Dan Bishop's Fake Teeth

 

He snarls. He growls. He froths at the mouth. Especially when Kevin McCarthy was Speaker and Bishop was a member in good standing of the Freedom Caucus. Back in May, Bishop was the very first House Republican to publicly float ousting McCarthy after McCarthy snubbed the hardliners in his caucus to negotiate a debt ceiling deal with President Biden. “It is inescapable to me. It has to be done,” Bishop told reporters then. "It" meaning vacate the Chair.

But not so much last Tuesday. McCarthy voted to keep McCarthy, saying that Matt Gaetz's motion to vacate was just creating chaos when chaos is the last thing that the sanctified Dan Bishop wants to see ... having cheered lustily just days before for a government shutdown if he didn't get his way on spending. “Among Republicans, there are those who don’t think we should make a change to anything that happens up here,” Bishop said. “And I am going to cast every single vote to see to it that the direction changes. We’re going to change the way this institution functions, so far as I have any control of it.”

Mission accomplished!

But Bishop is running away from that congressional job anyway, leaving the US House to run in 2024 for attorney general of North Carolina, which is evidently in need of its own new dose of chaos and dysfunction. Dan Bishop can do the job. Or at least snarl, growl, and froth at the mouth, while others do the actual dirty deeds.

via GIPHY

"Just Talk"?! Say It Ain't So, Dan!

 

"...now that the dust has settled, those threats seem to largely have just been talk."

--Nicole Lafond, writing in Talking Points Memo about the fizzling of far-right threats against Kevin McCarthy

The Freedom Caucus met for the first time Monday night (June 5) since the debt ceiling deal passed the House. Guess who wasn't there. Dan Bishop, who had become the most visible, the most pugnacious, the most threatening member of the Freedom Caucus, who on camera raised his hand at a Freedom Caucus press conference (May 30th) that he was willing to "vacate the Speakership" over the deal that Speaker Kevin McCarthy made with President Biden. 

What? Dan didn't show up at the meeting of the group that has propelled him to headliner Fox News status? Did he not want to face his colleagues and have them know just how big a paper tiger he actually is? For as soon as that debt ceiling deal passed the House, Bishop went as silent (one might even say passive) about the future of Kevin McCarthy and the direction of the Republican caucus. Turned out, Dan Bishop's threat didn't cut it; the Freedom Caucus didn't matter, for the debt ceiling deal passed easily without them. 

But on Tuesday this week, the Freedom Caucus struck back. They banded together and refused to approve the rules governing a clutch of non-controversial bills, essentially shutting down the House. McCarthy adjourned the body until next Monday. First time since 2002 that the House failed to approve rules for debate, and it's all about the debt ceiling deal with Biden. The Freedom Caucus rejects any legislation that will require Democratic votes to pass.

But Dan Bishop is not front-and-center for once.

Is Dan Bishop the Biggest Dick in Mugstomp-on-the-Potomac?

 

Dan Bishop beat Democrat Dan McCready in a special election for the NC9 congressional seat in September 2019. In Congress, Bishop promptly joined the Freedom Caucus, a collection of soreheads that Bishop clearly determined to out-shine. (Bishop now represents NC8.) The acid in his veins sloshes like mango juice in a rolling barrel, and since 2019 he's never failed to grab the microphone and scorch the neighboring landscape.

He plays The Scourge of God. While he was running against McCready in 2019, he forced the ex-Marine to return a donation from fellow Congresswoman Ilhan Omar by smearing her (and McCready by association) with Muslim extremism and even anti-Semitism, a nasty move worthy of a too-clever-by-half white supremacist who enjoys the game.

Before September of 2019, Bishop had served terms in both the NC House and the NC Senate. In Raleigh, he was known as abrasive and obnoxiously conservative. The infamous Bathroom Bill, HB2, was his baby and led to a national boycott of North Carolina by major employers, conventions, sporting events, and entertainment figures. (He's terrible at economics.) About all that collateral damage, Bishop was defiantly unrepentant.

