Well, it seems that my dreams are to be answered. Tomorrow, when the House of Representatives convenes, and each Representative, standing by his or her desk, announces in a loud voice a candidate for the office of Speaker, no one will get the 218 votes required. There will then be more rounds of voting.
This prospect poses for me a serious personal problem.
During the run up to the holidays, a local supermarket started carrying cardboard
tubes of candied popcorn that was to die for. Susie and I, but mostly I,
consumed five of these in the course of a couple of days. My problem is twofold: is
the supermarket still carrying this popcorn and do I dare buy some more of it
to eat as I watch the chaos unfold? I think the answer to the second question
is yes. If you cannot indulge when you are 89, what is the point of living to
such an age?
The Republicans will have to be careful. There has been some
talk that several of them may choose simply to reply “present” when their names
are called. If twelve of them take that choice, then only 422 votes will be
cast, and Hakim Jeffries, sitting there with 212 votes, will be the new Speaker.
As I have observed before, in these terrible times one must
take one’s pleasures where one finds them.
29 comments:
please spell check your title for this piece
Sloiuching is what you do when your galoshes are full of water.
Enjoy your popcorn!!
Sigh. Typos are what happen when one has hand tremors.
I know and I sympathise--I'm the first commenter. I have essential tremor which makes typing something on an iphone or using the new too sensitive tv controls almost impossible. I always find myself accusing the smart young things who devise all these ultra-clever devices of not having a clue about people like us--and we must be in the millions.
An interesting set of analyses from Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner of the current U.S. political miasma that starts with the thought that the post-war boom of contests between shifting coalitions of capitalists aiming to appeal to a shifting center has been replaced by the current condition where "Republican and Democrat rule alternates on the narrowest of margins" and winning "hinges on turnout and mobilization of a deeply but closely divided electorate": https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii138/articles/dylan-riley-robert-brenner-seven-theses-on-american-politics?fbclid=IwAR382pHiYnKBqMd3hlu2-V-yCIgqw9ukGq0tKpDDyip0cv2lXxrGO3tGrC4
Hakeem Jeffries is a corporate lawyer who hates leftists.
Another turd in a long line of turds.
"There will never be a moment where I bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism."
"Black progressives do tend to tackle issues first and foremost with an understanding that systemic racism has been in the soil of America for over 400 years.... Hard-left progressives tend to view the defining problem in America as one that is anchored in class. That is not my experience as a Black man in this country. And perhaps that’s where we have a difference of perspective."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/hakeem-jeffries-nancy-pelosi-speaker-house/619695/
"Jeffries has formed a new fundraising effort, Team Blue PAC, with [two co-chairs of centrist Democratic caucuses] Problem Solvers Caucus co-chair Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and New Democrat Coalition co-chair Terri A. Sewell (D-Ala.). [Rather than helping defeat Republicans in tight races in swing districts] the group will focus on protecting incumbent members of Congress [from more progressive challengers] in safe Democratic seats that are not a focus of the House Democratic campaign committee....
Jeffries’s involvement in the most recent primaries continues a long-running fight he has waged against more liberal elements of his party in New York, as he has cast himself as a leader who can bridge the Democratic donor community and the party’s activist base. He has raised nearly $1.4 million for House Democrats so far this cycle...."
"Despite the diversity of the best-known far-left candidates, Jeffries has at times characterized that wing of the party as White interlopers who don’t truly represent their urban communities. He mocked the Democratic Socialists of America as a club of professional activists.
'The socialist left is on the rise, particularly in neighborhoods where Black and Latino residents are being gentrified out of existence,' Jeffries told the New York Times late last year, as the mayoral contest got underway."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/democrats-house-incumbents-challengers/2021/07/13/5dad62a4-e327-11eb-8aa5-5662858b696e_story.html
A month ago (thereabouts) my brother and I had a conversation about error ridden texts that, if we were lucky, were corrected before sending. In other words, the state of being all thumbs when typing.
Since 'all thumbs' is an accurate descriptor we thought we should render that in Latin to make official name suitable for use in the ICD. Hence, "OMNI POLLEXIA". Omni = all, pollex = thumb.
When this name attains widespread usage (yeah, right) and becomes an entry in the OED, the first public use noted will be this entry the Philosopher's Stone blog.
Outlets like MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, CNN, Bloomberg never mention that Hakeem Jeffries is the nephew of Prof Leonard Jeffries.
A Google search for news articles mentioning "Hakeem Jeffries" and "Leonard Jeffries" yields almost all right-wing sites among the corporate news outlets.
