Summing Up

Not that House Republicans give fuck - they'll ride their little unicorn pony until it's heart explodes - but if they want a budget that gets the government to live within its means while leaving Trump's TaxScam2017™ in place, and not touching Defense or Social Security & Medicare, then we'll just have to do without:

• Border Patrol
• Dept of Homeland Security
• Veterans' Healthcare
• Air Traffic Control
• FBI
• Coast Guard
• Ag Programs
• Food Programs
• Education
• Disaster Relief
• Housing Programs
• Space Exploration
• Cancer Research
• Courts
• Diplomats

And that's just the budget shit that Speaker McCarthy is having to ignore &/or make up a whole new language to fumble with.

Opinion

Trump makes suckers of House Republicans. Again.

Be honest: Who among us has not had an extramarital affair with a porn star?

It is the rare person who can truthfully say he or she has not. And that is why I admonish you: Let he who has not lied about using campaign funds to pay hush money cast the first stone!

In the race by MAGA World to circle the wagons around Donald Trump in the Stormy Daniels case, a special prize must go to those who not only attack those investigating the former president but also defend his behavior with the adult-film actress as totally and completely normal.

“Settlements like this, whatever you think of them, are common both among famous people, celebrities and in corporate America,” one of our winners, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, misinformed his viewers. “Paying people not to talk about things, hush money, is ordinary in modern America.”

A couple of weeks ago, old text messages came out in which Carlson called Trump “a demonic force, a destroyer” and said “I hate him passionately.” Now he’s back to defending some of Trump’s seediest behavior as utterly routine.

It would never be just Carlson, of course. Elected Republican officials also collectively decided this week that it was in their interest to bring Trump back from the political dead. Once again, Trump used a fabrication to revive his flagging standing. And once again, congressional Republicans fell for it.

Just a week ago, leading Republicans were daring to hope that Trump’s sway was ebbing, as Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence took him on directly. Then Trump changed all that with just one post on his social media site Saturday morning. He announced his expectation that he “WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY.” He wrote: “PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”

In reality, he wasn’t arrested Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Or the rest of the week. Maybe he’ll yet be indicted in New York, Georgia or Washington. Maybe he won’t. Regardless, he already notched a significant victory. House Republicans didn’t wait to see whether Trump was speaking the truth about his imminent arrest. They did as he commanded, leaping to his defense — and, in the process, returning him to his previous place of dominance atop the Republican Party. It’s all about Donald Trump — again.

Within just a few hours of Trump’s claim that he was about to be arrested, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced that House Republicans were launching investigations into the “outrageous abuse of power” by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his attempt “to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions.”

On Monday, three House committee chairmen fired off a letter to Bragg summoning him to testify before Congress and demanding that he produce six years’ worth of documents — all because he was “reportedly about to engage” in “the indictment of a former president.” Never mind that Bragg hadn’t (yet) done so.

Things only deteriorated from there.

By the dozen, House lawmakers and their Fox News allies denounced Bragg by calling him “a hired hit man by George Soros” (Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo.) or by saying Bragg, who is Black, is “listening to his master, George Soros” (Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy).

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) called on DeSantis to “stop any sort of extradition of President Trump from the state of Florida.”

Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, apparently mistook Bragg’s criminal investigation of state law for a federal case. “Daniel Ortega arrested his opposition in Nicaragua and we called that a horrible thing,” he said. “Mr. Biden, Mr. President, think about that.”

House GOP conference chief Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) likewise called the investigation by a county D.A. “the epitome of the weaponizing of the federal government.”

Inevitably, Republicans found themselves not only denouncing the prosecutor but also defending Trump’s behavior. McCarthy vouched for Trump by saying that the hush money paid to Daniels “was personal money” and that Trump “wasn’t trying to hide” it — claims that are challenged by the available facts. (Fox News host Jesse Watters did McCarthy one better in Trump’s defense, telling viewers: “There’s no proof Trump slept with Stormy. There’s no baby.”)

Even Senate Republicans voiced public concern that their House counterparts had gone too far in their prosecutorial meddling. “I would hope they would stick to the agenda they ran on,” said Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.). He might offer the same advice to Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), who called for Bragg to “be put in jail” for unspecified offenses.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.) put it best when she told Punchbowl News: “The House is gonna do what the House is gonna do.”

And what it did this week was to put Trump back in unquestioned command of the Republican Party.

The California Republican promised right-wing holdouts that he would deliver a budget that balances within 10 years. But he also promised not to touch Social Security and Medicare. Republicans are likewise committed not to allow cuts to defense spending and veterans’ pensions, nor to allow the Trump tax cuts to lapse.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office ran the numbers on those promises at Democrats’ request, and the results are in. To keep all those pledges, Republicans would literally have to eliminate everything — everything — else the government does. No more Homeland Security, no more Border Patrol or FBI, no more Coast Guard, air traffic control or federal funds for education or highways, no agricultural programs, no housing, food or disaster assistance, no cancer research or veterans’ health care, no diplomacy or space exploration, no courts — and no Congress.

Defund the police? This is defund America. Even then, Republicans would still be in the red after 10 years.

Unsurprisingly, McCarthy’s lieutenants are attempting some rapid backtracking. House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-Tex.) said this week that the 10-year balanced budget is now merely an “aspirational” target — much like my diet. He’s instead touting a separate House GOP proposal to set 2024 spending at 2022 levels, which would require smaller (though still severe) cuts but wouldn’t come close to balancing the budget.

Apparently, the 20 holdouts who almost denied McCarthy the speakership didn’t get the memo, for several of them assembled before the cameras Wednesday and declared they weren’t budging. “We’re going to present a budget that actually balances in the 10-year time frame,” proclaimed Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.). He has said McCarthy’s promise of a 10-year balanced budget was “the whole thing” that led him to drop his opposition to McCarthy’s speakership in January.

Sens. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) hosted Norman and several other anti-McCarthy holdouts, all members of the House Freedom Caucus, in the Senate television studio. There, they proclaimed their determination not to increase the debt ceiling without large spending cuts — even if that means the United States goes into a catastrophic default.

