the speakership contest drags on are becoming hard to manage.

The chaos suggests that Republican leadership does not have the skills it needs to govern. Leaders often have to negotiate in order to take power—Nancy Pelosi had to bring together a number of factions to win the speakership in 2019—but since 1923 those negotiations have been completed before the start of voting.

Just weeks ago, McCarthy and his supporters were furious at Senate Republicans for negotiating with their Democratic colleagues to pass the omnibus bill to fund the government, insisting they could do a better job. Now they can’t even agree on a speaker. “Thank God they weren’t in the majority on January 6,” Pelosi told reporters, “because that was the day you had to be organized to stave off what was happening, to save our democracy, to certify the election of the president.”

One story here is about competence. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out that Pelosi ran the House with virtually the same margin the Republicans have now and yet managed to hold her caucus together tightly enough to pass a slate of legislation that rivaled those of the Great Society and the New Deal. McCarthy can’t even organize the House, leaving the United States without a functioning Congress for the first time in a hundred years.

But there is a larger story here about the destruction of the traditional Republican Party over the past forty years. In those years, a party that believed the government had a role to play in leveling the country’s economic and racial playing fields was captured by a reactionary right wing determined to uproot any such government action. When voters—including Republicans—continued to support business regulation, a basic social safety net, and civil rights laws, the logical outcome of opposition to such measures was war on the government itself.

That war is not limited to the 20 far-right Republicans refusing to elect McCarthy speaker. Pundits note that those 20 have supported former president Trump’s positions, particularly the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. They also worked to overturn the 2020 election, challenging the electors from a number of states. But 139 Republicans, including McCarthy himself, voted in 2021 to challenge electors from a number of states and went on to embrace the Big Lie, and McCarthy’s staunchest supporter is extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

And today, more than 60 prominent right-wing figures, from President Ronald Reagan’s attorney general Edwin Meese III to Trump lawyers Cleta Mitchell and John Eastman, who were both instrumental in the effort to overturn Biden’s election in 2020, and Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni Thomas, who also participated in that effort, declared themselves “disgusted with the business-as-usual, self-interested governance in Washington.” They declared their support for the 20.

The roots of today’s Republican worldview lie in the Reagan Revolution of 1980.

Reagan and his allies sought to dismantle the regulation of business and the social welfare state that cost tax dollars, but they recognized those policies were popular. So they fell back on an old Reconstruction era trope, arguing that social welfare programs and regulation were a form of socialism because they cost tax dollars that were paid primarily by white men while their benefits went to poor Americans, primarily Black people or people of color. In that formula, first articulated by former Confederates after the Civil War, minority voting was a form of socialism that would destroy America.

When Reagan used this argument, he emphasized its idea of economic individualism over its racism, but that racism was definitely there, and many of his supporters heard it. When he stood about seven miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Ku Klux Klan members had murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner just 16 years before as they tried to register Black people to vote, and said “I believe in states’ rights,” the racist wing of the old Democratic Party knew what he meant and voted for him.

In the years since, party leaders cut taxes and deregulated business while rallying voters with warnings that government policies that regulated business, provided a social safety net, or protected civil rights were socialism that redistributed white tax dollars to minorities. In the 1990s, under the leadership of House speaker Newt Gingrich, Chamber of Commerce lawyer Grover Norquist, and talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, the party purged from its ranks traditional Republicans, replacing them with ideological fellow travelers.

As their policies threatened to lose voters by concentrating wealth upward and hollowing out the middle class, Republicans increasingly warned that minority voters wanted socialism and were destroying the nation to get it. Trump rode that narrative to power, and now tearing down the current government is the idea that drives the Republican base.

Just last night, in his apparent realization that the party is moving beyond him, Trump launched a new attack on Black Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman, falsely accusing her once again of delivering suitcases of fraudulent ballots in the 2020 presidential election to steal victory from him. Trump said he is fighting “the evils and treachery of the Radical Left monsters who want to see America die.”

That Republicans now have a wing openly determined to destroy the federal government is not a function of a few outliers who have wormed their way into Congress; it is the logical outcome of this worldview. Lawmakers like Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) are clearly enjoying the power they are currently wielding, but their larger project is the one the party has advertised since they were children: stopping the government from any of the actions it has called “Marxist” or “socialist,” burning it all down to make white Americans free.

Destruction doesn’t take skill at governance; it only requires obstruction. The 20 are good at that.

