Jonathan Chait: Republicans’ Denial That They’re Defending Rich Tax Cheats Is Very Fake

Over the past generation, rich people’s taxes have been audited at a dramatically lower rate because the Internal Revenue Service has been slowly losing the resources to conduct the audits. Last year, in an attempt to increase tax compliance among the rich, Democrats passed a law to give the IRS more funding with the explicit direction of using the money to audit the wealthy.

Republicans propose to strip the IRS of its funding. But Republicans don’t admit their goal is to leave the agency unable to audit the rich. What they say instead is that the Democratic plans would actually target the non-rich. The basis of these claims is nonsensical.

A good summary of the state-of-the-art justification for the Republican plan can be found in a recent National Review column by Nate Hochman. Much of Hochman’s column is taken up with repeated familiar conservative myths — that the Democratic plan would hire “87,000 new IRS agents” (not true: Most of those new hires would not be agents and would be replacing existing staff) and that the Obama administration used the IRS to target the tea party (not true: The IRS was investigating the abuse of nonprofit status by political groups on the right and the left, and in any case, Obama had nothing to do with the policy).

Since the 1990s, Republicans have consistently pushed to increase tax-compliance requirements for low-income earners while decreasing funding for the IRS. Over that time, the poor have been audited at an increasing rate while the rich have been audited at a decreasing rate. They are now insisting with a straight face that the Democrats are the ones who want to protect rich tax cheats. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/irs-rich-tax-cheats-audit-tax-foundation-inflation-reduction-act-biden-congress.html

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Kevin McCarthy and the Republicans’ Rocky Road Ahead

How McCarthy eventually won over his opponents may provide a clue to how he will operate. Mostly, he traded leverage away for support. He agreed to lower the threshold for replacing a Speaker, and to keep a McCarthy-aligned super pac from picking sides in Republican primaries. Substantively, he agreed to establish a new select subcommittee on the “weaponization” of the federal government which Jordan is expected to lead, and is likely to begin with investigations into the Obama-era classified documents that recently turned up in an office that President Biden had used and at his home. (The new Speaker has also agreed to consider formally expunging Trump’s impeachment.) More ominously, McCarthy agreed not to raise the debt ceiling without extracting offsetting spending cuts. That concession suggests that the House’s year, which seems set to start with investigations into Hunter Biden and border policy, may be punctuated with a standoff over the debt ceiling, in which Republicans threaten to default on the government’s debt in the name of small-government principle. And he gave opponents the committee seats they wanted. Fox News asked Byron Donalds, a second-term Black congressman from Florida, whom the insurgents had repeatedly nominated for Speaker, “What did you get?” The answer was a spot on the Party’s steering committee. Gaetz said that the opposition to McCarthy’s election stopped because “we ran out of stuff to ask for.”

If this is, in fact, how the new Speaker has to govern, by cutting individual deals in order to preserve his majority, then his tenure is likely to move from crisis to crisis and may well be short. Already there are little fires everywhere in the caucus: some moderates have balked at the concessions made to the Gaetz faction, at the possibility that McCarthy’s debt-ceiling commitments will mean sharp defense cuts, and even at the caucus’s extreme line on abortion, which South Carolina’s Nancy Mace, a McCarthy ally, denounced as “tone deaf.” The main preoccupation of McCarthy’s first week as Speaker was the case of the freshman Representative George Santos, of New York, who, in his bid for office, appears to have made up just about every element of his biography: a sterling business record, Jewish heritage, even a star turn on the Baruch College volleyball team. (He was also wanted for fraud in Brazil.) Both the Nassau County G.O.P. and the five other freshman Republicans from New York have called for him to resign, but not McCarthy, whom Santos supported and who doesn’t have the margin to cut loose even an obvious liability. It might seem like good news for Democrats that the Republican leadership is this weak—except that weak Republican leadership is what paved the way for Trump in the first place. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/23/kevin-mccarthy-and-the-republicans-rocky-road-ahead

Ed Kilgore: Anti-Abortion Activists Are Bringing the Culture War to Your Drugstore

The anti-abortion movement is already working to dampen any enthusiasm over the FDA approving the distribution of an abortion pill, mifepristone, by pharmacies with a prescription (previously, it could be dispensed only by specially certified mail-order pharmacies, doctors, and clinics). The approval applies only to states where abortion pills haven’t already been banned after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization revoked the federal constitutional right to choose. And now the forced-birth crowd is pledging to put pressure on pharmacies that distribute these drugs in states where it’s legal in hopes of restricting access. As Politico explains, anti-abortion activists are focusing on large pharmacy chains that should quickly get certified to distribute the drugs:

Anti-abortion advocates are organizing pickets outside CVS and Walgreens in early February in at least eight cities, including Washington, D.C., in response to the companies’ plans to take advantage of the Food and Drug Administration’s decision last week allowing retail pharmacies to stock and dispense abortion pills in states where they’re legal.

