At the moment there doesn’t appear to be any way the GOP’s murder-suicide tax bill won’t become law next week. Bob Corker has flipped back to “yes”; another possible holdout, Marco Rubio, won’t be holding out.
This is going to be devastating to the nation’s economy, as even larger numbers of people will fall into poverty. And it’s bad enough already.
Meanwhile, Josh Marshall believes there’s about to be a purge at the FBI. Republicans and Right-wing news media has gone bonkers over an August 2016 text message between two FBI officials that seemed to suggest “Andy” (FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe?) was doing something so that “he” (Donald Trump?) wouldn’t get elected. And if so, it obviously didn’t work.
You’ve seen the on-going pseudo-controversy about two FBI employees who sent texts to each other trashing now-President Trump. The two were having an affair at the time and Special Agent Peter Strzok was reassigned off the Mueller probe and in essence demoted over the texts. Public employees are allowed to have political opinions. Indeed, there are laws specifically protecting government employees from being disciplined or having their work affected by their political views. The only real infraction here seems to be that the two used government devices to discuss their private political opinions when they should have reserved those for their personal devices – hardly a major infraction.
Nonetheless, defenders of the President have leaped from these emails to saying the entire Clinton emails probe – Strzok was involved in both probes – and the Mueller investigation are irreparably tainted. Others are going so far as to say the DOJ and the FBI need to undergo a political purge. The head of one prominent right-wing legal advocacy group went as far as to say the FBI should be shut down. It is a stark reminder of how many will go so far so quickly to prevent the enforcement of the law and lawful investigations when it comes to Donald Trump.
I think a lot of ugly stuff is about to break loose.