Thursday, October 6, 2022

Last Call For Border Line Insanity, Con't

House Republicans, supremely confident that they will take control of the House in January, are promising to impeach President Biden and basically every cabinet official in hearing after hearing after hearing until Democrats just throw the towel in and abandon the administration, I guess. They've already promised to go after Biden, AG Merrick Garland, and VP Kamala Harris, and now House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy has it in for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy will be swiftly confronted in a Republican majority with a politically dicey proposition gaining steam within his conference: Launching impeachment proceedings against President Joe Biden’s top official in charge of the southern border.

Senior Republicans and a number of McCarthy allies are signaling little appetite – for now – in immediately impeaching Biden himself, despite the push among a handful of far-right Republicans seeking to remove the sitting President from office if their party takes the House in next month’s midterms.

But more than a dozen of former President Donald Trump’s top congressional allies – and several Republicans close to the leadership – told CNN that the focus instead should be on targeting Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and that a new GOP majority should hold impeachment proceedings over the problems at the border. Senior GOP sources close to leadership say it’s a matter of when – not if – House Republicans initiate an impeachment inquiry and that Mayorkas has become their No. 1 target, with their base itching for revenge after Trump’s two impeachments.

Impeaching a Cabinet official has only happened once in US history, and the issue would become moot if Mayorkas were to resign. But talk of impeaching Mayorkas already has prompted internal pushback among some veteran Republicans who are skeptical that their policy disputes with the Cabinet secretary meet the bar of charging him with committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Yet as they have railed over the migrant crisis in their push to regain the House, a number of leading Republicans fully endorse the idea and acknowledge it’s one that McCarthy will have to deal with if he wins the speakership following the midterms.

“Mayorkas deserves (impeachment) for sure, because we no longer have a border,” said Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, a McCarthy ally who is in line to chair the powerful House Judiciary Committee, which oversees impeachment proceedings.

But while Jordan personally supports the idea, he believes it will be “a conference decision,” saying, “I think we’ll all sit down. Kevin is open to sitting down and figuring out what we do.”

Added Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, a freshman GOP firebrand who has already endorsed impeachment articles for both Biden and Mayorkas: “Secretary Mayorkas should be a priority. Joe Biden’s his own demise.”

Yet McCarthy must also contend with a larger yet less vocal group of moderate and mainstream Republicans, who are wary of the potential political blowback over such a move and warning their colleagues not to weaponize the most powerful oversight tool at their disposal.

GOP Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas said Republicans “should focus on policy” and “leave some of the other more emotional topics for another day.”

“The risk is if people lose faith in the ability of Congress to even do its basic function,” Womack said of voter blowback for impeaching Mayorkas. “The people that I talk to from all stripes tell me they want a Congress that works – not a Congress that is preoccupied with kind of revenge-type agendas. Because then a lot of other things (that) need to happen don’t get to happen. And then that hurts the country.”
 
McCarthy being Speaker of the House being beside the point, I don't think the odds of this are as good as both CNN and the GOP are telling you, the notion that whoever is leading the GOP in January won't be impeaching Biden officials for all of 2023 is laughable. Of course these idiots will waste America's time and work to ruin the economy, and vastly overplay their hand. That's a given.

Perhaps then the point of this story is to convince the people who think impeaching Biden's cabinet on Day One might be a bad idea to vote for the Dems.

I certainly think that this would be a solution.

The Dank Brandon Rises

President Biden will pardon all federal simple marijuana offenses and take a look at rescheduling or even removing weed from the Controlled Substances Act, something that will free thousands. It's a BFD.
 
President Joe Biden on Thursday announced he is taking executive action to pardon Americans who've been convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law.

The action will benefit 6,500 people with prior federal convictions and thousands of others charged under the District of Columbia's criminal code, according to senior administration officials.

"No one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana," Biden said in a statement outlining the administration's new actions. "Sending people to prison for possessing marijuana has upended too many lives and incarcerated people for conduct that many states no longer prohibit."

"Criminal records for marijuana possession have also imposed needless barriers to employment, housing, and educational opportunities," Biden continued. "And while white and Black and brown people use marijuana at similar rates, Black and brown people have been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted at disproportionate rates."

Biden is also urging governors to do the same for individuals with state convictions and is requesting Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and Attorney General Merrick Garland to expeditiously review how marijuana is scheduled under federal law. 
 
Biden is finally fulfilling this promise, and you don't get much more serious on federal criminal justice reform than pardoning thousands for simple weed possession. 

And yes, states remain way out front on this ahead of Biden and the feds, but this is still massive. It means we're paving the way for decriminalization nationwide, where the vast majority of those arrested on pot charges are people of color.

This is the Joe Biden I voted for, and will vote for again.



Walker, Tales's Rearranger

Things just went from bad to cavernously abyssal for Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker.
 
After a woman revealed that Republican senatorial candidate Herschel Walker had urged her to have an abortion, Walker adamantly denied the story and claimed he had no idea who this woman could be.

But there’s a good reason the woman finds that defense highly doubtful: She’s the mother of one of his children.

When the woman first told The Daily Beast her story, we agreed not to reveal certain details about her identity over her concerns for safety and privacy. But then Walker categorically denied the story and said he didn’t know who was making this allegation.

On Wednesday morning, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade asked Walker whether he had figured out the woman’s identity, based on details in the original report.

“Not at all,” Walker replied. “And that’s what I hope everyone can see. It’s sort of like everyone is anonymous, or everyone is leaking, and they want you to confess to something you have no clue about.”

Walker then spun the report as an attack from “desperate” Democrats eager to maintain control of the pivotal Senate seat. Instead of being deterred by his now-public hypocrisy, he said he now feels “energized.”

“They see me as a big threat, and I know that and I knew it when I got into this race. But they don’t realize that I think they came for the wrong one. They energized me,” Walker said. “They energized me, because I know how they really want to try to keep this seat.”

The anonymous woman said that defense sounded ridiculous.

“Sure, I was stunned, but I guess it also doesn’t shock me, that maybe there are just so many of us that he truly doesn’t remember,” she said. “But then again, if he really forgot about it, that says something, too.”

The woman, a registered Democrat whose years-long relationship with Walker continued after the abortion, told The Daily Beast that her chief concern with revealing her name was because she is the mother of one of Walker’s own children and she wanted to protect her family’s privacy as best she could while also coming forward with the truth. (Walker has publicly acknowledged the child as his own, and the woman proved she is the child's mother and provided credible evidence of a long-term relationship with Walker.)

The Walker campaign declined to comment for this story.
 
To recap, Walker paid for an abortion, then continued to have a relationship with the woman, as well as fathering a child with her, who Walker wanted to also pay for a second abortion, then lied about all of it on national TV multiple times.
 
You live by the "family values campaign" that treats women as property, you get wrecked by it.