reflectivepundit

Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Risk of Returning Trump to the White House

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Last week, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote that the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris team should not run again in 2024 listing his age and her inability to gain traction in the American public, not even among fellow Democrats. If Biden and Harris “campaign together in 2024, I think Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement — which was stopping Trump.” Ignatius warned.

As I read the thoughtful column, I agreed with the notion that the Democrats need a changing of the guards on the very top. President Biden’s approval ratings are low, Vice President Harris’s are lower. A series of recent campaign polls had Biden and Trump in dead heats with some showing Trump a few points ahead.

Not surprisingly, voters express their concerns about the presumed top contenders’ age in next year’s election, when asked by pollsters. Joe Biden will be short of 82 years old on Election Day 2024 and Donald Trump 78. The sitting president appears more aged as we see him walking and talking on the screen than his predecessor.

And in today’s world, whether true or false, appearances become reality.

That reality overshadows, in the mind of too many people, President Biden’s good qualities—his commitment to uphold democracy, his sound judgement on policies designed to help the American people, his accomplishment in foreign policy, and his never-ending efforts to reach out for bipartisanship.

For whatever reason, during the Biden presidency Kamala Harris did not get the same opportunities to show leadership qualities as Joe Biden did during the Obama presidency. Also, she has not gotten a fraction of the news coverage that Congresswomen Majorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and similar lightweights receive regularly.

Contrary to many pundits who claim that there are no strong alternatives to the Biden/Harris team among Democrats, I believe there are good choice. On top of my list are Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer as presidential candidate and Maryland Governor Wes Moore as second on the ticket—a woman and a Black man both exceptional leaders.

However, as of now, the Biden/Harris team will run for reelection. With Trump on top of the GOP ticket (or someone like Ron DeSantis), perhaps enough Americans will again vote in favor of democracy and Joe Biden.

I will.  

The Criminally Charged Ex-President and the Morally Challenged Would-Be Presidents

By Brigitte L. Nacos

The shamefulness of the positions taken by the majority in Wednesday’s television line-up of GOP hopefuls for their party’s presidential nomination became even more clear, when their idol was arrested in a Georgia prison and forced to pose for a mug shot. A day earlier, with the exception of Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson five male competitors (DeSantis, Pence, Ramaswamy, Scott, and Burgum) and the lone female candidate (Haley) had promised to vote for Trump if he becomes their party’s nominee--even if he is criminally convicted in a court of law.  

 

Instead of taking the moral high ground like Christie and Hutchinson, even former vice president Mike Pence, who, along with his family, was physically threatened by the violent crowd invading the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 said that he still would vote for Trump again. Did he forget the rapidly erected gallows and the horrible screams “Hang Mike Pence” by those marching in the name of the then president and waving Trump flags as they launched their violent assaults?

The most obvious Trump clone on the stage, Vivek Ramaswamy, was declared the winner of the debate by Mr. Trump. That was hardly surprising because the young entrepreneur with bully manners declared that “President Trump was the best president of the 21^st century.” Moreover, he promised that as president he would pardon Trump. He then attacked Pence for not making the same commitment.

Pence refused—but left the door open for a pardon--although Trump did not take any action to call off his attack dogs in the Capitol when Pence and others were acutely threatened; moreover, Trump continues to spread the Big Lie about the 2020 election outcome.

Yes, Mike Pence deserves our respect for protecting the US Constitution and our democracy on that infamous day in January 2021. But after that courageous act, he somehow lost the courage to stand up to Trump and Trumpism and the MAGA movement--all enemies of democracy.

Ramaswamy may be auditioning for joining Trump as running mate. He will not succeed. Trump will only accept a low-key person like Pence in his team, not a hotdog like Ramaswamy. Tim Scott may fit the bill.

When asked about Trump’s mug shot, John Bolton, for a while National Security advisor in the Trump White House, said, “He could’ve smiled. He could’ve looked benign. Instead, he looks like a thug!”

Even a mug shot with a thug-like image does not matter to Trump's supporters.  Instead, there are already signs that he and they will treat this picture like a badge of honor.

The question, then, is and remains: How will the American electorate at large react and vote next year?

The Jan. 6 Indictment of Donald J. Trump: Less Shock Value Than New Normalcy—and What Now?

