The zany fight among congressional Republicans over electing their own leader as Speaker of the House dramatized the nuttiness of their extreme right. What’s more worrisome for the country, however is just how off the wall the Republican majority is as a body.
Twenty Republicans proved zealous enough to publicly disembowel their own leader, forcing him to lose vote after vote for days before agreeing to make him Speaker. But those in McCarthy’s camp from the get-go aren’t exactly moderates. Fully 70 percent of the Republican caucus embraced Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen in their campaigns. One hundred and twenty-three of the Republicans were re-elected after refusing to certify the 2020 election, even after the Capitol was sacked. The fight over McCarthy wasn’t the fight against moderates. It was a squabble among the extreme.
McCarthy’s opponents – less than 10 percent of the Republican caucus – extracted pledges that will make it more difficult for the House to operate and will weaken McCarthy from day one. One member now will be able to demand a new vote for the Speaker at any time. The holdouts won promises for seats on powerful committees. They also extracted a promise from McCarthy that guaranteed a crisis over keeping the government open, designed to force deep cuts in basic support programs like Social Security and Medicare. They even insisted on in-person voting and hearings, ensuring that more legislators, staff, and witnesses would contract Covid.
Yet, even before concessions were made to the right, McCarthy’s majority already was promising an agenda that is far more about political posturing than public policy.
Consider. The economy is threatened by a recession, as the Federal Reserve keeps raising interest rates to fight inflation by throwing people out of work. Communities are ravaged by extreme weather – from cyclone bombs to floods to droughts – that cost billions in destruction and growing numbers of lives. Over a million people have died from Covid, and the contagion and future contagion remain a threat. Inequality has reached obscene extremes. Corporate corruption and malfeasance are pervasive. Gun violence plagues our cities and schools.
Deaths of despair continue to rise, even as the life expectancy of Americans continues to fall.
The costs of basics – health care, childcare, college, housing, and retirement security – continue to rise out of reach of more and more Americans. The military budget is soaring yet remains inadequate for the long and unending war that the country continues to wage while attempting to police the world.
So, McCarthy pledges that the first bill Republicans will introduce will be to encourage tax avoidance by the rich. That’s right. His priority is to cut the increased funding for the IRS that would enable the agency to increase its abysmally inadequate ability to audit the taxes of the very wealthy.
The second thing McCarthy promises is a flood of investigations into the past, almost all about political posturing. Republicans will investigate Hunter Biden. They promise to investigate the FBI, and the Justice Department, including “ongoing criminal investigations” and the “weaponization of the federal government,” whatever that means.
Whatever Hunter Biden’s misdeeds, they have nothing to do with the challenges the country faces. This is mostly about revenge for the investigation of Donald Trump, and the prosecution of those who sacked the Capitol on January 6. Bizarrely, McCarthy’s folks want to investigate the CDC’s Dr. Fauci, part of their continued posturing against the mandates that were imposed to fight the pandemic. They’ll investigate Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, mostly to embarrass the administration.
Their leading economic initiative will be to make it easier for oil, gas, and coal companies to get permits on federal land and to expand oil production in the U.S. This rewards their donors while simply scorning the clear and present costs of climate change.
At a time when college costs are still soaring, when schools are more segregated than they were when Brown v. Board of Education was decided, when new resources are needed to ensure adequate ventilation and adequate health facilities in our schools; their first order is showpiece legislation to “own the libs,” focused on bathroom rules and opening greater parental wars over books and racially biased history.
On crime, they’ll tee up bills to spend more on police while promising investigations to deter efforts to reform police forces and to discredit prosecutors who are trying to hold police accountable. On the border, they go after Biden administration officials, even while continuing to block any comprehensive package of reforms to address what will be a growing problem.
Tax relief for the rich. Fiscal austerity in a time of need. More money for Big Oil. Political revenge for Donald Trump. Posturing against “wokeness” while serious needs go unaddressed.
That isn’t the agenda of the 20 “knuckleheads” as former Republican Speaker John Boehner labeled them, who opposed McCarthy. That is the agenda of the Republican caucus. The lunatics truly have taken over the asylum – and the only question now is how much damage they will do to the country.
You can write to the Rev. Jesse Jackson in care of this newspaper or by email at jjackson@rainbowpush.org. Follow him on Twitter @RevJJackson.
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