Lee revived the dangerously dubious idea that failing to raise the debt ceiling “is not a default.” “You can blow past the debt-ceiling increase deadline,” Lee said. “Yes, that causes problems … but that is not itself a default.”

The federal debt is causing “more suffrage for the American people,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who presumably meant “suffering.”

And Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) contributed this patriarchal take on Biden’s budget: “Every wife in America would shudder if that was her husband.”

The hard-liners, confused though they were, made clear that they weren’t wavering on the debt ceiling. “This is not the Republican Party of the past that will surrender,” said Rep. Bob Good (Va.). “We made history in January,” he said of the anti-McCarthy holdouts. “You’re going to see us make history again.”

Only this time, it would be the historic collapse of the American economy.

Can anybody here play this game?

There is, theoretically, a deal to be had on the federal debt. It would have to be, as in years past, a “grand bargain” that would cut both domestic and military spending, raise taxes on the wealthy, and reform entitlement programs. But ruling out changes to all but the 15 percent of the federal budget known as nondefense discretionary spending, as House Republicans have promised, is a fool’s errand, destined to fail.

Problem is, this is a caucus full of fools — or at least a caucus of the clueless. They don’t know what they don’t know.

The median tenure for a House Republican right now is just four years. Most don’t know a time before Donald Trump took a wrecking ball to the American political system. McCarthy himself acknowledged this week that “we have to retool and rethink” because of the inexperience: “About half the conference has never served in the majority."

Catherine Rampell: Threatening a U.S. default was bad before. Now, it’s colossally idiotic.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) had a similar observation this week, as members of the House Freedom Caucus blasted what they called a “bailout” of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank — even though the government’s guarantee of deposits prevented a broader banking panic. “It’s complicated and takes a little time for people to understand," he said of his wet-behind-the-ears colleagues.

Their on-the-job training is off to a slow start. Three months into this new House majority, only two minor bills have become law: one rejecting the District of Columbia’s criminal code, and another declassifying what the federal government knows about the pandemic’s origins. As Rep. Blake Moore of Utah, a (rare) moderate Republican, told the Wall Street Journal: “We haven’t passed one of the must-pass bills this year.”

Yet the speaker claims that “we have changed Congress on its head in less than three months.”

In a way, he has changed Congress on its head — by executing a face plant.

Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

This week was the House GOP retreat at a J.W. Marriott in Orlando, an annual gathering in which Republicans talk the same nonsense about a “woke” and “weaponized” government that they do in Washington, only they do it wearing khakis, L.L. Bean fleece vests and Ritz-Carlton logo sweaters.

These gatherings are not called “retreats” anymore (that sounds a bit too Ritz-Carlton) but rather “issues conferences.” This is appropriate, because they’ve got a lot of issues.

Trump has just taken over the party again. The same 20 zealots who denied McCarthy the speakership until he gave them the keys to the car are now about to drive the vehicle off a cliff and into default. Republicans don’t agree on Ukraine, bank bailouts, border legislation or much of anything else.

As if real life weren’t hard enough, GOP leaders decided to spice things up at their retreat issues conference by playing a war game. Politico’s Olivia Beavers reported that they pretended China had invaded Taiwan, McCarthy was president and “committee chairs got a fictional promotion to cabinet secretaries.”

President McCarthy and Secretary of War Jim Jordan? God help us all.

Informed by his war gaming, McCarthy waxed eloquent with reporters about his foreign policy views when asked a question about Ukraine. “I have a real concern of the aggression of Russia. I have a more greater concern of this axis of power coming together of China, Russia, North Korea and Iran,” he announced. “I watched this happen in the world another time before I was ever born.”

Without explaining how that was possible, he continued: “I think it is utmost important that Russia lose. I think it’s utmost important that China does not think to go capture Taiwan now that President Xi changed his constitution and is now serving another five terms and believes to go in there. … I think it’s a very responsibility that yes Russia loses in this aggression.”

Well, okay then.

Two days later, McCarthy, asked a question about China, offered some high-level thoughts … on the Second World War.

“What should they have done when they first saw Hitler, Mussolini and Japan getting together?” he asked. “What dependencies did they become weak upon? What aggressions did they look the other way? On building up a military of Hitler even though it went against the Treaty of Versailles. Or the movement in of Czechoslovakia and Austria. Or the movement into Crimea. Or the desire to take Taiwan. So walking through the pandemic thinking about where was America waking up to medical supplies?”

I think I know the name of the war game House Republicans were playing: Mad Libs.

Milbank Gets One Right

Opinion

To save himself, McCarthy just destroyed the House

On the fourth of 14 failed attempts this week to elect Kevin McCarthy as speaker, Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) complained that Democrats and the media were enjoying the House Republicans’ meltdown too much.

“In some ways they’re salivating,” the lawmaker complained in his speech re-re-renominating McCarthy. “The schadenfreude is palpable.”

On Jan. 6, the House elected Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as the nation’s 55th speaker after days of defeats and concessions to win over hard-line Republicans (Video: Michael Cadenhead/The Washington Post)

No doubt some took pleasure in the Republicans’ pain. But as a longtime reviewer of political theater, I found nothing enjoyable about this performance.

This is what happens when a political party, year after year, systematically destroys the norms and institutions of democracy. This is what happens when those expert at tearing things down are put in charge of governing. The dysfunction has been building over years of government shutdowns, debt-default showdowns and other fabricated crises, and now anti-government Republicans used their new majority to bring the House itself to a halt.

This is insurrection by other means: Two years to the day since the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol, Republicans are still attacking the functioning of government. McCarthy opened the door to the chaos by excusing Donald Trump’s fomenting of the attack and welcoming a new class of election deniers to his caucus. Now he’s trying to save his own political ambitions by agreeing to institutionalize the chaos — not just for the next two years but for future congresses as well.

