Politics

Reasons to be cheerful? Those White House officials not rifling through classified documents in a Delaware garage (more on that later) have been able to enjoy back-to-back weeks of good economic news to start 2023. Taken together, last week’s robust December jobs report and this week’s inflation report that shows slowing price rises have boosted optimism about the possibility of a so-called “soft landing,” in which the Fed manages to tame inflation without causing a recession. Just a few months ago, it was a question of when, not if, America would dive into negative growth. A soft landing was seen as a pie-in-the-sky delusion; in October, a Bloomberg model put the chance of a recession at 100 percent.

President Biden said Tuesday he was “surprised” to learn that in November his lawyers had found classified documents in his former office at a Washington think tank. No doubt he was equally shocked when more classified docs turned up in his Delaware home. Yet the tone of the mainstream media seems to be that boys will be boys. Since Biden is being so cooperative with authorities after being caught red-handed, maybe this has nothing in common with Donald Trump's cache of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Or Hillary's cache on her private e-mail server. Could there be a double-standard? Biden had some/several/a bunch of classified documents while Trump had hundreds so that's different.

Almost a year ago, the Federal Aviation Authority, under the helm of transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, announced that the aviation briefing known as NOTAM, or Notice to Airmen, would undergo a name change. NOTAMs are unclassified notices distributed from an aviation authority to all pilots that contain essential information regarding conditions, hazards, system concerns, or other flight operations. NOTAM, Mayor Pete’s Department of Transportation declared, wasn’t gender inclusive and, as of December 2, 2021, it should henceforth be referred to Notice to Air Missions, not Airmen.

And then there was Kevin. In the wake of a forecasted red wave that never materialized, now-Speaker Kevin McCarthy plotted with friends and foes alike to secure the magical 218 votes necessary to take the helm of a rowdy, openly feuding House Republican caucus. After fifteen rounds of voting, Republicans eventually united behind him. Key players in the machinations spoke with The Spectator about the breakdown in the negotiations that had started in earnest after November’s elections. “Whirlwind.” “Shitshow.” “Weird.” At times, last week’s history-making votes felt more like a slog through purgatory than a victory lap over the long-awaited firing of Nancy Pelosi.

Four years ago this week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis presciently warned in his first inaugural address that big-spending, high-taxing states were inspiring “productive citizens to flee.” DeSantis came into office with a flimsy mandate of just four tenths of one percent at a time when Florida had 257,175 more registered Democrats than Republicans. Republicans now outnumber Democrats in the state by more than 356,000 and, in the wake of his resounding twenty-point win in November, DeSantis's inaugural address last Tuesday felt like a warm-up for the 2024 presidential campaign. In his 2019 speech, DeSantis spoke to Floridians, but he seemed to be addressing all Americans, urging us to reconsider Florida as a model rather than as the butt of Florida Man jokes.

After Kevin McCarthy finally ascended to the heights of the speaker’s chair, it remains to be seen what he actually won on that last fifteenth vote. The number of rules changes and side deals made along the way to please McCarthy's conservative opponents could fundamentally undermine the job of the speakership as we know it — and concessions made to leapfrog individual members into key committee positions could have significant ramifications. Whether that leads to more conservative policymaking depends on which members you ask; many are skeptical the results will be all that different for the House GOP given their slim majority. One question we don't know the answer to yet, and won't know for some time, is how permanent these negotiated changes will be.

Need a hit on Capitol Hill? Take your pick. Members and staffers alike are addicted to Twitter, where they log on for their daily stims of outrage. Cable news has also become a kind of drug, as congressmen stampede to the Fox News and CNN green rooms rather than go about the irritating business of legislating. But if we're looking for a way out of the present congressional gridlock, I think we need to turn to an older and wiser substance. "Alcoholism is as much of an occupational disease among politicians as black lung is among coal miners," Herman Talmadge once wrote. Talmadge, who served as a Georgia senator from 1957 to 1981, would know: he once took a month off from his senatorial responsibilities to get treated for alcoholism.