Senate page     Jan. 09


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New polls:  
Dem pickups: PA
GOP pickups: (None)

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What's the Deal?

In order to get the speakership, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) had to give away the store—that is, weaken the speakership to the point where it's probably not worth having (not that he is likely to have it for very long). Here are a list of the biggest concessions McCarthy had to give the MAGA 20 in order to get them to vote for him (or, at least, vote "present"). Note that these are tentative and could change as the power struggle between McCarthy and the MAGA 20 continues.

• Vacating the chair: That is, a motion to send the speaker on a long vacation. McCarthy agreed that any member of the House could call for a motion to vacate the chair (what is called a motion of no confidence in other countries). McCarthy wanted to set the number at five. Actually, it doesn't really matter if calling for a vote requires one member or five members. Winning the vote requires 218. If a member who wants to fire McCarthy can't find four other members to join up, how will that person get to 218? The worst that can happen here is some time is wasted on pointless motions—unless there really are 218 members who want to dump McCarthy.
  
  
• Rules Committee: The MAGA 20 want to be well represented on the Rules Committee, which, well, makes the rules. See also below. They also want to be disproportionately represented on other committees and subcommittees. In addition they want a number of committee and subcommittee chairmanships. These are normally earned through seniority. If McCarthy fires a number of current chairs who have earned their titles by coming up through the ranks, they are going to be exceedingly grumpy and could give McCarthy a hard time going forward. Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) called this concession "affirmative action for the smallest House caucus."
  
  
• Not interfering in primaries: McCarthy controls a super PAC that doles out money for House races. the MAGA 20 extracted a promise from McCarthy not to use this money to meddle in Republican primaries. In Turtle-speak, this would be: "We don't want you to interfere when we are trying to create a 'candidate quality' problem." This is one of the three concessions the Democrats will applaud.
  
  
• Cap spending: The MAGA 20 want to cap expenditures for the next fiscal year at the current level. This includes defense spending. That is an absolute nonstarter with the Republican defense hawks on the Armed Services Committee. They will never stand for it.
  
  
• Balanced budget: Wishful thinking here. The MAGA 20 want a balanced budget within 10 years. The idea is simple to express. The devil is in the details. Do they want higher taxes to cover the expenditures? No way. So the expenditures have to come down. Now where does the government spend its money? This chart shows both the mandatory and discretionary spending:
  
  
  
  Mandatory spending means "required by current law."" The law can be changed, of course, but that requires getting the changes through the Senate and getting the president to sign the bill. For example, Republicans might want to eliminate SNAP (food stamps), which is so small it doesn't show up on the chart, but that would require changing the law. In contrast, discretionary spending is for things Congress would like, but no law requires it. If the MAGA 20 want a balanced budget, they are going to have to come up with specific cuts. Eliminating NASA removes only 0.39% of the budget. If they try to cut any of the biggies, be sure to put on your noise-canceling headphones before the announcement because there will be a lot of resulting noise after the announcement. This is just so much pie in the sky.
  
  
• Holding the debt hostage: The debt celing has to be increased by July, give or take a month. The MAGA 20 want to hold it hostage to get spending cuts. If Biden says NO!, the U.S. government could default on its debt, which would result in the mother of all stock market crashes and might well plunge the world into a deep depression. The sane Republicans don't want the blame for that.
  
  
• No more omnibuses: No, this is not a line item in the transportation budget for more money for public transit. It is the practice of putting the entire federal budget in one bill with a straight up or down vote. This makes it much harder to vote against, say, housing for the poor because that would also mean voting against, say, money for the Pentagon. The MAGA 20 want separate bills for funding each department. That way they can give the Pentagon whatever it wants but cut HHS and HUD to the bone and then some.
  
  
• 72-Hour rule: This is the second part the Democrats will support. The idea is that before a vote can be taken on any bill, it has to be up on the House website for 72 hours so members can at least try to read it. Or, in the case of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), have someone read it to them. None of the members will actually read a thousand-page bill, but a few might tell a group of staffers to make an effort and report back. Further, if the bill is on the House website, reporters will take a look at it, and might find some shady stuff therein. In the past, the leadership would cook up a bill in the dark of night and then at 8 a.m. the next morning demand and up-or-down vote on it. Stopping the leadership (i.e., McCarthy) from doing this will reduce his power to sneak in things the members don't want.
  