On Thursday, the day McCarthy failed on an 11th consecutive ballot to secure the speakership, he formally surrendered to the 21 GOP extremists denying him the job. He agreed to allow any member of the House to force a vote at will to “vacate” his speakership — essentially agreeing to be in permanent jeopardy of losing his job. He agreed to put rebels on the Rules Committee, giving them sway over what gets a vote on the House floor, and in key committee leadership posts. He agreed to unlimited amendments to spending bills, inviting two years of mayhem. He agreed to other changes that make future government shutdowns and a default on the national debt more likely, if not probable.

Perhaps worst of all, the McCarthy-aligned super PAC, the Conservative Leadership Fund, agreed that it would no longer work against far-right extremists in the vast majority of Republican primaries — a move sure to increase the number of bomb throwers in Congress. Essentially, McCarthy placated the crazies in his caucus by giving up every tool he (or anybody) had to maintain order in the House.

Mike Rodgers being restrained

Finally, on the 15th ballot early Saturday morning, McCarthy’s abject surrender secured him the speakership, at least temporarily. But it was the most pyrrhic of victories. To save himself, he sacrificed the Congress itself. The saboteurs won.

Yes, the Republicans’ televised, self-inflicted debacle is gripping, in the train-wreck sense. As spectacles go, you’d have to look back more than 160 years to find a comparable failure to elect a speaker. This week, Republicans referred to one another as the “Taliban” and “terrorists” and “hostage takers.” They traded obscenities in a caucus meeting. One of the anti-McCarthy Republicans, Matt Gaetz of Florida, publicly called McCarthy a “squatter” for prematurely occupying the speaker’s Capitol office.

In an appalling scene on the House floor Friday night, Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the incoming chairman of the Armed Services committee, lunged at holdout Gaetz and had to be pulled away. Nearby was Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who conveyed her respect for the institution by voting with her dog in her arms.

On the House floor Thursday, Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), a White man from the South, accused Cori Bush (Mo.), a Black Democrat, of “grotesquely racist rhetoric.” The day before, Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) insinuated groundlessly in her speech re-re-re-re-renominating McCarthy that Democrats were drunk on the job.

Democrats howled for her words to be struck from the record, but because there was no speaker, there was nothing to be done. “There are no rules,” McCarthy said from his seat on the floor.

No rules. No functioning. And, essentially, no House. The elected members of Congress cannot be sworn in (although the office of New York Republican George Santos, who fabricated much of his life story, erroneously issued a news release stating that he had been sworn in). Bills can’t be introduced. Committee memberships and chairmanships can’t be assigned, and staff can’t be hired. Newly elected lawmakers can’t access emails or office supplies. House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik even called off her colleagues’ feeding. “Due to the House adjourning, there will not be pizza and salads tonight,” announced an email from her office Tuesday evening.

But sabotaging government is no joke. The incoming Republican chairmen of the Armed Services, Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees warned that the standoff could “place the safety and security of the United States at risk.” Even House Chaplain Margaret Kibben sounded the alarm. “Protect us that in this imbroglio of indecision we do not expose ourselves to the incursion of our adversary,” she prayed at the start of Thursday’s session. “Watch over the seeming discontinuity of our governance and the perceived vulnerability of our national security.”

There was only one upside to the anarchy: The government no longer controlled the TV cameras in the House chamber. Americans at home could watch leaders huddling with rebels, far-right Gaetz conferring with far-left Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and the serial fabricator Santos sitting alone, discreetly picking his nose.

Outside the House chamber, corridors smelling of cigar smoke and body odor became scenes of mayhem: As I and other reporters chased McCarthy on Wednesday night from the floor to his office, we knocked aside Michael McCaul, incoming chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, during a live interview with Fox News. Inside the chamber, lawmakers shouted at the House clerk — the only authority that exists in the leaderless House — as she struggled to maintain order.

The new majority couldn’t even manage the most routine business without chaos. A GOP attempt to adjourn Wednesday night nearly failed, as lawmakers sprinted into the chamber to vote after time had expired. Thursday morning, Republicans celebrated their two-vote margin on the adjournment.

“Yesterday, we experienced very briefly our first win,” John James (R-Mich.) said in his speech re-re-re-re-re-renominating McCarthy. “It was a small victory, but didn’t it feel good? We’ve been working hard for that victory.”

Not many would call it a “win” to adjourn the House after failing for the sixth time to elect a speaker — but even that minor victory was short-lived. On Thursday, Republicans held vote after vote in their fruitless attempt to elect McCarthy. The reason? It took them eight hours to corral enough votes to adjourn.

McCarthy’s allies on and off the floor freely admitted that the leadership pratfall was “messy.” But this goes well beyond messy and into the realm of stupidity.

One of the 21 anti-McCarthy holdouts, Ralph Norman of South Carolina (the one who urged Trump to declare “marshall [sic] law” before the Jan. 6 insurrection), told me and others Wednesday that he would support McCarthy only if he agreed to “shut the government down” rather than “raise the debt ceiling.” In reality, one has nothing to do with the other.

But such people now run the show. McCarthy clearly can’t control them. Even Trump can’t control them. Rebel Lauren Boebert (Colo.), just a few seats away from McCarthy on the floor, told the House that Trump, rather than lobbying for McCarthy, “needs to tell Kevin McCarthy that, sir, you do not have the votes and it’s time to withdraw.”

McCarthy forced a grin.

His leadership has been lacking, if not utterly absent, throughout the crisis.

First, he stiff-armed opponents, delaying for weeks before responding to their demands.

Then he and his allies tried to fight the rebels, shaming them publicly and threatening to take away their committee assignments.

Next, Team McCarthy tried to beat them through attrition, forcing the 11 votes over three days that McCarthy lost by nearly identical tallies.

And finally he capitulated. “Cavin’ Kevin,” as Gaetz called him, surrendered.

The one thing McCarthy didn’t try? Negotiating with Democrats. They could easily have given him the votes he needs to become speaker, in exchange for concessions. But bipartisanship is a nonstarter in McCarthy’s caucus.

An hour before the new Congress convened to elect a speaker on Tuesday, an email went out from the Capitol Police: The Capitol’s “Duress Alarm System” had gone offline. Too bad, because McCarthy’s duress was just beginning.

In a caucus meeting, McCarthy told Republicans that he had earned the job, “God dammit.”