The wikipedia entry on leonard jeffries is interesting, but it doesn't mention hakeem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Jeffries
anon.
Actually it does (or perhaps you just added it yourself).
"A Google search for news articles mentioning "Hakeem Jeffries" and "Leonard Jeffries" yields almost all right-wing sites among the corporate news outlets."
Are there any CNOs that don't tilt right (or at least rightish)?
Poor eyesight, LFC, not an intentional exclusion.
Hakeem Jeffries uncle, Leonard Jeffries, was decidedly not right-wing. He had been the chairman of the Black Studies Dept. at CUNY when he was removed as chairman after giving a speech in Albany in 1991 in which he made several repugnant anti-Semitic remarks. He sued the university and ultimately, after a circuitous route up to the Supreme Court and back down, his removal was sustained by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, in Jeffries v. Harleston, 52 F.3d 9 (1994).
Correction:
"Hakeem Jeffries' uncle ... "
According to the wikipedia account, he wasn't just anti-semitic. Indeed, he's presented as something like a black nationalist who viewed almost everyone else in a rather racist way. But what do I know?
Briahna Joy Gray commenting on the votes in the House.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pZKZjHU88E
I agree.
Eric,
I watched the first 4 or 5 minutes of that commentary. Contrary to Briahna Joy Gray's statement, progressives do not have "egg on their face" because, among other things, most people likely don't remember the "force the vote" proposal of 2021. Moreover, it's quite possible that any such effort would have backfired on the progressive faction, just as the current effort, even if it wrings some concessions from the Republican "establishment," will likely end up hurting politically everyone associated with the Republican Party, irrespective of their particular ideological bent.
But I know you will disagree, since you view all even vaguely mainstream Democrats as defenders of capitalism and enablers of the military-industrial complex who all basically deserve banishment to the seventh circle of hell.
I agree with LFC's comment.
Eric, does she realize there's a Senate? Does she really think that tying up the House in the wake of an insurrection would have been a good idea? Hashtags and policy are two different things. One hopes that the current clown show is but the beginning of a Whig like end. Pelosi will go down as one of the greatest Speakers ever.
BTW, Grey voted for Jill Stein in 2016, refused to endorse Biden in 2020 (she was Bernie's press secretary), and seems to be a tankie, so there's that.
I also agree with aaall's comment.
A cinematic review. Sunday night, my wife, daughter and I went to see Avitar – The Way Of Water. I was not as impressed with the first Avitar film as many critics were. It seemed like an interplanetary version of cowboys and Indians, with special effects. I was equally unimpressed and bored with the first 1 ½ hours of the sequel, which struck me as a repetition of the original. But the last 1 ½ hours were worth the price of admission. Commenters on this blog who denounce imperialism would enjoy the last 1 ½ hrs. And I kept thinking, if only this could happen to Putin.
LFC,
First, her commentary is not directed to "most people." It's intended for a more select audience who follow these kinds of insider politics more closely, and especially for those who follow debates in alternative internet-based and print media. (This is an audience who would be familiar with people like Sam Seder, Cenk Uygur, Kyle Kulinski, Krystal Ball, and Ana Kasparian, for example.)
Second—with regard to your view that "it's quite possible that any such effort would have backfired on the progressive faction," Manchin and Sinema were extremely effective in extracting quite a bit for themselves and their donors during the past Congress. And conservative House rebels brought down a next-in-line-to-be Speaker (Eric Cantor) and a sitting Speaker just a few years ago. Whether they achieved all of their objectives or not, they made it clear that their demands could not be ignored (unlike what's happened to the so-called Democratic progressives under Pelosi).
Third, if you only listened to the first 4-5 minutes, then you missed the best parts, which start at about 6:45.
some highlights
(1) Force The Vote was an idea that came straight from the DSA's handbook, and which AOC explicitly campaigned on during her initial run for office.
(2) "One key ask [that progressive Democrats could have demanded in order to agree to vote for Pelosi] was a vote on Medicare For All, which was intended to keep the fight alive and draw contrasts between Democrats' claims that they want to improve healthcare for Americans and the fact that they repeatedly kill Medicare For All legislation as quickly as they receive money from the pharmaceutical industry....
Look at how California, with its Democratic super-majority legislature, killed a state-wide Medicare For All bill. Or consider how silent all of the Squad members have been about Medicare For All since the end of the Bernie campaign. Did 68,000 people a year stop dying from lack of health insurance—or did it just become uncool to talk about it, now that we're outside of a fundraising cycle?"
