The election is over except for Arizona which seems to be bogged down in some mishap with absentee ballots.
The Democrats have taken a majority of the House of Representatives so the Speaker and committee chairs will shift. Nancy Pelosi wants to be Speaker again at the age of 78. She has shown some signs of mild dementia and is definitely not the first choice of many Democrats. However, she has been a big fundraiser with her San Francisco connections.
Committee chairs who will be prominent include Jerry Nadler, energized after his obesity surgery and now promising impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh and President Trump.
The Federalist reported that Nadler was riding an Amtrak Acela train to Washington, DC, Wednesday to meet with his congressional staff and House Judiciary Committee staff when he revealed in a phone call with a friend the details of House Democrats’ plans for the next two years.
“We’ve got to figure out what we’re doing,” he explained on the call before he began discussing House Democrats’ plans to investigate and later impeach Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh for alleged perjury.
The first option, he explained, was to investigate the FBI for how they handled the uncorroborated claims from several women claiming Kavanaugh sexually assaulted them.
“They didn’t even do a half-ass job,” he said. “They didn’t interview 30 witnesses who said ‘Interview me! I’ve got a lot to say!’”
He then brought up Democrats’ Plan B, which was to go after Kavanaugh himself, because “there’s a real indication that Kavanaugh committed perjury.”
Whether this was just boasting to a friend or a serious plan is yet to be revealed.
Adam Schiff, who has been Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, will become Chair and plans to continue “investigations” of the Russia collusion rathole.
Representative Adam Schiff, one of the top Democrats preparing to investigate the president, had a response at the ready. On Wednesday, he tweeted: “We will protect the rule of law.”
Read: The 7 most dumbfounding moments from Trump’s post-election press conference
Now, with power shifting in Washington and the president seemingly prepared to intensify his fight against the Russia investigation, Schiff is poised to play a key role in the coming struggle.
When I spoke with Schiff, currently the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee and the most likely chair of the committee in the next Congress, just ahead of the election, he didn’t indicate that Democrats would be deterred by the president. Investigations, he argued, are vital to the national interest.
This is insanity but promises to entertain the more deluded members of the Democrat base.
Then there is Maxine Waters, who ranks high on the corruption scale, and will likely chair the Financial Services Committee.
“By contacting then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to request a meeting, allegedly for a group of minority-owned banks, but then arranging for only one bank – OneUnited, in which she had a financial interest – to attend, Rep. Waters violated House conflict of interest rules,” said CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan.
Around the same time Rep. Waters asked the Treasury Department to hold the initial meeting, Rep. Waters spoke to Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) about OneUnited, telling him that her husband previously had served on the board. Rep. Frank advised her to stay out of matters related to the bank. Nevertheless, Rep. Waters’ chief of staff and grandson, Mikael Moore, continued to actively assist OneUnited representatives in their quest to receive bailout funds, and worked to craft legislation authorizing Treasury to grant OneUnited’s request.
This, of course, is history and Maxine has been prominent lately encouraging left wing agitators, like those who attacked Tucker Carlson’s house last night. Carlson is a Fox News host and the only one I watch.
An anti-fascist group called Smash Racism DC announced the protest in a video posted late Wednesday: “BREAKING. Activists ring doorbell, hold protest at the Washington DC area home of @TuckerCarlson, racist, sexist, bigoted FOX News personality. So far no one has opened the door.”
“Tucker Carlson, we will fight!” the protesters chanted. “We know where you sleep at night!”
They sent Twitter messages with his home address, and Maxine would be proud.
Moveon.org refuses to move on and plans massive protests about the resignation of Jeff Sessions as AG. A year ago, the Left was demanding his resignation but that was then and this is now.
The LA Times is deeply concerned about “Trumpism.”
Enough Americans rose up against President Trump on Tuesday to take from him and his party one house of Congress, and that will partially block his path of destruction through the nation. For that we are grateful. Democrats also won governor’s offices previously held by Republicans in Kansas, Maine, Michigan and Wisconsin and flipped legislative houses in Maine and Minnesota. It was a referendum on Trump and Trump lost. It was indeed a blue wave.
But not a tsunami. It was not big enough to show that the populist reactionary movement that elected Trump in 2016 was an anomaly.
What if it wasn’t “an anomaly?” What if the people in this country, at least half of us, are concerned about The Ruling Class ? At least the Ruling Class could perform their ruling function in a competent fashion.
The fiasco of the Obamacare rollout was just one example of incompetence. The financial collapse of 2008 was another example and confirmed impressions that this was not the doing of only one of the two major parties. Peter Wallison, a Republican financial expert has an explanation that is probably close to the truth. He tends to absolve the banks, which I think is probably not the whole story. Nicole Gelinas has a book about the financial crisis, for which I wrote a review at Amazon.
It was probably a combination of poor housing policy and financial malpractice. The solution of TARP, which is the subject of Codevilla’s article, was an example of Ruling Class corruption.
As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.
It didn’t matter what the public and the Congressmen who represented them wanted. The Ruling Class got their money back. And we then got Trump.
Tags: politics
Someone of Althouse said that this is the current home of Michael K. It seems like your writing style.
I have always enjoyed your insightful comments so I’d like to continue reading your musings.
Ken (Viking in Winter)
Sure. I just got tired of the anger and strife over there and found I was getting into it, too.