Replied Boebert: “This is bulls---!”

She walked out and told reporters: “Now here we are being sworn at instead of being sworn in.”

Gaetz, at her side, called McCarthy “the biggest alligator” in the Washington swamp.

McCarthy, in turn, vowed to bore the rebels into submission. “Look,” he told reporters before heading to the floor, “I have the record for the longest speech ever on the floor. I don’t have a problem getting a record for the most votes for speaker, too.”

But it quickly became clear that the anti-McCarthy Republicans were more numerous than expected. The first roll call produced 19 Republican votes against McCarthy. Each one set off a wave of murmurs in the chamber: Biggs. Bishop. Boebert. Brecheen. Cloud. Within the first few minutes of the alphabetical roll call, McCarthy’s defeat was already assured — the first time in a century a speaker hadn’t been chosen on the first ballot.

McCarthy greeted each defection with a wan smile. He jiggled his leg. He tapped his reading glasses. He scrolled on his phone. He whispered to an aide. And when the clerk’s tally made his loss official, he acted as if he had won, shaking hands, smiling, waving.

It was much the same for subsequent votes, as he endured insult after insult:

“The last time an election for speaker went to a second ballot, Leader [Hakeem] Jeffries’s beloved New York Yankees had not yet won a World Series,” Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) pointed out.

Gaetz referred to McCarthy as “someone who has sold shares of themselves for more than a decade” to get the job.

On the third vote, Byron Donalds (Fla.) joined the rebels. “It’s clear right now that Kevin doesn’t have the votes,” he told a group of reporters after his switch.

On the fourth vote, Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) switched her vote from McCarthy to “present.”

Nominating McCarthy for the fifth ballot, Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) asked: “Does it really boil down to this, that 20 or more of my colleagues will never trust Kevin McCarthy as speaker?”

One of the rebels, Scott Perry (Pa.), claimed that his opposition to McCarthy “is not about personalities.” This prompted laughter from the Democratic side.

On the fifth vote, a foreign journalist in the press gallery fell asleep, face down on the table.

On the sixth ballot, Cammack began her McCarthy nomination speech by telling the House: “Well, it’s Groundhog Day, again.”

And after each tally, the clerk repeated the same refrain: “A speaker has not been elected.”

Ignoring the reality on the floor, McCarthy kept smiling, back-patting, waving to his family in the gallery, pumping his fist. During one roll call, he was so distracted that he didn’t respond at first when the clerk called his name — and for good reason: He had already begun the process of surrendering.

The concessions began to flow Wednesday night, and they flooded out during talks Thursday. As the GOP rebels held the line on the floor, rejecting McCarthy five more times, McCarthy’s representatives were one floor below, in the office of Republican Whip-elect Tom Emmer, giving away the store.

The holdouts had been given essentially everything they had asked for — and still, the extremists demanded more. “A deal is NOT done,” Perry, head of the House Freedom Caucus, tweeted Thursday afternoon.

“Somebody should check and make sure Kevin McCarthy still has two kidneys,” Adam Smith (Wash.), top Democrat on the Armed Services committee, quipped Friday.

By Friday evening, the rebels could hardly believe the breadth of McCarthy’s capitulation. “We’re running out of things to ask for,” Gaetz marveled.

Yet still they tortured McCarthy. One vote shy at the end of Friday night’s 14th ballot, McCarthy publicly humiliated himself by walking over to Gaetz and pressuring him to switch his vote. In view of the whole House and the TV cameras, Gaetz rebuffed him. McCarthy retreated. “We’ll do it again,” he said angrily.

Finally, after four full days of chaos capped by intra-GOP fisticuffs and Republicans voting down their own motion to adjourn, McCarthy claimed the gavel. But by then his fate had become unimportant, because whoever occupies the speaker’s chair will now be irrelevant. McCarthy’s surrender has condemned the House to two years — or more — of anarchy.

The New Speaker

Kevin McCarthy started badly when he had staffers move all his stuff into the Speaker's Office before the clusterfuck in the House chamber even got going.

That in itself isn't such a horrible thing - the psych game is a more or less valid ploy. I think this should be one of the times you don't pull any of this High School Fuckaround crap, but hey - McCarthy was playing a very weak hand, so yeah. OK.

But then he went further and tried to bluff his guys into thinking he was cutting a deal with the Dems.

WHAT MATT GAETZ AND AOC TALKED ABOUT DURING KEVIN MCCARTHY’S SPEAKER VOTE

The pair’s conspicuous exchange in the back of the chamber on the first day of the 118th Congress was caught on C-SPAN — and noted by many members in the building. Thanks to Gaetz and his far-right allies, McCarthy, a California Republican, failed to win the speakership on the first round of voting.

Kevin McCarthy Must Commit to Government Shutdown Over Raising Debt Ceiling, Says Freedom Caucus Holdout

Gaetz told Ocasio-Cortez that McCarthy has been telling Republicans that he’ll be able to cut a deal with Democrats to vote present, enabling him to win a majority of those present and voting, according to Ocasio-Cortez. She told Gaetz that wasn’t happening, and also double-checked with Democratic party leadership, confirming there’d be no side deal.

“McCarthy was suggesting he could get Dems to walk away to lower his threshold,” Ocasio-Cortez told The Intercept of her conversation with Gaetz on McCarthy’s failed ploy. “And I fact checked and said absolutely not.”

Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York won all 212 of his party’s votes, a show of unity that, if it holds, requires McCarthy to win over all but four of his colleagues.

Gaetz, who has shown a willingness to break with the GOP establishment, said that his crew of McCarthy opponents was dug in and would continue to resist him, adding that McCarthy has been threatening opponents with loss of committee assignments. A private gathering of Republicans ahead of the vote had been heated, multiple sources said. (Gaetz did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

McCarthy and Gaetz presented their positions in dueling press conferences Tuesday morning. McCarthy said that Gaetz and his allies had requested plum committee assignments in exchange for supporting his speaker bid. McCarthy also accused Gaetz of telling Republican members that he was willing to elect Jeffries as speaker rather than accede to McCarthy. Gaetz told reporters that he and his allies didn’t trust McCarthy.

