Last Call For The GOP Circus Of The Damned, Con't

It's quite obvious that Rep. Steve Scalise doesn't have the votes for Speaker, and he's turning to House GOP Armed Services committee chair Rep. Mike Rogers to make an overture to House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to play Let's Make A Deal! again.

 

“They put us in this ditch along with eight traitors,” Rogers said, referring to hardline GOP dissidents who toppled Speaker Kevin McCarthy last week. “We’re still the majority party, we’re willing to work with them, but they gotta tell us what they need.”

Rogers said the Republicans’ speaker nominee, Steve Scalise, is in the same situation McCarthy was in struggling to get the 217 votes needed for election. A lot of Republicans, Rogers said, would never vote for conservative firebrand Jim Jordan, who narrowly lost to Scalise on a secret ballot vote Wednesday.

“To limit ourselves to just getting 217 out of our conference I think is not a wise path forward,” Rogers said.

Rogers said the disarray in the House is endangering US national security and preventing approval for aid to Israel in its war with Hamas.

“It is perilous what’s happening in Israel right now. It could get much worse,” Rogers said. “And we’re paralyzed right now.”

 

Jeffries has Scalise, Rogers, and the GOP Clown Show over a barrel, and it's the worst-kept secret in Washington.  The October 7th attack by Hamas has suddenly made it very necessary for the Speaker fight to be ended.

Democrats are ready to form a bipartisan coalition to lead the House, Jeffries said.

“The House of Representatives has been broken by chaos, dysfunction and extremism,” Jeffries said. “The only way out is to enter into an enlightened bipartisan coalition of the willing in order to get things back on track.”

The leadership vacuum in the US House has rendered Congress unable to act on legislation.

Another Republican, David Joyce of Ohio, told reporters he’s contacted Democrats about expanding the authority of acting Speaker Pro Tem Patrick McHenry of North Carolina so that the House can act on legislation. Joyce said he has proposed granting McHenry such powers for a limited period of time — perhaps 30 or 60 days — and Democrats have been amenable to that approach to act on issues like Israel.

Steve Womack, a senior Republican appropriator, supports that idea. The “only other option,” he said, is for Democrats to enable election of a Republican speaker nominee by voting “present,” lowering the threshold needed for victory.

Jeffries has offered discussions on a bipartisan path forward. But Rogers said Democrats should make a specific offer that could provide a basis for opening negotiations.

“They haven’t offered jack,” Rogers said.

 

It's not on Hakeem Jeffries or the Democrats to offer the Clown Show anything. You'd think someone would tell Rogers his negotiation position is the equivalent of a man standing on a burning bridge. Besides, McCarthy made it clear he wouldn't negotiate in good faith, and it looks like Rogers is going down this same path.

We'll see what backchannel offers can be brought up, but my guess is that Jeffries has had plenty of time to name his price to help Scalise, and who knows if the Clown Show will agree to anything.

[UPDATE] No, they won't. Scalise has withdrawn his name from the race for Speaker.

The Clown Show rolls on.

Orange Meltdown, Israel Edition

Donald Trump may be a blithering chaos elemental, but he does tend to follow a couple of rules in general, which explains him turning on Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday night.

 

Donald Trump lashed out at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, telling a crowd of Florida supporters that the countries' intelligence failed, and its enemies were ''very smart."

"I'll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down," Trump told a group of supporters Wednesday in West Palm Beach, Fla. "That was a very terrible thing."

Trump discussed the operation that killed Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani in early 2020. The former president said Israel now has to strengthen itself as it fights Hamas and other militant groups, including perhaps Iran.

Supporters of Israel said on social media said that the Soleimani operation was aided by Israeli intelligence, while others criticized Trump for criticizing Israel's government in the midst of a crisis.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is running against Trump for the Republican nomination, zeroed in on Trump's description of Hezbollah leaders as "very smart."

Noting that at least 1,200 Israelis and 22 Americans have been killed in recent days, DeSantis said on the X website that "it is absurd that anyone, much less someone running for President, would choose now to attack our friend and ally, Israel, much less praise Hezbollah terrorists as 'very smart.' As President, I will stand with Israel and treat terrorists like the scum that they are."

