Congress Is Too Old for This Shit
The Doom Report, Week 19
This week the Republicans passed Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which they actually named the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And if you need more proof than that they’re all morons, I don’t know that I can help you. If you want to see my personal reaction to learning this fact, you can just watch Cody over at Even More News: trust me, his reaction perfectly mirrored my own.
But, if you stick around until Cody puts his brain back together, you can hear producer Jonathan Harris say this:
So the thing passed; it passed 215 to 214, two Republicans voting no, and three Democrats voting not being alive any more on planet Earth.
Now, we often talk about how it’s a problem that all our Congresspeople are too damn old, because they’re out of touch, because they don’t understand what it’s like for the younger generations, because they don’t understand technology, etc etc. But I think too often we forget that there’s another really good reason it’s not a great idea to have nearly half of your entire Congress being Baby Boomers (or older!): they have a tendency to die. The 3 Democrats who have passed away since Trump’s inauguration were 72, 75, and 77, with a wide array of health problems, and the fact that all Representatives are up for re-election every two years means that they all ran for office in that state, knowingly. And they all died of old age. If even 1 of those 3 seats had been won by a younger candidate, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” would not have passed. And I haven’t heard a single show talk about this other than the good folks over at Some More News.
About the only other thing of interest this week was a reporter telling Trump that Wall Street has coined the acronym “TACO”—which stands for “Trump always chickens out”—as the new, best way to make money. You just wait for Trump to raise a tariff (or fifty), the stock market crashes, you buy heavily, then all you have to do is wait for Trump to reverse himself, sell everything, and boom! you just made a killing. Probably the best take on this story was Brian Tyler Cohen’s coverage of the press conference. And, this is hardly the most important part of the story, but notice how Trump gets pissed at the reporter for asking “such a nasty question.” Dude: all the reporter did was let you know what people were saying about you. Talk about shooting the messenger.
Top shows to watch this wee:
Adam Conover talks about the Right Wing Nutjobs’ plan to convince more white women to have babies. I was pleased to note that the ultimate conclusion was the same I came to back in Week 16: stop trying to keep the immigrants out.
If you’re into conspiracy theories, Christopher Titus has been going on for a while now about how Trump’s victory last year was pretty suspicious. This week he got an expert (a statistician from the Election Truth Alliance) and released several videos diving deep into this theory. (If you just want to try one to see if it’s for you, I’d probably start with part 3, strangely enough.) What I will tell you about this particular conspiracy theory:
Don’t believe in conspiracy theories. People believing stupid shit is how we got into this mess in the first place.
That having been said, while all conspiracy theories are stupid, they are (sadly) not all wrong. As I wrote once in an off-topic work discussion about them: I always used to think that the conspiracy theory that the U.S. totally invented an excuse to get into the Vietnam War was kookoo for Cocoa Puffs. Turns out ... not so much. Or, if I had told you ten years ago—hell, even five—that some shadowy group called “the Federalist Society” was engaged in a 50-year plan to change the meaning of the Second Amendment and reverse Roe v Wade, I’m sure I would have sounded like a total nutjob. Today, it’s a documentary on Showtime.
I actually used to work on electronic voting systems. While I can make you feel a little better and tell you that some of the stuff they discuss in this video doesn’t track for me, I’m also going to make you feel a little bit worse by telling you that a lot of it is totally plausible.
Every time Trump and the MAGA crowd accuse someone of doing something, it’s always what they’re doing themselves. Every time. It’s like the dumbest version of “nuh-uh, you are!” And they sure do accuse the other side of rigging elections a whole bunch ...
Definitely don’t believe in stupid shit. Also, sometimes listen to the stupid shit and work out for yourself just how stupid it is. Or isn’t.
I love it when BTC interviews James Talarico, the fundamentalist Christian Democrat on the Texas state legislature. In their discussion this week about Texas mandating the 10 Commandments in classrooms, Talarico drops this truth bomb: “The Christians in Congress should be feeding the hungry, but they’re cutting food stamps; they should be healing the sick, but they are cutting Medicaid.” You know, my friend (who you may recall as being the impetus for this whole series) is also a devoted Christian.1 I sort of wish he were reading along here, because I’d love to hear his response to Talarico’s poignant words, but I suspect he’s not bothering.
The Some More News crew did an excellent report on the influencer culture on the right, which included this remarkably depressing graph from Media Matters. Those red bubbles are the Right Wing Nutjobs, and the blue ones—the ones that are few, far between, and generally much smaller—are the progressive shows. I love that Trevor Noah and Charlamagne tha God are two of the three biggest, and it’s nice to see BTC (in a fairly small bubble in the upper left), but, as Cody notes, Some More News itself doesn’t even show up at all. (The reason being that the minimum is 1 million subscribers, and SMN has just over 900K. If you haven’t subscribed yet, take this opportunity to help push them over the edge.) But the video covers the problems with the Nutjobs’ dominance in this space and why you should be worried about it.
And, for even more reason to subscribe to SMN, this week’s second installment of Even More News features a crossover with another of my favorite political shows, Strict Scrutiny. Their guest is Leah Litman, who’s got a new book to promote. This is a really great confluence of judicial insight and absurdity acknowledgement; don’t sleep on this one.
Is there any reason for hope this week? Well, Leah tells Katy, Cody, and Jonathan that she doesn’t believe the Supreme Court will support Trump’s batshit crazy legal theory on birthright citizenship, but she packs it with enough caveats that I’m not sure we can count that as good news. Everyone is continuing to report that President Musk is stepping down, which is certainly good news if true (personally, I’ll believe it when I see it). And there’s some reason to believe that the One Big Beautiful Bill won’t make it past the Senate, and, even it does, it almost certainly won’t make it through in its current form, which means it’s back to the House where it passed by a single vote last time. And maybe that will take long enough that some special elections can be held to fill the seats of the Democrats we lost to the Grim Reaper this year. Honestly, that might be the best we can hope for.
Full disclosure: I myself am not. I was raised an indifferent Methodist, and would now best describe myself as pan-theistic agnostic. When I don’t outright claim to be a Baladocian.