  
• Holman rule: This is an obscure 1876 law that would allow to reduce the salary of certain federal employees or allow Congress to fire specific civil servants. This is something Donald Trump tried to do with Schedule F, but wasn't able to pull off. The idea is to get rid of civil servants who are doing their duty, when the Republicans would prefer that not be the case. Trump wanted to get rid of those he deemed insufficiently loyal, but what the MAGA 20 want is to fire the new IRS agents being hired as part of the spending bill the Democrats passed last year. Interestingly enough, what Rep. William Holman (D-IN) had in mind when he proposed this law was to eliminate political patronage jobs, not the jobs of people who try to uphold the law.
  
  
• Amendments: Finally, this is the third item the Democrats support. It will allow members to propose amendments to bills from the floor and have votes on them. If a Freedom Caucus member wants something in a bill and can't get the committee to put it in, this would give another shot at it. In the past, amendments were allowed from the floor and it led to "filibuster by amendment." Imagine that the Democrats don't like some bill so each of the 213 Democrats (once the vacancy is filled) offers some amendment. That could really slow the House down, especially if some member asks for 15 minutes to explain why an amendment to create "Medicare for all" is germane to the farm bill being considered (short answer: farmers also need health care).

There may be more things McCarthy gave the MAGA 20, but these are the main ones that have come out so far. (V)

Getting on the Rules Committee Is a Big Win for the MAGA 20

One of the concessions the MAGA 20 squeezed out of Kevin McCarthy is that the House Rules Committee would consist of three of its members, six other Republicans, and four Democrats, a hugely disproportionate number of MAGA Republicans given the distribution of House seats. What the Rules Committee does is definitely inside baseball, but it is very important. It manages the flow of bills before they hit the floor. The Committee can kill any bill its members dislike by not allowing a floor vote on it. Alternatively, if the Committee doesn't like a bill, it can tell the chair of the committee that sent it to kindly "fix" it, something that committee chair may not take kindly to. The Committee also determines which amendments can be proposed for each bill on the floor, as normal order includes a limit on the total number of amendments that can be brought up for consideration.

Normally, the speaker loads the committee with enough loyal friends to make a majority. That won't be the case this time. Any time the three MAGA 20 members and four Democrats want to kill a bill or have it rewritten, they have the votes for that. So McCarthy has already lost control of what is probably the most important committee in the House.

One of the things the Rules Committee may try to do is restore the "regular order." This is what you learned in high school civics class about "how a bill becomes a law." Some member introduces a bill, it is debated at length in the appropriate committee, a vote is taken, if passed, it goes to the floor where amendments can be offered and debated, and then a final vote is taken. If it passes, it goes to the other chamber, which usually makes changes. That results in a conference committee that irons out the differences by making compromises. It doesn't work like that anymore. If one party has the trifecta, the two majority leaders concoct bills in secret and then ram them through. If Congress is divided, it lurches from one hostage crisis to the next. The MAGA 20 may start out trying to restore the regular order, but once its members see how much power they have, they may lose interest in introducing democracy into the House.

One of the most important functions the Rules Committee has performed for previous speakers is keeping toxic bills from the floor so members would not have to take tough votes on them that could be used in future campaign ads against them. For example, in past sessions, bills were introduced to create "Medicare for all." Democrats in swing districts absolutely did not want any on-the-record votes on that since such a vote was guaranteed to anger either moderates or progressives. Much better for the Rules Committee to send it back from whence it came with a Post-It note saying: "Please remove the Medicare for all parts of this bill." Or to just put it in the paper shredder directly.

A bill to abolish Social Security or Medicare is not something many Republicans would want to take a recorded vote on. Nor would a bill to abolish the IRS. But the MAGA 20 and Democrats might well be willing, even eager, to have a floor vote on abolishing, say, Medicare. For Democrats, this is an easy vote. Every Democrat would vote "No" and make campaign ads about the vote ("I protected Medicare! Vote for me!"). But for some Republicans it puts them in a real bind; a "Yes" vote could doom them in the general election in districts with many senior citizens, while a "No" vote could be fatal in a primary. Much better to have the Rules Committee make sure no vote is taken. But now McCarthy has lost control of it.

