1. Our Constitution has all kinds of interesting (and scary) loopholes and inconsistencies. I often think about how our leaders failed after 9/11 to enact continuity of government provisions to ensure the House of Representatives could convene in the wake of a successful attack that killed more than half of its members.
The start of the 118th Congress has highlighted a new example: no entity is responsible for ensuring that people running for office are actually eligible to run. We can thank the infamous Rep. George Santos (R-NY) for spotlighting this challenge.
Given all of the lies Santos has told, Vice’s Tim Marchman asks: “Of the many questions surrounding serial fabulist George Santos as he joins the new Congress, one of the most basic is also one of the hardest to answer conclusively: Has he been a U.S. citizen for seven years, one of the three requirements for the job specifically listed in the Constitution?”
Marchman takes us on a journey from the Clerk of the House of Representatives, the House Ethics Committee, the House Administration Committee, to the New York State Board of Elections and finds that no one believes they have a responsibility to determine eligibility. I doubt the new Speaker of the House will prioritize fixing this issue.
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2. Speaking of Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), it took 15 ballots, but he is finally the Speaker of the House. In his Breaking the News Substack, James Fallows notes that Speaker of the House is part of “a category of jobs for which the greatest day is the day your appointment is announced.”
Fallows is a former presidential speechwriter and often explains what politicians are trying to do with a speech—and whether or not they were successful. In this post, Fallows looks at the speeches made by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Speaker McCarthy right after the final Speaker vote.
Jeffries’ speech was terrific, and people are going to focus on the A-to-Z rundown of values that closed it (you can watch his speech here from C-SPAN). That’s a sign of a great address! Fallows explains the risks Jeffries took and why they paid off. “By the end of this, Jeffries was having fun, and much of the audience was too. What would he do for Q? And … X? It didn’t go on too long, it was appropriate for the time of night and place in history, it was both sober and jokey, and it made his point. Jeffries never needs to recite this list again, because other people will quote it. He had his opportunity, and he used it.”
Fallows then examines Speaker McCarthy’s speech (you can watch his speech here from C-SPAN). Fallows writes that McCarthy didn’t mention many of the conspiracy theories that were a significant part of his colleagues’ speeches to nominate him (there was no mention of a stolen election lie here). He even avoided the Newt Gingrich/Frank Luntz intentionally disrespectful use of Democrat (rather than Democratic) as an adjective in his remarks. I wish McCarthy could lead the House based more on his acceptance speech, but the MAGA rebels extracted such a high price for their votes to ensure he couldn’t. The situation is about to get much worse for McCarthy and our nation.
3. Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day recaps the news from across the country regarding reproductive freedom and sexual and reproductive health care. Today Valenti explains her frustration with the reporting about abortion medication: “[t]he article, an explainer about abortion medication and the new rules around the pills, goes out of its way to tell readers that abortion medication is illegal in Tennessee, but doesn’t mention—even once—that having the pills shipped to you is not illegal. In fact, the Department of Justice reiterated as much just this week! Mainstream media outlets—especially those in anti-choice states—need to do better for their female readers.” Valenti also shares stories about OBGYN residents who have to leave red states to complete their training because of these bans and once again explains why exceptions to abortion bans may provide political cover for Republican politicians but don’t help people who can become pregnant.
4. Dr. Joanne B. Freeman is an expert on the history of political violence in the United States, and reading her book The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War was one of my 2022 highlights. So I am listening as she tells us why we should take the chaos we just saw with the Speaker of the House election seriously in this New York Times commentary (gift article).
Freeman explains how the 133-ballot Speakership debate of 1855-56 reflected the fractions of the nation leading up to the Civil War. Moving back to what we experienced over the past week, Freeman writes:
“The House has elected a speaker, but that won’t put an end to the internecine Republican battles. They will continue, entangling Congress and stymieing national politics in the process. Politics is a team sport that requires captains, congressional politics, even more so. Today’s congressional Republicans are not a team; they have no captain and they have displayed their failings for all the world to see.
In effect, we’re witnessing the rupture of the Republican Party, the ultimate outcome of Republicans’ continuing failure to stand up to the extremism in their ranks. In choosing to remain silent in the face of their right wing’s politics of destruction, they have essentially endorsed it. Their silence in the face of Donald Trump’s lies and his election loss denial did much the same, laying the groundwork for the upheaval that we’re watching now.”
5. How many innocent people will police arrest because the algorithms behind facial recognition software are notoriously bad when identifying people of color and women? As Gizmodo’s Thomas Germain explains, “Randall Reid says he’s never even been to Louisiana, much less stolen $10,000 worth of Chanel and Louis Vuitton handbags there. That didn’t stop police from arresting the 28-year-old Georgia resident for the theft, committed in a New Orleans suburb, based on an algorithmic guess at what his face looked like. Reid was on the way to a belated Thanksgiving dinner with his mother when the cops picked him up, three states and seven hours away from the scene of the crime. He was locked up for nearly a week.”
The biases in facial recognition are well known, but the use of the technology is everywhere. What we don’t have are rules for its use. Worse, as Germain writes, efforts to enact regulations stalled out as crime grew as a campaign issue: “This time last year, it seemed like there was a growing movement to ban law enforcement’s use of technology, with legislatures across the country instituting a facial recognition prohibition for their police forces. But that movement lost steam, and a number of states and cities quietly undid their face recognition bans, including California, Virginia, and—you guessed it—New Orleans.”
Quick Pitches:
I love the Bay Lights art installation on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. They are coming down in March unless philanthropists donate $11 million for an upgraded version. I hope the nonprofit behind this work is successful in raising the money required to keep it going. (Heather Knight, San Francisco Chronicle)
Last summer, Walgreens was one of the chain stores that raised alarms about thefts from their stores. These claims became part of the campaign that led to a backlash against liberal District Attorneys (like the recall of San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin) and the efforts to redirect a fraction of law enforcement funding to social services. Guess what? “A major US drugstore chain that supposedly experienced a surge in shoplifting last year – fanning the flames of conservative outrage over a purported spike in crime and disorder – said on Thursday that it might have overstated the problem.” Weird how that happens. (Victoria Bekiempis, The Guardian)
Reporters need to do a better job when discussing the debt ceiling.
See downthread. Turns out @GStephanopoulos didn’t follow up to make @GovChristie’s bad faith clear. Will be really important for non-Fox hosts to be better at presenting the plain, one-sided extremism of GOP default threats, especially as we’ve been down this road so many times.
— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) 9:35 PM ∙ Jan 8, 2023
Bothsidesism harms many democracies.
The problem with ‘balanced’ reporting.
— Christian Guthier (@oxford_guthier) 2:57 PM ∙ Jan 5, 2023
Today’s Thought:
“Be wary of paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.”—Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny.
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