Hey y’all!
It’s Tim in for JVL today but do not fret, our Sad King will return tomorrow.
Thanks again for all your support for World Central Kitchen. We are closing in on $100k contributed from Bulwark readers. Amazing! Here’s the link if you want to be the one to put us over the top.
Before we get to the news, Part Two of the On Paradise book club is live. Here’s the link. You can revert to the main Book Club page or share with friends here -> www.thebulwark.com/timreads. I posted some discussion questions about Book Two today. I am about halfway through Book Two, Part Two—so no spoilers about the second section in Hawaii.
It has been fun doing this with folks. If you haven’t started yet and are a fast reader you can still catch up to us in time for the next installment, because I’m stuck reading boring politics books side-by-side with my To Paradise candy.
On that note…
1. This Will Not Pass. No Seriously, It Won’t.
So I’ve been paging through This Will Not Pass, the book by my pal Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns. And for all the SHOCKING REVEALS (with audio!) about Kevin’s cowardice, Mitch’s cravenness, and Kamala’s ennui, the thing that keeps striking me throughout is that none of the ostensible political professionals being profiled seems to understand the reality of the political situation they find themselves in.
By January 6th, Trump had been the number one story in politics for five years, upending all the conventional wisdom that came before. He was in the middle of an extended, multi-pronged effort to undermine our democracy. It may have been boobish, but it captured the imaginations of tens of million of Americans.
Yet most of the characters in This Will Not Pass act as if they are caught up in some 24-hour fever that will subside with liquids and a good night’s rest.
Here are just a few of the book’s wishcasting highlights:
On Jan. 6th, as the mob entered the Capitol, Lindsey Graham asked his fellow senators, with apparently no hint of irony: “Who could possibly hate Joe Biden?” (I don’t know, Lindsey, maybe the same base that believed a racist conspiracy theory about Barack Obama’s birthplace and decided Hillary Clinton was part of a pedophile ring in the basement of a pizzeria?) Graham went on to posit that after Jan. 6th “people will say, ‘I don’t want to be associated with that.’ . . . There will be a rallying effect for a while, the country says we’re better than this.” (No, we are not.)
Senator Rob Portman “privately assessed that McConnell was serious about a potential conviction” of Trump. (LOL.) He also thought a censure of Trump would be supported by thirty GOP senators. And those sharp political antennae arose again after Biden was in office when he lobbied Kevin McCarthy to come around on the bipartisan infrastructure bill. McCarthy never considered doing anything that could help Biden and stopped taking Portman’s calls.
Just hours before the Capitol was sacked, Joe Manchin was giddy about the 50/50 Senate because he thought it would “bring bipartisanship back to the country.”
Steve Womack, a generic Republican house member from Arkansas, advocated for the caucus to strip Mo Brooks of his committee assignments over his speech on Jan. 6th. Womack said Republicans needed to pivot and become the “adults in the room.” (Womack voted against Trump’s impeachment. Brooks was not punished. There are no adults to be seen.)
Lisa Murkowski and Fred Upton agreed that the carnage of Jan. 6th was Trump’s “legacy” and that this was the moment for the party to break from Trump. (Upton is retiring.)
John Thune thought the Republican party had to have a reckoning about its identity “pretty soon.”
McConnell, that wise old crow, somehow thought that Democrats would “take care of the son of a bitch for us” even if he didn’t convict Trump in the Senate. He told the book authors that the MAGA extremist “sons of bitches” were going to be “crushed” by McConnell’s political operation during the primaries in 2022. In another scene, Joe Biden called Mitch because he hoped the Republican Leader would juggle both an impeachment and the swift confirmation of his cabinet appointees. (Sigh.)
Let me clear my throat for a second.
WRONG. WRONG. WRONG. WRONG. WRONGITY WRONG WRONG!
You fucking idiots. You maroons. You really thought all this {waves hands} was over? That you were going to be let off that easy? That bipartisanship was coming back to Washington? That the radicals who stormed the Capitol wouldn’t get their dander up over Joe Biden? That the Republicans were going to bring back some old-timey comity?
How obtuse could these people possibly be?
And yet somehow, even today, the very same thick-headed, self-absorbed clowns are still peddling the notion that change is gonna come. That the parties might come together to pass an anti-inflationary immigration compromise and that Republican voters will be fine with that as long as they just “get back to where [the GOP’s identity] is built on a set of ideas and principles and policies,” like John Thune wishes they would.
My God.
What more needs to happen for these people to wake up?
It’s over. The party is over.
THIS is the party now:
Now after watching that video, how is Mitch’s vow to crush the sons of bitches working out?
Here is a reality check.
This will not pass because people in power refuse to take on the risk required to force change.
Some days it seems like the only one who gets this is Liz Cheney.
And that’s why in the book, Kevin McCarthy’s bestie Jeff Miller is quoted as saying “Fuck that bitch.”
Because anyone who shows actual courage and bursts the comfortable bubble where these Republicans tell themselves that things might magically get better if they just keep on doing the same shit they’ve been doing for 7 years must be debased, degraded, and expelled from the club.
2. Susan Collins: Bad & Bougie; Concerned & Calculating
I’m taking over JVL’s newsletter, so I want to engage in one of his favorite pastimes.
No, not watches. Or baseball. Or dire predictions of doom.
We spend a lot of time batting around out-of-left-field ideas for how Democrats could shake up our political snow globe. One of those ideas involves changing the power center in the Senate by getting some group in the middle to create a third caucus that blocks anti-democratic partisans from taking over Senate committees.
Hypothetical example: Maybe Murkowski, Collins, Romney, Manchin, Sinema, and Tester all get together and commit to support only a majority leader who vows to uphold the next election. . .
Well, according to This Will Not Pass, there was some backroom dealing in this vein being discussed in late 2020. But during this furtive gathering at Bistro Cacao, a French restaurant on Capitol Hill, it was not, as we had envisioned, Democrats courting Murkowski, Collins, and Romney.
Exactly the opposite.
It was Republicans, specifically Susan Collins, courting Manchin and trying to encourage him to caucus with them so McConnell could be majority leader. And she recruited John Thune and Rob Portman to help make the sale.
That’s right, brave independent-minded Senator Susan Collins was plotting to oust Schumer.
The hero of this story is the criminally underrated Joseph Manchin.
Manchin said he wouldn’t go along with it so long as Mitch McConnell was going to be the one put back in charge of the Senate.
Crisis averted.
3. Free Brittney Griner
There’s been a lot of performative concern lately about the sanctity of women’s athletics from people who only otherwise discuss them for mocking purposes.
And, well, for anyone who actually cares about the athletes themselves, rather than winning another battle in the imaginary Twitter war against the wokes, there is a story that actually merits attention.
Brittney Griner is one of the top 10 women’s basketball players in the world. And she has been detained in Russia since February, on the charge of carrying “hashish oil.” She had been in the country playing for the Yekaterinburg squad in the Russian league during the WNBA’s off season. Yesterday, Trevor Reed, a former Marine, was released from Russia in a prisoner swap, but there remains no news on Brittney.
It’s a scary crisis thrust upon a truly special athlete.
Take a few minutes to read this old profile on the slam-dunking, gender-bending star, and the abuse she has faced.
And the latest on her status behind Putin’s curtain.
#FreeBrittney
Peace.
I like this Triad. The world needs more Tim.
So it sounds to me that Joe Manchin is more personally repelled by Mitch McConnell than I imagined. I have always thought he would have so much to gain and so little to lose by going independent and caucusing with the Republicans. Although he would cease to have the same leverage he enjoys now. Which may be the point.