Ahead of the second round of voting, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who won six votes for speaker in the first round, nominated McCarthy again. Then Gaetz rose and nominated Jordan. All 19 McCarthy opponents voted for Jordan in the second round, leaving McCarthy again at 203 votes — 15 short of what he needed.

Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz. another McCarthy opponent, also huddled with Ocasio-Cortez in the chamber, where they discussed the possibility of adjourning the House. (Gosar did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

In the first round, McCarthy won just 203 votes, losing 19 of his colleagues. McCarthy has been insistent on remaining in session, as have his opponents. Adjourning without choosing a speaker would be embarrassing to Republicans but might also give time for McCarthy to break the opposition one by one.

Ocasio-Cortez was noncommittal on the tack, as an adjournment strategy would require party leadership.

Like the man said:

This is politics -

if you want a friend,

buy a dog.

Oy

Kevin McCarthy blew right thru the modern era record for failing at getting enough votes to be Speaker Of The House.

11 tries - 11 crap-outs

And he's losing some of whatever steam he started with, because Ken Buck (R-CO04) has been MIA for the last three ballots.

Sausage-Making

It takes a lot of practice to watch the process, and not be disgusted or become cynical.

And even then it can be a futile endeavor. It will effect you.

McCarthy makes fresh concessions to try to woo hard-right Republicans in speaker bid

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has made fresh concessions to a group of 20 GOP lawmakers in hopes of ending their blockade of his speakership ahead of votes Thursday, a stunning reversal that, if adopted, would weaken the position of speaker and ensure a tenuous hold on the job.

During late-hour negotiations Wednesday, McCarthy (R-Calif.) agreed to the proposed rule changes, according to four people familiar with the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

In a major allowance to the hard-right Republicans, McCarthy offered to lower from five to one the number of members required to sponsor a resolution to force a vote on ousting the speaker — a change that the California Republican had previously said he would not accept.

McCarthy also expressed a willingness to place more members of the staunchly conservative House Freedom Caucus on the House Rules Committee, which debates legislation before it’s moved to the floor.

And he relented on allowing floor votes to institute term limits on members and to enact specific border policy legislation.

These Republicans voted against Kevin McCarthy for House speaker

1. Rep. Andy Biggs
2. Rep. Dan Bishop
3. Rep. Lauren Boebert
4. Rep. Josh Brecheen
5. Rep. Michael Cloud
6. Rep. Andrew Clyde
7. Rep. Eli Crane
8. Rep. Matt Gaetz
9. Rep. Bob Good
10. Rep. Paul Gosar
11. Rep. Andy Harris
12. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna
13. Rep. Mary Miller
14. Rep. Ralph Norman
15. Rep. Andy Ogles
16. Rep. Scott Perry
17. Rep. Matt Rosendale
18. Rep. Chip Roy
19. Rep. Keith Self
20. Rep. Byron Donalds

(asked Trump for a pardon)

It remained unclear early Thursday whether the concessions could move the holdouts, several of whom have said they will not support McCarthy no matter what. The House is scheduled to reconvene at noon Thursday for more voting. But some moderates have grown irate at the moves, after pledging last month they would never support a rules package that gives one House member the power to vacate the speaker.

McCarthy emerged from the Wednesday night meeting bluntly telling reporters that the impasse continued, but suggested that progress was being made.

“I don’t think a vote tonight will make a difference,” he said. “But a vote in the future will.”

McCarthy has failed six times to secure the necessary votes to become speaker over two days of voting, a stalemate for majority Republicans that highlighted deep divisions within the party and raised questions about whether the GOP can run the House with a slim advantage.

Amid the humiliating defeats in floor votes, McCarthy has struggled to win over the defectors. Through three rounds of voting Wednesday, he failed to gain any support — and in fact lost a vote from one lawmaker, Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.), who switched her vote to “present” as a message to her colleagues to reach a compromise.

In another bid to woo holdouts, the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC endorsed by McCarthy, and the conservative Club for Growth, which had initially signaled opposition to McCarthy as speaker, announced a deal Wednesday to stay out of open House primaries for safe Republican seats.

“Kevin McCarthy has effectively led House Republicans from the Minority to the Majority and we want to see him continue to lead the party so we can pick up seats for the third cycle in a row,” Conservative Leadership Fund President Dan Conston said in a statement.

During the midterm elections, the McCarthy-endorsed group worked to elect more moderate Republican candidates considered more willing to govern, an intervention that alienated staunch hard-liners in the House Freedom Caucus.

Club for Growth President David McIntosh said Wednesday that the agreement not to interfere with “safe-seat primaries” fulfilled a major concern they had pressed for.

“We understand that Leader McCarthy and Members are working on a rules agreement that will meet the principles we have set out previously,” McIntosh said in a statement. “Assuming these principles are met, Club for Growth will support Kevin McCarthy for Speaker.”

Kevin In The Middle

I keep thinking McCarthy could counter the Foil Hat Five by moving across the aisle and enlisting five Dems.

That's awfully improbable to begin with, unless he made enormous concessions to seal the deal, but he's making enormous concessions anyway, so WTF - why not?

And maybe he's tried that, but maybe he's as inept as Ryan and Boehner before him.

Maybe no one is "adept" enough to wrangle the crazies who have risen from the pits of dark money hell to become what is easily tagged as Minority Rule. They seem intent on destruction for its own sake. Which puts them squarely in line with my Project Plutocrat belief.

McCarthy’s Bid for Speaker Remains in Peril Even After Key Concessions

Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, is struggling to break through a wall of entrenched opposition from hard-right lawmakers even after agreeing to weaken his leadership power.

WASHINGTON — Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the party leader, toiled on Monday — 24 hours before Republicans assume the House majority — to lock down the votes he needs to be elected speaker because he had so far failed to break through entrenched opposition from hard-right lawmakers.

The recalcitrance among ultraconservative lawmakers, even after Mr. McCarthy made a key concession that would weaken his power in the top post, threatened a tumultuous start to the Republican majority in the House. The standoff underscored Mr. McCarthy’s precarious position within his conference and all but guaranteed that even if he eked out a victory he would be a diminished figure beholden to an empowered right flank.