One source told Politico: "Members can no longer be protected from politically toxic conservative wish lists." The MAGA 20 members and the Democrats may find common ground forcing ordinary Republicans to make up-to-down votes on bills they really don't want to vote on. This confluence of interest is because MAGA 20 Republicans regard squishy Republicans as being as bad as Democrats, and they are rarely in the mood to protect them. When sane Republicans look to McCarthy to protect them from votes they don't want to take, he will be powerless. As a consequence, his days as speaker may already be numbered. At 2 a.m. just after McCarthy won election on the 15th ballot, a CNN reporter asked Rep. Dave Joyce (R-OH) how long it would for conservatives to make a motion to vacate the chair. he said: "Tomorrow?" He meant it as a joke. Maybe it will be more of a prophesy.

And on that note, and as a reminder, we have put up a poll if readers care to give their best guess as to how many days into his tenure it will take before McCarthy is subject to a motion to vacate (choose 725 if you think he'll dodge that bullet completely). And if you have comments on why you chose the number you did, send 'em in. Results on Friday. (V)

What Will House Republicans Actually Do Now?

House Republicans finally elected a speaker. Now what? OK, writing and adopting the rules comes next and then assigning members to committees and picking chairs. But then what? Passing laws is pointless because any law that could make it through the Republican-controlled House will not make it through the Senate. Nevertheless, the House may pass some bills for show, like one banning abortion nationwide starting 60 minutes prior to conception or one forbidding the teaching of critical race theory in pre-schools. These are simply to show the folks back home, with no intention of even reaching Joe Biden's desk, let alone getting him to sign them.

So will the House members just go home and start their 2024 campaigns? Not quite yet. Here are a few of the activities House Republicans are going to focus on in lieu of passing laws.

• Funding the government: The current funding for the government lasts until the end of this fiscal year (Sept. 30), but come late summer, the Republicans will have to come up with funding bills for the next FY, probably per executive department rather an an omnibus. There will be huge battles over funding since most Republicans are not on the same page as the MAGA 20 crew. If Kevin McCarthy allows the sane Republicans to work with the Democrats on bills that the Senate might accept, the MAGA 20 crew will call for a vote to vacate the chair. And that's assuming he has made it to the fall.
  
  
• The debt hostage drama: By summer, the government's authority to issue more debt will run out and the debt limit will need to be raised, The whole idea is crazy, since if Congress really wishes to reduce the debt it should either cut spending, increase taxes, or both. Instead it is trying to repeal mathematics. If the debt limit is not raised, the U.S. government will default on its debt, which is virtually certain to cause a worldwide depression. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) really, really, really does not want that because he knows who will get the blame, but he has no clout with the MAGA 20 crew in the House, who love chaos for its own sake. One way out is for Biden to request the Dept. of the Treasury to issue, say, five platinum trillion-dollar coins and deposit them in the Fed's bank account, thus reducing its debt. This tactic is a last resort, but it could be a bargaining tool to keep the MAGA 20 crew from doing real damage to the economy.
  
  
• Impeachments: Some House members want blood. Specifically, they want to impeach someone for something. It doesn't matter who and for what. It's all for show. It probably won't be Joe Biden because McConnell and others will remind the newcomers what happened when the House impeached Bill Clinton in 1998 (Hint: It didn't work out so well for the red team.) The most likely target is DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for some made-up charge about the border. But that could backfire, too, especially with Latino voters. If you want a real dark horse, they could impeach... Hillary Clinton. That would thrill the base, and might generate less of a backlash. Since she is not in office right now, they could not remove her from office, but they could try to bar her from future officeholding. The Senate will never actually go for it, of course, but that could be the stated purpose.
  
  
• Hunter Biden: This one is guaranteed. The House Oversight Committee, led by Rep. James Comer (R-KY), is going to turn Hunter Biden's life upside down and examine it minute-by-minute since he entered kindergarten (Did he ever take a toy from another child, especially a child whose parents were Republicans? Did a Chinese-American child ever give him a birthday present?). Young Biden has not led a ideal life, but as far as we know now, he has never broken any laws. If he got China to give him some money and he didn't do anything in return for it, then all he can be accused of is treating the Chinese like suckers. And even if he did break laws, Biden is a private citizen, and his behavior is not germane to anything else unless his father is also somehow responsible for the illegal conduct. In any event, this will be all over the right-wing media for months and months. One interesting question: What if Comer subpoenas the First Son and he cites the "Meadows Rule," saying "I don't have to come if I don't want to!"?
  