But a new era is pushing the Reagan era aside. Plenty of Republicans who want to deregulate business and cut taxes recognize that it is our democratic government and the rule of law that protects their investments, and that maintaining the government will take basic laws and the skills to negotiate and pass them.

At the same time, after two years of Democratic control, Americans have seen that government can work for them, and they appear to like the new laws that have created jobs—including in manufacturing—and invested in social services and are rebuilding infrastructure. Republicans who want to get reelected are moving away from the extremists to take credit for the laws passed under the Democrats. Just today, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Ohio governor Mike DeWine, and former Ohio senator Rob Portman—all Republicans—joined President Joe Biden, Democratic governor of Kentucky Andy Beshear, and Democratic Ohio senator Sherrod Brown in Covington, Kentucky, to visit the Brent Spence Bridge between Covington and Cincinnati, Ohio. The bridge is on one of the country’s busiest freight corridors and is being rebuilt with money from the bipartisan infrastructure law passed in 2021.

In Ohio yesterday, Jason Stephens, a Republican promising to stop far-right policies, joined with Democrats to snatch the speaker’s chair from a far-right Republican who focused on religion and opposing abortion rights and who believed he had sewn up the necessary votes in his party. A Democratic state representative told Morgan Trau of ABC News, “Speaker Stephens led a coalition of moderate lawmakers from across the aisle, who will now focus on delivering the common sense solutions that Ohioans sent us here to deliver…. Now we can work on investing in our communities, on public education and workforce development.”

Party of chaos fails to elect a Speaker. Will they “burn it all down?”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

January 4, 2022

The Republicans won a narrow majority in the House of Representatives in 2022—aided by gerrymandering and new laws that made it harder to vote—but they remain unable to come together to elect a speaker. In three ballots yesterday, Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) could not muster a majority of the House to back him, as a group of 20 far-right Republicans are backing their own choices. The saga continued today with three more ballots; McCarthy still came up short.

In contrast, the Democrats have consistently given minority leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York 212 votes, more votes than McCarthy received but not a majority of the body. When former Speaker Nancy Pelosi nominated Jeffries yesterday, she blew him a kiss and the caucus rose up in a standing ovation.

Because it is still unorganized, the House technically has no members. No one is sworn in, and so they cannot perform their official duties or hire staff. About 70 new members brought their families to Washington, D.C., to watch their swearing in, and the extra days as the speakership contest drags on are becoming hard to manage.

The chaos suggests that Republican leadership does not have the skills it needs to govern. Leaders often have to negotiate in order to take power—Nancy Pelosi had to bring together a number of factions to win the speakership in 2019—but since 1923 those negotiations have been completed before the start of voting.

Just weeks ago, McCarthy and his supporters were furious at Senate Republicans for negotiating with their Democratic colleagues to pass the omnibus bill to fund the government, insisting they could do a better job. Now they can’t even agree on a speaker. “Thank God they weren’t in the majority on January 6,” Pelosi told reporters, “because that was the day you had to be organized to stave off what was happening, to save our democracy, to certify the election of the president.”

One story here is about competence. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out that Pelosi ran the House with virtually the same margin the Republicans have now and yet managed to hold her caucus together tightly enough to pass a slate of legislation that rivaled those of the Great Society and the New Deal. McCarthy can’t even organize the House, leaving the United States without a functioning Congress for the first time in a hundred years.

But there is a larger story here about the destruction of the traditional Republican Party over the past forty years. In those years, a party that believed the government had a role to play in leveling the country’s economic and racial playing fields was captured by a reactionary right wing determined to uproot any such government action. When voters—including Republicans—continued to support business regulation, a basic social safety net, and civil rights laws, the logical outcome of opposition to such measures was war on the government itself.

That war is not limited to the 20 far-right Republicans refusing to elect McCarthy speaker. Pundits note that those 20 have supported former president Trump’s positions, particularly the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. They also worked to overturn the 2020 election, challenging the electors from a number of states. But 139 Republicans, including McCarthy himself, voted in 2021 to challenge electors from a number of states and went on to embrace the Big Lie, and McCarthy’s staunchest supporter is extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

And today, more than 60 prominent right-wing figures, from President Ronald Reagan’s attorney general Edwin Meese III to Trump lawyers Cleta Mitchell and John Eastman, who were both instrumental in the effort to overturn Biden’s election in 2020, and Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni Thomas, who also participated in that effort, declared themselves “disgusted with the business-as-usual, self-interested governance in Washington.” They declared their support for the 20.

The roots of today’s Republican worldview lie in the Reagan Revolution of 1980.

