IMAGE: White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon (L) and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus (R) watch as U.S. President Donald Trump announces his nominee for the empty associate justice seat at the U.S. Supreme Court, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S. January 31, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
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Speaker Kevin McCarthy
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy suffered yet another loss on Thursday, one that no speaker should ever experience. Five of his Republican colleagues rebelled against sending the defense appropriations bill to the floor, and blocked it. Again. These things aren’t supposed to happen in the House. Speakers don’t put a bill on the floor when they don’t have the votes locked up. A controlling bloc of the majority doesn’t vote against leadership. Republicans don’t vote against defense spending.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is right: As speaker, she didn’t lose any rule votes—the procedural vote that kicks off consideration of a bill—because she didn’t put them on the floor without knowing she had the votes locked up. In fact, until McCarthy, it had been more than two decades since a rule vote failed on the floor. McCarthy has managed to do it three times in four months, and twice just this week.
Last week, McCarthy intended to put both the defense appropriations bill and a stopgap government funding bill on the floor in tandem. That quickly fell apart when the extremists in his raucous caucus made it clear they wouldn’t sign on, and he was forced to pull both from the floor—the smart thing to do.
The not-smart thing to do was to come back this week and try to put defense appropriations back on the floor without having worked out a plan with his hard-liners on government funding—or anything else. Which is exactly what McCarthy did Tuesday. He lost when GOP Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona, Dan Bishop of North Carolina, Ken Buck of Colorado, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and Matt Rosendale of Montana all voted no.
The really not-smart thing to do was to try it again just two days later. This time around, it was Biggs, Bishop, and Rosendale again, joined by Reps. Eli Crane of Arizona and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia (so much for her being McCarthy’s ally). Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, chairman of the Rules Committee, also voted no in a process move so that he can bring the bill to the floor in the future.
Greene drew a new line in the sand on the bill: All funding in it that might go to Ukraine has to be split out. Now, if McCarthy wants to get Greene back on board, leadership has to go back to the Rules Committee and rewrite it, stripping out anything to do with Ukraine aid. Even doing that is no guarantee that McCarthy can get everyone else on board—or even get enough votes to let the defense bill pass.
Again, this is defense spending. Republicans are hating on the troops. This is the House McCarthy built. House Republicans can’t even fund the military.
At this point, the hard-liners are toying with McCarthy just because they can. Unless he gets wise—and soon—a government shutdown is inevitable. It’s all they will allow. McCarthy’s only option to stop them is to work with Democrats.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
Rupert Murdoch
This week New York Magazine published a sprawling account of the lead-up to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s ouster from the network, detailing Rupert Murdoch’s state of “denial” surrounding the $787.5 million dollar settlement his company was forced to pay to Dominion Voting Systems.
Murdoch on Thursday announced he was stepping down as chairman of Fox and News Corp.
Dominion Voting Systems successfully sued Fox News for defamation after the network accused the company of rigging voting machines to steal votes from former President Donald Trump during the 2020 presidential election. In April 2023, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million and acknowledged, in a statement, “the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false."
The suit, Wolff notes “was far and away the largest defamation award ever made, outside of Alex Jones.”
In an excerpt from his new book, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, Wolff reports that after a Delaware Superior Court judge in June 2022 "ruled that the suit could also extend to Fox News’ parent company, Fox Corp,” a visitor to the billionaire’s Montana Ranch found Murdoch “absolutely unwilling to consider any view in which Fox could be at fault.”
Wolff writes:
Murdoch, the visitor discovered, was stuck in a place far from the real world. The Dominion suit had somehow become an attack on him and on his long career. He seemed angrily trapped in the company’s desperate and preposterous logic: that it was just airing the newsworthy opinions of important political figures.
“Why don’t you just settle?” asked the visitor. This provoked a Murdoch rant, lots of it hard to follow but leaving the visitor with the sense that Murdoch had found himself alone, up against all those who wanted him to settle, and that he, if no one else, was going to stand up for free speech. And at any rate, it wasn’t Fox’s fault. It was Donald Trump’s fault. He wasn’t going to pay for what Donald Trump did. Sue Donald Trump. The visitor came away wondering how this famously cold and analytic business mind had become such a hot mess.
According to Wolff, while Rupert Murdoch remained static in his denial leading up to the settlement, CEO Lachlan Murdorch — who was named chairman and CEO of Fox News in 2019 — “began telling people that Fox was going to focus on Dominion and get it resolved.”
“But Rupert Murdoch wasn’t having it — he seemed to double down on a desire to punish Trump rather than resolve Dominion. Dominion wasn’t the problem — Trump was,” Wolff writes.
As Wolff reports, Murdoch’s refusal to settle with Dominion bucked the two main rules “of libel law for a media company” — 1) “never to go before a jury,” and 2) “avoid discovery.”
“On Monday, April 17, the day the jury was supposed to be seated and opening statements begun — before a day’s delay was declared — Murdoch told Carlson Dominion was holding to a demand of a billion dollars in damages,” Wolff reports. “For Murdoch, this was a nonstarter: He would not endure the humiliation and defeat of paying a ten-figure settlement in the case. It would be not only a record-shattering sum but also tremendous fodder for his enemies (like the Times) when it came to writing headlines.”
But the company did settle, announcing the following day that it was “pleased to have reached a settlement of our dispute with Dominion Voting Systems.”
“We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues,” Fox News said in a statement.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
