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.

 

Who'll Lead the NCGOP?

 

John Kane, insurgent candidate
for NCGOP Chair

There's a contest going on right now that'll be fought out and settled one way or another on the second weekend of June at the Khoury Convention Center in Greensboro ... the state Republican Party Convention, where the biggest question before the delegates will be who's going to be the next Chair of the NCGOP? Behind Door Number One: current chair Michael Whatley, running for reelection with the blessings of the old Republican mainstream; Door Number Two features an extreme-MAGA ideologue, John Kane, who comes from an election-denying gene pool of some prominence.

The Daily Haymaker, a MAGA standard-bearer who knows no end of serious contempt for the rest of the world, makes the savaging of Michael Whatley a long-running and therefore tiresome replay. The most recent Haymaker headline story ("Michael Whatley: A Cheney-Kinzinger Republican") opens like this:

The current NCGOP chairman loves to talk about Donald Trump and post pictures of himself with Trump’s plane. But much of what he does and says aligns much more with Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger — the two former “Republican” congressmen who colluded with Democrats on the farcical so-called “January 6 committee.”

It takes great courage and fortitude against sin, doesn't it? to sweep away every piece of evidence, including the ocular proof, as totally and unironically "farcical," but at least we know the mind-set we've waded into. Haymaker hates Michael Whatley (at least in today's blog post) because Whatley supposedly "boasted" that he had been the first Republican state leader to "condemn the mob."

Michael Whatley

But who's John Kane, you ask. John Kane is the number one son of an elder John Kane, a renown Raleigh mega-developer who was actually honored as Tar Heel of the Year in 2016. The elder Kane is also renown for raising big money for Republicans. The younger John Kane (he who would be chairman) emphasized his MAGA bona fides in an interview with Haymaker, hitting especially "election integrity," which is MAGA code for a cascade of conspiracies: "The election was stolen and we have to prevent more theft and all Democrats (and some RINOs) are suspect."

Kane also seems on-board for punishing Sen. Thom Tillis and other RINOs for snubbing MAGA orthodoxy, so if Kane wins, we might expect a purge-night with a lot of screaming.

A blow for the Haymaker crowd: Way back in January, Donald Trump endorsed Michael Whatley for reelection. That was before there was a John Kane campaign, so the Trump endorsement perhaps means only that he didn't have another choice.

Anger Lights a Fire

 

Nationwide, voter files have been updated and verified and the county and precinct-level data have been gathered and organized, which means that truly data-driven and meaningful analyses are emerging of what really happened last fall.

Catalist, a Democratic data analytics firm, has released "What Happened,"  and Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report digs into it. Some of the data supports conventional wisdom, some not (and North Carolina seems even more an outlier from Democratic trends in other purple states). 

This particular observation about young voters may be my strongest takeaway:

After 2008, many assumed that Obama's personal connection with younger voters would transfer to the Democratic Party's candidates in subsequent elections. That didn't happen. Instead, what seems to be driving younger voters to the polls isn't love, but anger. In 2018, Donald Trump's presence in the White House was a motivating factor for these voters. In 2022, anger over the abortion decision was the most likely catalyst for turnout.

Google quotes about anger, and you'll be hard pressed to find anybody praising rage as a productive driver of action. But, hell! The Trumpists made out pretty well with it as their signal emotion, so maybe it's high time the Democrats learn to manage that boiling pot.

 

Credit: Carolina Forward

Gov. Cooper Goes To the Bully Pulpit

 

This was our governor last Monday (May 23), calling all of us who care about public schools to rise up, git the frickin pitchforks, because the Republican extremists in the General Assembly mean to let all the little red schoolhouses fall into ruin and disappear, replaced by businesses in it for the profit. (If I had edited the text that the governor reads from a teleprompter, I would have cut it by half.)

The Republicans went ape, especially the newest one, Tricia Cotham, who dismissed the governor's appearance as "political theater." Why yes (even a blind hog finds an acorn eventually). Senate boss Phil Berger's office joined that chorus: “...meaningless publicity stunts do nothing to improve educational outcomes in our state.”

“The general public doesn’t realize the disaster that is brewing,” Cooper told the AP.

The Republicans played their trump: Cooper himself sent his own kids to private schools. So there, hypocrite.

Briana Brough took to Twitter in Cooper's defense: "OMG the pearl clutching They are so mad Cooper is using the one tool left in his toolbox (the bully pulpit) to let people know what this voucher scheme would actually do: give wealthy families a tax break while further defunding public schools. So what if Cooper sent one of his kids to private school? That's his right! There are scholarships to help people afford it. What we shouldn't do is subsidize wealthy folks (like him!) sending their kids to private school while underfunding public schools that serve everyone."