Big drugstore chains aside, smaller mom-and-pop independent pharmacies may already be deterred from distributing abortion pills by the burdensome certification process. Now they’ll also have to consider the threat of protesters outside and “pharmacists of conscience” inside. And underlying all these considerations for pharmacies will be the continuing battles in the courts over state constitutional provisions protecting the right to choose, policies set by state legislatures, and upcoming ballot initiatives (won by the abortion-rights cause in every 2022 test). And while Democratic control of the White House and the Senate means there’s no reason to fear federal abortion bans right away, the House will be churning out anti-abortion legislation (it’s already passed one bill protecting pro-life protesters and another requiring medical treatment for rare survivors of botched late-term abortions) in a sign of what might happen after 2024 if Republicans win a trifecta that year.

So the parking lots at CVS and Walgreen’s will simply join other contested ground the U.S. Supreme Court created with Dobbs. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/anti-abortion-activists-bring-culture-war-to-your-drugstore.html

Molly Jong: Fast: Keeping Up With The Congressional Kardashians  

Welcome to the 118th Congress, season one, a taxpayer-funded reality show where, instead of glitzy women battling it out, it’s mostly old white guys jockeying for power, protecting Donald Trump, and targeting Joe Biden. Last week’s episode featured Kevin McCarthy pathetically promising the far right everything from a one-person motion to vacate to a very likely debt-ceiling default debacle. In fact, McCarthy has made so many people so many promises that Republican Nancy Mace wondered Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation, “So my question today is what backroom deals were cut?”

Good question! For it certainly seems like McCarthy gave away the store to get the gavel. On Monday, McCarthy kicked off his first week as Speaker by rejecting Dan Crenshaw as chair of the Homeland Security Committee, and instead picking House Freedom Caucus member Mark Green. You may remember the representative from Tennessee: He had to withdraw his nomination for secretary of the Army after his anti-transgender comments surfaced. After getting his plum assignment, Green told reporters Monday he was going to put a permanent staffer on the border.

We’re still learning more details about the concessions and arm-twisting that apparently went on last week beyond the reach of C-SPAN’s cameras in order to get McCarthy over the finish line on the 15th vote. As Politico’s Olivia Beavers tweeted Tuesday, “At least two Republicans among McCarthy’s 20 holdouts got direct threats from GOP donor Thomas Peterffy last week, per GOP sources I spoke with.” Beavers shared a screenshot of a message purportedly from Peterffy: “What goes on in the house is weakening the party. Unless you vote for Kevin now, we’ll never give you any money, Big Donors.”

This season seems like it’s going to have lots of twists and turns as the House GOP turns Congress into The Real Housewives of the Longworth Building. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/01/congressional-kardashians-kevin-mccarthy-speaker-drama

David Rohde: The Investigations of Joe Biden Begins

On Tuesday, the Republican-controlled House, in a party-line vote, created a new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which they say will be modelled on the Church committee, a landmark Senate investigative panel created in 1975 to examine abuses committed by the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and other intelligence agencies.

The new subcommittee will have the power to investigate “ongoing criminal investigations” by the Justice Department and the F.B.I., and what Republicans say is political bias in both organizations. Representative Jim Jordan, of Ohio, has vowed to look into the banning of Donald Trump and other conservatives from Twitter as well as reports from internal whistle-blowers of anti-conservative activity at the F.B.I. “We have a duty to get into these agencies,” Jordan told Fox News, “and how they’ve infringed on First Amendment liberties of the American people.”

Jordan and some potential Republican members of the subcommittee played a central role in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 Presidential election. Jordan worked closely with Trump to get House members to block the certification of the results—and voted against it himself. (Nancy Pelosi vetoed Jordan’s nomination to the January 6th committee.) Scott Perry, who has expressed interest in serving on the subcommittee, was involved in Trump’s failed attempt to seize control of the Justice Department just before January 6th by attempting to appoint an election denier as Attorney General. In an interview that aired on Sunday, Perry insisted that he should be able to serve on the panel investigating the Justice Department—even though the Justice Department is potentially investigating him. “Why should I be limited just because someone has made an accusation?” he asked. “Everybody in America is innocent until proven guilty.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-investigations-of-joe-biden-begin

Nick Catoggio: Waiting for Ronald

Arguably no one, Trump included, understands better than Ron DeSantis that popularity within the Republican Party requires relentlessly confronting the right’s domestic enemies. As such, it’s unimaginable that he’d discourage House Republicans from a politically and economically ruinous fight over the debt ceiling just because having that fight would be politically and economically ruinous.

