Last Call For Going After Joe

In order to take the public's eye off of Trump's pending indictment, House Republicans are screaming at the top of their lungs to anyone in earshot that not only are they assured taking back the House, they plan to impeach President Joe Biden on multiple charges of "high crimes" starting in January.

Republicans hoping to seize control of the House in November are already setting their sights on what is, for many of them, a top priority next year: impeaching President Biden.

A number of rank-and-file conservatives have already introduced impeachment articles in the current Congress against the president. They accuse Biden of committing “high crimes” in his approach to a range of issues touching on border enforcement, the coronavirus pandemic and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

Those resolutions never had a chance of seeing the light of day, with Democrats holding a narrow control of the lower chamber. But with Republicans widely expected to win the House majority in the midterms, many of those same conservatives want to tap their new potential powers to oust a president they deem unfit. Some would like to make it a first order of business.

“I have consistently said President Biden should be impeached for intentionally opening our border and making Americans less safe,” said Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.). “Congress has a duty to hold the President accountable for this and any other failures of his Constitutional responsibilities, so a new Republican majority must be prepared to aggressively conduct oversight on day one.”

The conservative impeachment drive is reminiscent of that orchestrated by liberals four years ago, as Democrats took control of the House in 2019 under then-President Trump. At the time, a small handful of vocal progressives wanted to impeach Trump, largely over accusations that he’d obstructed a Justice Department probe into Russian ties to his 2016 campaign. The idea was repeatedly rejected by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), not least out of fear that it would alienate voters in tough battleground districts.

The tide turned when a whistleblower accused Trump of pressuring a foreign power to find dirt on his political opponent — a charge that brought centrist Democrats onto the impeachment train. With moderates on board, Pelosi launched a formal impeachment inquiry in September of 2019, eight months after taking the Speaker’s gavel. Three months later, the House impeached Trump on two counts related to abusing power.

The difference between then and now is that liberals, in early 2019, were fighting a lonely battle with scant support. This year, heading into the midterms, dozens of conservatives have either endorsed Biden’s impeachment formally, or have suggested they’re ready to support it.

At least eight resolutions to impeach Biden have been offered since he took office: Three related to his handling of the migrant surge at the southern border; three targeting his management of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last year; one denouncing the eviction moratorium designed to help renters during the pandemic; and still another connected to the overseas business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden.

Those proposals will expire with the end of this Congress. But some of the sponsors are already vowing to revisit them quickly next year. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), the lead sponsor of four of the impeachment resolutions, is among them.

“She believes Joe Biden should have been impeached as soon as he was sworn in, so of course she wants it to happen as soon as possible,” Nick Dyer, a Greene spokesman, said Monday in an email.

 

Remember, "high crimes and misdemeanors" are "whatever 218 House members decide it means" should Kevin McCarthy's motley mess get control. We certainly won't have any reasonable or even logical response to the nation's problems for years to come, nothing but impeachment hearings, committee hearings, subcommittee hearings, oversight hearings, and in the meantime Americans will just have to sit around while these idiots masturbate in public.

We have to keep the House and Senate or nothing gets done, another two years of worthless gridlock, and Americans suffering under Republican stupidity.

Vote like your country depends on it, because it does.

Secret Squirrels, Con't

Deputy Secret Service Director Tony Ornato, who was also an aide to the Trump White House, is stepping down from his office as the January 6th investigation focuses on Trump's USSS detail, deleted (and now recovered) text messages from the day and the agency's role in the attempted electoral coup last year.

 

Tony Ornato, the senior Secret Service official who served as a top aide in Donald Trump’s White House and faced scrutiny from the Jan. 6 select committee earlier this summer, announced his retirement Monday.

The agency confirmed Ornato’s retirement, which was announced internally earlier in the day. He’s the latest high-level official in the Secret Service to announce his departure in recent weeks. Spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said Ornato — who joined the Secret Service in 1997 — became eligible for retirement earlier this year and leaves the agency in good standing.

Ornato’s role in the Trump White House made national headlines after explosive testimony by former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who said he had briefed Trump and other White House officials about armed elements within Trump’s rally crowd on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021.

Although Ornato quickly signaled he was willing to testify in response to Hutchinson’s account, he has yet to appear for a new interview with the select committee, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

Asked about the status of those discussion, Guglielmi said “We have continuously made Tony Ornato available.” He noted, however, that Ornato is now a private citizen and no longer a federal employee.

