Citizen Cartwright

The maneuvering over removing McCarthy

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., announced on Monday that he was using the motion to vacate to remove Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., from his post. The next step is for a House vote within two legislative days.

 

McCarthy allies say Gaetz is motivated to do this because McCarthy didn't shut down an Ethics Committee investigation into Gaetz. Others wonder whether Gaetz is mainly interested in raising his profile and fundraising for a possible run for Florida governor, Roll Call says.

 

It would take a simple majority of the House — 218 votes, when no seats are vacant — to remove the speaker.

 

Gaetz says he has enough GOP support for his motion. Four other Republicans — Reps. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Eli Crane and Andy Biggs of Arizona, and Bob Good of Virginia, have said they’re inclined to support it.

 

But McCarthy could hang onto his job if enough Democrats vote to support him, skip the vote altogether or vote “present,” says The New York Times. Democrats not voting would lower the threshold for a majority and make it easier to defeat Gaetz’s motion.

 

It's nearly unheard-of for members of the minority to vote for the opposing party’s candidate for speaker, says a separate Times article. Top Democrats suggest that, given McCarthy’s multiple partisan transgressions, they'd be exceedingly unlikely to do so now without a clear-cut commitment from him to engage Democrats more in governing.

Some Democrats fear that deposing the speaker could both damage the institution and prevent the already nearly paralyzed House from accomplishing much legislatively. They also worry about who and what could come next, the Times says.

Democrats have a litany of complaints about how they believe they've been wronged by the speaker. Just this past weekend, they accused him of jamming them with a 71-page stopgap bill and no time to review it. McCarthy then appeared on a Sunday news show portraying Democrats as the party backing a shutdown, when it was mostly Democrats who approved the legislation averting it.

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The government is open. Now what?

On Saturday, as it looked like the government was about to shut down, House Speaker McCarthy put a bill on the floor to keep the government running until Nov. 17. The bill dropped demands for deep spending cuts and passed 335-91, with 209 Democrats and 126 Republicans voting for it. 

 

“There has to be an adult in the room,” McCarthy said.

 

The Senate subsequently passed the bill 88-9.

 

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., said on Sunday that in the next few days he’ll follow through with threats to bring up a motion to vacate. The measure prompts a snap vote on whether to keep the speaker in his post. 

 

“So be it, bring it on,” McCarthy said. “Let’s get over with it and let’s start governing. If he’s upset because he tried to push us into a shutdown and I made sure the government didn’t shut down, then let’s have that fight.”

 

Here is a Politico Playbook article titled "Gaming out Matt Gaetz’s bid to oust Kevin McCarthy.” 

 

And here is an article from Fox News titled "House GOP members seek to expel Gaetz amid renewed threat to vacate House Speaker McCarthy.”

 

And is this some schadenfreude from overseas? BBC News: "Why government shutdowns seem to only happen in U.S.”

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Biden signs spending bill to keep government open for 7 weeks

 

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Tributes from both sides of the aisle for California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, dead at 90

Good news on resource use, climate

Because I didn’t blog at the end of last week, we have a double shot of good news from Future Crunch this morning. 

 

Among the gems in the Sept. 21 issue:

 

— As e-waste from our electronics has increased, Britain’s Royal Mint has developed a way to recover gold from circuit boards in laptops and phones and is working to help globalize e-waste recycling technology, says the BBC.

 

In Future Crunch's Sept. 27 issue:

 

— Cutting greenhouse gas emissions from the world’s energy sector to net zero and limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius remains possible due to the record growth of key clean energy technologies, though momentum needs to increase rapidly in many areas, according to a new edition of the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero Roadmap.

 

— President Biden used an executive order to create a New Deal-style American Climate Corps. The program will employ more than 20,000 young adults, who will build trails, plant trees, help install solar panels and do other work to boost conservation and help prevent catastrophic wildfires, The Associated Press reports.

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Takeaways from the second GOP presidential debate

At this point, I watch the Republican debates mainly to be able to assess the most substantive reporting on them.

 

A New York Times article on the proceedings begins: "As he sat in the spin room with the Fox News host Sean Hannity after the second Republican debate on Wednesday night, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida accurately summed up the spectacle he had just participated in."

 

“If I was at home watching that,” DeSantis said, “I would have changed the channel.”

 

I wanted to.

 

This Associated Press article seems about as good as they get.

 

Here is a fact check of the debate, by The Washington Post.

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Federal government, 17 states file antitrust suit against Amazon

The Federal Trade Commission and states allege that Amazon’s anticompetitive action occurs in two markets: the online superstore that serves shoppers and the market for online marketplace services purchased by sellers. The actions include, according to the FTC:

 

— Anti-discounting measures that punish sellers and deter other online retailers from offering prices lower than Amazon's, keeping prices higher for products across the internet. For example, the FTC says, if Amazon discovers that a seller is offering lower-priced goods elsewhere, Amazon can bury discounting sellers so far down in Amazon’s search results that they become effectively invisible.

 

— Conditioning sellers’ ability to obtain “Prime” eligibility for their products — a virtual necessity for doing business on Amazon — on sellers using Amazon’s fulfillment service, which has made it substantially more expensive for sellers on Amazon to also offer their products on other platforms. "This unlawful coercion has in turn limited competitors’ ability to effectively compete against Amazon,” the FTC says.

 

With its amassed power across both the online superstore market and online marketplace services market, Amazon extracts "enormous monopoly rents from everyone within its reach,” the FTC says. And this includes:

 

— Degrading the customer experience by replacing relevant, organic search results with paid ads — and deliberately increasing junk ads that worsen search quality and frustrate both shoppers seeking products and sellers who are promised a return on their ad purchase.

 

— Biasing Amazon’s search results in favor of Amazon’s own products over ones Amazon knows are better quality.

 

— Charging fees on the hundreds of thousands of sellers that currently have no choice but to rely on Amazon to stay in business. These fees range from a monthly fee sellers have to pay for each item sold, to ad fees. Combined, these fees force many sellers to pay nearly 50 percent of their total revenues to Amazon, the FTC says. These fees also harm shoppers, who pay increased prices for thousands of products sold on or off Amazon. 

 

Amazon says the FTC is “wrong on the facts and the law” and has departed from its role of protecting consumers and competition.

“If the FTC gets its way, the result would be fewer products to choose from, higher prices, slower deliveries for consumers, and reduced options for small businesses — the opposite of what antitrust law is designed to do,” said Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky in a statement.

 

The FTC began investigating Amazon in 2019 under the Trump administration, but the probe significantly expanded after President Biden appointed Lina Khan to be chair of the FTC.

 

Khan became famous as a Yale law student in 2017 when she published a paper arguing that U.S. antitrust laws had failed to adequately stop Amazon from amassing power over its customers, competitors and suppliers. The paper helped kick off a debate about whether America’s antitrust laws needed to be modernized to rein in tech giants, says The New York Times.

 

Prior to becoming FTC chair, Khan was an associate professor of law at Columbia Law School. She also previously served as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law; legal adviser to FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra; and legal director at the Open Markets Institute.

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