Letters from an American - May 9, 2024

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

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May 9th, 2024. Last night, 163 Democratic representatives joined 196 Republicans to stop far-right Republicans from removing House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana. Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene led the effort to Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana. Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene led the effort to remove Johnson, but her motion received only 43 votes, 32 Democrats and 11 Republicans. 28 representatives either did not vote or voted present. Greene promptly excoriated the uniparty, saying that the Democrats now control Speaker Johnson. That was something that everybody suspected all along. They just voted to save him. But the majority of the House Republican conference appears to be tired of the chaos

in their ranks that has made this Congress one of the least productive in American history. ranks that has made this Congress one of the least productive in American history. Jordaine Carney and Olivia Beavers of Politico reported today that House Republicans who are not aligned with Greene and her cohort want to change House rules to create punishments for the extremists who keep stopping House business by, for example, voting against letting bills come to the floor of the House. Green and Thomas Massey, a Republican of Kentucky, her main ally in trying to oust Johnson, urged their colleagues to bring it on. Massey said that anyone trying to stop them was going to take an ass-whooping from their base. Since the 1990s, right-wing media hosts have directed the Republican base, telling them what to think and urging them to put pressure on Republican lawmakers to do what the media hosts wanted.

representatives in 1995, for the first time since 1954, they made him an honorary member of their incoming congressional freshman class. And what Limbaugh did for radio, the Fox News Channel hosts like Bill O'Reilly did for television. But Limbaugh died in February 2021, and after the Fox News Channel, or FNC, had to pay a $787 million settlement to Dominion voting systems for the lies the network's hosts told about the company's voting machines in the 2020 election, it let go of main host Tucker Carlson. There are indications that FNC founder and former chair Rupert Murdoch hoped to center Republican messaging around young activist Charlie Kirk. But Kirk has slid into MAGA extremism, too. The Republican extremists no longer have a centralized messaging center. Oliver Darcy noted today, Murdoch's outlets themselves, the Fox News Channel, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post, stood behind Johnson. Yesterday, FreedomWorks,

the right-wing organization that was backed by the Koch family at its start in 2004, and that was behind the Tea Party movement, abruptly shut down. FreedomWorks attacked democratic measures for business regulation and social welfare because it embraced libertarian principles. Its revenue had dropped by half since 2022, its president, Adam Brandon, told Luke Mullins of Politico. But in the end, what did the organization in was the party's split over Trump. That split was crystal clear in Tuesday's Republican primary election in Indiana. Trump won that election, but with only 78.3% of the vote.

Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who suspended her campaign in early March and has not campaigned since, won 21.7%. Before the Indiana primary, on May 2nd, political statistician Tom Bonior debunked the idea that Haley's support came from Democratic leaning voters flooding the primary vote to hurt Trump. Crunching the numbers in North Carolina showed that Haley voters there were not substantially younger than the GOP voters, 41% over 65 versus 45 among registered Republicans. They were overwhelmingly white, 94% of independents versus 97% of Republicans. And they were actually more likely to be men, 51% of independent Republican primary voters versus 50% of Republicans. In short, he wrote, every indicator suggests these independents voting in Republican primaries are more likely Republican voters.

They just don't like Trump. Political commentator Chris Saliza today called attention to the numbers that landed before Tuesday. On March 2nd, Haley won 13.2% of the vote in Georgia, or 78,000 votes. 111,000 votes, 13.9% of the vote in Florida, 155,000 votes, and 14.4% of the vote in Ohio, 161,000 votes. On April 2nd, she won 12.8% of the votes in Wisconsin, or 77,000 votes. And on April 23rd, Haley won 16.6% of the votes in Pennsylvania, 158,000 votes. If Biden picks up even one in five of these votes, Saliza noted, it matters bigly. Three high-level Republicans this week told media they would not vote for Trump,

helping to pave an off-ramp for other Republicans. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan told Yahoo Finance that he would write in another Republican rather than vote for Trump. Character is too important to me, he said. Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, also cited character when she said she would not vote for Trump. I've never voted for a Democrat in my life, but I would absolutely consider voting for Joe Biden this upcoming November because he will not seek to destroy our nation or our Constitution, and he is the statesman character that we need in an elected official. Georgia's former Lieutenant Governor Jeff Duncan went further on Monday night,

endorsing Biden, whom he called in an op-ed, a decent person I disagree with on policy, over Trump, whom he described as a criminal defendant without a moral compass. Sometimes the best way to learn your lesson is to get beat, and Donald Trump needs to get beat. We need to move on as a party. We need to move on as a country, he said. Meanwhile, as Kaya Himmelman noted in Talking Points Memo, MAGA Republicans are already blaming a potential loss in 2024 on illegal voters. 2024 on illegal voters. On Wednesday, Speaker Johnson and other Trump Republicans held a press conference to promote their new bill to make it illegal for people who are not U.S. citizens to

vote in federal elections. This is a political stunt. It is already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, and there is no evidence that this is happening. In 2017, Trump created a commission to root out the illegal voting he claimed had affected the 2016 election. Less than a year later, he disbanded it when it could find no evidence of his claims. Johnson admitted there was no evidence of voting by undocumented immigrants when he told reporters, we all know intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it's not been something that's easily provable. We don't have that number. Political prize-winning author T.J. Stiles retorted, people terrified of contact with government because they don't want their lives destroyed by deportation, don't register to vote illegally,

and then vote illegally for the reward of having a tiny, tiny influence on federal electoral outcomes. For his part, Trump appears to have tried a more direct approach to re-election. According to Josh Dossi and Maxine Joslo of the Washington Post, last month at Mar-a-Lago, Trump told about two dozen top oil executives that if they gave him a billion dollars to get re-elected, he would immediately reverse the environmental regulations the Biden-Harris administration has put into place and stop any new ones. A $1 billion gift would be a deal, according to Trump, because the tax cuts he plans to enact and the regulatory cuts would be worth far more than that. Since then, Ben Lefebvre wrote yesterday in Politico, oil executives have been drawing up executive orders that Trump can

sign as soon as he takes office. Yesterday, in an interview with CNN's Aaron Burnett, President Biden said the U.S. would continue to supply defensive weapons to support the Iron Dome over Israel, but it would not send offensive weapons to Israel if it went forward with its controversial invasion of the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, where more than a million Palestinians have taken shelter from Israeli strikes. The administration has publicly opposed that invasion since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced it. If they go into Rafah, I'm not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, Biden said. Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs

and other ways in which they go after population centers. Trump and other Republicans promptly accused President Joe Biden of taking the side of these terrorists, just like he has sided with the radical mobs taking over our college campuses. We're not walking away from Israel's security, Biden told Burnett. We're walking away from Israel's ability to wage war in those areas. Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.