Another result of Bishop's nastiness: During the protests against Trump and trumpism at the 2017 Inauguration, former Gov. Pat McCrory, who had signed Bishop's bathroom bill into law, got recognized by a group of LGBTQ demonstrators on a Washington street, and when he began to run away from them, they gave chase, and there was film of McCrory's embarrassment. Bishop proposed criminalizing peaceful protests with a five-year minimum sentence. In 2020 Bishop became the first member of Congress to divulge the name of the whistleblower whose memo (about a phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky) sparked the first House impeachment inquiry. The federal Whistleblower Protection Act makes it illegal to divulge the name of a whistleblower, but so far as I know, Bishop experienced no repercussions.

Peach of a guy.

The Freedom Caucus held a fomenting press conference yesterday to denounce Speaker Kevin McCarthy's deal for ending the debt limit crisis, and Bishop was front and center. (Plenty on the left hate that deal too. As one activist said, "I'm sorry, but 'it could have been worse' just doesn't do it for me any more!") “This is a career-defining vote for every Republican,” Bishop said. “Many more need to emerge [in opposition] if there is any path to salvaging what we began as a unified conference .… We’re prepared to stand up and take the slings and the arrows.”

Unified conference? I'm no fan of Kevin McCarthy, but Dan Bishop clearly seems to hate the guy. Bishop was one of the 20 hardcore holdouts on McCarthy's elevation to the speakership. He was quoted at one point saying he'd rather resign from Congress than see McCarthy as Speaker of the House, but he denied he ever said that. He finally voted for McCarthy on the 12th roll-call (of 15), because he was reportedly promised his own subcommittee to investigate federal law enforcement agencies, which Bishop claims have been "weaponized against Republicans."

Yesterday, at the press conference, when a reporter asked the Freedom Caucus lawmakers if any of them now supported "vacating" the speakership (Motion to Vacate, which any single congressperson can now make, with humiliation awaiting for someone), Bishop was the only Republican to raise his hand.

The temperature of Bishop's malice is what fixes my attention. Whether it's queer people or Black people or a weak fellow traveler that feels Bishop's lash -- or reporters trying to gather facts -- he consistently confuses cruelty with ideological purity. "I am vindictive; therefore, I am right." 

What should scare the plaid pants and golf shoes off the citizens: Reportedly, Bishop is aiming to run for NC Attorney General. Same report also says that Bishop has already scared off the candidacy of the Republican who was considered a frontrunner candidate -- former US Attorney Andrew Murray, who now serves as district attorney for Henderson, Polk, and Transylvania counties.

Kevin McCarthy Has Had Enough of Madison Cawthorn

 

Implicating fellow Republican Congesspersons as sex-orgy-attending deviants is the line you apparently don't cross in Washington, and Madison Cawthorn crossed it. So Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy ordered Cawthorn into his office for an official paddling. And Cawthorn showed up. The photo of his leaving McCarthy's office yesterday suggests to some observers that the 26-year-old had been crying.

The backlash [against Cawthorn had been] remarkably swift. There was even talk about kicking Cawthorn out of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. Multiple members suggested publicly that a reprimand and an apology would be insufficient, and that Cawthorn needed to get specific if he was going to tell salacious tales.

“You should have to name names if you are going to go make those kinds of brushstroke accusations and impugn the character of people in this institution or … anybody else in this town,” an anonymous Republican told Politico. (Aaron Blake, reporting in the WashPost)

Sounding like the scourge of God Himself, Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) said, “He’ll need to be careful, because eventually he’ll be judged.”

Womack even alluded to wanting Cawthorn out, as in out of office: “If it’s: ‘Hey, don’t do that, again,’ we’ve been there. Frankly, if western North Carolina is not going to fix the problem, then leadership will have to.”

