Confessions of a process nerd

I am one of those people who likes to go behind the scenes and see how things get done. If I join an organization, I tend to study the bylaws to make sure that things are done properly. This is especially true of politics. Most of the time when things are working smoothly, the process is largely opaque. It is only when things go seriously off the rails that the inner workings get exposed. And boy, these last two years have been a boon for process nerds.

We saw this with the the Electoral College fiasco that led up to the January 6th riot by Trump supporters. The whole process was laid bare revealing the potential for abuse. One good thing that came out of it is that as part of the omnibus spending bill that was passed last month, it was clarified that the vice president’s role in certifying the results was purely ceremonial, leaving no room for him to unilaterally reject the slate of voters sent by each state, as Trump and his cult members claimed.
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The puzzling hatred of Kevin McCarthy

Kevin McCarthy has suffered six defeats in his attempt to get the 218 votes to become Speaker, failing each time by about 16 votes. The numbers have barely budged and it must be humiliating for him to have Democrat Hakeem Jeffries get more votes than him with a solidly united caucus.

The sixth vote also gave him just 201 votes.

It seems clear that there is a hard core of Republicans who hate McCarthy with a passion and this is deeply puzzling to me because his whole career has been of schmoozing and cultivating relationships to get ahead. He really has no core principles or convictions, which are the things that usually arouses strong antagonisms. Jonathan Blitzer took a deep look at his political evolution starting from his early days as a aide in Bakersfield CA for his local congressman Bill Thomas and a California state assemblymen

In an [CA state] assembly dominated by Democrats, McCarthy faced a bind. Because conservatives outnumbered moderates in the minority, there wasn’t a strong appetite for compromise. Yet the Republicans lacked the power to pass legislation. Jim Brulte, who was the minority leader in the state senate at the time, told me, “When you’re the minority leader in the California State Assembly, you can only lead by sheer force of personality.” McCarthy distributed books (Newt Gingrich on politics), iPods, and watches; he planned Party retreats and organized weekly bipartisan basketball games at a Sacramento gym. He had presents ready for members’ birthdays and their children’s graduations. When Núñez, the Democrat, became the speaker of the assembly, he kept a binder with biographical information on his members. McCarthy paged through it once, while the two were chatting in the state capitol. “I have the same thing,” he told Núñez. “Except I have wedding anniversaries in mine. You don’t.”

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The Speaker vote fiasco

Republican leader of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy failed to get a majority of the members present and voting even after three attempts, so they adjourned until noon on Wednesday. In the interim, there is going to a lot of pleading, yelling, and arm twisting in an effort to get to the magic number of 218.

Frankly, I did not see this coming. I did think that the hardliners in the Republican caucus would defeat McCarthy on the first vote to show their displeasure but I expected the two sides to arrive at some face-saving compromise that would enable both sides to declare victory. But not only did that not happen, the vote against McCarthy increased by one on the third round.

There are 435 members in the body and the last election results split 222-213 in favor of Republicans. But one Democratic member from Virginia died soon after the election, which means that Democrats have only 212 votes and a special election to fill the seat will be held on February 21. It seems like a safe Democratic seat so the final result will be the same as before. But given the razor-thin margins and the rules for voting for the Speaker, this could be significant.
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The link between machismo and climate change denial

Not being well versed in popular culture, I had never actually heard of Andrew Tate before his Twitter exchange with Greta Thunberg made news headlines last week. I was in a discussion group where the topic of the tweets came up and one of the participants enlightened me on who he was and the odious views he espoused, adding that he has become ‘the Jordan Peterson for the incels’.

Rebecca Solnit goes beneath the surface of the Twitter exchange.

There’s a direct association between machismo and the refusal to recognize and respond appropriately to the climate catastrophe. It’s a result of versions of masculinity in which selfishness and indifference – individualism taken to its extremes – are defining characteristics, and therefore caring and acting for the collective good is their antithesis.

