Crooked Media - Impeaching to the choir

- Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) ready to oust the head of his own caucus or take his ball and go home

Remember when House Speaker Kevin McCarthy wagered that pursuing a baseless impeachment inquiry into President Biden would quell the bloodlust of his frothing GOP caucus? Well, you’re not gonna believe this, but it didn’t work.
 

• McCarthy officially opened an impeachment inquiry into Biden on Tuesday in a move to appease his most far-right members, who continue threatening to oust him if he does not meet their lengthy list of demands for deep spending cuts that will force a government shutdown at the end of September. Just over a week ago, McCarthy said, “If we move forward with an impeachment inquiry, it would occur through a vote on the floor of the People’s House and not through a declaration by one person.” Well, so much for that! Republicans may have been hoisted by their own petard, as Trump’s DOJ declared in 2020 that House impeachment inquiries are invalid without a formal vote to authorize them.
   

• McCarthy announced that he would task the Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means committees with carrying out the inquiry into the president and his family as House Republicans doggedly hunt for evidence of corruption or financial malfeasance. Unfortunately for them, Biden’s disclosed all his financial information, and his son has been under federal tax investigation for a long time, so if there were shenanigans, we’d know about them. “Shouldn’t an impeachment inquiry start with evidence of wrongdoing?” you may ask. Yes, it should! But unfortunately for these poor oafs, after months of extremely loud investigating, the House GOP has turned up nothing. In fact, despite at times referencing “evidence,” when pressed no one from the party is able to cite any. 
   

• The move is an obvious act of score settling against Democrats, who twice impeached disgraced former president Donald Trump because he was a machine of high crimes and misdemeanors. The inquiry will focus on Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine, which Republicans have been probing since before they took the House majority. Hunter Biden has never held public office, but that hasn’t stopped Republicans from screaming on every 24-hour news channel that will host them that there is a grand corruption conspiracy within the Biden family. It’s all starting to feel very, “I know you are, but what am I?”

The impeachment inquiry and its internal fallout demonstrate that McCarthy has lost his already-tenuous grip on his slim House majority. 
 

• Few were able to sum up the move better than Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who said, “This impeachment is Kevin McCarthy’s shiny new object to distract the public from the fact that the GOP can’t even pass bills to fund the government.” Hell yeah, Rep. Jayapal, get his ass. But the Speaker’s decision hasn’t swayed the far-right Freedom Caucus, which was its intended goal. Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), one of the group’s most red-faced lunatics, spoke at a press conference on the Capitol steps flanked by other Freedom Caucus members and declared that regardless of the impeachment inquiry, he would not vote to fund the government. 
   

• Unsurprisingly, Trump has been chiming in on the possibility of a Biden impeachment all along, wielding his gargantuan influence over the GOP to get them to abuse power. The former president has had weekly talks with House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, the first member of GOP leadership to publicly support impeachment. Trump has not been subtle about his desire for a Biden impeachment, writing on Truth Social last month, “Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US.” 
   

Normal, healthy political party! Should be an equally normal and healthy 2024 election!

Ever find yourself doom scrolling on Instagram? Tune into this week’s Offline, where Jon Favreau and Max Fisher talk about phone addiction and their best practices to stay offline, plus parenting the Internet Generation. New episodes of Offline every Sunday, wherever you get your podcasts.

Coronavirus pandemic assistance, particularly the Expanded Child Tax Credit, cut child poverty in half in the United States in 2021. It was the most successful attack on child poverty in American history, with rates falling to a historic low of 5.2 percent. In 2022, an effort to continue the program failed thanks to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who single-handedly killed President Biden’s Build Back Better legislation, because he privately told his colleagues he was convinced that families would use extra money from the CTC to buy drugs (without citing any evidence, of course). Now, new census data shows that the U.S. poverty rate has experienced its largest one-year increase on record, and the child poverty rate has more than doubled. The increase shows essentially a return to pre-pandemic levels of poverty in the United States, significantly higher than the rates of other wealthy countries. It’s difficult to think of a single piece of policy that has had more tangible benefits than the expanded child tax credit, and how effective running on that accomplishment would have been if Democrats had fought to keep it. One policy lifted 3.7 million American children out of poverty, and Congressional Dems haven’t tried to revive it since (apart from last year when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) tried to add it as an amendment to a budget-reconciliation bill, which failed overwhelmingly as Dems feared it would kill the bill). Now, with a GOP House Majority and Joe Manchin continuing his reign as a lump of fossilized coal, Dems have to wait until (hopefully) the winds change in 2024 before they can try again.

The United States hit a new record of billion-dollar weather disasters this year due to worsening climate change, so the Red Cross is launching a $1 billion response effort. 

Five former Memphis police officers involved in the fatal January beating of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols have been indicted on federal civil rights, conspiracy, and obstruction charges by a federal grand jury. 

The U.S. Treasury Department issued terrorism sanctions Tuesday on a family network of seven people and businesses in Lebanon and South America accused of financing Hezbollah. 

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un arrived in Russia on Tuesday as the two nations seek closer military ties. The official story from the Kremlin is that Kim is there to discuss “trade and economic issues.”

More than 5,000 people were killed in Libya after heavy rains and flooding caused two dams to burst, destroying much of the coastal city of Derna. According to local authorities, entire neighborhoods were carried into the sea. 

Talks between the “Detroit Three” (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler’s parent company Stellanis) and the United Auto Workers union stalled as the Thursday night deadline to reach a deal on a new contract approaches. UAW President Shawn Fain vowed to call for strikes at all three if no deal is reached by the deadline, which would be the first-ever simultaneous strike of Detroit Three workers, and one of the largest labor actions in recent history.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is in the midst of two-dozen lawsuits accusing prominent banking and credit institutions like Fifth Third Bank, TransUnion, and Moneygram of financial misconduct. The agency has issued over 300 enforcement actions since its creation in 2010 in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, resulting in $16 billion in relief to American consumers, including a $3.7 billion settlement last year with Wells Fargo. Republicans, if you can believe it, hate the CFPB. Conservative challenges to the funding structure of the CFPB (in the form of two groups representing the payday loan industry) have made their way to the Supreme Court, and arguments will be held on October 3. Republicans love corporations and hate consumer protections, so they’re hoping that the 6-3 Conservative majority on the Supreme Court will deliver for them, as it has when it arbitrarily curbed the powers of other federal agencies like the EPA. Opponents of the conservative efforts argued in court briefings that invalidating the funding mechanism of the CFPB could endanger similarly-structured agencies like the FDIC, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and even the Federal Reserve.

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Republican presidential candidate Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) desperately wants you to believe he has a girlfriend. 

The California State Assembly has passed a bill that will allow workers who are on strike for more than two weeks to be eligible for unemployment benefits. The bill now heads to the State Senate. 


Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) was escorted out of a Sunday night performance of the “Beetlejuice” musical for, according to officials, vaping, singing, recording and “causing a disturbance” during the performance. Still somehow better than the way she behaves at her day job. 

In a victory for years of organizing by student activists, New York University will divest from fossil fuels.