McCarthy Picks the Witch Hunters

The House Republicans want to go on a witch hunt and for that, one needs witch hunters—that is, people specialized in... well, hunting witches. One of the many things Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) had to promise the MAGA 20 in order to get their votes for speaker was a create a special panel to investigate how Democrats have "weaponized" the federal government to investigate and damage conservatives. Of course, the Democrats have done no such thing, so the whole stunt is about enraging the base.

McCarthy has been negotiating with the MAGA 20 for weeks about the exact form the panel would take. The 20 wanted a select committee with subpoena power, roughly the analog of the select committee the Democrats created in the previous Congress to investigate the coup attempt. McCarthy has enough political smarts to realize that the higher the panel's profile, the more damage it can do to the Republican brand, and the more seats it will cost the GOP in 2024. Consequently, he refused that request. The most he was willing to do was create a select subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee to try to bag some witches. In order to get the MAGA 20 to buy into this format, he agreed to name Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), a real fire breather if ever there was one, to head the subcommittee (as well as the Judiciary Committee itself). Of course, if McCarthy had ever watched the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz, he would have known that the correct way to dispose of unwanted witches is to use water, not fire.

The deal also included language that gives the Subcommittee the authority to get information from the House Intelligence Committee and the Dept. of Justice. Jordan had better be careful about the former, since the Intelligence Committee handles classified information that must not be made public. He doesn't have to be careful about the latter because the DoJ won't give him the time of day, let alone information about ongoing investigations (and probably not about completed ones, either).

The Republicans on the Subcommittee are a mixed bag. Not all are fire-breathing dragons. Some are other McCarthy allies, like Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Mike Johnson (R-LA), and Kelly Armstrong (R-ND). However, some are not, including Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Dan Bishop (R-NC). But these are the only two who have given him grief in the past. The Subcommittee was initially expected to have 15 members, but McCarthy is trying to increase the size, probably to placate members who want to join the Greatest Show on Earth. If McCarthy succeeds in increasing the Subcommittee size, that will also increase the chances of a couple of loose cannons getting onto it and saying things on camera that the Democrats will feature in their 2024 ads.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) will be on the panel since he is the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries hasn't named his other four picks yet (or more if the Subcommittee's size grows). (V)

Facebook to Reinstate Trump

Axios got the scoop on it, but within 10 minutes it was all over the place: Facebook (and Instagram) will reinstate Donald Trump's accounts. Nick Clegg, Meta's president for global affairs said: "We've always believed that Americans should be able to hear from the people who want to lead the country. We don't want to stand in the way of that."

Perhaps he has forgotten that Trump was removed for lying and inciting violence? But that was 2 years ago, so all is forgiven and forgotten. Well, actually, Meta did not forget one thing. They did not forget that a couple of weeks ago a bunch of Trumpists, with powers to launch investigations and compel testimony, took over the House of Representatives. This is a transparent attempt to throw some meat to the wolves, in hopes that they won't go after Meta.

The reinstatements will give Trump two big platforms for his presidential campaign. He had 34 million followers on Facebook and 23 million on Instagram. He will now also be able to run ads and do fundraising on these platforms. Trump has also be reinstated at Twitter, but he hasn't posted anything to his Twitter account since being reinstated. Of course, doing that would be tantamount to admitting that Truth Social is a failure. On the other hand, he can use Facebook and Instagram and still save face.

Meta has instituted some new policies relating to civil unrest, but the company was hesitant to enforce its existing policies in 2021, so many people are wondering if it will be willing to enforce them if Trump violates them again. Also, the company left itself an out. The new policy will be that if someone violates the rules but the posting is newsworthy, the company may leave it up. (V)

Santos' (Un)lucky Number: 199.99

Some people have a lucky number, like 2.718 or 3.1416 or 7 or 11 or 21 or 6.022 x 10²³. Rep. "George Santos'" (R-NY) lucky number appears to be 199.99. Forty of his line-item campaign expenses were in amounts of exactly $199.99. Interestingly, and surely just by coincidence, FEC regulations require all candidates for federal law to preserve receipts for all campaign expenditures of $200 or more. Expenditures of $199.99 or less are legal and have to be reported but the candidate need not retain proof of the expenditure.

