Wow. This is an epic post from yesterday. Rebecca Solnit is awesome, brilliant, and truly gifted in her consistent ability to focus and distil the most important news of these incredibly crazy times. — Molly
Today the Republican Party imploded some more in a big way:
--the leader of this political party is on trial for financial crimes today, where a judge just ordered him to shut up or else; that judge has already stripped him of his business licenses and quite probably his most significant properties;
--(no news today, but the party's former next most powerful person, the former senate majority leader, is falling apart in front of our eyes and sometimes struck dumb by whatever is or isn't going on in his head;)
--the party's own house speaker, in a drama that has never happened before in this nation, was today ousted by a handful of his own party members and will not run again and there is no clear next leader and he let them have this weapon they used against him, this easily triggered removal;
--the congressman from a swampy district who was the leader of that ejection of the speaker was reportedly on a vendetta because the speaker would not kill the investigation into the swamp congressman's sex crimes, including trafficking and statutory rape as well as money stuff, and now his own party hates him.
The New Republic notes: "House lawmakers have for the first time ousted their own speaker—and no one has a clue what comes next. In fact, some are literally crying about it." The sheer criminality, looniness, and venality is so striking.
And there are multiple criminal trials to go for the leader. It's also striking how readily they all turn on and against each other. Trump isn't helping his co-conspirators who tried to help him with stealing the election, and Giuliani is in huge financial trouble, with many lawsuits against him, including for sexual harrassment/abuse. Principals involved in the Georgia case and the classified documents case seem to be turning on him. When selfishness is your ideological basis, loyalty is pretty flimsy.
It's just a staggering moment. Rep. Stefanik: "This Republican Majority has exceeded all expectations."
And insurrectionists continue to get identified, tried, and imprisoned.
p.s. There is news on McConnell today. He hung out with Sam Bankman-Fried a lot to get him to donate $$$ to anti-Trump Republicans, speaking of fissures in the party.
Washington Post: By the time Gaetz (R-Fla.) finally made good on his long-standing threats to force a vote to topple McCarthy (R-Calif.), his Republican colleagues were so fed up with him that they wouldn’t let him debate from within their caucus, banishing him to the minority Democratic side of the room. Gaetz’s successful fight to remove McCarthy from the speakership has cost him in his own conference, lawmakers say. The GOP on Tuesday was considering expelling Gaetz from its caucus. McCarthy, meanwhile, told Republicans he would not seek reelection as speaker after Gaetz pushed him out.
Politico: Trump’s co-defendants are already starting to turn against him
New Republic: There are plenty of reasons to savor this moment, even if you’re not exactly a Matt Gaetz fanboy. McCarthy has spent his months in office striving to protect Donald Trump while denigrating and diminishing the vital work of the January 6 committee. He authorized a bogus impeachment push against President Biden, despite there being no evidence of any wrongdoing whatsoever. On only two occasions did he break from the far right: once to cut a deal with Biden to raise the debt limit (which he quickly reneged on) and again late last month on a short-term deal to keep the government open. It was the latter defection that cost him his job. The irony, as Norm Ornstein pointed out on Twitter, is that McCarthy is being pushed out for being an institutionalist—for compromising to keep the government open—when few have done more to trash the institution of the House of Representatives.
The Lincoln Project
@ProjectLincoln
BREAKING: Judge Engoron has just ordered a gag order against Donald Trump for posting a personal attack on the judge's clerk, attorney Allison Greenfield. Violating this order could land Trump in jail for 30 days.
Petty as hell: "As one of his first acts as the acting speaker, Rep. Patrick McHenry ordered former Speaker Nancy Pelosi to vacate her Capitol hideaway office by Wednesday, according to an email sent to her office viewed by POLITICO."
To which Congressman Joaquin Castro @JoaquinCastrotx said:
·"Pretty much the Congressional GOP in a nutshell — lots of important, historic things going on but waste your time on the petty shit instead".
I started this with a fun picture but it's a major moment so I went with J.M.W. Turner and the burning of the Houses of Parliament.
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