DL Open Thread Monday April 10 2023

Fascism: Gov. Greg Abbott vows to pardon Texas man who drove into crowd, murdered BLM protester

On this date in 1970 Paul McCartney officially announces the split of The Beatles. And on April 10th 1869 Congress increases number of Supreme Court judges from 7 to 9.

Having promised a ten year balanced budget, McCarthy is truly fucked

Simmering tensions among House Republicans flared anew over the weekend, following a New York Times report that detailed how Kevin McCarthy’s (R., Calif.) bitterly contested speakership battle has undermined his confidence in colleagues.

While it took McCarthy a historic 15 ballots to secure the position through January’s chaos and infighting, the speaker reportedly remains particularly frustrated by certain Republicans — including Jodey Arrington (R., Texas) and Steve Scalise (R., La.), the budget committee chairman and House majority leader, respectively.

“Mr. McCarthy has told colleagues he has no confidence in Mr. Arrington, the man responsible for delivering a budget framework laying out the spending cuts that Republicans have said they will demand in exchange for any move to increase the debt limit,” Jonathan Swan and Annie Karni wrote in the Times. McCarthy still regards Arrington, who sought to nominate Scalise during the speakership balloting, “as incompetent, according to more than half a dozen people familiar with this his thinking,” the Times revealed.

A Note to Breathless Conservatives: Bill Clinton Was Almost Indicted in 2001, But He Cut a Deal

…First, fuck yeah, indict presidents. Presidents should be scared of committing crimes. As just about everyone sane has said, if we had prosecuted Nixon, if we had prosecuted Reagan, if we had prosecuted W. Bush, this shit might not be happening. We pretend to be this grand and glorious nation of laws but we want to act like a president is a fucking king except for the inconvenience of elections. Absolutely indict criminals. And people who committed crimes that they’re hiding shouldn’t run for president because that’s just dumb. Or Trump. It’s hard to separate those two words.

You’ll notice I left Bill Clinton out of that list of prosecution-worthy presidents. It’s not because I think he shouldn’t have been indicted for perjury. He obviously committed it. It’s because everyone has fucking forgotten one fact:

They were about to indict Clinton in 2001 when he cut a deal to avoid it.

You got that? When Bill Clinton was at the very end of his presidency, as a result of the Whitewater investigation, the independent counsel, who was then Robert Ray after Kenneth Starr finally got the fuck out, was looking to indict Clinton for perjury about that blow job from Monica Lewinsky. If it had gone forward, Bill Clinton would have been an ex-president when he was indicted. If he had raged and blustered about it being untrue and told everyone to go fuck themselves with their perjury, he would have been indicted. As an ex-president. Trump could have cut a deal a long time ago, but he didn’t go the Clinton route because he refuses to ever say he’s wrong because he’s a tiny-pricked ego monster.

See, Clinton gave up his law license in Arkansas for five years and paid a $25,000 fine, and he admitted he made false statements about the blow job. And then the whole investigation was closed with a report that pissed off a lot Clinton haters, but that pointed out how much Clinton was actually punished, including an $850k settlement with Paula Jones (google her – I don’t feel like going into all that) and a $90,000 fine for contempt of court.