Especially since, more so than most Republican politicians, DeSantis is hypersensitive to populist opinion. This is a guy so intent on staying on the good side of MAGA voters that he’s repositioned himself as a vaccine skeptic to win their favor. He surely knows by now that a majority of Republican voters oppose raising the debt ceiling. He’s not going to side against them and with Democrats by backing a clean debt-ceiling hike, especially while Trump is hooting at the House GOP to fight, fight, fight.

There go the people. He must follow them, for he is their leader. https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/boilingfrogs/waiting-for-ronald/

Republican Opposition to Ukraine Is Reaching Tipping Point

When Russia first launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, most Americans and their political representatives immediately identified with and sought to assist the beleaguered victims of Vladimir Putin’s aggression, while condemning the crude neo-tsarist imperialism it represented.

But from the get-go in the dark heart of MAGA-land, there was dissent and considerable grumbling. Some of if took the form of America First whataboutism, best expressed by Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance; on the brink of the invasion he said, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine” because he was too absorbed with fentanyl coming across the U.S.-Mexico border. But others were really struggling to abandon their affection for Putin, who had, with Donald Trump, Victor Orbán, and Jair Bolsonaro, represented a sort of right-wing authoritarian network. Then-Congressman Madison Cawthorn parroted Russian propaganda by saying “the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies,” and his colleague Marjorie Taylor Greene called the Ukrainians “neo-Nazis.” Fox News’ Tucker Carlson was a constant font of bitter hostility toward U.S. aid for Ukraine.

Now, nearly a year later, it’s harder to find Republicans expressing a crush on Putin, but neo-isolationist disdain for any U.S. role in aiding Ukraine has been steadily rising in the GOP and may have reached a tipping point where it has real-life consequences. When putative House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached a handshake agreement with his right-wing critics to roll back appropriations for the current fiscal year, defense hawks in his party were appalled. It quickly became apparent that the “defense cuts” many House Republicans had in mind involved the new tranche of military aid to Ukraine that had been included in the omnibus spending bill Congress approved in December. It’s no accident that a majority of House Republicans skipped Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s address to Congress on December 21, even as opinion leaders on the right were attacking him (e.g., Donald Trump Jr.’s dismissal of Zelenskyy as an “ungrateful international welfare queen”). https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/republican-opposition-to-ukraine-is-reaching-tipping-point.html

John Cassidy: Kevin McCarthy’s Hollow Victory Will Have Economic and Political Consequences

Based on his own self-serving modus operandi, McCarthy doesn’t have much choice; if he is to get anything done over the next two years, he will need to retain the support of Greene and many other far-right extremists.

This prospect is already raising alarms on Wall Street, where attention is focussing on the need to raise the debt ceiling and prevent a U.S. government default—an imperative that will probably become pressing by the summer. Earlier this week, Representative Ralph Norman, of South Carolina, who is a member of the Freedom Caucus, called on McCarthy to “shut down the government rather than raise the debt ceiling,” adding that this demand was “a non-negotiable item.” In this instance, it would be a mistake to focus exclusively on the maga crazies: months ago, McCarthy and Senator John Thune, of South Dakota, both made clear that they favored using the debt limit to force big cuts in spending. But McCarthy’s humiliation has made clear how little flexibility he will have in managing his own caucus during the debt-ceiling brinkmanship.

A repeat of the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis, in which the G.O.P.-led House of Representatives defied President Barack Obama, now seems likely, and it could be a lengthy one. Ultimately, perhaps, even the members of the Freedom Caucus won’t want to be held responsible for a financial crash that tanks their voters’ 401(k) plans and endangers the mighty dollar, especially at the start of another Presidential-election campaign. But who really knows? https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/kevin-mccarthys-hollow-victory-will-have-economic-and-political-consequences

Dana Milbank: Can you govern on a lie? House Republicans give it a try.

Former Trump administration interior secretary and incoming Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) stepped up to the microphone and into the Twilight Zone.

