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Item one: The least surprising poll of all time

CNN released a new poll Thursday finding that just 27 percent of Americans think Republican leaders in the House have shown the right priorities so far. Well, duh. I’m mildly surprised it’s as high as 27, but that’s a lower-than-usual number for a brand-new Congress that people haven’t yet learned to hate.

It’s even bleaker for the Republicans, and, of course, for the people of the United States, when you look at the cross tabs. Eight percent of Democrats say Congress is following the right priorities (who are these people?), and 24 percent of independents. And Republicans? Only 51 percent say Congress is on the right track. That’s a disaster for the new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Now—I will say that we should be cautious here. When you and I think of “stuff Congress ought to be doing,” we think of, well, stuff Congress is supposed to do! Pass legislation helping working people, for instance. But God only knows what rank-and-file Republicans think Congress’s proper priorities should be. They feast on such a diet of shit peddled to them by the right-wing media, their biggest question is probably why the House hasn’t hauled Hunter Biden before a firing squad yet.

In any case, this is already a serious low point for the new GOP House, and we can see in their early debt-limit chess moves that these people have no idea what they’re doing. They started out boastfully, saying they were going to demand cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Within days, they read their internal polls telling them just how unpopular that was, so that flew off the table. Now they want deep domestic spending cuts, but they won’t enumerate them, and they won’t enumerate for a simple and obvious reason: Whatever they are, they too will be massively unpopular. So they’ll never say until the very last moment, when they are forced to, which means as close as possible to the point of actual default, by which time they will hope that there will be pressure on Joe Biden and the Democrats to cut some kind of deal that will make Biden & Co. implicit in the cuts.

Let’s phrase that another way. They want to do something—these representatives of the people—that they know runs counter to the will of the people. And they know the only way to get it done is to delay and lie and use subterfuge.

Wouldn’t it just be easier to, you know, do something people like? Yes, it would! But the people they really care about, their donors, would hate that, so that’s completely off the table.

That brings us to the one matter this House will pursue with zeal, because it’s the only glue they can think of that binds the donors, the base, and, if they’re lucky, a critical mass of swing voters: investigating Biden, his administration, and his family. That is the only thing this House will, as it were, “accomplish.” Or I guess they may pass another rich people’s tax cut, but I actually doubt that, because they know that that too is massively unpopular, and besides it’s pointless because the Senate will kill it, so it’s not even worth the symbolism anymore.

It’s pathetic, but it’s also disgusting. It’s really hard to think of one major issue on which Republicans represent the majority opinion. Not economics anymore. Not Social Security. Not Medicare. Not abortion. Not gay marriage. Not gun laws. Not immigration. What else is there? God, Jesus, phony patriotism. That’s how they keep it close. And accusing the Democrats of doing the crap they do. And gerrymandering. And so many people keep falling for it.

Item two: Should Merrick Garland now prosecute John Durham and Bill Barr?

That’s the bottom-line question that emerges from the stunning New York Times report that dropped Thursday afternoon under the headline, “Barr Pressed Durham to Find Flaws in the Russia Investigation. It Didn’t Go Well.”

This was an exhaustive and so impressive piece of reporting by Katie Benner, Charlie Savage, and Adam Goldman. It’s long. It’s complicated. But please, read it. It. Is. Insane.

It’s impossible for me to summarize here, but just to hit three of the many “wtf” points the reporting makes clear:

That is: Durham, who had been assigned by Barr to investigate the people investigating Trump, was now assigned simultaneously to … investigate Trump! But the two never made this public (it seems the meeting with the Italians took place in 2019). Not only that, they allowed a perception to fester that the probe was directed elsewhere, and neither man ever bothered to correct the misimpression—and this during the 2020 presidential campaign.

All this was done under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Justice by the attorney general himself. This can’t be legal. So: Merrick Garland, what are you going to do, if not about Bill Barr, then at least about John Durham? I remember all the stories about what a straight shooter he was when he was named. The only thing he’s shooting is his reputation, right between the eyes. What a thug.

Item three: Get armed police out of patrol cars

We are going to see, apparently this evening, the police video of what happened on January 7 when Memphis police pulled over and ended up killing Tyre Nichols. People who’ve seen it call it “sickening” and hard to watch. We’ve seen a lot of sickening and hard-to-watch police cam video over the years, so if officials are preparing us like this, it must be horrendous.

Whatever the content, the tragedy proves again a point I will make and make and make until either something changes or I die. Armed officers should not be making routine traffic stops.

We don’t yet know much about what happened when Nichols, 29, was pulled over on a routine traffic stop under suspicion of reckless driving. We don’t know what he did or did not do, or whether he resisted arrest. But no matter. Whatever he did can’t have justified what was apparently a savage, minutes-long beating. His mother, who watched a minute of the video, says her son asked the cops, “What did I do?”

The likely answer to that question is that he was doing 42 in a 35 zone and the cops were under pressure to produce revenue, so they stopped the first Black guy they saw who was speeding, or, like Sandra Bland, had the turn indicator on when it needn’t have been (yes, that was what got her stopped).

That the cops were Black complicates the normal narrative, but in a way, it only underscores the point that the important color here is green—the revenue cops feel they’re under pressure to bring in on these stops. Memphis police started making fewer stops when Covid hit, and revenue from stops decreased from around $12 million to about $7 million. This seems to have led to a rise in reckless driving, so pressure mounted to step up stops again. That happened, and, unsurprisingly, it disproportionately affected people of color.

Stipulating that we don’t yet know the facts of this particular case, it’s more than fair to say that in general, these stops get out of hand and lead to this violence because there are guns on the scene. That’s the only reason. So—remove the guns. But what if a violent motorist shoots an unarmed traffic cop, you say? To which I say, What kind of maniac is going to shoot an unarmed peace officer? Maybe one in a thousand or something. But people mostly shoot cops when they think they’re going to die. If the cops don’t have guns, people won’t think that.

The other piece of this is to remove the revenue incentive. As municipal budgets have been cut, police forces have been called on to produce revenue. That’s unfair to them. It also compromises fair criminal justice results, as numerous studies have shown (here’s just one). So let’s just fund these places properly. Which brings us back to the House Republicans in a way, doesn’t it?

This week’s quiz: Famous/Anonymous: The great session musicians of rock’s golden age. If you call yourself a fan of this kind of music, you ought to know something about these amazing people.

I love this quiz. So much cool, fascinating, buried history. I could read about this stuff for hours. And have. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com.

—Michael Tomasky, editor

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