If western North Carolina is not going to fix the problem ... like, in the upcoming May 17th Republican primary, where Republican state lawmaker and primary challenger Chuck Edwards (only one of many in the primary) has earned himself the endorsement of both Phil Berger and Tim Moore (who are headlining a fundraiser for Edwards), along with Sen. Thom Tillis's endorsement. If Republicans coalesce around a single challenger in the 11th CD, they can indeed "fix the problem" of Madison Cawthorn (an outcome I've never much believed could happen but which is looking more likely).

Sacrificial Lambs

 

Democrats willing to put themselves forward in 2022 against some of the most notorious Republicans in the US Congress. Bless them, Saint Simeon, patron saint of ships of fools.

 

Holly McCormack

She's declared herself a candidate against the Republican poster child of Trumpist insurrection and all-around junkyard snarler, Marjorie Taylor Greene in the 14th CD of Georgia.

Holly McCormack sells insurance in Ringgold, Georgia, and has never held office before nor run for any office. Her launch video emphasizes economic opportunity: "Once thriving communities are now hanging by a thread. There’s real frustration walking these streets. Our towns aren’t what they used to be. We are hardworking people that just want a shot at the American dream. But for the people of northwest Georgia, the American dream seems out of reach."

On her Twitter feed, she refers to Taylor Greene as "Marge": "Marge is all stunts, and no substance. I’m here to talk about the REAL ISSUES impacting Georgians. She can take her circus somewhere else, because we’re going to take her seat."

McCormack has an ActBlue page, if you want to come to her side. She'll raise some serious money, but the 14th CD of Georgia is ominously red. They like Marjorie Taylor Greene because she's a roaring braggart and bully. 

Kerry Donovan

Kerry Donovan

She's a well known Colorado state senator who's filed paperwork declaring her candidacy against pistol-packing Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert in the 3rd CD of Colorado. Boebert was insurrection-adjacent on January 6th, has posed for photographs with notorious militia types, and has insisted on her right to wear a sidearm into the US House chamber.

Donovan also makes an issue of the sagging economic prospects of rural America: “Our part of Colorado has big problems we need to solve. We have a huge drought on our hands. We need to have a robust economic recovery. These are big problems that need serious and big solutions, and I think that this district deserves to have someone fighting for them in Congress."

Donovan grew up in Colorado’s mountains and first won election to the state senate in 2014. She runs her family’s Cooper Bar Ranch near the town of Edwards and previously served as a member of the Vail Town Council.

She's @KerryDonovanCO on Twitter and she too has an ActBlue account.

She also already has at least two fellow Democrats who'll compete in a primary for the privilege to take on Boebert -- ex-Marine Gregg Smith, an ex-employee of Erik Prince of Blackwater fame who says he blew the whistle on Prince; and lawyer Colin Wilhelm, who ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the Colorado House. But I'm from West Texas and naturally susceptible to a woman in a cowboy hat.

As Yet Unrecruited Democrat

Mo Brooks at the
Insurrection Rally
on Jan. 6th

Democrats in the 5th CD of Alabama are reportedly working hard to recruit a credible candidate to challenge Rep. Mo Brooks, who has made himself an avatar of Trumpist insurrection both before and after January 6th. “Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America?” Brooks yelled into the microphone at the Ellipse rally which came directly before the Capitol siege.

Three days after the riot, Brooks was publicly proud of helping to incite it: “I make no apology for doing my absolute best to inspire patriotic Americans to not give up on our country and to fight back against anti-Christian socialists in the 2022 and 2024 elections,” Mr. Brooks told a local newspaper. “I encourage EVERY citizen to watch my entire rally speech and decide for themselves what kind of America they want: One based on freedom and liberty or one based on godless dictatorial power.”

Brooks has always operated on the Republican far-right and at the specific instrux of his God, but he seems to have tripped a wire this time among Alabama Democrats (both of them?). “I plan to use whatever small influence I have to see that Mo is defeated,’’ said former Alabama Chief Justice Sue Bell Cobb. “We don’t need an ideologue representing Alabama.’’