In a vote planned for around midday on Tuesday, when the new Congress convenes, Mr. McCarthy would need to win a majority of those present and voting — 218 if every member of the House were to attend and cast a vote. But despite a grueling weekslong lobbying effort, the California Republican appeared short of the near-unanimity he would need within his ranks to prevail.

A group of five Republicans has publicly vowed to vote against him, and more are quietly opposed or on the fence. Republicans control 222 seats and Democrats are all but certain to oppose him en masse, so Mr. McCarthy can afford to lose only a handful of his own party members.

With little time left ahead of the vote on Tuesday, Mr. McCarthy attempted over the weekend to deliver the hard-liners a major concession by agreeing to a rule that would allow a snap vote at any time to oust the speaker.

Lawmakers opposing him had listed the change as one of their top demands, and Mr. McCarthy had earlier refused to swallow it, regarding it as tantamount to signing the death warrant for his speakership in advance. But in recent days, he signaled he would accept it if the threshold for calling such a vote were five lawmakers rather than a single member.

But that was not enough to sway the five rebels opposing him. and more dissenters emerged on Sunday night, after Mr. McCarthy announced the concession to Republicans in a conference call.

Roughly two hours later, a separate group of nine conservative lawmakers — most of whom had previously expressed skepticism about Mr. McCarthy’s bid for speaker — derided his efforts to appease their flank of the party as “almost impossibly late to address continued deficiencies.” The group included Representatives Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, and Chip Roy of Texas.

“The times call for radical departure from the status quo — not a continuation of past, and ongoing Republican failures,” the group said in a statement. “For someone with a 14-year presence in senior House Republican leadership, Mr. McCarthy bears squarely the burden to correct the dysfunction he now explicitly admits across that long tenure.”

Mr. McCarthy has pledged to fight for the speakership on the House floor until the very end, even if it requires lawmakers to vote more than once, a prospect that now appears to be a distinct possibility. If he were fail to win a majority on Tuesday, members would take successive votes until someone — Mr. McCarthy or a different nominee — secured enough supporters to prevail.

That could prompt chaos not seen in the House floor in a century. Every speaker since 1923 has been able to clinch the gavel after just one vote.

No viable candidate has yet emerged to challenge Mr. McCarthy, and it was not clear who would be able to unite the fractious Republican Conference if he proved unable to do so. Potential alternatives who could emerge if he fails to secure enough votes include Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, his No. 2; Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a onetime rival who has strong support among the powerful ultraconservative faction; and Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, one of his close advisers.

Laboring to avoid a scene and cement the speakership, Mr. McCarthy has made a number of concessions over the past few months in attempts to lock up votes of far-right members.

He has called for a “Church-style investigation” into past abuses of power by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency, a reference to the select committee established in 1975, informally known by the name of the senator who chaired it, Frank Church of Idaho, that looked into abuses by American intelligence agencies.

He toughened his language in response to hard-right demands to oust Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, calling on him to resign or face potential impeachment proceedings. He promised Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who was stripped of her committee assignments for making a series of violent and conspiratorial social media posts before she was elected, a spot on the coveted Oversight Committee.

He threatened to investigate the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, promising to hold public hearings scrutinizing the security breakdowns that occurred. Last month he publicly encouraged his members to vote against the lame-duck spending bill to fund the government.

It is unclear whether any single offering from Mr. McCarthy at this point would be enough to win over some lawmakers.

During the call on Sunday, Representative-elect Mike Lawler of New York, who has announced his support for Mr. McCarthy, pointedly asked Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, a ringleader of the opposition, whether he would vote for Mr. McCarthy if the leader agreed to lower the threshold for a vote to oust the speaker to just one member of Congress. Mr. Gaetz was noncommittal, according to a person on the call who recounted it on the condition of anonymity.

The exchange underscored the challenge Mr. McCarthy faces in attempting to keep control of the House Republican Conference, which includes the task of bargaining with a group of lawmakers who practice a brand of obstructionism that former Representative John A. Boehner, the Ohio Republican who was run out of the speaker post by the far right, famously described as “legislative terrorism.”

Ms Amy Jo Hutchison

A little over a year ago, and what have we heard from guys like Joe Manchin (D-WV)?

Not much more than "Gee whiz, it's just too expensive to help anybody"

The cost of treating someone's cholecystitis in the local ER because they couldn't afford their gallbladder meds is a lot higher than just caring for that patient on the preventative side of things.

At first blush, I'm amazed at how stoopid "the smart guys" can be when it comes to understanding the basics of risk management and harm reduction and preventive medicine.

But these are not smart guys behaving stupidly - these are smart guys taking these actions (or non-actions) for reasons that just aren't as apparent to us as they should be.

So the huge extra cost of treating that gallbladder attack instead of preventing it becomes part of the scheme to capture profit by externalizing cost.

Privatized income and socialized outlay.

President Stoopid Out For A Ride

He got bored.

WaPo:

Current and former Secret Service agents and medical professionals were aghast Sunday night at President Trump’s trip outside the hospital where he is being treated for the coronavirus, saying the president endangered those inside his SUV for a publicity stunt.

As the backlash grew, multiple aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations also called Trump’s evening outing an unnecessary risk — but said it was not surprising. Trump had said he was bored in the hospital, advisers said. He wanted to show strength after his chief of staff offered a grimmer assessment of his health than doctors, according to campaign and White House officials.

A growing number of Secret Service agents have been concerned about the president’s seeming indifference to the health risks they face when traveling with him in public, and a few reacted with outrage to the trip, asking how Trump’s desire to be seen outside his hospital suite justified the jeopardy to agents protecting him. Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis has already brought new scrutiny to his lax approach to social distancing, as public health officials scramble to trace those he may have exposed at large in-person events.

“He’s not even pretending to care now,” one agent said after the president’s jaunt outside Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to wave at supportive crowds.

“Where are the adults?” said a former Secret Service member.

They spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.