By Brigitte L. Nacos

After eight years of Donald Trump’s reality show performances on the political stage, his demagogic hate speech, lies, authoritarian tendencies, corruption, and a violent coup attempt to overturn the 2020 election results--nothing can shock the American public and political class with respect to the former president and current presidential candidate.

Thus, Tuesday’s four count conspiracy and obstruction Jan. 6 indictment did not result in a public shock wave but rather in a business-as-usual perception. It was simply the same as the reaction to Trump’s earlier indictments in the classified documents, hush money illegalities, and sexual assault cases.

To be sure, there was a burst of breaking news coverage in the hours following the release of the Jan. 6 indictment the other day. Talking heads spoke about the first time a former U.S. president was charged with unlawful conspiracies and obstruction to falsify election results to stay in office. What the 45-page indictment describes eloquently were not the actions of a president who respects the Constitution and the traditional democratic rules and values but of a rogue leader and long-time admirer of past and present authoritarian strongmen.

Worse yet, although Trump faces prison, if found guilty, he is the dominant candidate for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination. His best bet for beating one or more criminal convictions is a victory in next year’s election and his return to the White House.

The most recent opinion polls show that Trump and President Joe Biden are in a tied race. Of course, these numbers can change in the 15 months to next year’s election day.

But in the first hours after the latest indictment a multitude of Republicans in Washington and around the country attacked the “Biden DOJ” for charging their “innocent” leader. While Mike Pence, Chris Christie, and Asa Hutchinson spoke of the serious charges against Trump, the more Far-Right candidates Ron DeSantis blamed the “weaponized [Biden] government and Vivec Ramaswamy called the indictment “un-American.”  Nothing changed.

In the past, political observers wondered why a man like Donald Trump was able to win the 2016 election. I do not want to rehash in detail that Hillary Clinton won the total number of national vote but fell short in the electoral college that is a vestige of the undemocratic features of the US Constitution. One way or the other, some 70 million Americans voted Trump into the White House seven years ago.

Yes, Trump lost in 2020 both in the electoral college and in the nationwide total of votes. But it was not a landslide for Biden but a slim victory.

Today, the support for Trump in his MAGA movement and the Republican Party seems solid and goes up with every new set of criminal charges against him. As the campaign and the various trials approach and begin, Trump will certainly go the mass rally route again and stir his followers hate of “the other side.” Last month, Trump told his supporters already, “I’m being indicted for you!” And he promises that only he can save the country from the evil liberals, socialists, globalists, and the likes.

I think that in today’s America we should no longer focus solely on Trumpism and its threat to democracy but rather on the many Americans who believe in the values of liberal democracy, the mutual agreement on the legitimacy of majority and minority parties, the peaceful transition of power from one party and one leader to the others, and so forth…

Why is it that we do not see a potent pro-democracy movement here? This question occurs to me every time I look at the images of protesting Israelis who try to prevent their state’s fall into illiberal democracy or theocracy. There are a multitude of former Republicans, anti-Trumpers, and PACs that support them; there are the usual groups supporting the campaigns of Democrats. 

We have not seen any efforts to mobilize Americans by organizing pro-democracy rallies and perhaps even a from-below movement.  

Typically, it takes politically skilled leaders to organize grass roots political actions over longer time periods or even social movements. But the story of an Israeli woman, a particle physicist, mother of five daughters, with no political past or ambitions, who became one of the several  organizers for the pro-democracy protests in her country, is inspiring.

Why not similar initiatives in defense of democracy right here and now—before it is too late?

MAGA Attack Dogs in the House Are Ideological Brethren of Violent Far-Right Extremists

By Brigitte L. Nacos

In 1978, the founder of the Hitler-worshipping, neo-Nazi organization “National Alliance” William Pierce self-published book titled “The Turner Diaries” under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald. For the last fifty years, the book has been the most influential how-to-do guide for violent far-right extremists. The poorly written diary of a fictious White supremacist named Earl Turner describes how members of the revolutionary “Organization” attack and eventually defeat the hostile U.S. government or what they call the “System.”   

