After House Speaker Kevin McCarthy ignored the Freedom Caucus’ wishes and struck a bipartisan budget deal with President Joe Biden, the far-right lawmakers weighed their options. Some in the faction raised the specter last week of retaliating against McCarthy by trying to take his gavel away.
That idea collapsed rather quickly. But as the public learned yesterday, the radical contingent managed to come up with a Plan B. NBC News reported:
A band of 11 House conservative rabble-rousers took the rare step Tuesday of joining all Democrats to block a pair of GOP bills to protect gas stoves to express their anger over the debt deal cut by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden.
Let’s briefly review how we arrived at this point, because what might seem like a dull procedural fight is proving to be surprisingly dramatic.
Circling back to our earlier coverage, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, pointing to research on public safety, indoor pollution, and childhood asthma, raised the prospect several months ago of new safeguards related to gas stoves. No one would be forced to replace their existing stoves, but a political backlash soon followed anyway — with far too many Republicans effectively telling the public that Biden was on his way to American kitchens with a wrench to take their appliances away.
GOP officials knew how foolish their talking points were, but the party saw political value in juvenile antics and rhetoric, so they embraced a silly “Democrats want to take your stove” campaign anyway.
It wasn’t long before Republicans pushed absurd legislation and hearings intended to “rescue” gas stoves from rascally Biden administration officials, and GOP leaders held a press conference yesterday morning, bragging about the bills the House would soon pass to combat the “extremist control freaks” in the federal government and undo a “ban” that does not exist in reality. It was, House Republican leaders boasted, going to be awesome.
At…
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