White House spokesman Judd Deere defended the outing, telling reporters “appropriate precautions were taken in the execution of this movement to protect the president and all those supporting it.” Deere said precautions included personal protective equipment, without providing further details, and added the trip “was cleared by the medical team as safe to do.”

The White House did not immediately respond to questions from The Washington Post on Sunday night.

Trump wore a mask as he waved from the back of his vehicle, after announcing he would “pay a little surprise to some of the great patriots that we have out on the street.” But the face covering was little comfort to doctors, who took to Twitter to criticize the trip as irresponsible. Masks “help, but they are not an impenetrable force field,” tweeted Saad B. Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.

Axios:

White House crises of competence and credibility grew during a botched weekend that left even White House aides dismayed and befuddled.

Many complained bitterly about the leadership of chief of staff Mark Meadows.

After days of internal and external snafus as the virus spread through all levels of the White House, President Trump left his hospital suite just before 5:30 p.m. yesterday, and took an SUV ride outside the Walter Reed gates to wave at the supporters who have lined the road ever since he arrived Friday evening.

• Trump wore a mask, but the stunt risked exposing the Secret Service agents in the Suburban.
• Two senior White House staffers said they thought the P.R. stunt was selfish, and compounded a weekend of horrible decisions.
• White House spokesman Judd Deere said: "Appropriate precautions were taken in the execution of this movement to protect the President and all those supporting it, including PPE. The movement was cleared by the medical team as safe to do."

Frustration and anxiety built among White House staffers, who say they went days with no internal communication from Meadows about protocols and procedures — including whether they should show up to work — as COVID tore through the West Wing.

• By contrast, the first lady’s chief of staff, Stephanie Grisham, emailed her staff on Saturday advising them to work from home and reminding them of CDC guidance.
• And the vice president’s chief, Marc Short, emailed his senior staff at 3 a.m. Friday with an update on the president’s situation and urged them to work from home. Short also had a conference call with his staff on Saturday to take questions and explain the protocol and situation.

A senior White House official said it was "ridiculous'" that there had been no proper internal communication from the chief or operations officials since COVID started rapidly infecting their colleagues: "A bunch of us are talking about it and just gonna make the calls on our own."

• The White House finally emailed staff with guidance at 8:18 last night — about 15 minutes after Axios contacted the press shop for a story about the lack of guidance. A senior official insisted the guidance email was "pre-scheduled."
• The impersonal email, signed "White House Management Office," mentioned nothing about the new circumstances, and was almost identical to formulaic emails that had gone out to the staff at previous intervals before POTUS and multiple other West Wing officials got sick.

Several staffers told Axios they were furious with Meadows for leaving much of the staff in the dark, at the same time the White House was sending mixed, incomplete and inaccurate messages to the public.

• West Wing staff were privately circulating an unsparing indictment by Politico’s Tim Alberta, "How Mark Meadows Became the White House’s Unreliable Source."

A senior White House official defended the chief: "Mark is extraordinarily accessible and caring for his staff. White House employees know well what to do in the event of exposure to a positive case, and best practices regarding mitigation. He has been working hard to assist the President, keep the public informed, and manage the most famous employment complex in the world."

• Another senior official added: "Peanut gallery criticism like this is absurd and unfair — guidance has long been in place for what to do in the event of a West Wing case, as it has for best practices, testing, teleworking, etc. Meadows has been at Walter Reed with the President managing a million different logistical concerns since Friday. But apologies if anyone had to wait a couple extra hours to receive their updated email on Sunday."

The White House's public communication about the virus has been a debacle of deception and contradictory information.

• The White House physician, Navy Commander Dr. Sean Conley, admitted at yesterday's briefing that he had painted an overly rosy picture the day before:
• "I was trying to reflect the upbeat attitude that the team, the president, that his course of illness has had. I didn't want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction. And in doing so, you know, it came off that we're trying to hide something, which wasn't necessarily true."

On Saturday, after Conley's pep talk, Meadows took reporters aside and gave (at first anonymously) a more worrisome snapshot, saying Trump's "vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning, and the next 48 hours will be critical."

• Yesterday, another briefer, Dr. Brian Garibaldi, said: "[I]f he continues to look and feel as well as he does today, our hope is that we can plan for a discharge as early as tomorrow."

Today's Little Meltdown

45* gets some good pushback, and he just can't handle it.

And what flashes through my little brain?

We Are Not Surprised

There's more than one way to fill a bathtub. 

It'll get filled if all you do is leave it out the rain for a good while.

What you don't do is open the drain and turn off the taps - are you that fuckin' stoopid?

The Hill:

The federal deficit in the first seven months of fiscal 2019 jumped 38 percent compared to the same period last year, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said Tuesday.

The deficit ballooned to $531 billion from the beginning of October to the end of April, well above the previous year's $385 billion mark.
But the comparison with 2018 was somewhat inflated, CBO said, due to differences in payments and outlays; without them, the deficit would have been $486 billion.

Expenditures rose by $178 billion during the first seven months of the fiscal year, driven by both increased mandatory spending and a bipartisan agreement to increase discretionary spending. Higher interest rates also contributed.

“Outlays for net interest on the public debt increased by $27 billion (or 13 percent) because interest rates on short-term debt are substantially higher now than they were during the same period in 2018 and because the amount of federal debt is larger than it was a year ago," the CBO said in its report.

Meanwhile, revenues were up only $34 billion, due in part to the 2017 GOP tax law.

“Most of that shortfall stems from lower-than-anticipated withholding of individual income and payroll taxes in December 2018 and January 2019,” CBO said.

A recent CBO analysis found that if current spending and tax policies remain in place, the nation’s debt burden will reach 105 percent of gross domestic product by 2029, just 1 percentage point below the post-World War II record set in 1946.

Stealing It

Call me crazy if you want - hell, everybody else does - but I think maybe taking care of all the shit we've been neglecting the last 20 years or so is a little higher priority than 45*'s Horizontal Phallus Project down on the Mexico border.

CNBC:

When 2nd Lt. Lance Konzen got his first military assignment, the Air Force recommended he and his wife Megan Konzen move into housing right on his base at Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas, to help them adjust to military life.

