The House of Putin

 

 (By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

Yesterday was one of those days when nothing went right for the Republican Party. First, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled in a unanimous 3-0 vote that Donald Trump wasn't entitled to presidential immunity and to act like a dictator with impunity for any amount of time. Nevertheless, he's planning on using the same moth-eaten argument in his Florida documents case.

    But then, as proof that the Powers That Be often save the best for last, there were the two House votes that very publicly went down in white hot flames last night. The first was the inability to pass a standalone bill that would've sent $17.6 billion in aid to Israel. The second was the House's inability to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

    These were things that the GOP seemingly wanted, even though they never could quite articulate exactly what crimes Secretary Mayorkas had allegedly committed. It was just the usual substanceless Republican impeachment theater upon which we've come to depend from the "Party of Ideas" in this historically dysfunctional 118th Congress.

     Much moreso than the Israel aid bill, it revealed just how fragile Mike Johnson's majority is in the House. The pundits have crunched the numbers countless times and have always come up with the same math: That Johnson could not spare more than three Republican defections. That's precisely what had happened last night.

     The vote was deadlocked 215-215 after Al Green, the Democratic congressman from Texas, literally rolled onto the House floor to dramatically cast the tying vote. Wearing hospital scrubs, Rep. Green, who'd just had abdominal surgery last Friday, put an end to the impeachment farce. One Republican, Blake Moore of Utah, even changed his vote, resulting in the 214-216 split. To remember a more dramatic vote, one would have to go back to John McCain's thumbs down in Mitch McConnell's sagging face regarding Obamacare.

     Naturally, after dashing out of the Capitol without speaking to reporters, Johnson vowed to bring the Mayorkas impeachment vote back to the House floor. But that, too, is part of the dinner theater experience. It stands zero chance of passing and odds are pretty good that the measure will lose even more votes. And, if by some miracle it gets out of the House and moves to the Senate, it would stand even less of a chance of it resulting in a conviction in the Democratic-run Senate.

    As humiliating as these losses were, the Republicans did manage to successfully pass one vital piece of legislation: To declare that Donald Trump was not a January 6th insurrectionist despite Jack Smith prosecuting him for just that. The resolution got 63 co-sponsors and was written by reliable right wing rodeo clowns Matt Gaetz (R-Mann Act) and Elise Stefanik (R-I Have No Shame). It promises a sequel in the Senate with a matching resolution by JD Vance (R-One Hit Wonder).

     So, last night's party line vote on Mayorka' impeachment plus the GOP's head-shaking denial that Trump was worse than Benedict Arnold or Quisling ever was shows that Trump's stranglehold on the Republican Party has considerably gone past the autoerotic asphyxiation stage. (And, oh yeah, the government will shut down again in a few days until something is passed. Just sayin'.)

We Want it Until We Don't

A little trickier and more complex is the foreign aid package to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. It was originally supposed to be tied to a border security bill and seemed destined to sail through the Senate. For once, Schumer and McConnell both seemed to want the same thing (Until McConnell did an about-face in a private meeting with Republicans just three hours after publicly endorsing it). The Senate bill was painstakingly negotiated and crafted by James Lankford of Oklahoma, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut.

    But then Trump had to open his little wooden ventriloquist dummy's mouth.

    Pretending he was the still the president, Trump let it be known on Truth Social that he wanted to deny Biden this win so he could keep screaming about the so-called southern border crisis despite the fact that Republicans have been screaming for this bill for literally a couple of generations. It would've raised the bar for migrants seeking asylum, added significant amounts of money for border security (which would've funded more border patrol agents) and would've triggered an automatic closure of the entire southern border once the average daily threshold for crossing reached 5000.

    In return, Democrats were willing to settle for tepid reforms such as giving unaccompanied child migrants legal counsel, which they should already be getting. In other words, as far as border security theater goes, this is a right wing wet dream. And then Trump had to open his big mouth from Putin's lap.

     Trump is primarily concerned about the southern border, the 2016 campaign plank from his platform that put him on the map. He shamelessly wants to create a problem by unofficially blocking the border security bill so he could then scream about it on the campaign trail. Ironically, if the Senate wanted to part it out like Mike Johnson did in the House, the aid package to our allies probably would've passed.

     But there's another reason Trump wants to scuttle it and that's because Putin obviously does not want us funding Ukraine's war against him. The aid package would be over $70 billion. Putin doesn't give a shit about the southern border any more than he does the aid package to Taiwan and Israel. He does, however, care very much about us funding Ukraine.

    And with Putin, whatever he wants, Trump also wants. Therefore, it doesn't take an exhaustive following of the bread crumbs to deduce that the trail will take you to the front door of the Kremlin and that Putin, by proxy, is now calling the shots in our legislative branch of government. 

     So, what looked like a sure thing in both chambers now looks like two dead hound dogs that ain't gonna hunt no more. Johnson's already promised that the Senate bill will be dead in the water even if it passes because he wants to give Trump an opportunity to spike the football. Again, the border security bill is something the Republicans have been screaming for for the last couple of decades. They will likely never get another chance at this ever again. And they're blowing it.

     All so they could kowtow to a dictator-in-waiting and future felon who'd cost them the White House and the Senate and stands virtually zero chance of getting re-elected. It would be pathetic if we could at least believe the GOP is doing this on Trump's behalf. But they're not doing that. Instead, they're giving away the farm to a Russian strongman who's an even worse tyrant than Trump ever was.