In a statement, Ornato said he retired today “to pursue a career in the private sector.”

“I retired from the U.S. Secret Service after more than 25 years of faithful service to my country, including serving the past five presidents,” he said. “ I long-planned to retire and have been planning this transition for more than a year.”

Ornato’s departure comes shortly after the director of the Secret Service, James Murray, announced his own intention to retire but put it on hold amid expanding investigations into the agency’s conduct in the days surrounding the Capitol attack.

 

I think Ornato was given a choice, given his decades of service: retire or else. As far as his cooperation with the January 6th investigation, I would think things are too late for him. We know House Democrats (and Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger) plan more primetime hearings next month.

We'll see if all of that is true.

The Jackson, Hole

Jackson, Mississippi's water system has been coming apart since deadly flooding last month, and this week the municipal water plant has completely failed, leaving some 200,000 residents without any water to drink, bathe, or flush as GOP Gov Tate Reeves scrambles to contain the disaster in the state's capital city, created solely by Republican "governance".

 

Jackson’s water system is failing and water across the city is entirely unsafe to drink, officials said at an emergency briefing Monday night. State leadership have warned all residents of Mississippi’s capital city to boil water before drinking or even brushing their teeth.

“We need to provide water for up to 180,000 people for an unknown period of time,” Reeves said tonight.

“Please stay safe,” Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said at the evening briefing. “Do not drink the water. In too many cases, it is raw water from the reservoir being pushed through the pipes. Be smart, protect yourself, protect your family, preserve water, look out for your fellow man and look out for your neighbors.”

Reeves declared a state of emergency over the Jackson water crisis tonight, ordering the state to step in to prop up the failing O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant and to deliver potable water to Jackson residents beginning tomorrow.

“This is a very different situation from a boil water notice,” Reeves said at a press event tonight. “Until it is fixed, we do not have reliable running water at scale. The city cannot produce enough water to fight fires, to flush toilets and to meet other critical needs. The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency will take the state’s lead on distributing drinking water and non-drinking water to residents of the City of Jackson.”

Following a month without clean, drinkable water, Jackson has now mostly lost water pressure, with operational collapses at O.B. Curtis reducing the flow of water through the city’s distribution system to the degree that residences and businesses across the city have little or no water at all.

While the city highlighted the potential flooding of structures at O.B. Curtis due to the high crest of the Pearl River over the weekend, officials have yet to firmly establish the direct causes of the plant failures at the water treatment plant.

“The main pumps had recently been damaged severely,” Reeves said, “about the same time as the prolonged boil water notice began. The facility is now operating on smaller backup pumps.”

Whatever the cause, Reeves said that the State will be intervening to prop up the water plant on the brink.

“The state has created an incident command structure, is surging our resources to the city’s water treatment facility and beginning emergency maintenance, repairs, and improvements,” Reeves said. “We will do everything in our power to restore water pressure and get water flowing back to the people of Jackson.”

A lack of visibility at O.B. Curtis has Mississippi State Department of Health leadership unable to answer how much water is currently flowing out of the plant and into Jackson’s pipes. Tomorrow, leadership warned, they may discover that O.B. Curtis is not producing any water at all.

Operational failures at O.B. Curtis are downstream from the facility’s most pressing issue—a near complete lack of qualified personnel. Class A water operators and regular maintenance staff are sorely needed at O.B. Curtis. The governor said tonight that the State would be acquiring the operators necessary, and would split the cost with the City of Jackson.

“We will cash flow the operation and the City will be responsible for half of the cost of the emergency improvements that we make,” Reeves said. “I want to make something very clear to those operators we have been and will be reaching out to: You will be paid for your work. The state is owning that guarantee.”

 

Jackson's water crisis has been years in the making, for the simple reason that five out of six city residents are Black in a state where white Republicans have run the show for decades. Jackson has begged for help from the state, and has been told time and time again that the problem is not enough federal dollars to replace the city's aging infrastructure.

 

The city's main water treatment plant has come close to collapse several times in the last 24 months, and EPA chief Michael Regan has visited the city several times in order to bring attention to the city's plight and to promise help.  President Biden's infrastructure bill has provided some money, but fixing decades of neglect will cost at least $1 billion, and the state sure as hell isn't going to spend that kind of money on Black folk.

But this week, after record flooding in 2020 and again over the weekend, now has seen that infrastructure collapse entirely.

This doesn't happen without deliberate choices by state Republicans.