But the Konzens didn't know their new home had mold growing in the vents, which gave Megan respiratory problems and led to several emergency room visits, she said. The family said the private company managing their home didn't provide preventative maintenance or clean the home thoroughly once mold was discovered.

The Konzens are one of several families highlighted in a report from the Military Family Advisory Network published Wednesday, which found that military families living in on-base housing face dangerous conditions including mold, vermin and poor water quality.

The military uses private companies to provide and maintain on-base housing for families, but the report shows that substandard living conditions are widespread.

"Private companies" - the supremely stupid notion that outsourcing is always better than letting Da Gubmint do it themselves. The only thing worse than government waste fraud and abuse is private sector waste fraud and abuse. 

It's all at taxpayer expense, and privatizing this shit costs us more.

WaPo Gets One Right

...partly right anyway.

Publishers' Editorial:

Tempers boiled over on Capitol Hill Thursday as Peter Strzok, the FBI official at the center of President Trump’s attempts to discredit special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, testified before a joint meeting of two House oversight committees. With all its yelling and interruptions, the hearing was a fitting coda to the hyperpartisan farce of an investigation that House Republicans have conducted into the FBI and Mr. Mueller’s Russia probe.

Republicans spent hours parsing text messages and waving documents in the air. But all of it, just like most of the broader House investigation, was a distraction from this central point about the conspiracy narratives the president and his defenders have been cooking up about the FBI: If the agency had been trying to harm Mr. Trump’s campaign, agents could have released damaging information on pro-Trump Russian interference before Election Day — and they did not.
- and -

Mr. Strzok is not the perfect messenger, but he was right about this message: “Russian interference in our elections constitutes a grave attack on our democracy,” he said. “Most disturbingly, it has been wildly successful — sowing discord in our nation and shaking faith in our institutions. I have the utmost respect for Congress’s oversight role, but I truly believe that today’s hearing is just another victory notch in [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s belt and another milestone in our enemies’ campaign to tear America apart.”


Republican rhetorical attacks are typically self-contradictory:

"Obama's a commie stooge bent on destroying capitalism, which is why the stock market is up 18,000 points since he took office."

"Obamacare is a total waste of tax money, and a brilliant plot to take over the entire healthcare system and kill the insurance companies, which is why those companies are posting record profits since the passage of ACA, while Medicare and Medicaid have shown significant savings."

You get the picture.

So here we are with the bullshit about how the mighty forces of darkness (eg: The Deep State) plotted against our Noble Donald, and now are planning a coup.

It's the same shit over and over and over: 

"The enemy is invincible - and we're beating them at every turn."

On Chickens And Roosting

Ari Melber's The Beat on MSNBC, via Crooks & Liars:



Ari Melber covered a topic that would be getting national attention, were it not for the frenetic 24/7 news cycle coming out of the Trump administration.

Just after Mike Pompeo stepped down from CIA, Trump declared that he was promoting Gina Haspel to run the CIA, touting her as a great choice. Well, many Americans have a different opinion. Both Democrats and Republicans have reservations leading back to Haspel's past history as the person who had oversight over a CIA "black site" in Thailand. While an open investigation into torture was underway, evidence was destroyed. Haspel claims to not have given the order for tapes to be destroyed, though.

Ari Melber discussed this in an extensive segment on his nightly show, The Beat, on Tuesday night. It was hard hitting, deep dive into what Haspel's confirmation could mean for our country, as well as how we would be viewed by the world.
Olbermann, Special Comment, 11-05-2007:



(paraphrasing) Torture causes people to plead, and to break, and to provide the most authentic-sounding fiction - it does not cause them to tell us the truth.

Gina Haspel is implicated in the effort to cover up the crimes of the CIA. It's not unreasonable to think she's looking to complete that project, and if she's willing to go that far, there's nothing to keep me from thinking she'd be willing to let 45* use the CIA against American citizens on American soil.

I hope she's just intending to polish up the CIA's image and to protect its standing in the federal power structure. But she's compromised, which can be a very bad thing in itself, and could easily mean she'll be further compromised, feeling the need to do more bad things as she tries to compensate for all those other bad things - and on and on and on.

That's the kind of geometric expansion of shit that happens when we refuse to hold government accountable because we've become comfortably numb and we only really care about "our team" winning.

What Was That, Anyway?

Raw Story

President Donald Trump’s White House was caught completely unprepared for Saturday’s false alarm about a missile attack on Hawaii, said Politico.

The news about the potential attack “sent White House aides scrambling” as they frantically called federal agencies trying to find out what to do and how to respond, raising serious questions about their preparedness for an actual attack — nearly a year into Trump’s presidency.

“President Donald Trump’s Cabinet has yet to test formal plans for how to respond to a domestic missile attack, according to a senior administration official,” wrote Politico’s Eliana Johnson. “John Kelly, while serving as Secretary of Homeland Security through last July, planned to conduct the exercise. But he left his post to become White House chief of staff before it was conducted, and acting secretary Elaine Duke never carried it out.”
The last I heard, it took 38 minutes before Hawaiian officials got their shit together enough to go public and withdraw the warning.

38 minutes.

I get the feeling there was a buncha guys hiding in the basement waiting and checking their watches, until finally one guy says, "I didn't hear a boom - I think there woulda been a boom by now - anybody hear a boom? Anybody?"

So this is where we are now. We have a government run by assholes who apparently think it's OK to make everybody live at the broken end of the bottle all the fucking time.

Working poor - don't get too comfortable with that Medicaid. You're kids are expensive, and we've got better people to spend that money on.

Middle class - don't bitch to us about conditions and wages - we let you work here and pay you just enough to keep you from getting together and coming to our gated communities to fuck us all up.

That false alarm in Hawaii could be real next time - you'll need to trade in your Social Security and Medicare to pay even more for a military that you're required to venerate, but will never ever be used in any way that benefits anyone but multinational rentiers.

What do you mean you don't like it? This is what you voted for, dumbass - it's not like nobody told you this is what we intended to do all along.