During what was otherwise a campaign speech, Trump claimed that an unnamed U.S. official described Israel as being vulnerable from the north, and that kind of information would be helpful to adversaries.

"You know, Hezbollah is very smart - they're all very smart," Trump said at one point.

 

Many of you have already sussed out these rules, and they follow a pattern that explains Trump's modus operandi here.

 

First, Trump doesn't like "losers". He's seen Netanyahu come under attack for critical intelligence failures at best on the Hamas attack and at worst, being warned and letting it happen anyway. 

Mounting questions over Israel’s massive intelligence failure to anticipate and prepare for a surprise Hamas assault were compounded Monday when an Egyptian intelligence official said that Jerusalem had ignored repeated warnings that the Gaza-based terror group was planning “something big” — which included an apparent direct notice from Cairo’s intelligence minister to the prime minister.

The Egyptian official said Egypt, which often serves as a mediator between Israel and Hamas, had spoken repeatedly with the Israelis about “something big,” without elaborating.

He said Israeli officials were focused on the West Bank and played down the threat from Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is made up of supporters of West Bank settlers who have demanded a security crackdown there in the face of a rising tide of violence over the last 18 months.

“We have warned them an explosion of the situation is coming, and very soon, and it would be big. But they underestimated such warnings,” the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the content of sensitive intelligence discussions with the media, told The Associated Press.

Netanyahu denied receiving any such advance warning, saying in the course of an address to the nation Monday night that the story was “fake news.”

 

The problem for Bibi is that House Republicans are backing this intel. 

Egyptian intelligence officials warned their Israeli counterparts of a a possible terror attack days before Hamas slaughtered at least 1,300 people, according to the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee — who said Wednesday he doesn’t know how Israel and the US missed the signs.

“We know the Egyptian intelligence service handed this off days before the terrorist invasion, if you will, or attack,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) told CNN following a closed-door intelligence briefing. “So, there’s a lot of questions about that.”

 

Second, more than a few pundits and pols have accused Trump of being complicit in the Hamas attack with his failed foreign policy, the loudest voice being Trump's own former VP, Mike Pence.

Former Vice President Mike Pence tore into Donald Trump and pointed to isolationism in the Republican Party as complicit in the sweeping Hamas attack on Israel, decrying American “retreat on the world stage.”

In a scathing rebuke, Pence faulted “voices of appeasement like Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis that I believe have run contrary to the tradition in our party that America is the leader of the free world.”

Pence’s comments in Iowa represented the first ripple in the Republican primary from the violence that erupted on Saturday — and effectively threw down a challenge to Republicans he said have “embraced the language of isolationism and appeasement.”

The role of the United States in maintaining global security is one of the most important points of friction between the Republican presidential candidates — one that could now erupt in a new way because of the violence in Israel. Pence’s criticism of Trump was uncharacteristically pointed. But it was even more remarkable for the break it represented in their previously lockstep approach to Israel. Once a signature priority of the Trump-Pence administration, the U.S.-Israel relationship Saturday was suddenly becoming a wedge issue between them.

Faulting President Joe Biden for “projecting weakness on the world stage,” Pence also pointed an accusatory finger rightward at an event here near the Nebraska border.

“This is also what happens when you have leaders in the Republican Party signaling retreat on the world stage,” Pence said.

 

Third, the Biden administration is backing Netanyahu and his war council, which means Trump will do the opposite. 

As Israel prepares to launch a likely ground invasion into Gaza, the Biden Administration and leading members of Congress are crafting an American aid package of roughly $2 billion in supplementary funding to support the nation’s war effort against Hamas, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell TIME.

The funding would go toward replenishing Israel’s stockpile of interceptors for its Iron Dome missile-defense system, artillery shells, and other munitions. If approved, the assistance would come at a crucial time for Israel, as it gears for a lengthy and devastating offensive against the terror group that brutally massacred more than 1,200 Israelis in Saturday’s surprise attack.

“We’re heading into a war for many, many weeks, maybe several months, in which the objective is to dismantle Hamas,” Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, told TIME shortly after attending a briefing from White House officials on the situation. “It will be perhaps the highest casualty war Israel has faced since the War of Independence,” he added, referring to the 1948 blitz that five Arab nations waged against Israel shortly after its establishment. “But Israel didn’t ask for this.”