Politico Reporter Jessica Piper must have taken a graduate course in statistics at one point, because she felt so many expenditures at precisely the maximum value for which proof is not required was—what's the technical term here?—fishy as a truckload of tuna. So she did a bit of research on the subject. She laid hands on 4,300 FEC reports filed by candidates for the House and Senate in 2022 to see how often other candidates had line-item expenses of $199.99. Specifically, she looked for line-item expenses in the range $199.00 to $199.99 because some candidates might have rounded or truncated amounts to whole dollars and $199.95 is a plausible price for a computer monitor.

What she discovered is that 90% of the campaigns had zero expenses in the $199.00 to $199.99 range. Among the others, some had a line-item expense of $199.90 one or more times. However, she also noted that the video conferencing platform Zoom, which some candidates used, had a business plan at $199.90 per year. Candidates for federal office are a tiny part of Zoom's business so it is very unlikely that the company chose this price point to evade FEC regulations. More likely, it was chosen for normal business reasons (e.g., maximizing its profit while still being competitive).

Of the 4,300 campaigns studied, only 25 of them (0.6%) listed $199.99 at all, and none of them listed it more than four times. Santos listed it for many things, including Uber rides, Amtrak trains, and Delta Airlines flights. We did a small bit of research ourselves and discovered that all of Delta's prices are a whole number of dollars. A round-trip from New York to Miami might have cost $199.00 or $200.00 with some advance planning, but not $199.99. Amazon has plenty of items at $XX.99 but Delta doesn't play that game.

While Piper's research is not proof that Santos made up the numbers, it certainly suggests it because other campaigns rarely had items that cost $199.00 to $199.99 except for Zoom, which is clearly a legitimate campaign expense (and for which other campaigns most likely had proof, even though they didn't need it). Also suspicious is that eight of Santos' $199.99 expenses were dinners at an Italian restaurant in Queens. Did his inner circle dine there frequently and everybody ordered the same items every time? Piper didn't check out the restaurant's menu to see if there are any combinations of items that add to $199.99, but even if there aren't, Santos could argue that the food was usually in the ballpark of $170 and he calculated the tip to just hit $199.99. Harder to explain is how he got $600 hotel rooms in Miami for $199.99. There are New Yorkers who go to Florida for the winter but vote by absentee ballot in New York, so holding an event in Florida in October could be a legitimate expense.

At this point, we should probably remind everyone that submitting a false report to the FEC is a crime. In a trial, a prosecutor could bring one or more professors of statistics from Columbia University or NYU who were asked to repeat Piper's research and could testify that the probability of Santos having 40 items at $199.99 when virtually none of the other 4,300 campaigns hit that number even five times is essentially zero. In other words, the only plausible explanation is that Santos made up the numbers. Santos' lawyer could yell: "You can't prove that." But "proof" is not needed. All that is needed is for all the members of the jury to be convinced that Santos faked his reports. If in addition, a Delta official or travel agent testified that Delta's prices are always a whole number of dollars, then clearly a $199.99 ticket is false.

This issue of this "(un)lucky" number of $199.99 is important because if the local D.A. indicts Santos, part of a potential plea deal will probably include resigning from Congress immediately, as well as a fine and/or jail time. Unlike lying about his Jew-ish-ness or his education (or lack thereof), lying on an official form about campaign finances is a crime and that could be what ultimately nails the congressman. If that happens, it will be because 199.99 was actually Santos' unlucky number.

