09/26/23

Good morning! It’s Tuesday, September 26th.

National Pancake Day! No notes!

I have a great pancake tip – fun fact, I am excellent at pancakes. And I never burn them.

Hear my words – I never burn them.

The secret? Before you make the batter, put your pan on the stove and turn it onto medium-low heat. Leave that on while you’re doing everything else, so that when you’re ready to cook the pancakes, you’re not tempted to turn your burner on too high for it to heat up. So simple, but it works.

And now, the news.

Special Episode: The Drama is Coming from Inside the House

-via

Okay! Last week while I was doing my least favorite thing (attempting to take it easy. Yuck!), the House of Representatives was like – hey. What if we self-imploded? Wouldn’t that be silly?

So, let’s talk about everything going on in the House, because in some ways, it’s a very loud way to basically do nothing. And in other ways… it’s an example of why democrats absolutely must take the House back next November.

In order to do this, we need to go back to January.

How do you like that fun little sound effect? We’re really going wild here!

As a reminder, Kevin McCarthy is a sad boi version of an elected official. When the Republicans won the House in the midterms, he began his fight for the right to lead his party, aka become Speaker of the House.

However, the Republicans? Oh friend, they are messy. They are also incredibly divided. And in the first hint of what kind of Speaker Kevin would be, he went all around town begging House Republicans to vote for him and, as he did so, he made a bunch of concessions. Put people into coveted committees. Put previously-censured House Rep Paul Gosar back on committees. As a reminder, he was censured for sharing an anime video of him killing AOC and violently attacking the president. He also put Marjorie Taylor Greene back on committees, even though she was removed from them after people uncovered some barely covered up social media posts that were racist, antisemitic, and spread super dangerous conspiracy theories.

On top of that and many other things, he also told Republicans that if they’ll pretty please give him the job he wants because he’s trying to heal something deeply broken inside of him and he’s hoping that this will fix it, even though it won’t – but still, if they’ll give him the job, they can also call for a vote of no confidence at any time.

That’s super important here.

Also, remember that it took 15 rounds of voting before McCarthy won the speakership. Normally it just takes one. That’s important too, because of vibes. He is not a popular speaker.

Okay, so take all that – Republicans are a mess, McCarthy is bad at being speaker, and… yeah no that’s kind of it.

Since this kind of, sort of, starts with them hating Biden (though an argument could be made that they just hate themselves and that kind of explains everything else they’re doing), let’s start with the latest on the Biden impeachment.

Although years of investigation have found nothing, and his son has been indicted on charges all of his own, the House Republicans are set on impeaching Biden as retaliation for impeaching Trump. These two things are not the same. They don’t even exist in the same universe. But still… so they’ve wanted to impeach Biden from day one, and McCarthy has never let them do it.

However, now that we’re heading towards a budget that needs to be approved in order to keep the government open, a handful of Republicans who are on Team Impeachment are using that as leverage and, led by Matt Gaetz (that’s how you know this is bad. Never let Matt Gaetz lead you anywhere), has threatened to remove McCarthy if he doesn’t open impeachment proceedings.

Which he did.

And while this is still absolutely absurd and dangerous and infuriating, the latest on that is… House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer announced the first impeachment hearing will be start Thursday at 10am Eastern. The hearing will present all evidence to date uncovered by the committee into the Biden family finances and then, when those thirty seconds are done, they "will examine the value of an impeachment inquiry."

Spoiler alert… there is none, but they’re going to go forward anyway.

Now that McCarthy has given the thumbs up emoji to impeachment, he should be good to go, right?

Wrong! Because Matty is already saying McCarthy isn’t being serious enough about the impeachment. Almost like, I don’t know… perhaps he wants him out no matter what he does?

Gaetz is already on record saying that he wants to start having votes every single day, right prayer and the morning pledge, to vacate McCarthy. Absolutely feckless – Matt. The vote. McCarthy. All of it. He says he’s mad about more than just not enough impeaching, but the main thing here is that every day it’s clearer and clearer Gaetz just wants McCarthy out.

So far, however, there has not been a vote to vacate. However, it’s hard to imagine McCarthy is going to make it through this session without losing his speakership.

That being said, while Matt has not yet called for a vote, he does say there’s one thing Kevin could do that would force him to call for a vote to vacate right then and there.

The budget.

In the background of all of this, we’ve got a national budget that needs to get passed. The government’s fiscal year ends this week, on September 30th. In order for the government to stay open, a new spending bill needs to be passed in the House, the Senate, and signed off on by Biden.

The path to a bill is currently uh… murky at best. However, it is possible that the House could pass a CR, or continuing resolution, which is a short-term spending bill that keeps the government open while also allowing for more debate on the budget.

The main sticking points are hard-line cuts that the Republicans want to make, as well as Republicans not wanting the bill to include billions for Ukraine aid or, are you ready for this… natural disaster aid in the US.

They don’t want to fund that.

As I talked about earlier this year, a lot of this is PR and a lot of this is what’s actually getting done. Right now, we’re seeing a lot of PR. I don’t cover PR. I cover the actual news. So, as we get news on the looking shut down this week, I’ll update you.

Normally, this would likely be solved with a CR and then budget, and to be honest, I sort of feel like that’s what’ll happen here still. However, there is another element at play.

Because if McCarthy brought that CR to the table, as a way to literally keep the lights on, Gaetz claims he will call the vote to vacate immediately.

Oh also Trump says that unless republicans don’t get everything they want, they should shut the government down. But who cares what he says – he’s not an elected official right now (and also we need to do everything we can to make sure that doesn’t change)

And not for nothing, but the Republicans in the Senate are not helping either.

See what I meant when I said it was messy? It’s like the last few seasons of As the World Turns… lots of drama, characters you truly can’t bring yourself to care about, and it’s very clear that the writers have lost the plot, but you’re in too deep to stop watching now!

The TL;DR here is… Republicans are a deeply unserious party that will literally burn their own house down, if it gets them the headlines.

I’ll keep you updated.

But can we please consider something super cool and maybe uh… vote them all out?

And that’s it. That’s the news!

I’m proud of pancakes. I love pancakes. I try not to have them too often, because I love them so much and I don’t want them to not be so special when I have them. But now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t think I could ever have so many pancakes that they’re not special.

But more than that… because you’re special and, frankly, I can’t get enough of ya… I’m proud of you.