The revolutionaries’ first major target is the F.B.I. headquarters building in Washington, D.C. in order to weaken the System’s law enforcement muscle. One of Turner’s comrades drives a fertilizer truck bomb into the building. According to the diary, “approximately 700 persons were killed in the blast or subsequently died in the wreckage…” He justifies the mass killing by blaming the failure of the “System” to “preserve a White America. Before long, Earl Turner becomes a member of “The Order,” the System’s elite unit.

A few years after the “Turner Diaries” were published, Robert Matthews called his break-away group from the neo-Nazi “Aryan Nations” organization “The Order” signaling his plan to bring Earl Turner’s narrative into the real world. There were several shoot-outs between Matthew’s group and F.B.I. agents. In the early 1980s, Matthews along with Louis Beam, an Aryan Nations leader, and several other White supremacists planned the bombings of F.B.I. field offices in several cities, among them Denver, Kansas City, New Orleans, Minneapolis, and St. Louis. The F.B.I. arrested them, before they could strike.

Ten years later, Timothy McVeigh was inspired by the “Turner Diaries” to detonate a fertilizer truck bomb near the Federal Building in Oklahoma City that housed an F.B.I. field office and other federal agencies. 168 persons were killed, hundreds injured. McVeigh left no doubt that his number one target was the F.B.I. office.

For Earl Turner’s Organization, Robert Matthew’s The Order, McVeigh’s leaderless two-person cell with militia connections, and contemporary violent far-right extremists, the common denominator is propaganda to delegitimate and violence to weaken the federal government and especially the F.B.I.  

This anti-government ideology was for many decades limited to fringe groups—from the Ku Klux Klan to the Patriot and Militia movements and the contemporary White nationalists.

But during the Trump presidency and thereafter the MAGA devotees in the Congress have embraced the dangerous anti-government ideology of violent far-right groups and QAnon conspiracy theorists.

During Wednesday’s hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, the Republican members led by committee chair Jim Jordan, showed this mindset, when they altered a testimony session with F.B.I. director Christopher Wray into an ugly inquisition. Wray, a life-long Republican, was appointed by then ex-president Donald Trump. As the New York Times reported, “Even though Mr. Wray sat alone at the witness table, his Republican interlocutors made it clear the entire bureau, and its 38,000 employees, was in effect on trial.”

Representative Chip Roy (R-Tex.) called the FBI “tyrannical” and Jordan cited in his opening statement a recent Louisiana Court ruling that states ludicrously, “The United States government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian Ministry of Truth” and singled out the F.B.I.  

While the bomb throwing in the contentious hearing was rhetorical, it signaled a more dangerous threat than actual terrorist bombs: The extreme right MAGA faction in the GOP, among them elected members of the U.S. Congress, and presidential candidates for 2024, consider the FBI an enemy and talk about defunding the agency. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is reportedly considering the impeachment of Attorney General Merrick Garland.

These are serious threats to democracy which needs law enforcement agencies and an overall judiciary system independent of partisan manipulation.  

Nikki Haley’s “Softer” Touch: Posing with an Attack Gun

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina, UN Ambassador during part of the Trump presidency, and now declared candidate for the GOP’s presidential nomination, runs as member of “a new generation to lead us into the future.” In the early stages of her candidacy, she appealed particularly for the support of female Republicans in Iowa and elsewhere. Yet, if anyone hoped that a woman as alternative to candidate Trump and potential male competitors would take a softer approach to her party’s outrage politics, she already dashed those hopes. For once, Trump may be right in calling her “overly ambitious.”

Like her onetime boss and now fellow-candidate, she wants to please the core of extremist Republican primary voters, many of them part of America’s deadly gun culture. In the midst of a mass shooting crisis in this country and nearly daily incidents in which children and adults are killed in public places and their own homes, Haley tweeted a photo showing her with an attack weapon with her finger on the trigger and the caption, “Making sure our military has the equipment they need to keep us safe is a priority…” Under the guise of supporting the

military candidate Haley promoted the very attack guns that can be bought and carried in most blue states. She also thanked the manufacturer of the gun she held and a gun-rights organization. At a campaign stop in New Hampshire shortly after the mass shooting in a school of Nashville, Tennessee, Haley rejected any gun-control measures. Instead, she assured fellow-Republicans, “Everybody wants to talk about gun control. My thing is, I don't want to take away your ability to protect yourself until they do those things that protect those kids." She said it is okay to have metal detectors in schools.

