After their first 100 days in power, the cracks are beginning to show in the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Speaker Kevin McCarthy is going to try to pass a bill with a bare-bones summary of a budget within the next few weeks, but at this point no bill has actually been written and no GOP consensus has emerged about what that bill should (or shouldn't) contain. It is still unclear whether any plan is going to get the 218 votes to pass. Factionalism within the Republican conference is a tough hurdle to get over, what with the razor-thin majority McCarthy has to work with. But the debt ceiling looms, so it is now "put up or shut up" time for McCarthy's Republicans.

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There's a new reality in American politics, and one political party is reaping the benefits of it while the other is trapped in a downward spiral of ever-increasing extremism. Some Republicans are beginning to understand the power of the sleeping giant they have awoken, but there's really no easy way out from the conundrum they have created for themselves. Abortion is going to be a potent political issue for at least the next few elections, and Republicans' only answer so far is to double down, triple down, or quadruple down on forcing the most extreme positions they can come up with on as many of the American people as they possibly can.

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The ranks of the 2024 Republican presidential field just grew by one. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina is the new entrant, but at this point (with the exception of Ron DeSantis) it really looks for all the world like nothing more than a race to be Donald Trump's vice-presidential pick. I say that for two reasons -- the fact that so far no one else other than DeSantis has gotten any sort of traction at all in the polls, and the fact that none of the candidates have really directly taken on Trump in any meaningful way. To put it another way: there still isn't an "anti-Trump" candidate in the running.

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Republicans seem to be increasingly fond of using the levers of government -- any levers of government they control -- to get their own way, no matter what. Perhaps this was spurred by Donald Trump's attitudes (and/or lawlessness) or perhaps it is the end result of a gradual Republican slide towards authoritarianism, but whatever the actual cause Republicans are now engaged in rather extraordinary uses of government power to punish those whose political opinions they disagree with. This is a far cry from the traditional Republican stance against "Big Government" it should be noted -- just one more in a long list of previous ideological positions they have completely abandoned in the Trumpian era. They now seem to have settled on: "The era of Big (Republican) Government is at hand!" as a guiding principle.

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Today's Republican Party is not just the Party of Trump, it also is now the Party of Trumpism -- or to put it in plainer terms: authoritarianism. "We're going to do whatever we want to do, because we can" seems to be the new rallying slogan for Republicans. Never mind what the public thinks or wants, never mind the possible political backlash, it's just going to be full steam ahead for as long as they can get away with it.

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As I write this, America is in an extended intermission between Act 1 and Act 2 of today's political drama. Donald Trump has surrendered himself to the New York authorities, been arraigned, been charged with 34 felonies, and been released. He is currently en route to Florida, where he will later give a speech and/or press conference from his own golf resort.

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Some news was made over the weekend, as another Republican unofficially threw his hat into the presidential primary ring. This, depending on how you count them, brings the list of serious declared candidates to either three or four. Or you could count the number of people who are definitely running (whether they have announced or not), which would make Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson either the sixth or the seventh candidate in the race. Hutchinson made his pre-announcement announcement this weekend on a Sunday morning television show, which came as a surprise to many -- myself included (mostly because I don't think he has even a prayer of winning the nomination). Many others, hearing the news, reacted with: "Asa who?"

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Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, facing the same intransigence within his caucus that has been present since the rise of the Tea Party, issued a laughably empty threat today. The headline in the Washington Post read: "House GOP Eyes Bill To Cut Spending, Raise Debt Ceiling Amid Stalemate." In poker terms, this is nothing short of a monstrous bluff. It is so far removed from the reality of the situation that the only real response from President Joe Biden and the Democrats should be: "Go right ahead -- please don't let us stop you!"

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Although the American news media hasn't paid it a whole lot of attention, Israel now seems to be teetering on the brink of an existential crisis over what form of government it is going to have -- one geared towards democracy and checks and balances, or one headed in a much more authoritarian direction. While international news is routinely given short shrift in America (unless our own troops are somehow involved), what seems striking to me are the parallels between what Benjamin Netanyahu is currently attempting to do and what a second Donald Trump presidential term might look like here.

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On one of the last days of the year 1170, an English king seems to have begun a long tradition of what might now be known as "mobspeak." Like unto a mobster capo who is cautious about saying or ordering his minions to do specific things which he might later be found guilty of, King Henry II -- speaking about a man who was a powerful rival at the time, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket -- uttered the ultimate in "deniability" to his knights. The wording is in doubt, since this all happened a very long time ago, but the most common phrasing known today is: "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" We personally prefer the version that calls him a "meddlesome priest" instead, just for the Scooby Doo vibe, but the only account written by a contemporary of Henry worded it (in Latin): "What miserable drones and traitors have I nurtured and promoted in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric!" This version, we feel -- with only slight modernizations of the language -- could easily have been uttered by Donald Trump. It includes shaming his own followers ("miserable drones and traitors") for being insufficiently loyal and fervent in his defense, a personal playground insult to the object of his wrath ("low-born cleric"), as well as overdramatizing his own victimhood ("treated with such shameful contempt"). The whole statement is downright Trumpian, when you think of it.

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