Reagan and his allies sought to dismantle the regulation of business and the social welfare state that cost tax dollars, but they recognized those policies were popular. So they fell back on an old Reconstruction era trope, arguing that social welfare programs and regulation were a form of socialism because they cost tax dollars that were paid primarily by white men while their benefits went to poor Americans, primarily Black people or people of color. In that formula, first articulated by former Confederates after the Civil War, minority voting was a form of socialism that would destroy America.

When Reagan used this argument, he emphasized its idea of economic individualism over its racism, but that racism was definitely there, and many of his supporters heard it. When he stood about seven miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Ku Klux Klan members had murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner just 16 years before as they tried to register Black people to vote, and said “I believe in states’ rights,” the racist wing of the old Democratic Party knew what he meant and voted for him.

In the years since, party leaders cut taxes and deregulated business while rallying voters with warnings that government policies that regulated business, provided a social safety net, or protected civil rights were socialism that redistributed white tax dollars to minorities. In the 1990s, under the leadership of House speaker Newt Gingrich, Chamber of Commerce lawyer Grover Norquist, and talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, the party purged from its ranks traditional Republicans, replacing them with ideological fellow travelers.

As their policies threatened to lose voters by concentrating wealth upward and hollowing out the middle class, Republicans increasingly warned that minority voters wanted socialism and were destroying the nation to get it. Trump rode that narrative to power, and now tearing down the current government is the idea that drives the Republican base.

Just last night, in his apparent realization that the party is moving beyond him, Trump launched a new attack on Black Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman, falsely accusing her once again of delivering suitcases of fraudulent ballots in the 2020 presidential election to steal victory from him. Trump said he is fighting “the evils and treachery of the Radical Left monsters who want to see America die.”

That Republicans now have a wing openly determined to destroy the federal government is not a function of a few outliers who have wormed their way into Congress; it is the logical outcome of this worldview. Lawmakers like Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) are clearly enjoying the power they are currently wielding, but their larger project is the one the party has advertised since they were children: stopping the government from any of the actions it has called “Marxist” or “socialist,” burning it all down to make white Americans free.

Destruction doesn’t take skill at governance; it only requires obstruction. The 20 are good at that.

But a new era is pushing the Reagan era aside. Plenty of Republicans who want to deregulate business and cut taxes recognize that it is our democratic government and the rule of law that protects their investments, and that maintaining the government will take basic laws and the skills to negotiate and pass them.

At the same time, after two years of Democratic control, Americans have seen that government can work for them, and they appear to like the new laws that have created jobs—including in manufacturing—and invested in social services and are rebuilding infrastructure. Republicans who want to get reelected are moving away from the extremists to take credit for the laws passed under the Democrats. Just today, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Ohio governor Mike DeWine, and former Ohio senator Rob Portman—all Republicans—joined President Joe Biden, Democratic governor of Kentucky Andy Beshear, and Democratic Ohio senator Sherrod Brown in Covington, Kentucky, to visit the Brent Spence Bridge between Covington and Cincinnati, Ohio. The bridge is on one of the country’s busiest freight corridors and is being rebuilt with money from the bipartisan infrastructure law passed in 2021.

In Ohio yesterday, Jason Stephens, a Republican promising to stop far-right policies, joined with Democrats to snatch the speaker’s chair from a far-right Republican who focused on religion and opposing abortion rights and who believed he had sewn up the necessary votes in his party. A Democratic state representative told Morgan Trau of ABC News, “Speaker Stephens led a coalition of moderate lawmakers from across the aisle, who will now focus on delivering the common sense solutions that Ohioans sent us here to deliver…. Now we can work on investing in our communities, on public education and workforce development.”

Letters to The Hobbledehoy, May 2021

by

Hall of Fame Letter from Terri:

Hi Mike ! I’ve just discovered your website and Yeh, I love it! Do you know what I DON’T love??? I really REALLY don’t love having that orange douche bag in my Direct peripheral vision while watching a video. There’s no such thing as a good Trump pic….. but that one! Omg! Seriously?? Please please please please….. AT LEAST move it down the page … Because THAT MOUTH. It’s like my cats assh@le. Worse!

 Thanks for your time & Happy Monday

Hi Terri!
Thanks for visiting the website. You are so right – it’s time to move that cat’s asshole from the homepage. The link for “Trump’s Covid Timeline” will no longer be accompanied by an image of Trump.