“Despite the ‘deep state’s’ repeated attempts to stop me, I stand before you as a duly elected member of the United States Congress and tell you that a deep state exists and is perhaps the strongest covert weapon the left has against the American people,” he told the House. The Montana Republican, who has returned to Congress after a scandal-plagued stint in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, informed his colleagues that “the deep state runs secret messaging campaigns” and is trying “to wipe out the American cowboy.”

Yee-haw! Zinke was speaking in support of a new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, or, as Democrats call it, the “Tinfoil Hat Committee.” In substance, it’s the QAnon committee, with a remit to probe the “deep state” and other wacky conspiracy theories. With the panel’s creation, QAnon completes its journey from message board for the paranoid to official policy of the House Republican majority.

After the chaos of the first week of the 118th Congress, many Americans wondered: If it took them 15 ballots just to choose a speaker, how could Republicans possibly govern? Now we know. They are going to govern by fantasy and legislate on the basis of fiction.

On Monday, their first day of legislative business, they voted to repeal funding for a fictitious “87,000 IRS agents” who don’t exist and never will. On Wednesday, they approved legislation purporting to outlaw infanticide, which is already illegal and always has been. In between, they set up the deep state committee. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/13/house-republicans-govern-lie-weaponization-committeee/

Jackie Calmes: Republicans being the party of fiscal conservatism? Don’t believe it for a minute

With a Democrat inhabiting the White House, perhaps the most predictable thing about House Republicans’ return to power is this: They’ve rediscovered their faux fiscal conservatism.

All week members of the Republican majority have been chest-beating about how, thanks to the new House rules they devised, they will restore rectitude to federal budgeting. Income will be balanced against spending and debt reduced, just as American families have to do at their kitchen tables.

Don’t take that promise to the bank. It’ll bounce. And not because Republicans are up against the supposedly profligate Democrats who control the White House and Senate. As we begin what’s sure to be a chaotic two years of Republican governance in the House, a little fiscal history is in order, no green eyeshades needed.

In short, Republicans forfeited the title “fiscal conservatives” so long ago, most Americans weren’t even born yet. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-01-12/house-republicans-budget-national-debt-fiscal-conservatism

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: What the Twitter Files Reveal About Free Speech and Social Media

The Twitter Files, a serial investigation into the way the company has managed sensitive public issues, commissioned by its new owner, Elon Musk. Not long after Musk bought Twitter, in October, he reached out to a few prominent journalists, each of them at least broadly sympathetic to Musk’s view that Twitter’s past moderation decisions reflected its own entrenchment in the liberal establishment, and were therefore effectively suppressing conservative and other dissenting views.

If the problem were a runaway progressive corporate culture, then it should have ended with Musk’s takeover. The billionaire came in, late last fall, with guns blazing: Twitter’s internal bureaucracy was going down. Agrawal, Roth, and Gadde were all out; he fired half its staff and started making decisions with a “war room” of a half-dozen longtime allies and friends. But pretty quickly the Musk experience, which began with promises of a less censorious approach to speech and a more robust public square, turned hypocritical. Musk tweeted an excerpt of an academic paper of Roth’s that concerned underage access to apps like Grindr; a wave of threats accusing Roth of being a “pedo” forced the former Twitter executive and his husband to flee their home. Not only did Musk suspend a Twitter account, operated by a college student, that published public data tracking Musk’s private plane; he also briefly suspended the accounts of a half-dozen or so journalists who reported on the suspension. This week, the billionaire publicized a new edition of the Twitter Files, by the covid-conspiracist journalist Alex Berenson. This installment focussed on the efforts of a prominent public doctor, Scott Gottlieb, to lobby Twitter to limit anti-vaccine propaganda. Musk tweeted about the series, “Some conspiracies are actually true.” Even if you believe—and I don’t—that Musk took a progressive thumb off the scale when he acquired the company, all he has done since is stick his own thumb—bigger and clumsier—on it.

Musk could have made different choices. He could have opened the files to more journalists, with broader perspectives, rather than a group that largely shared his view. They, in turn, could have taken the time to write as investigative reporters rather than commentators, and might have begun with material other than the company’s response to the Hunter Biden story—a preoccupation of Republican politicians but far from the most compelling element of the archives. Rather than try to handle suspensions with a small group of allies, Musk might have appointed an independent body to assess such sensitive matters. The choices Musk did make suggest another aim—not neutrality, but counterbalance. If progressive ideas had been too amplified, he would now amplify conservative ones. Everything in the Twitter Files has had this see-saw quality, in which the only response to excessive partisanship is partisanship on the other side. In this way, the Twitter Files have been trapped in the style of Twitter itself. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/what-the-twitter-files-reveal-about-free-speech-and-social-media