Aaron Fritschner/Twitter:
This is the biggest concession the Freedom Caucus has won and an absolutely devastating blow to McCarthy’s power, the moderates, and governance in the House:
If current committee formulas remain unchanged (party-split= same as last Congress so it should) the split on the Rules Committee will be 9R – 4D.
As @sarahnferris notes, a bloc of 3 R’s could break off and defeat a vote in Rules 7-6.
Should that go through, forget about anything •necessary• coming out of the House, let alone anything good. More here. This is what the fight’s about, even more than who is Speaker.
And you can thank Kevin McCarthy.
Enablers, line-straddlers and quiet resisters: How GOP lawmakers contributed to Jan. 6
Jan. 6 panel members released mountains of evidence that painted a detailed picture of their GOP colleagues — just as they’re taking the House majority.
A handful of Republicans who remained in the Jan. 6 committee’s sights throughout its investigation are now leading the effort to deny Kevin McCarthy the speakership — using their power to bring the House to a standstill.
Charles P Pierce/esquire:
Even When They Get the Chance to Re-do an Election, Republicans Manage to Muck it Up
Somehow it’s a fitting way for them to spend the anniversary of Jan. 6 (even if they don’t want anyone to talk about that).
McCarthy, of course, voted against certifying the election as well, because McCarthy is made of ambition and nothing else. He voted against certification to cultivate the forces that are presently carving him into brisket on ballot after ballot this week. (Late Thursday afternoon, McCarthy failed on his 10th consecutive attempt to get 218 votes, breaking the post-Civil War record of Commonwealth homeboy Fred Gillett that had stood for 100 years. I expect the tally sheet to appear on eBay shortly.)
Molly Jong-Fast/Vanity Fair:
THE KEVIN MCCARTHY MESS IS PEAK TRUMPISM
The GOP’s failure to get the 118th Congress going shows how the performative nature of today’s Trumpified party is making it incapable of governing.
Despite his best efforts, the leopards have finally come for Kevin McCarthy’s face. For those not extremely online, I’m referring to a 2015 tweet from YA novelist Adrian Bott: “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”
It’s nearly eight years later and McCarthy is learning this lesson the hard way, as his quixotic quest for the Speakership, which spanned most of that time, is falling apart on C-SPAN. Rumors of an affair (which McCarthy denied) might have derailed McCarthy from taking over the gavel from John Boehner in 2015. And again, in 2018, when McCarthy was set up to be Speaker, Republicans lost the House. Now finally, Republicans have a razor-thin majority, but their party is too dysfunctional to govern. McCarthy is finding it impossible to stop a brakeless freight train driven by morons, making a mess of the 118th Congress before members are even sworn in.
Hans Noel/Twitter:
The consensus take is that the #ChaosCaucus has no agenda. I don’t think that’s exactly true. Based on their speeches, what they want is to minimize the leaderships agenda setting power.The problem, long understood, is that the running of a legislature requires someone to set the agenda. Coalition management suggests this should be the governing coalition — the majority party.
But the #ChaosCaucus is opposed to everything that helps manage coalitions, like earmarks, deals or side-deals. Those sound unsavory, but they are central to governance. They are the tools of compromise and coordination.A chamber that cannot build and maintain coalitions can’t pass legislation. But it can function as a debate club. The #ChaosCaucus wants a body in which they can say much but which does not need to do anything.
Isaac Bailey/Charlotte Observer:
The Brittanee Drexel case: How to nearly destroy a Black family in 21st century America
PART I: THE CONFESSION THAT ALMOST HAPPENED
It was late 2016. The FBI was about to get its man – an innocent man. Timothy Shaun Taylor, 49, of McClellanville, S.C., was going to confess to raping and murdering Brittanee Drexel of Chile, N.Y., even though he had never met Drexel. A cascade of tragedies and travesties had led Taylor to his lawyer’s office that day to discuss the process of confessing to a crime he had not committed but for which his family was being severely punished.
David Wallace-Wells/NY Times:
9 Pandemic Narratives We’re Getting Wrong
You could write columns about any number of misleading pandemic fables. (For my sins, I have: about America’s Covid-19 exceptionalism, about “red Covid,” about pandemic learning loss.) And some misunderstandings have been etched into our collective memory: over aerosol spread or the value of masking, ventilators and ivermectin (to name a few). But as time rolls on, the bigger point feels even more important to me. Though the fog-of-war phase of the pandemic is over, we are still struggling to see clearly many of its major features, captive instead to narrative formulations we’ve imposed on even messier realities, perhaps as a way of avoiding the harder questions they might raise.
Which do I mean? Below are a few examples that sketch that bigger phenomenon. This is not at all a comprehensive list, nor is it meant to be. But I hope it is an illustrative one, itemizing several ways in which huge swaths of the country see the experience of the past few years through prisms of anxiety and partisanship, self-justification and self-interest.
Greg Dworkin
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