To emphasize the generational gap between herself (she is 51 years old) and the two heavy weights for 2024, Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Haley called for mandatory mental competency tests for politicians 75-years old. But although Trump will be 77-years old in June, Haley exempts the former president from her “old age” campaign attacks on Joe Biden, who is four years older than Trump and will be 81-years old in November.

Many voters, Democrats and Republicans, are uncomfortable with the advanced age of both Biden and Trump along with the old guard in the Congress. Thus, it is quite legitimate to discuss the age of candidates for the highest offices in the land.

The question is, how to frame such discussions. And Haley has not come up with right answer. Instead, her public statement that it is unlikely for the Biden to live until he is 86 years old and that therefore a vote for Biden in 2024 will be a vote for Kamala Harris is as shameful as her mandatory pro-gun photo on Twitter.

But as the great Irish writer Finton O’Toole wrote in the New York Review of Books on Trump’s current legal problems and by extension the political culture the former president created, “the shameless cannot be shamed.”

The Chutzpah of Tucker Carlson: Now the Fired Fox News Star Sells Himself as Truthteller

By Brigitte L. Nacos

After years of falsifying the truth and promoting non-factual tales and ridiculous conspiracy theories that contributed mightily to dividing Americans into hostile political camps, the fired Fox News star and darling of the hard-line MAGA movement Tucker Carlson sells himself as victimized truth-teller. And he promises to return to counter the “liars.”

“Both political parties, and their donors, have reached consensus on what benefits them, and they actively collude to shut down any conversation about it. Suddenly, the United States looks very much like a one-party state…,” he said in the first response after his fall. And then, in a first-rate propaganda trick he compares the honest people against the liars—the “us” versus “them” thing—and sends a message of hope to his fans:

"When honest people say what’s true, calmly and without embarrassment, they become powerful. At the same time, the liars, who have been trying to silence them, shrink and they become weaker. That’s the iron law of the universe. True things prevail. Where can you still find Americans saying true things? There aren’t many places left, but there are some.  And that’s enough. As long as you can hear the words, there is hope. See you soon."

In other words, Carlson tells his fellow “honest people” that he will not be silenced for long. The American cable channels with more extreme Far-Right ideologies than Fox News offer him options. And then there is the Russian government’s propaganda arm RT that invited Carlson with the tweet, "Hey @TuckerCarlson, you can always question more with @RT_com.”

More telling is that the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov commented unprompted during a news conference on Carlson’s firing implying that it was a move by the US government. “Perhaps it would be useful to consider how things are with freedom of speech in the United States,” he said with a straight face.

To be sure, Moscow is not happy that their favorite American TV host lost his Fox News perch from which he dispatched anti-American messages that found their way into Russia’s government-controlled media.

If one had not witnessed the perennial truth-twisting by Carlson (and his like-minded colleagues), one would be shocked by the fired TV-host’s complaint that the U.S. looks now like a one-party state. Isn’t that what Carlson and his fellow autocrats in the Far-Right GOP movement see as model? He and they have not hidden their great admiration for strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Hungary’s Victor Orban.  

But, then, it is hard to understand the logic of these people. Instead, we need to remind us that  there are two  “realities” in American body politics with drastically different perceptions of what is fact and fiction.

Anti-Gun-Control Hardliners are Accomplices in Gun Violence

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Gun violence in the United States is as American as apple pie. The same is true for mass shootings in schools and other public places. As the growing number of mass shootings in elementary and secondary schools attests to, young children and teenagers are increasingly victims of this sort of violence. According to the Gun Violence Archive, so far this year 59 children (up to 11-years old) and 344 teenagers (12- to 17-years old) were killed in such incidents this year; the number of injured was 130 for children and 827 for teenagers. The latest mass shooting in an elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, was merely another of the frequent mass shootings across the country.

In the Nashville case, the shooter was a 28-year-old woman armed with an AR-15-style rifle, an AR-style pistol and another handgun. The military style assault weapons could have killed far more children and adults in record time, if law enforcement officers had not responded as quickly as they did.

