There it is, that White Generic Meathead Face, fit for the beaming mug of some racist grifting evangelical pedophile, or your typical Republican Congressman, take your pick. There’s always some new idiot with some version of this awful face ready to fix bayonet and storm up Capitol Hill; get him elected (easy), then wind him up and point him in the right direction, and off he’ll charge, wailing his war cry of grievance and hollering his scripted right wing talking points like a good little shock trooper. One look and you know all you need to know…He’s White GOP Guy, and he’ll be from Florida or Texas or South Carolina, with a name like Devin or Buddy or Matt, the latest dumbass to win his gerrymandered district full of quiveringly fearful dumbass white people. He’ll hang around Washington for the next 50 years or so, until they’re wheeling him in and out on a gurney to vote for the latest tax break for the rich, and in all that time he’ll never understand the first fucking thing about anything at all.
This blog, October 27, 2019
My legendarily loyal long-term readership might recall the post I made way back in October, 2019, when I first took notice of one Matt Gaetz, a (fairly) recently-elected Republican in the House of Representatives, hailing from the great State of Florida (where else?). You can gather what I thought about him from the excerpt above, or indeed read the whole thing via the handy link, also above, but to boil it all down, I hated the moron on principle from the moment I became aware of him. He hadn’t done anything particularly noteworthy at the time, and for the next few years his primary claim to fame was being the subject of an investigation into underage sex-trafficking, an alleged crime for which he remains mysteriously un-indicted. Word was that his buddy-in-crime had flipped, there were receipts, and they had him dead to rights.
Oh well.
You’ll recall that our Matt was one of the last hold-outs during Kevin McCarthy’s excruciating week-long effort to get elected as Speaker, and how other Republican Representatives practically came to blows with him on the House floor while he kept voting against Kevin, all the while extorting more and more concessions until, as he stated in a moment of unusual candour, he couldn’t think of anything else to demand. Between the deals McCarthy made with Matt and all the other Freedom Caucus yahoos (especially Marjorie Taylor Greene), he more or less turned the Speaker’s position into a hollow, powerless shell, which in turn pretty much guaranteed that his whole caucus was going to be ungovernable. We all knew it, right then and there. Probably he knew it too. But he just had to get that gavel, he had to, whatever the price.
You almost felt sorry for him. It was like watching a guy with maybe a couple of hundred bucks in savings going through some sort of fit, and putting a luxury auto, a forty-foot boat, and twenty-odd 8K big screen TVs on his Amex. He must have known that the great big bill would be coming due, sooner rather than later. He must have.
And so it has.
A little less than two weeks ago, Matt Gaetz got up in the House chamber, cleared his throat, and gave just the damndest speech. I’m not sure there’s ever been anything like it, not since the run-up to the Civil War, anyway, and it would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. Swear to God, he stood there and threatened McCarthy. The Speaker of the House. Second in line to the Presidency. His boss. Gaetz told him to live up to his back-room bargains or else he’d be booted from his precious job. He said it as bold as brass: or else.
I was trying to visualize what would have happened if, say, AOC had ever been enough of a dumbass to try that with Nancy Pelosi. It would have been swift, and brutal. They’d probably still be cleaning little bits of her entrails out of nooks and crannies all over the chamber. Of course, AOC is no such dumbass (quite the contrary), and Pelosi wouldn’t have given her that sort of leverage in the first place, but it’s an illuminating little thought experiment.
Matt, however, carried on without consequence, and despite everything they’d already seen over the past eight years or so, folks were surprised by his fearless display of withering contempt. Social media was buzzing with live play-by-plays.
Yikes!! The cajones. And what was Florida Man all worked up about anyway?
Well, plenty, actually. He and his goon squad in the Freedom Caucus – Christ, these people are kind to themselves, the Freedom Caucus for the love of God – were still seething over the deal McCarthy made with Biden to raise the debt ceiling and avert an utter catastrophe. At the time, Matt, Marjorie, and all the rest of them were all WTF? Avert catastrophe? Avert?? No, no, there was supposed to be a catastrophe. Kevin had promised to precipitate a catastrophe at the first opportunity, which arrived soon enough, but then the silver-haired dummy goes and makes a compromise bargain to stave off the hotly-anticipated global economic extinction event? That wasn’t the deal! God save us, that helped horrible Biden!! Grumbling ensued. Team F.C., which had also extorted a rule change allowing any one Representative to bring a motion for McCarthy’s removal, started whipping the votes.
Kevin had one chance to redeem himself: he’d also promised they’d impeach Biden. It was what Donald wanted. So OK, where the hell was that? He was screwing up on that pledge too! McCarthy, apparently, tried and tried some more to explain that his hands were tied, since the constitutional threshold for invoking the nuclear option hadn’t in any way been crossed, not even a little bit, but that wasn’t the point, was it? A promise was a promise. The grumbling got louder, and then our Matt pitched his unprecedented hissy fit, forcing Kevin to fold like a cheap umbrella and agree to launch an impeachment inquiry by fiat, under his purported authority as Speaker, despite having vowed earlier never to go that route without a House vote to authorize it. He didn’t have the votes, you see. His majority is so razor-thin that all it takes is a half-dozen sane Republicans to defeat him, and as it happened there were, for once, at least that many ready to thwart the pant-loads of the Freedom Caucus, so fine, he launched the inquiry anyway. This is of dubious legality – indeed, a written opinion delivered in 2020 out of Bill Barr’s Justice Department concluded that an impeachment inquiry without a vote was unconstitutional – but Kevin did it. He had to, can’t you see? Otherwise, Matt and Marjorie and the rest of the gang were going to throw him out of his coveted office! He wouldn’t be Speaker any more! He’d lose his precious. You can see the bind he was in.