Maybe the experience of defeating Roy Moore and winning the Senate seat for Doug Jones -- however short-lived it was, and it was short-lived -- has sparked new life in Alabama Democrats.

In recent election cycles, the Alabama Democratic Party hasn't even bothered to recruit a candidate in the 5th CD, but following Brooks' performance as a "Stop the Steal" promoter, the state party began raising money via two online solicitations. “We cannot allow Mo Brooks to win re-election and continue embarrassing the state of Alabama,’’ said one, titled “The No Mo Bull**** Fund .... These funds will be used to hold Mo accountable and recruit and support the next congressperson from the 5th Congressional District — a Democrat.’’ They reportedly have an ActBlue page set up, but I haven't found it.

Bruno Amato

A professional Hollywood bit actor, with some 109 film credits on IMDB.com, who has announced that he will challenge Rep. Kevin McCarthy in 2022. McCarthy you know as the harried Republican minority leader and ideologically The Weakest Link. But McCarthy represents the 23rd CD in California, home to Bakersfield and valley agriculture where Trumpists grow faster than artichokes, which is exactly the reason McCarthy took back (in a Bakersfield minute) his statement blaming Trump for the insurrection. Following that fuck-up, McCarthy quickly got himself to Mar-a-Lago to kiss ass and never say a discouraging word to Marjorie Taylor Greene.

McCarthy took 62% of the vote in the 23rd last November. He'll probably take 62% in 2022, or even more.

Trump: Full Frontal with the Democrats

Photo by Al Drago for the NYTimes

House Speaker Paul Ryan had earlier in the day yesterday called "the deal" that Trump struck with Congressional Democrats "ridiculous" and "disgraceful." Yet Trump jumped at the offer from Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to tie Hurricane Harvey relief to a three-month extension of government funding and increase in the debt ceiling.

In other words -- and the short version -- Schumer and Pelosi ate Republican lunch.

Besides Schumer and Pelosi, representing the Democrats, who else was there? Trump, yes, but also House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. All those Republicans opposed the Schumer-Pelosi plan -- one might say, opposed it bitterly -- but Trump ignored them. In fact, later on Air Force One, on his way to North Dakota, Trump deliberately praised Schumer and Pelosi for striking a deal with him while not even mentioning the Republicans who were also in the meeting.

Schumer and Pelosi now have more than just leverage. Their three-month deal on the debt ceiling will force another painful vote for Republicans around Christmas time, with every chance of political disaster. Paul Ryan had wanted a debt ceiling extension of 18 months, which would have put another vote beyond the 2018 mid-term elections. Trump in effect shat in Ryan's hat.

Trump also later talked up the mutual willingness among the Trump-Schumer-Pelosi triumvirate to make the "Dream Act" (DACA) into solid law. Trump now wants the Democrats in Congress to save him from the blowback over his tromping on DACA on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Ryan and McConnell fumed in the corner like jilted spouses in a nasty divorce.

The deal struck between the Democrats and Trump still has to go for votes in both House and Senate, and many Republicans are steaming mad about it. “The Pelosi-Schumer-Trump deal is bad,” Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska tweeted. Representative Mark Walker of North Carolina, chair of the Republican Study Committee, said, “I’m still processing this, but my first instinct is I’m not very happy about it." But can Republicans afford to vote against it?

Score one for Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.

How Did Virginia Foxx Vote?

That didn't take long. Last night, in a secret vote, the Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted to gut the independent Office of Congressional Ethics, which was set up in 2008 following congressional scandals. We don't know what the vote was, because it was secret. We don't know how Rep. Virginia Foxx voted, because the vote was secret, peckerheads!

It was a preliminary vote involving the rules that the majority Republicans can -- and will -- impose on the operation of the House. The package of rules has to be voted on again today in the full body. One wonders whether enough Republicans opposed the very bad "optics" of this move to join the Democrats in voting this down. We do know from inside sources that both Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy spoke against the motion.