 

Finally, Trump never passes on an opportunity to be a raging antisemite and an Islamophobe if he can do both at the same time. 

Dumping Bibi under the bus accomplishes Trump's agenda on all four of those points. Expect a harder line against Israel's nearly assured Gaza invasion in the weeks and months to come.

Meet The New Ringmaster Of The GOP Clown Show

As expected, a majority of the House Republican caucus decided on Rep. Steve Scalise as their candidate for House Speaker rather than Rep. Jim Jordan, a direct repudiation of Trump's endorsement (everything he touches still turns to shit though). But the concept of Scalise getting 218 votes however still looks very elusive.

 

House Republicans on Wednesday nominated Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) to be the next Speaker, sending his candidacy to the House floor following Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) stunning ouster last week, multiple lawmakers told The Hill.

Scalise secured the nomination 113-99 in a closed-door GOP conference meeting, defeating House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in a close race that did not have a clear front-runner heading into the internal vote.

Scalise will now take his candidacy to the House floor, where he will be up against House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who Democrats nominated for Speaker on Tuesday night.

The floor fight could get messy. Candidates need the support of a majority of the chamber to take control of the gavel and Republicans hold a razor-thin majority. McCarthy required 15 rounds of voting to secure the gavel.

Multiple Republicans have already said they won’t vote for Scalise on the floor and others remained non-committal.

Jordan, however, said he offered to deliver a nominating speech on Scalise’s behalf.

Scalise’s nomination marks the pinnacle of his congressional career, which began in 2008 and has spanned more than nine years in leadership, including stints as Republican whip and, most recently, majority leader.

Throughout the week-long race for the top spot, Scalise branded himself as the Republican who could unite the conference following McCarthy’s ouster, which bitterly divided the GOP and inflamed tensions within the party.

“I’ve got a long history of bringing people together, uniting Republicans, focusing on the issues that we’ve got to do to address the issues we came here to do to get our country back on track,” Scalise told Fox Business in an interview Tuesday.

 

Yeah, let's have a little chat about Steve, shall we?  Remember how he spoke at a white supremacist hoedown with fellow Louisiana trash beast David Duke in 2014? ZVTS remembers, as does CNN.

The story has all the traits of a career-ending political scandal:

A congressman who recently snagged a top position in party leadership faces accusations that he addressed a hate group run by a notorious white supremacist. And all of that, just a week before his party is set to take the reigns of power in Congress.

But the fast rising career of Republican Rep. Steve Scalise, who was tapped as House Majority Whip this summer, may not be in the ditches just yet. There’s a lot to keep track of. Here’s what you need to know:

So what happened?

It turns out Scalise addressed an anti-Semitic, white supremacist group back in 2002 run by none other than David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Klu Klux Klan who is well-known in Scalise’s home state of Louisiana because of several statewide campaigns for governor and senator.

A liberal Louisiana politics blogger revealed the encounter with the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO) after finding an account of Scalise’s speech to the group on a white supremacist forum.

The group is bad news for Scalise: it’s been labeled as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which details the group’s anti-semitic, racist views.

The next day, reporters in D.C. were asking Scalise’s office about the meeting and after aides first said it was “probable” and then “likely” the congressman spoke to the group, Scalise broke his silence in an interview with his local paper, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans.

He said he didn’t remember specifically addressing EURO, but said that at the time he “went and spoke to any group that called” in 2002 when he was trying to drum up support in opposing a state tax plan.

And then Scalise released the ultimate mea culpa statement Tuesday afternoon, calling his appearance at the event “a mistake I regret.”

“One of the many groups that I spoke to regarding this critical legislation was a group whose views I wholeheartedly condemn. It was a mistake I regret,” Scalise said.

 

That should have been the end of his career 9 years ago and now he's failed upward all the way to House Speaker, despite paling around with avowed racists and antisemites as Israel takes the American foreign policy stage. I bet there's going to be some fun phone calls this week between here and Tel Aviv. 

In hindsight, a Republican in Congress who was chasing the neo-Nazi vote in 2014 was simply ahead of the curve for the rest of the party, and now he's going to get rewarded for it.

Well, eventually. Who knows how many votes it will take to get him elected?