Donald trrump

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.

“President Biden should be impeached by the incoming House Republican majority over his ongoing destruction of the southern border,” proclaimed National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy on New Year’s Eve. Once the preserve of the GOP’s right wing, which introduced nine failed impeachment resolutions against Biden prior to the midterm elections, the idea of impeaching Joe Biden is gathering ground. Even staid moderates are beginning to realize that six million illegals pouring across the Rio Grande might not be such a blessing of liberty. Rank-and-file Republicans are hungering for revenge against Democrats for twice impeaching former president Donald Trump.

So where are the FBI SWAT teams? Will they be raiding Joe Biden’s private office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy & Global Engagement as they raided Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Palm Beach home? Of course not. Sure, it turns out that there were classified documents in Biden’s office dating from his time as vice president. But only Trump and Trump-friendly people get the full klieg treatment from the Deep State’s Geheime Staatspolizei.   We do not yet know exactly what is in Biden’s documents, though news reports acknowledge that some of the material was marked “sensitive compartmented information,” also known as SCI, a designation used for “highly sensitive information obtained from intelligence sources.

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.

The year is 2072. House Republicans are about to embark on their 47,838th attempt to elect a speaker. Kevin McCarthy's hair has achieved sentience, giving him an extra vote, while Marjorie Taylor Greene has transformed into a werewolf. Outside the deteriorated Capitol building, flying cars pass overhead and gawk at the democracy that once was. That's one read into the future anyway, after three days and an orgy of failed votes that have left the House in a state of chaos. And that's assuming there even is a House anymore. The previous Congress has been vacated, while the current one is prohibited from being sworn in until a speaker is chosen. That's left some observers asking disorienting questions: does the House still exist? Has it ever?

In the Quaker denomination, they have a term: “bloody-minded objector.” Because the Society of Friends requires consensus on all matters concerning their meetings, they make exceptions for those who are needlessly gumming up the works for personal or wrongheaded reasons. Today, Florida Man Representative Matt Gaetz is leading a band of twenty bloody-minded objectors who refuse to vote for Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House — and that's not all. He and they are also making Donald Trump look like an absolute fool. McCarthy and Trump have a good relationship and Trump has endorsed the GOP leader for the speakership. As a presidential candidate, Trump needs his endorsements to matter; he needs to show that he is still the leader of the MAGA cause.

In two weeks, with great sorrow, our nation will mark the second anniversary of the culmination of an unprecedented self-coup attempt by a sitting president: the January 6 Capitol riot, which resulted in five deaths. The callous barbarism we witnessed that day was nothing less than a brazen assault on the fountainhead of American self-governance, the Constitution. No amount of Tucker Carlson’s documentaries or Revolver News clickbait can change that inconvenient fact. Conservatives who dismiss what happened as nothing more than a false flag operation designed to initiate a “patriot purge” are doing themselves a grave disservice. Since July of last year, the January 6 Committee has been charged with investigating the events of the fateful day and what precipitated it.

The Select Committee to Investigate January 6 announced Monday that it would refer former president Donald Trump for charges to the Department of Justice’s special counsel. The committee also released its Executive Summary, which includes a description of findings and charges. Since its formation in July 2021, the committee has heard testimony from dozens of officials in the Trump administration and individuals who were associated with the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. The Executive Summary lists seventeen findings of the Select Committee which inform their decision to refer Trump for charges.

When asked whether he will leave the Democratic Party and become an independent at a press conference on Monday, West Virginia senator Joe Manchin said, "I'm not a Washington Democrat, I don't know what to tell you… I have no intention of doing anything right now. Whether I do something later, I can't tell you what the future's going to bring." Simultaneously, Manchin threw a punch at former Senate challenger and current congressman Alex Mooney, stating, "[Governor Jim] Justice is a much better candidate, and he would be doing it for the right reasons. I think Mooney is doing it strictly for his political ambition." While Manchin hasn't yet confirmed a re-election bid, his comments leave the door open for his departure from the Democratic Party.