  
• Investigations of the DoJ: Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has promised to investigate the DoJ and FBI over dozens of matters. Jordan already asked AG Merrick Garland for a slew of documents and Garland replied that Jordan had no authority to ask for them. As soon as Jordan becomes Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, he will ask again. Garland will probably take his time responding and may refuse turning over many of them citing Mumble Jumble (preferably in Latin). If Garland refuses point-blank, or slow walks the whole thing, Jordan can refer Garland to the DoJ for prosecution. Good luck with that. Jordan will also be confronted with all the things he said about witch hunts when the Select Committee was trying to get reluctant witnesses to show up. Please fasten your seat belt to avoid whiplash.
  
  
• The southern border: Alejandro Mayorkas might be called to testify about the southern border. If so, he will surely show up and tell the committee that the problem there lies with Congress. If it wants something done there it has to pass the right laws and provide enough funding so they can be enforced. His answers could form the nominal basis for his impeachment, which will fail in the Senate, especially if Majority Leader Chuck Schumer adopts the same rules as McConnell adopted for the impeachment trials of Donald Trump (no witnesses, no testimony, no facts, just a quick vote and it's over).
  
  
• The Afghanistan withdrawal: The withdrawal was messy. It happened in a hurry because Donald Trump agreed to an unrealistic timetable with the Taliban. The Republicans will milk it for all it is worth, but we suspect that most voters have moved on and it won't resonate, especially since part of the problem was due to Trump and Democrats on the committee will hammer on that.
  
  
• COVID-19: Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee wants to find out how COVID-19 got started. Two detailed studies have already shown that it probably originated at a market in Wuhan, China and not in some research lab in China financed by the CIA. Maybe the Committee will draw up a report recommending that China expunge all recipes for sweet and sour bat from Chinese cookbooks and call it a day.
  

The items about laws that must pass (budgets and the debt limit) will get plenty of attention. The others will get plenty of attention on Fox but elsewhere much less unless there is some actual news there. The upcoming session of the House will probably be one of the least productive ever. The Senate will probably also have some investigations, as we pointed out last week, and they could conceivably even overshadow the House ones. (V)

Trump Takes Credit for Getting McCarthy over the Finish Line

Donald Trump used to refer to Kevin McCarthy as "My Kevin," as though he were referring to a dog. Which, to be honest, is not far from the truth. Now, "His Kevin" won, even though it was very close on the 15th ballot, with McCarthy getting 216 votes, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) getting 212, six members voting "present" and one person who was elected to the House not voting because he is dead. A landslide it was not. Yet apparently Trump is proud of his Kevin, as indicated by a post to his boutique social media site in which he wrote: "Thank you. I did our Country a big favor."

What he apparently meant is that he placed calls to Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Andy Biggs (R-AZ) after the 14th failed vote to try to get them on board. A widely circulated photo shows Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) trying to pass her cell phone to Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) during the voting:

A close-up of the photo shows she was in a call with "DT" (Donald Trump) at the time and Trump wanted to talk to Rosendale, one of the MAGA 20.

If Trump really had so much influence, one could ask why getting his Kevin over the hump took 4 days and 15 ballots and he made it by only four votes. But we're not going to ask that. (V)

Why Do Fringe Politicians Have So Much Power?

A toxic mixture of television, the Internet, social media, political polarization, gerrymandering, and campaign financing have changed politics and enabled extremist politicians, mostly on the right. There are also some on the left, such as the Squad, but they are not nearly as extreme or as aggressive as those on the right. Summarized very briefly, AOC is no MTG.