Power breeds corruption. We've known all along that the Trump administration is likely to be the most corrupt in history, with more self-serving conflicts of interest than genes in the human genome, and now the Republicans in the U.S. House seem to be paving the primrose path to hell. We look for weak accountability over wrong-doing.

The Office of Congressional Ethics was established following a string of "bribery allegations against Representatives Duke Cunningham, Republican of California; William J. Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana; and Bob Ney, Republican of Ohio. All three were ultimately convicted and served time in jail."

Instead of an independent agency conducting investigations, we'll now have the House Ethics Committee, a bi-partisan bunch which has been more than just reluctant in the past to lower the boom on corruption. They pussy-foot, because they're foxes guarding the henhouse, and the American public are the chickens.

The North Carolina Connection to the Downfall of Kevin McCarthy

McCarthy & Ellmers

At 8 a.m. yesterday morning, as Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy was approaching a noon nomination and probable election in the Republican House Caucus as the new Speaker of the House, he received an email from a conservative Chicago activist with the subject line, “Kevin, why not resign like Bob Livingston?”

Bob Livingston, O my brethren, was the replacement Speaker chosen by the Republican caucus back when a sex scandal drove Newt Gingrich out of the House in 1998. Livingston was promptly scuttled by his own sex scandal. That's when the Republicans of that day found Denny Hastert hiding in a back room and elevated him to the speakership, because everybody said that Denny had never had sex with anyone (little did they know!).

Anyhoo, according to Huffington Post, the "why don't you resign" email yesterday morning amounted to a threat of being outed publicly for an alleged romantic, extra-marital affair with North Carolina Congresswoman Renee Ellmers. Ellmers, as a matter of fact, was also a recipient of that 8 a.m. poison email. Apparently, if you're anybody in DeeCee, or hang out at the Capitol Lounge or the Tune Inn on Capitol Hill, you've known about the McCarthy-Ellmers rumor for months!

Following that 8 a.m. threatening email, McCarthy was then treated to a very public letter written by NC 3rd Dist. Congressman Walter Jones, which contained its own potent threat. Though the letter was addressed to the Republican Conference Chair, who would be running the caucus meeting at noon, it got wide distribution and without any doubt got into the hands of Kevin McCarthy.

Jones wrote, "With all the voter distrust of Washington felt around the country, I am asking that any candidate for Speaker of the House, majority leader, and majority whip withdraw himself from the leadership election if there are any misdeeds he has committed since joining Congress that will embarrass himself, the Republican Conference and the House of Representatives if they become public."

What did Walter Jones know and when did he know it?

Oh, okay, Jones has denied that he was writing about Kevin McCarthy specifically, if you want to believe it. And McCarthy has denied that Ellmers or Jones had anything whatsoever to do with his decision, if you want to believe that.

Bad Night in Mugstomp-on-the-Potomac

Both Virginia Foxx (R-5th District) and Brad Miller (D-13th District) voted against the Senate's "fiscal cliff" legislation last night. I agree with Foxx and Miller: that "fix" should not have passed.

House Republicans fractured, badly, and John Boehner's speakership appears to be on the line. Foxx didn't vote with Boehner and with her recent kissy-face partner, Paul Ryan, who amazingly supported the Senate deal. She voted against, following the path of that super ambitious snake Eric Cantor, and that other ambitious snake Kevin McCarthy, both of whom are clearly angling to push Boehner off his mountain. "Foxx and Cantor, sitting in a tree..."

Boehner reportedly told Sen. Harry Reid to "Go fuck yourself!" ... twice. No report yet on how many of Boehner's own Republican conference suggested he do something similar, after he informed them that the fiscal cliff legislation included no spending cuts. If Foxx didn't say it, she was certainly thinking it.

As for the Negotiator-in-Chief, we see no reason to retract our earlier estimation of his poker-playing abilities. President Obama gave away the farm, or at least a large portion of it, and the "victory" the White House is celebrating today is rotten at the core, setting up another confrontation with the Republican House in a couple of months where, once again, the president will negotiate.

Oy.