Bogus impeachment inquiry it is, then! Comin’ right up, sir! Oh, and also, thank you sir, may I have another!
Have they a shred of evidence to warrant an impeachment inquiry? Nope. Is there any chance that Biden could actually be convicted, supposing it got to the Senate? Not on your life. Is there much of a chance it could ever even turn into anything that could get to the Senate? No, not much. But god-dammit it to hell, the Dems had impeached Dear Leader – twice! – and it was payback time.
Just by the by, I’m prepared to argue that it’s also unconstitutional to launch an impeachment process in fulfillment of a bargain, since any such deal, made prospectively, and in the absence of any relevant facts, mandates the inquiry whether there’s a reason for it or not, and that’s not what the parchment provides. You can’t just frigging-well promise to impeach the President down the road some time, come hell or high water, and we’ll figure out why later, except yes, apparently, you can, and that’s exactly what Kevin did, so get ready, ‘cuz it’s off to the races.
Now, McCarthy probably reckoned this would mollify the slobbering rabble for at least a little while, but as usual, he reckoned wrong. Of course they weren’t satisfied. The mere launching of an inquiry, after all, was not, legally, anything close to an impeachment; even the F.C. moonbats acknowledge that the real deal requires a full vote of the House upon receiving the recommendation of any such inquiry (but only because the Constitution unambiguously says so, the f’ing thing). It was just an investigation, which would certainly look a lot like a bona fide impeachment to the Base, which is dandy, but was still only a preliminary step, in this case guaranteed to amount to nothing more than another collection of GOP gasbags looking like idiots while failing to produce any evidence (see Jim Jordan’s farcical “weaponization of government” committee), and frankly, that’s not enough chaos. Balls of fun, sure, but life would go on, so what to do next? What really sets the cat among the pigeons? You can guess, right?
Yup, it’s the same old same-old. Budget blackmail. The radicals are now refusing to authorize any more government funding, and vowing to shut down the government, unless they get their way. Yes, again. Why not? It’s fiscal crunch time, the very best time to spool up the old extortion racket, and why shouldn’t they leap at the juicy opportunity? It’s ideal! There are supposed to be multiple budget bills passing through the House about now (it should have been done much sooner, actually), and then going up to the Senate, and given all the procedural hijinks there’s virtually no wiggle room left. None, really. The whole federal government runs out of money in about a week from today, as I write this. The next batch of funding should have already occurred. Yet it’s not happening. The GOP loons are digging in their heels. The die seems, therefore, to have been cast, and almost everybody believes a shutdown is inevitable at this point. It might last a while, too. The Dems in the Senate will never vote for the sort of budgetary violence required to make Matt, Margie, and all the rest happy (just to give you an idea what that would look like, Jim Jordan says they shouldn’t fund the government unless Jack Smith’s prosecution of Donald is abandoned). It’s really not clear yet how this one gets resolved.
Bear in mind there was already a budget deal in place with the Dems, arrived at during the debt limit negotiations. Gaetz and company are thus forcing their Speaker to renege, which just isn’t done, not under any circumstances, but you know, whatever.
So why doesn’t Kevin simply wrangle his half-dozen sane colleagues and ask the Dems to help him pass the existing agreement? Because he can’t. Don’t you see? If he does that, for God’s sake, Matt and Margie will boot him out of the Speaker’s chair! His precious. Unthinkable!
You can see the bind he’s in.
Nobody should be surprised by any of what’s going on. Just about everybody predicted it would come to this, this very thing, from the outset. Heck, even I predicted it, although people keep telling me, a little cruelly, that I’m no Nostradamus, which I guess I’m not, because I had plenty of company, right from the start, in predicting that this profoundly dysfunctional crew of idiots and ideologues wasn’t a functioning caucus. Everybody said it: there is no way this clown car is up for any of the business of actually governing. Not by a damn sight. They haven’t the faintest hope of accomplishing diddly-squat. None of them can even articulate what they might want to do, or why, just to get the argument started. Instead, they’re at each other’s throats, as if on principle, and have been since the current session began, when it took them an incredible 15 votes just to elect Kevin as Speaker! Since then, not a single bill of any substance, with any hope of becoming law, has emerged from the GOP majority, except for the debt ceiling deal, the passage of which was a real tooth-pulling festival, and nobody should hold their breath waiting for the generally loathsome morons to pass any more. They aren’t able to do anything positive. All they can do is gum up the works.
This we always knew. Still, can you even believe that these feckless chowderheads are once again going to shut down the federal government? For no reason, save a nihilistic desire to smash things, and maybe make Biden look bad, because almost nobody in their low-information electorate knows enough to understand whose fault it is, and Biden’s the most likely culprit because he’s the guy in charge, isn’t he? The voters haven’t the slightest idea that their revered Constitution empowers Congress, and only Congress, to authorize government spending, which authorization has to be passed into law continually, every year, just to keep the wheels turning. Good God, the majority of them can’t even name the three branches of government (though polls show consistently, to this day, that they can name the Three Stooges). They sure as hell won’t know what’s going on when their elected representatives fail, yet again, to complete the most basic task on their neglected legislative plates. All people will know is that a bunch of government agencies are shuttered, they’ve closed down Yellowstone Park, the stock market is reacting badly, the economy is taking a nasty hit, and things are FUBAR in Washington like always.
Then they’ll get angry and vote Republican. Supposing they vote.
the needlefish 