The fact that anyone in this country can acquire weapons designed for soldiers fighting in wars is scandalous and only possible in the United States. Leaving all other gun-control issues aside, those politicians in Congress and in Republican-controlled state governments who refuse to outlaw military style assault weapons are in my book accomplices in all incidents in which Americans are killed by assault weapons in the hands of perpetrators.

Even when the victims are their neighbors, these Second Amendment fanatics in the political class will not vote for life-saving measures that a strong majority of the American public approves.

Last year, after the mass shootings in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty (R-Tennessee) noted,  

To be clear: using this horror to infringe upon the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens—before we even know what might have prevented this tragedy—and accusing anyone who disagrees of being complicit in this abhorrent crime is not a solution that will make us safer.

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R. Tennessee) said at the same time,

Schools should have secured, limited entry points, and increased funding for school resource officers. School officials with prior military or law enforcement experience should be allowed to carry firearms. Finally, mental health must be taken seriously.

Well, the Nashville perpetrator shot the glass out of doors and climbed easily through a seemingly secure entrance.

 Senator Blackburn reacted with a tweet: “Chuck & I are heartbroken to hear about the shooting at Covenant School in Nashville…” Her colleague Senator Hagerty wrote, “Devastated and heartbroken about the tragic news at Covenant School

Always the same, unhelpful phrases.

                                                                       

Congressman Andy Ogles (R-Tennessee), who represents the district that includes Nashville and the Covenant School, posted last year a Christmas card on Facebook depicting his family posing with guns. That’s how deeply ingrained the gun culture is in the United States of America and why it still seems impossible to defeat it.  

GOP House Members Mock America’s Shooting Epidemic

By Brigitte L. Nacos

The first act of the new, albeit slim GOP majority in the US House of Representatives was a telling one: The leadership ordered the removal of metal detectors outside the House chamber that had been put up following the violent breach of Capitol Hill to protect members and staffers from copy-cat violence.

Just as many GOPer were and remain Covid-pandemic deniers, they seem equally untouched by the mass-shooting epidemic that kills increasing numbers of Americans, their own constituents among them.

In a macabre scene, Republican members of the House Natural Resources Committee repealed this week a rule adopted in 2021 by the same committee that prohibited lawmakers from carrying guns in the hearing room. But that was when the Democrats were in control. Several GOP members insisted on their need to defend themselves—and nobody stronger than gun-happy Loren Boebert of Colorado who declared, "With threats against members of Congress at an all-time high, now is not the time to be stripping members of our constitutional right to defend ourselves.”

It seems that guns are not potent enough for Second Amendment fanatics on the Hill.

Why else would several House members, among them disgraced Congressman George Santos, wear AR-15 assault rifle pins at their lapels along with their congressional pins—as they did the other day? This awful pin was a freebee distributed by Georgia Congressman Andrew Clyde who owns a gun store, where he sells those pins.

A sad, promotional coup at a time, when mass shootings in the country occur all too often and many times involve AR-15s or similar assault weapons.

And then there are the grenades that GOP freshman Representative Cory Mills of Florida presented to his new colleagues in what he called the “mission-oriented congress.” In a letter that accompanied the gift, he assured that the grenades were inert and added,  

“I am honored to be a part of the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committee. In that spirit, it is my pleasure to give you a 40mm grenade, made for a MK19 grenade launcher. These are manufactured in the Sunshine State and first developed in the Vietnam War.”

What kind of “mission” do GOP members have in mind?

Are the removed metal detectors, the vote against banning guns from hearing rooms, the display of AK-15 rifle pins and the handing out of grenades metaphors for the GOP House majority’s agenda?

If so, 2024 may not bode well for these political performance artists.  

The Different Meanings of “We the People…”

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Violent and peaceful protesters at the right and left often use the slogan “We the People” to link their demands to their understanding of the U.S. Constitution’s promise. Both sides refer to the U.S. Constitution which was written and signed by the Founding Fathers in 1787 and begins with the words “We the People of the United State, in Order to form a more perfect Union….”

On January 6, 2021, many in the violent MAGA crowd considered themselves “We the People” fighting to keep Donald Trump in the White House. “We The People need to be in that building,” screamed a preacher from Ohio into the direction of Capitol police officer who stood behind metal barricades.