These factors have come together in such a way that many aspiring politicians are almost free agents, with the party label, machinery and money being largely irrelevant to them. This is how some of these factors enable fringe politicians:

• New goals: Older politicians ran for Congress because they had ideas about policy and legislation. They may have cared deeply about taxes, immigration, health care, abortion, the planet, or something, and they wanted to influence laws and government spending related to their issue. Some of the younger politicians, by contrast, don't care about policy. They just want to be famous. When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) entered Congress, she had four times as many followers on Twitter as then-speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Matt Gaetz is jealous and has said he wants to be the AOC of the right (although in fairness, AOC cares about policy and all Gaetz wants is her fame). What is important to many of them is not how many laws have their name in it (e.g., the Hatch Act, the Hyde Amendment, the Mann Act, Obamacare, and the Sherman Antitrust Act) but how many followers they have on social media. Like everyone else, they want their 15 minutes of fame. Only they want it every day.
  
  
• Television: The new right-wing politicians look in the bathroom mirror every day and they don't see a president the way the old ones did. They see Tucker Carlson. (Whether the left-wing ones see Rachel Maddow is something we don't care to speculate about.) Carlson is a good-looking guy who makes a lot of money spewing lies and hate for an hour every day. What a great gig. Of course they can't all be Carlson, but they can be on his show and build up a national following. They crazier they are, the more often he will invite them to be on the show. So crazy gets rewarded and being sane does nothing. Easy call, apparently.
  
  
• The Internet: Another way to be famous—and remember, being famous is the goal, not the means to some other end—is to use the Internet. Social media to the rescue here. The more outrageous your tweets are, the more followers you get and the more famous you become. The Internet has also enabled direct contact with supporters via e-mail lists. You can contact your supporters every day and keep them in a state of outrage, which keeps them coming back for more. The Internet also has enabled campaign contributions from small donors (e.g., via ActBlue and WinRed). That is a real game changer. Getting $10 here and $20 there from hundreds of thousands of donors adds up fast. When Marjorie Taylor Greene was stripped of her committee positions for posting hate speech to the Internet, she raised $3 million in that quarter. That amount is prodigious for a member of the House and she raised because she was stripped of her committee memberships, not despite being stripped of them.
  
  
• Polarization: Gerrymandering has been around for 200 years, but with modern computer software it has become a fine art. When it gets the chance, each party creates as many safe districts for itself as it can. A side effect is packing as many of the other party's voters into a small number of districts (because they have to go somewhere), in effect creating safe districts for the other side as well. When representatives are in D+15 or R+15 districts (or states), they don't have to worry about the general election. Their only fear is a primary from an extremist, which tends to move them to the extremes themselves to cut off their potential opponents' oxygen supply. How could someone out-extreme Marjorie Taylor Greene?
  
  
• Weakened leaders: All these factors have combined to weaken the leaders of both parties—and the party system itself. In the past, a leader could have a man-to-man (or less commonly, man-to-woman or woman-to-man or woman-to-woman) talk with a rank-and-file politician and read the riot act to that politician. If that didn't work, leaders had two tools to control difficult members. First, the leader could assign the recalcitrant member to a powerless, low-profile committee, or alternatively, to an important committee that the member had no interest in being on. The Agriculture Committee would be an desirable assignment for a member from Nebraska but less so for someone representing Phoenix.
  
  Second, leaders could threaten to withholding campaign funding from the NRCC (or DCCC). Without that money, the candidate might not make it into the next Congress. Nowadays, neither threat works with many members. The ones who have come to Congress simply to put on a show and become famous don't care much about committee assignments because they have no interest in writing laws. Saying: "We're not going to let you write laws" is no threat at all to them because they don't want to write laws (although it should be noted that being on committees does enable certain types of look-at-me grandstanding, as Jim Jordan has ably demonstrated). Even more important, by being famous, many of the fringe candidates can raise more money than they could possibly use on their own, so they have no need for party money and threatening to withhold it is no threat at all. With districts so gerrymandered and voters so polarized, all the fringe candidates have to do is watch their flank and become more extreme if need be. Consequently, leaders have very little power over them.
  