Yesterday, Kevin McCarthy said: "If for some way when we go through Ethics and he has broken the law, then we will remove him." That sentence, according to our staff linguist, is apparently in English. Who knew? In any event, the House Ethics Committee is not a law enforcement agency and is certainly in no condition to conduct a serious investigation (especially now that it has been gutted, conveniently, by McCarthy). Consequently, it is unlikely to conclude that Santos broke the law. So, McCarthy is just buying some time. If the Ethics Committee concludes that Santos lying was unethical but does not come to the conclusion that he broke the law, then McCarthy could say: "Well, he didn't break the law, so we can keep him." That doesn't solve his problem, but it kicks the can down the road until the local D.A. decides that Santos broke the law.

Oh wait. There's more. The above story is about Santos' campaign expenses. The other side of the ledger is where the money came from. Looks like a second truckload of 2-week-old tuna. In his original FEC filing, Santos said he loaned his campaign $500,000 from his personal funds. That is legal as long as it is disclosed. However, 2 days ago he filed an amended FEC report which did not check the box "personal funds of the candidate." That raises the question of where the money did come from if it wasn't his own. Did someone give him $500,000? if so that is illegal because the maximum allowed contribution is $2,900. Needless to say, this story is nowhere near the end and the D.A. and the feds are going to have a field day here with likely violations of federal law on both the input and output sides. (V)

Senate Republicans Aren't Getting Involved in the RNC Race

Later this week, the RNC will meet at a resort in Dana Point, CA, just south of Los Angeles, to elect a new chair. The chairperson of the RNC is highest-ranking person in the Republican Party (which is not the same as the highest-ranking Republican in federal office, which would currently be speaker Kevin McCarthy). Consequently, one might think that all Republicans in federal office would be intensely involved in the now-competitive race. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, very few Republican senators are getting involved, at least not in public.

Ronna Romney McDaniel is running for a fourth 2-year term as chair. Her results in 2018, 2020 and 2022 were disappointing for Republicans, but it is unfair to give her the blame. Her job was to raise a lot of money. She raised a lot of money. What she didn't do (and was not expected to do) is pick candidates or somehow make Democrats not hate Donald Trump so much. Also, there are other big players in Republican campaigns these days, including the NRSC, the NRCC, and super PACs too numerous to name.

What is surprising is how few Republican senators are out there fighting either for her or against her. A typical response from a Republican senator is that of Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) when asked about the RNC race. Cramer said: "I don't care. I was surprised she wanted to run again. Why would you put yourself through that? But it's her call." Hardly a strong endorsement, but also not much of an endorsement of McDaniel's main challenger, Harmeet Dhillon.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) said: "I don't know what the RNC does. I really don't." If she really means that, she is dumber than the rear end of a rodeo bull. The RNC's job is to raise lots of money and distribute it wisely to critical races up and down the ballot. The RNC also coordinates the 50 state parties, provides messaging and talking points to the state parties and candidates. If Lummis really wanted to find out what the RNC's does, she might have just gone to www.rnc.org and looked at the main page, which looks like this (except we added the green ellipse):

To say she doesn't know is very insulting to her party (as well as making her look like a dumb hick). If she didn't want to comment on McDaniel, she could have said: "I am very busy working every day for the people of Wyoming and don't have time to get involved in party politics."

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Minority Whip John Thune (R-SD) are well aware of the race but are staying neutral. That is legitimate, of course, since they are not members of the RNC, but at least they are not making fools of themselves. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) supports his niece, but only a handful of other Republican senators have come out for her. On the other hand, while the senators know the Republicans have done poorly in the past three cycles, they don't know if Dhillon would have done any better or will be able to do better in the future, given that Donald Trump still seems to be calling the shots. In fact, most of them don't anything about Dhillon at all. Sometimes it is better to support the devil you know than the devil you don't know. (V)