Four years earlier, anti-Trump activists organized a “We the People” protest on January 20, 2017, when Donald Trump was sworn in as U.S. President. A poster for the event, created by Shephard Fairey, showed the images of African-American, Latina, und Muslim Women as “a pointed reference to people who have felt attacked” by the president-elect as the artist explained.

While Conservatives tend to insist on the original words and meanings of the Constitution, Liberals tend to insist on interpreting the living Constitution in the context of the more than 200 years since the document was framed.  

So, what did “We the People” mean for the Founding Fathers? Whom did they consider the citizens of the republican form of government?

Since the framers were all White male elitists or, as the political scientist James MacGregor Burns put it, “the well-bred, the well-fed, the well-read, and the well-wed,” they restricted “We the People” to their own kind. Excluded from citizenship with voting rights were

• Slaves,
• Indentured slaves,
• Males without property,

No wonder that contemporary Americans, who resent the multicultural nature of modern America’s population and call for “taking our country back” consider the Framers’ meaning of “We the People” as justifying White Supremacy. And, yes, some of the Far-Right extremists would also like to repeal the voting rights for women. While they embrace and misinterpret the Bill of Rights (especially the First and Second Amendments) that the first U.S. Congress adopted, they reject the bulk of later Amendments that expand the franchise and other rights for formerly excluded groups.

In contrast, Liberals appeal to an inclusionary “We the People” concept achieved by the progress made in the 19^th and 20^th centuries for the benefit of groups excluded by the Framer’s view on citizenship.  

Now, in the 21^st century, hard fought-for rights of women and minorities are under attack from constitutional originalists—among them the majority of Supreme Court Justices.

To be sure, the Founding Fathers did not mention abortion rights in the document they framed. Thus, a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court overturned last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization the Roe v. Wade decision that established the constitutional right to abortion.

Among the major cases to be heard by the highest court during the current session are others with issues not mentioned by the Framers and thus other opportunities for reactionary rulings.   

On the Second Anniversary of January 6th: GOP Anarchists at the Gate

By Brigitte L. Nacos

This day, to years ago, a violent crowd of organized terrorist groups and fanatic MAGA and QAnon supporters of Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s clear and fair election victory. Among those who sympathize to this day with the violent mob and the White House cabal behind the failed coup to keep Trump in office are many of the current GOP Representatives-elect—those who refuse to vote for Kevin McCarthy to become Speaker of the House and others who support McCarthy.

While most mainstream media reporters and commentators call the anti-McCarthy GOPers “conservative” or “hard-line” Republicans, the truth is that they along with others in the pro-McCarthy crowd are anarchists or, as former GOP Speaker John Boehner once called them, “legislative terrorists.”

Indeed, like all terrorists, these nihilistic anarchists want to destroy the existing order—not improve or reform the political, economic, and social systems.

They do not want sit at the legitimate table of decision-makers. They want to destroy the table without an idea of how to build a better future for the vast majority of the people they claim to represent.

Interestingly, some of the most extreme congressional GOPers who share the disruptive ideas and actions of their anti-McCarthy colleagues chose another path to realize their power-hungry objectives: They opted to support McCarthy in exchange for influential positions in the GOP House majority in form of their desired committee assignments and influence on the leadership strata.

The most visible examples are Jim Jordan, Ohio, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia, who have been close to Kevin McCarthy since he has struggled to become Speaker.

Jordan, a founding member and first chair of the far-right congressional Freedom Caucus, has been for long a rhetorical bomb thrower and was, according to the Jan. 6^th select committee, a supporter of the coup attempt.

Last year, Taylor Greene was stripped of her committee seats because of her toxic rhetorical attacks and endorsement of violence against Democrats. More recently, she claimed that under her leadership the January 6^th attackers would have won and been armed. But whenever the new congress has a speaker, she will get the committee assignments of her choice.

Add to this McCarthy’s surrender to his GOP opponents by agreeing to all their demands that limits his power drastically and you see that the script for the next two years is written:

Whether the 21 or so members of the anti-McCarthy gang will prevail or not, the anarchist wing of the GOP will hold the balance of power for the next two years in the U.S. House of Representatives and inflict great harm to the legislative imperatives of the lower chamber.

The forces that drove the events before, during, and after January 6, 2021 are still at work and, yes, at the gate of congressional decision-making.