All this leads to political fragmentation with dozens of free agents working in temporary coalitions depending on the issue of the moment. In Europe, the same process is taking place, albeit with local characteristics. In the most recent elections for the Dutch parliament, 37 parties filed to run and 16 of them won at least one seat. If a leader threatens a member, the member can say: "If you do that, I'll start my own party and run against you." (V)

Biden Visits the Border

With all the talk about immigration and the border crisis, Joe Biden should have gone down south for the required photo-op much earlier. But yesterday he finally made the trip for the first time. He went to El Paso, where he was greeted by Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX). Abbott immediately handed him a letter that said the border crisis was a direct result of Biden's failure to enforce federal immigration laws. On the other hand, the President was instantly criticized by members of the House Hispanic Caucus for pandering to MAGA voters. This is not Biden's first rodeo, and he knew he'd take withering fire from all sides, which is probably why he waited so long to make a visit to the border.

The nominal purpose of the trip was to talk to local officials and community leaders for managing the migration challenges caused by political oppression and gang violence in many parts of Latin America. Biden chose El Paso because that is where the most illegal immigration is at the moment. He also chose this moment because he knows the House will soon begin investigating immigration and didn't want to allow the Republicans to say: "Biden hasn't even been to the border." Now, with a high-profile visit just before they start, all they can say is: "Why did it take so long?" Actually, he answered the question himself yesterday by saying it was up to Congress to update the immigration laws and provide sufficient funding to enforce the laws. Take that, House Republicans!

Biden knows a hot potato when he sees it. As veep for 8 years, he traveled all over the world because then-president Obama wanted to focus on domestic issues. So he sent the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hither and yon to avoid having to go himself. But in all this worldwide travels for many years, the only time Biden went to the Mexican border was a campaign stop in El Paso in 2008. Now the issue of immigration has become so critical that he will have to deal with it. Most likely, he will blame Congress for not updating immigration laws and House Republicans will blame him for not enforcing current laws. Then nothing will happen, as usual. Mission accomplished. (V)

South Carolina Supreme Court Overturns State Anti-Abortion Law

Will wonders never cease? The South Carolina Supreme Court has ruled that the right to privacy guaranteed by the state Constitution means that the state's new law banning abortions after 6 weeks is unconstitutional. With the new law scrapped, the old law, which allows abortions up to 20 weeks, takes effect starting immediately. Understanding why a 6-week ban is an invasion of a woman's privacy but a 20-week ban is not an invasion of a woman's privacy, is something that you have to go to law school and spend years on the bench to understand. It's not for laymen or laywomen to fathom.

The relevant portion of the state Constitution states that the people have the right:

...to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures and unreasonable invasions of privacy shall not be violated.

Chief Justice Donald Beatty wrote: "This fundamental, constitutional mandate transcends politics and opinion." Rep. John McCravy (R) didn't like that. He said: "It's certainly disappointing. It infringes on the legislature's job of making the laws." He has a point there. Constitutions often tell legislatures what laws they can and cannot pass. For example, the South Carolina legislature cannot pass a law bringing slavery back, even if a two-thirds majority want to do so.

Meanwhile, the legislature is working on a new bill that will ban abortions starting at the moment of conception. A similar ban came up last summer and was passed by the state House and killed in the state Senate. And that was before the state Supreme Court ruling. It seems unlikely that a bill even stricter than the one the Court threw out would have much chance.

The South Carolina Supreme Court is the first one to rule since Dobbs on whether anti-abortion laws violate the state Constitution. However, other states have similar provisions in their Constitutions. Similar challenges to anti-abortion laws are now pending in Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, Indiana, Iowa, North Dakota, Ohio, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming."

One thing the state legislators could do is change their constitutions to state that the right to privacy does not preclude the legislature passing laws regulating abortion. Then it would go, in most cases, to a vote of the people. Just like in Kansas last summer. Only that didn't work out so well for the anti-abortion forces. (V)

State Senate Election in Virginia Tomorrow

When Jen Kiggans (R) was elected to the U.S. House, she left behind an empty seat in SD-07 of the Virginia state Senate. A special election will be held tomorrow to fill it. The state Senate is currently 21D, 18R, with one vacancy. No matter who wins tomorrow's special election, Democrats will still hold the majority, but a two-seat majority would be a lot more effective at blocking Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) than a one-seat majority. Since Youngkin is often mentioned as a potential presidential candidate, his track record in getting things done could be something his opponents talk about. If the Virginia Democrats can pick up the seat and block everything the governor wants, that will certainly crimp his style.

The district includes parts of Norfolk and Virginia Beach. The candidates are Aaron Rouse (D) and Kevin Adams (R). Both are Black. The district is a swing district and could go either way. Both parties have won it in the past.