(3) "The Squad could have demanded important committee assignments, as the current rebel Republicans have done. They could have forced a vote on banning stock trading by congressmembers [including Pelosi herself, whose personal wealth 'has balooned during her decades in office, widely out of proportion to her congressional salary, and who famously defended congressional stock trading despite the clear conflict of interest'].
But instead of choosing that moment to fight, to highlight the corruption of the Democratic Party, and to lead a genuine populist movement that stood a chance of waking people up to the limitations of the two-party duopoly, something curious happened.
A call seemed to go out to leading figures in progressive media that they should drop Force The Vote. [Sam Seder initially supported Force The Vote, but 'quickly changed his tune, alluding to a call he received that discouraged this approach.'] The legacy left [alternative] media all quickly turned against the idea, with large accounts like The Young Turks, The Majority Report [Sam Seder], and others spreading outright misinformation about the risks of what might happen if the Squad declined to vote for Nancy Pelosi. They repeatedly claimed, wrongly, that Kevin McCarthy would become Speaker of the House by default.... The lie was so pervasive that Pramily Jayapal herself [co-chair of the House Progressive Caucus and lead sponsor of the Medicare For All bill in the House] lied directly to ... Ryan Grim's face when he asked her why she voted for Nancy Pelosi without demanding real concessions."
Eric, whatever a candidate for an elective entity campaigns on will be reality checked by the composition of that body (and its rules) after the election.
"But instead of choosing that moment to fight, to highlight the corruption of the Democratic Party, and to lead a genuine populist movement that stood a chance of waking people up to the limitations of the two-party duopoly, something curious happened."
And a pony!. The contradictions were heightened in 2000 and 2016. How did that work out? The folks who follow the folks you mentioned are sometimes electorally significant for evil but are otherwise irrelevant.
"Populism" isn't a thing. Right Populism is a gateway drug on the way to some variety of fascism.
LFC: who all basically deserve banishment to the seventh circle of hell
I don't think anyone should be banished to Hell.
In fact, as I have become more familiar in the past few years with the work of Mariame Kaba, Dylan Rodriguez, Ruth Gilmore, and other prison abolitionists and advocates for a complete rethinking of the carceral state, the more I have tended to view our whole approach to "justice," based as it is on incarceration and ultimately capital punishment, as misguided.
LFC: since you view all even vaguely mainstream Democrats as defenders of capitalism and enablers of the military-industrial complex
You write this dismissively.
What evidence is there that it is not true (with regard to Democrats elected to federal offices and high state offices)?
Nancy Pelosi: "We're capitalists. And that's just the way it is."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR65ZhO6LGA
Barack Obama: "I actually believe that capitalism is the greatest force for prosperity and opportunity that the world has ever known. And I believe in private enterprise, not government, ... driving job creation."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVzdcC-FtWc
Elizabeth Warren: "I am a capitalist to my bones."
https://twitter.com/katielannan/status/1018852303212896257
Can't forget this oldie-but-goodie.
Stacey Abrams: “I’m not going to do class warfare; I want to be wealthy”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/stacey-abrams-whats-next.html
Eric,
I don't think anyone here is claiming that Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and their ilk are their intellectual or spiritual heroes.
After all, we've all chosen (insofar as we choose) to follow Professor Wolff's blog and Professor Wolff is a Marxist and anarchist. Probably most of us here share many of Professor Wolff's values and admire his intellectual life trajectory.
We just find that given the climate of polarization, not only in the U.S., and the danger of the far right, we prefer Nancy Pelosi to Donald Trump. After all, she believes in climate change and in vaccination against Covid to begin with.
I recall the German Communist Party refused to ally themselves with the Social Democrats, who they saw as traitors to the working class (and maybe they were) against Nazism and when
the Nazis came to power, they exterminated both the Communists and the Social Democrats.
Eric,
It is true. Most Dems elected to federal office are "defenders of capitalism."
The thing is, there are different varieties of capitalism (there is, as you may be aware, an entire academic literature on this).
Enacting Medicare for All would not turn the U.S. into a non-capitalist country, polity, or economy. A single-payer national health care system is not incompatible with capitalism (see the various capitalist countries in the world that have one).
DSA (I'm no longer a dues-paying member, though I was at one time) spends a lot of energy fighting for things like rent control, higher minimum wages, health care reform, union organizing drives etc. None of which lead to the end of capitalism.
On Force the Vote: I didn't follow the discussions around this, so perhaps I spoke prematurely.
Re aaall's statement that "'Populism' isn't a thing": That's nonsense. Populism has been a "thing" in the U.S. for a long time. You can start w the Farmers Alliance in the 1890s and go from there.
This will be last comment today. Other things to do.
"I recall..."
Apt observation by s.w.
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