All Quiet on the Eastern Front

The White House is only 30 miles from Chesapeake Bay, which is part of the Atlantic Ocean, so it is clearly in the East. And the battle for it is surprisingly quiet right now. At this point in Jan. 2019, four Democrats (Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY, Kamala Harris, D-CA, and Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, along with Mayor Pete Buttigieg) had taken formal steps to run for president. Now, on the Republican side, only Donald Trump has made an announcement. The rest of the likely Republican field is completely frozen, waiting to see what the others do. Except for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), all the others are waiting for someone else to go first. DeSantis is in no hurry because he already has a team in place from his gubernatorial run and he can raise nearly infinite money for his super PAC by making phone calls to three billionaires (Ken Griffin, Ronald Lauder, and Robert Mercer) that have done everything except post their phone numbers on their Facebook pages. Besides, DeSantis is waiting until the Florida legislative session is over in the late spring so actually governing won't be a distraction. Right now his priority is passing laws that wil make the libs' blood boil.

Wayne MacDonald, the former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party said: "It's very, very quiet." In other words: "Where are the candidates? Why aren't they up here in New Hampshire where they belong?" He's probably going to have to wait quite a bit longer.

Trump's bumpy start (no rallies but dinner with antisemites) has removed some of the pressure on the others. If Trump were out there talking to 10,000 people every day, the pressure to do likewise would be much greater, not he is not, so it isn't. One strategist thought that having multiple candidates announce at the same time would be strongest because if Trump has only one opponent, all his fire will be directed at that one. So each of the not-Trump candidates may be looking at the others to see if they are close to announcing. Basically, they are all scared of their shadows. It could also be that they are really waiting for DeSantis to get in because they know he is tough and when Trump starts going after him, DeSantis will hit back just as hard. This could give the other ones some cover.

The only candidate doing serious-money digital ads is DeSantis. The ads haven't attacked Trump. They are just building name recognition for him along the lines of "Stand with Gov. DeSantis against the woke left." He has spent $65,000 on Google and about $60,000 on Facebook in January. Nobody else is even in the five digits.

In the book alluded to in the headline (All Quiet on the Western Front), the soldiers just sit around in their trenches most of the time waiting for something to happen. Same thing with the Republican primaries. For now. (V)

What Can the Democrats Do about the MAGA 20?

Democrats can't do anything to stop the MAGA 20 extremists, but Greg Sargent over at The Washington Post has four suggestions how to force them to show their true colors to the country, as follows:

• Force votes on amendments: One of the things Kevin McCarthy agreed to was allowing amendments from the floor. Democrats could take advantage of this by forcing votes on amendments that make Republicans take positions they don't want to take. For example, when an immigration bill comes up that focuses only on blocking all immigration, they could offer an amendment that provides even more money for border enforcement but also gives the dreamers a path to citizenship. Almost every Republican will oppose it. Then the Democrats will start working on their 2024 ads that say: "Democrats wanted to hire more border patrol agents and Republicans voted it down."
  
  
• Bipartisanship: Democrats could work with one or more moderate House Republicans, for example, Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL), to produce bills that the moderates genuinely want. Unlike the above strategy, the goal here is not to simply embarrass Republicans and provide material for ads, but to try to get bills passed with 213 Democrats and maybe 5-10 Republicans. This will make the heads of the MAGA 20 explode. Such bills could be done in conjunction with at least one moderate Democratic senator and one moderate Republican senator. The senators might be Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) and Thom Tillis (R-NC), who have worked together before on legislation.
  
  
• Discharge petition: Kevin McCarthy certainly does not want votes on any bills that might embarrass his members or drive the MAGA 20 crazy, but he doesn't have full control of the process. One technique that exists but is rarely used is the discharge petition. If 218 members of the House vote to force a bill stuck in committee onto the floor, then a floor vote must be taken, even if the speaker doesn't want one. Democrats plus a few moderate Republicans could force bills on immigration, raising the debt ceiling without any conditions, and more onto the floor for amendments and votes
  
  
• Empower southwestern Democrats: The best spokespersons the Democrats have on immigration are the senators and representatives from the border states. Democrats should let them take the lead. They know the material the best and have the most credibility on the subject because they have the most skin in the game. Let them craft target bills and take the lead in defending them.
  