Although the recent, er, activities, in the U.S. House are not specifically relevant to the Virginia state Senate, Virginia is close enough to D.C. that most voters are probably aware of what went on there. It is at least possible that some swing voters came away thinking that Republicans don't actually want to govern, and that could affect their vote tomorrow. We don't know if there will be any exit polls. We certainly hope so, because if anything is a test of whether the circus in the House affects voters, it is surely a special election in Virginia 4 days after the House finally elected a speaker. (V)

Hawley Has a Democratic Opponent

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is right up there with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in believing that the main job of a senator is to grandstand, feed red meat to the base, and own the libs. Passing laws is for losers. Whether the voters of Missouri agree will be tested in 2024, as Hawley is up for a second term.

Missouri has become a fairly red state but Hawley is so over the top that he could go the way of Blake Masters, Tudor Dixon, Doug Mastriano, and some other extreme Republicans. But of course, you can't beat someone with no one. In 2022, there was an open seat and Marine veteran Lucas Kunce ran for the Democratic Senate nomination against beer heiress Trudy Busch Valentine. Valentine won the primary but lost the general election. We don't know yet if Valentine will try again, but Kunce has already announced that he is running again.

Here is Kunce's announcement. It is very hard hitting and contrasts Hawley's wealthy upbringing (elite prep school, Stanford, then Yale Law School) with Kunce's simple family background followed by service in Marine Corps. In the end he calls Hawley a coward and a fraud. Take a look:

On January 6, 2021, Josh Hawley showed us he's a fraud and a coward.

Missourians deserve a U.S. Senator who's willing to stand and fight. That's why I've decided to take him on. pic.twitter.com/VbN1SuqPFU

— Lucas Kunce (@LucasKunceMO) January 6, 2023

If this is the start, it is going to be a very nasty campaign. Although Valentine lost in 2022, Kunce will run a very different kind of campaign than she did. As a millionaire heiress, she couldn't very well attack Hawley as an out-of-touch elite. That is going to be the core of Kunce's campaign.

It is not clear how Hawley will respond if Kunce gets the nomination this time. Personally attacking a Marine Corps veteran who came from hardscrabble background probably won't work given his own privileged upbringing (his father was a wealthy banker). So Hawley may just campaign on "Democrats are socialists" and leave it at that. It could work, but if Kunce really turns up the heat on Hawley (again, assuming he gets the nomination this time), it could get very nasty. Note also that many Americans are aware that if there's any organization that's not exactly brimming with socialists and communists, it's the U.S. Marine Corps. The flags may be red, but the troops aren't. (V)

Brazilian Orange

Consider the following scenario:

1. A right-wing populist is elected president of his country.
2. His first term proves very divisive, due to his extreme policies and his propensity for villainizing his opponents.
3. When he runs for reelection, he loses to a more liberal challenger.
4. Because of the kind of man he is, he refuses to concede defeat and tells his supporters they have been cheated.
5. Some of the president's supporters, roused to fury by having been "cheated," launch a violent assault on the nation's Congress.
6. The president's party condemns the attack, but the president himself says very little, beyond framing the incident as a garden-variety "protest."

We assume this sounds very familiar. After all, it happened in Brazil just yesterday. Their system is a little different from the one in the U.S.; there's no counting of electoral votes to be interrupted, and new president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has already assumed office. Oh, and the Brazilians have no problem arresting politicians suspected of criminal behavior, former president or no, so alleged-inciter-of-insurrection Jair Bolsonaro is apparently out of the country, and is reportedly visiting Florida, where a politician like him should be right at home. Anyhow, some of the details are different, but the broad outlines are eerily familiar.

This helps explain why so many non-Americans follow this site in particular, and U.S. politics in general—folks well beyond the United States' borders often take their cues from the Americans, for better or worse. And you would have to look pretty long and hard to find two leaders more similar than Jair and the Hair. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), among others, observed as much yesterday, tweeting: "Two years since Jan. 6, Trump's legacy continues to poison our hemisphere." We will see if Bolsonaro has the colhoes to return to Brazil, or if he takes up permanent residence in the Democratic People's Republic of Florida. (Z)

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