Briana Brough is a Durham activist (a founder of FlipNC) and has joined up with others (Durham Families for Every Child NC), which is hosting a teach-in on the whole Republican privatization crowd and their schemes:

This is the kind of consciousness-raising that needs to be going on across the state. Briana Brough wrote about it compellingly in a Twitter thread:

This plan would siphon $200M from public schools. It would actually DECREASE the amount the state kicks in by about $2300 for each public school kid who transfers to private. But it would INCREASE state funding for a kid currently attending private school by an average of $5000.That means the state will be spending about $138M in new expenditures to families already paying for private school. 

It will pay the same amount for kids who transfer to private schools, but will cost public schools $200M b/c the value of the voucher is < per pupil spending. So basically, half the voucher funding will go to families already wealthy enough to pay for private education. The rest will go to families wealthy enough to make up the difference between the voucher and tuition. 

The rest of us - the vast majority of families who either don't want, can't afford, or don't have a good private school option - get screwed by a budget that continues to disrespect educators and underfund our public school system in violation of the North Carolina Constitution.

The Queen of Mean

 

Rep. Virginia Foxx, as the Republican chair of the Education Committee in the US House, put her talons deep into President Biden's student debt forgiveness program, because let's face it, forgiveness has never been a prominent feature of Madam Foxx's core. (If President Trump had proposed student debt relief, and added government-paid free trips in his jet, with a Trump steak and all the fixins, Foxx would have absolutely drooled with abject appreciation for the spread. But Biden student debt relief is nothing but a "bailout" of unworthy cry-babies who never vote for the likes of me.

When she was in the NC Senate, she once said out loud, "The worst thing we can do is to get government involved in solving problems." During her tenure in the Senate, she was famous for dismissing voters curtly: "There's nothing I can do. Don't contact me again about this." That's a mentality I cannot grok.

Saul Friedman once remarked that Foxx seems like a benign grandma until she speaks. Then her heart reveals itself as a cold cinder of retribution. She stood in the US House and denounced the pending vote on a hate crime bill following the Matthew Shepard murder ("because he was gay"). She said the "gay" part was just "a hoax" to steamroll Congress. She belittled Shepard's death, incidentally, in front of Shepard's mother, who sat in the gallery.

"There are no Americans who don't have healthcare. Everybody in this country has access to healthcare," said Foxx on July 24, 2009, in a Capitol Hill press conference -- evidently putting the emphasis on access, meaning, we guess, that an ambulance will take you to the hospital if you're hit by a car -- but, suckers, you're gonna have to get hit by a car to get medical assistance if you're without insurance.

Remember what she did after Hurricane Katrina wiped out so many lives, so many livelihoods on the Gulf coast? On September 8, 2005, Foxx was one of only 11 members of Congress to vote against an emergency relief bill for Katrina victims. She suggested instead that people with devastated lives should pray. Meanwhile she posted helpful instructions on her congressional website for directing private-sector contractors to the federal trough. Throughout her political career, Foxx has bragged about the poverty she grew up in, but the experience evidently did not enlarge her character.

So of course she ridiculed and voted to end Biden's student debt relief ... while continuing to "serve" a Congressional district with multiple colleges and with many students going into massive debt in order to get ahead in this life. Foxx herself got ahead and was fortunate (as well as quick with the hands), but don't ask her to have sympathy for others. It's just too heavy a lift.

Lightning Strikes Kidwell and McNeely

 

Wow. Apparently, the GOP leadership in the NC House actually worries just a tab about its image.

Last week, Republican Rep. Keith Kidwell remarked that Democrat Diamond Staton-Williams, who spoke about getting an abortion, had perhaps been raised in the Church of Satan. And Rep. Jeffrey McNeely questioned whether Democrat Abe Jones only got into Harvard because of his race.

This morning Kidwell and McNeely were stripped of their leadership roles in the Republican House Caucus.

Slow News Monday

 

This cryptic headline appeared in the News and Observer yesterday: "Former Gov. Pat McCrory is not running for president, but he does have plans for 2024." What?

Turns out it was a nothing-burger article, very much in keeping with the latter days of our former governor, who was during his one term in office little more than a throw rug under the feet of Berger-Moore. The news is that McCrory is now a "volunteer" -- he used that word himself -- with a struggling new political "party" calling itself No Labels (what, "Beige" wasn't even considered as the name?)

Not really that "new" either. It was founded in 2010 with Joe Lieberman as the figurehead national chair. The NandO article at least got me interesting in learning more about No Labels, whose centrist goals are wholly unobjectionable except that it might -- be warned! -- might run a third-party presidential ticket in 2024 "if data shows that Americans aren’t satisfied with the party nominees and the No Labels candidates have a path forward to win, McCrory said."

Which means, practically speaking, diluting the vote for Joe Biden and allowing the nightmare of Trump to return.

The one tangible thing No Labels has accomplished is the formation in the US House of the Problem Solvers Caucus, which has accomplished some good things including passage of Biden's big infrastructure act.