“Men resist green behavior as unmanly” is the headline for a 2017 story on the phenomenon. Machismo and climate denial, as well as alliance with the fossil fuel industry, is a package deal for the right, from the “rolling coal” trucks whose plumes of dark smoke are meant as a sneer at climate causes to Republicans in the US who have long opposed nearly all climate action (and are major recipients of oil money).
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Evangelicals souring on Trump

I have raised the question before about the hesitancy of the leaders of the evangelical community to rally behind Donald Trump’s candidacy this time around. Caleb Ecarma writes that while they still like him, they have real concerns about his electability, reinforced by his loss in 2020 and the poor showing of his chosen candidates in the mid-term elections in 2018 and 2022. They fear that he may lose agan, preventing them from advancing their reactionary goals.

“There’s a lot of people who share a lot of our similar thoughts but don’t want to go on record,” Bob Vander Plaats, one of America’s top evangelical thought leaders, who hesitantly backed Trump in 2016, tells me. “You can see that it’s almost a silent majority right now,” he says. Everett Piper, a Washington Times columnist and the former president of an evangelical university, published a post-midterm polemic last month arguing that Trump is “hurting…not helping” American evangelicals. “The take-home of this past week is simple: Donald Trump has to go,” Piper added. “If he’s our nominee in 2024, we will get destroyed.” Earlier this month, televangelist James Robison, who served as a spiritual adviser to Trump, likened the former president to a “little elementary schoolchild” while addressing the National Association of Christian Lawmakers. Another major evangelical leader, who requested anonymity, tells me there’s “no doubt” that if Trump wins the primary, Republicans will “get crushed in the general.”

But even as some evangelical leaders seek a divorce, Trump’s influence on the Republican Party has held strong. He’s centered many of the culture wars that evangelical voters have been harping on for decades. And, increasingly, the party’s agenda has become nearly interchangeable with the attitudes of evangelical voters.

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A funny and interesting Twitter experiment

Kenneth Osgood is a historian who, he says, “writes sleep-inducing books and articles weighed down by pages of footnotes”. He rarely tweets and has just 139 followers who are mostly historians like him. He is kind of like me. Although I have tweeted more than him, every one of my tweets is simply a link to my blog posts. I have never tweeted anything funny or a hot take on an issue, which seems to be the dominant form of the medium. It is hardly surprising that I have even fewer followers than Osgood, just 130.

Osgood was angered by Musk’s decision to reinstate Donald Trump, a man who had incited violence against his own vice president and instigated a riot on the Capitol. He decided to quit Twitter but found that doing so is a pain. Social media sites do not make it easy to leave. So he decided to test whether it might be easier to get booted off the platform since Twitter owner Elon Musk seems to be trigger-happy with the ‘ban’ button.
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Is his name even George Santos?

That politicians exaggerate their biographies in order to appeal to voters is well known. Donald Trump raised lying to a pathological level but it appears that he has a challenger to his crown and that is the recently elected member of the US House of Representatives George Santos. He is merely 34 years old but in that short span has managed to pack in so many lies that would normally take a full three score and ten years. Since his election, there have been one exposed lie after another. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
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A true MAGA head never gives up

Kari Lake is the former TV personality who ran for governor of Arizona on a full MAGA platform, embracing all of Donald Trump’s insanities including that his loss in the 2020 election was due to fraud and that he is the rightful president. Well, she lost her election too but in true MAGA style refused to concede and declared that her loss was also due to fraud and that she should be declared governor.

When the election was certified by Arizona election officials who declared that Democrat Katie Hobbs had won, Lake sued because that is what MAGA heads do. The judge was not impressed.

An Arizona judge on Saturday rejected Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s lawsuit attempting to overturn her defeat, concluding that there wasn’t clear or convincing evidence of misconduct, and affirming the victory of Democratic Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs.
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Thompson previously dismissed eight other counts alleged in Lake’s lawsuit prior to trial, ruling that they did not constitute proper grounds for an election contest under Arizona law, even if true. But he permitted Lake an attempt to prove at trial the two remaining counts involving printers and the ballot chain of custody in Maricopa County.
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