Lisa writes:

Hello, Just checking that you got my previous email regarding a broken link on your site, and just to confirm that this isn’t some weird spam message but an actual person trying to bring a broken link with a potential replacement to your attention 🙂 Here are link details: Your Page: https://thehobbledehoy.com/donald-trumps-coronavirus-timeline/ Dead link title: ’15 days’ Dead link: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/03.16.20_coronavirus-guidance_8.5x11_315PM.pdf Working link: https://templatearchive.com/coronavirus-guidance/
Stay safe, Lisa

Hi Lisa!
Thank you for your perseverance on this issue. Corrected – finally! You are an editor’s dream.
As for Covid and Trump’s responsibility for American deaths – “The first time we ha(d) an excuse,” said Dr. Deborah Birx. “There were about a hundred thousand deaths that came from that original surge. All of the rest of (the deaths), in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.”

Rory writes:

Hi, I have come across the use of my name on your website in an article completely unrelated to me or the content you have quoted. Article can be found here: How did historic alehouses, taverns and inns evolve into the pubs we see today? Can I please ask you to remove this at the earliest convenience. Thank you.

Hi Rory!

So sorry about that odd mistake. Of course we will remove your name. I honestly do not know how it happened! With the curated content on The Hobbledehoy (which accounts for 99%) we don’t factcheck quotes or who the quotes are attributed to by the source. That piece (now removed from the Hobbledehoy) originally appeared in The Morning Advertiser. Cheers!

Richard writes:

Love your blog! It often creates a portal for me to go deeper, like Centralia today. I am so curious about where you live – in the UK or USA? I live where one of your links resides – Edmonds WA (Rick Steves). Great guy.
Cheers, Richard

Hi Richard!

I live in the smallest state in the union, Rhode Island, an hour south of Boston. I have had the pleasure of visiting Edmonds, Washington on several occasions. You are fortunate to live in such a warm, friendly, beautiful town with such a gorgeous view of the mountains and Puget Sound. Perhaps I will see you some evening at the Church Key Pub – which might be my favorite pub in the USA. Cheers!

Emma writes:

Hi there, I saw your page An abuse of power’: alarm grows over top Trump lieutenant’s military masquerade, and I wanted to thank you for supporting the Black community.
The events of last summer (BLM protests and COVID-19) saw many people rally to support Black-owned businesses. Sadly, since summer ended, people forgot to keep sharing and supporting these businesses.
I just found a new article with links to more than 150 Black-owned businesses. I was so happy to see that people still care about helping these companies thrive!

The link is here

I think sharing this link on your page would be a great way to help your readers keep supporting Black-owned sites and stores. I think it will be a great addition to your site and that your audience will love this new resource!


Thank you in advance for your support, Emma

Hi Emma,

The Hobbledehoy believes Black Lives Matter and we hope our readers do as well. I’m pleased to share the link of 150 Black Owned Businesses.

Chris writes:

Hello Michael,

The Hobbledehoy is a marvelous haven for folk music and is responsible for introducing me to so many artists I had not previously known, or whom I had forgotten with the passing of time. It was on The Hobbledehoy that I first heard Little Nora Brown and for that I am forever grateful. A short time ago I fired off a track from BARDE’s 1977 album ‘Barde’ called ‘Fanny Power’. You kindly posted it on the HH site, for which many thanks .
It occurred to me to send the first two albums au complet for you to kick around as you see fit [ . . . ]

Hi Chris:

Always appreciate your comments and feedback on The Hobbledehoy. With the past year of Covid, the death of a parent, and moving from my home of 20 years, I got a bit behind on our scheduled posts. Soon I’ll be adding clips from your ‘Barde’ 1977 and ‘Images’ 1978, as well as your track notes.
Thank you very much for introducing your music to me and followers of The Hobbledehoy. And happy to read you enjoy the banjo of Little Nora Brown.

Sister Marie writes (in caps):

DEAR SIR,
YOU MY “D E A R” SIR. YOU ARE SIMPLY THE BEST!! BETTER THAN ALL THE REST, BETTER THAN ANYONE, ANYONE I’VE EVER MET!!!! I LOVE YOU!!! YOUR ARTICLE WILL GO VIRAL! WE NEED TO PRAY THE DEMON OUT OF OFFICE”

Hello there, Sister Marie!

My guess is that you are not the same Sister Marie I had in my 3rd grade Catholic School, as she was more discerning with her use of capital letters, and certainly did not regard me as “better than anyone.”
Nonetheless, it appears you did “pray the demon out of office,” and for this The Hobbledehoy are eternally grateful