Will Democrats do any of these things? We'll see, but all of the proposals make sense to us. (V)

It's Location, Location and Location

It is sometimes said that in real estate, the three most important factors that determine the price of a property are location, location and location. Maybe that's true, maybe not. We don't know. But in politics, voting has been increasingly location-based in recent years, even thought it wasn't true historically. Thomas Edsall has now summarized some recent studies on the subject.

The Republican Party is now largely dependent on winning votes and House districts in sparsely populated rural areas whose population is actually declining due to more deaths than births and people moving out. Studies show that the rural areas are becoming redder because many voters are switching from the Democrats to the Republicans. Back in FDR's time, farmers were largely Democrats. Now they are largely Republicans. There are three main reasons for the shift:

1. People in rural areas believe the Democrats care only about urban dwellers and don't care about them.
2. People there think they don't get an adequate share of public resources.
3. They also think city folks don't understand their lifestyle and if they do, denigrate it as primitive.

The situation in the cities is different. People are not switching parties as in the rural areas. Instead, the influx of new voters as they turn 18 strongly favors the Democrats.

Wisconsin is a case in point. As recently as 2006, rural Wisconsin was Democratic. Jim Doyle (D), the Democratic candidate for governor, won the rural counties by 5.5 points. In 2022, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) won them by 29 points. That's a shift of almost 35 points, largely due to the points made above, as documented in several books. The 1992 presidential election was a milestone. For the first time in its history, the Democratic Party got its strength outside the rural South, with wins in the Northeast, Illinois, and the West Coast. This is when the urban-rural divide really started to take off in many areas. This was also visible in the House. After the 1992 elections, Democrats had 41% of suburban districts. After the 2018 elections, it was 60%. Democratic control of rural districts dropped from 24% to 5% in the same time period.

Some Democrats like this situation. They think white rural voters are dumb, bigoted yokels and don't want them in their coalition. Or at least, they are not willing to change any of their policy positions to try to attract them. The problem with this view is that Republicans are starting to attract socioeconomically rising and "white-adjacent" members of minorities (think: middle-class Latinos), especially when Democrats go all in for issues that they find culturally repulsive (think: if you say you are a woman, then you are a woman).

The gap between rural and (sub)urban America can be summed up by a remark from Maria Kefalas, a sociologist at St. Joseph's University and author of the book Hollowing Out the Middle. She wrote: "People who live in rural America are surrounded by folks who play along with a particular worldview, yet my friends from Brooklyn and Boston will tell you they don't know anyone who supports Trump or won't get vaccinated. It's not open warfare, it's more like apartheid." (V)

The Most and Least Popular Senators

Morning Consult ran a poll at the end of last year to determine how popular each senator was. Here are the 11 most popular senators of the 117th Senate sorted on their approval rating.

Senator	Approve	Disapprove	Net
John Barrasso (R-WY)	66%	25%	+41%
John Thune (R-SD)	64%	28%	+36%
Pat Leahy (D-VT)	64%	29%	+35%
Bernie Sanders (I-VT)	64%	34%	+30%
Cynthia Lummis (R-WY)	63%	26%	+37%
Mike Rounds (R-SD)	63%	27%	+36%
John Hoeven (R-ND)	61%	24%	+37%
Jon Tester (D-MT)	60%	30%	+30%
Brian Schatz (D-HI)	58%	28%	+30%
Jack Reed (D-RI)	56%	26%	+30%
John Kennedy (R-LA)	56%	31%	+25%

It's interesting that senators from rural states score very high. In fact, the top eight are all from rural states. Only Schatz and Reed are from urban states.

Now the bad news. Here are the 10 senators with the highest disapproval ratings, sorted on same.

Senator	Approve	Disapprove	Net
Mitch McConnell (R-KY	29%	64%	-35%
Joe Manchin (D-WV)	40%	53%	-13%
Ron Johnson (R-WI)	42%	53%	-11%
Susan Collins (R-ME)	44%	52%	-8%
Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ)	37%	48%	-11%
Lisa Murkowski (R-AZ)	45%	48%	-3%
Lindsey Graham (R-SC)	43%	47%	-4%
Ted Cruz (R-TX)	45%	46%	-1%
Mike Crapo (R-ID)	44%	45%	-1%
Mitt Romney (R-UT)	46%	45%	+1%

What's interesting here is that being really unpopular doesn't seem to stop someone from getting reelected. In 2022, Johnson, and Murkowski got reelected. In 2020, McConnell, Collins and Graham were all reelected by large margins. In all these cases, while the individual Republican senators were not popular, the Democratic Party was even less popular.

In a sense, these two tables are good news for the Democrats in 2024. Tester is +30. That's a very good starting place. He may be a Democrat, but Montanans like him personally. Manchin is moderately unpopular, but McConnell is even less popular and Johnson is almost as unpopular and they both won recently. (V)

Debbie Dingell Is Starting a Heartland Caucus

In Congress, a caucus is a group of like-minded legislators who get together from time to time to discuss matters of common interest and plot legislative strategies. At present there are 462 congressional caucuses. That's more than there are members in the House. Of course, a member can join many caucuses and most do.

Some of them are really well known, like the House Freedom Caucus. But how many of these do you recognize?

• Afterschool Caucus
• Algae Caucus
• Aluminum Caucus
• Anti-Socialism Caucus
• Apiary and Beekeeper Caucus
• Armenian Issues Caucus
• Assyrian Caucus
• Blockchain Caucus
• Bourbon Caucus
• Bureau of Prisons Reform Caucus
• Bus Caucus
• Campus Free Speech Caucus
• Candy Caucus
• Cement Caucus
• Chicken Caucus
• Cranberry Caucus
• Ethiopian-American Caucus
• Fertilizer Caucus
• Flat Tax Caucus
• Fragrance Caucus
• Freedom from Big Tech
• Friends of Belgium Caucus
• Hellenic Israel Alliance Caucus
• Hepatitis Caucus
• High Performance Building Caucus
• I-14 Caucus
• Internet of Things Caucus
• Macedonia and Macedonian-American Caucus
• Malaria and Tropical Disease Caucus
• Maple Caucus
• Prayer Caucus
• Real Estate Caucus
• Reality Caucus
• Rock Caucus
• Second Amendment Caucus
• Shellfish Caucus
• Tire Caucus
• Tourette Syndrome Caucus
• U.S.—Kazakhstan Caucus
• Vision Caucus
• Wild Salmon Caucus
• Zoo and Aquarium Caucus

If you want to know the leaders of each one, here is a list. Did you know that Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), who is famous for being in the Freedom Caucus, is also in the Algae Caucus? Fair enough, he certainly qualifies as pond scum. Or that Jim Jordan is co-chair of the Campus Free Speech Caucus? That's so he can complain that conservatives can't give far-right, fire-breathing addresses on campus without being booed. You probably know that Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) co-chair the Second Amendment Caucus.

Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) thinks there aren't enough caucuses, so she has just unveiled plans for a new caucus: the Heartland Caucus. She made a map of the country and put stars in all the states where a Democrat has a leadership position of some kind. It turns out that they are largely in the Northeast, one in South Carolina, and a few in the Pacific Northwest. None are in the middle of the country. She thinks this has to change. So she is starting the Heartland Caucus to allow legislators from the Great Lakes region and adjacent states to have a place to get together and talk about issues that affect, well, the heartland. She also wants to remind the Party leaders that they are not "flyover country."

Dingell expects about 40 House members to join. Top issues will be manufacturing, labor, rural health care, infrastructure and the environment. She noted that all roads to a House majority go through the heartland and it needs to be represented better. The Party leadership is receptive to Dingell's plans. (V)

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