Jerry Falwell must be spinning in his grave. For those that don't remember the era, in the 1980s, Falwell was at the forefront of the movement to instill his brand of Christianity into American politics, which at the time mostly meant influencing conservatives and Republicans. This was far enough back when "conservative" and "Republican" weren't as 100 percent interchangeable as they are today, I should point out. Falwell created his own group and called it the "Moral Majority" -- a name meant to highlight what he (obviously) believed was an amoral minority who had become too powerful in American politics. Moralism and being holier-than-thou were the watchwords of the day. Republicans would use all sorts of moral issues (today we'd call them "culture war" issues) as a big wedge to shame Democratic liberals and get more Republicans elected to office. This was long before the moralistic frenzy surrounding Bill Clinton -- that all came later. This is also what laid the groundwork for Republicans painting themselves as taking the moral high road while Democrats collapsed into degenerate "secular humanism." Those days, quite obviously, are gone. Because today's Republican Party is about as amoral as can be imagined -- far beyond the caricature of the godless liberals Falwell painted back in the day. Today's Republicans simply do not care one whit about morals -- any morals at all, it seems.

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President Biden is a good politician in many ways, but there is one area where he can be rather weak at times -- reacting quickly to developing events. Something major happens, the news media makes a big deal out of it, and then the White House takes an interminable amount of time to react -- even when they were warned ahead of time. The most obvious example of this was the Dobbs Supreme Court decision which overturned Roe v. Wade. Not only was the decision expected, but it had been telegraphed a month earlier by a leaked opinion draft (a rarity for the Supreme Court). But even given this head-start, the Biden administration was slow to react and took days before even deciding upon any real course of action. Currently, Biden is slow-walking his reaction to the scandal of classified documents being found at his former workplace and home. And so far, the drip-drip-drip of news has been met with a very weak and inadequate response from the White House.

Biden needs to get out in front of this issue. He needs to address the nation and explain where things stand. If he doesn't, then he will remain captive to the "next shoe to drop" waiting that we're all currently going through. The big question everyone's got right now is: "Is that all of them? What else are we going to learn?"

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Today is the official day to remember and celebrate Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior and everything he stood for, since yesterday was the 94th anniversary of his birth. Normally on this date I would feature some excerpts from his speeches or writings, to remind everyone that he was more than just one excerpt from one famous speech ("I have a dream..."). Because his legacy is far wider and far deeper than just those few stirring quotes you hear repeated every single January. It is a legacy that includes many things which made White America extremely uncomfortable when he was alive; and to erase all those things and only leave the things which make White America feel good about themselves in the present day is downright criminal and counterproductive to everything King stood for and struggled so hard to achieve.

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With apologies to Frank Zappa, this week's big political story might be summed up as coming from "Joe's garage." But we'll get to all of that in a moment, down in the awards section (it shouldn't be any mystery which one he's going to get). First, though, let's take a look at the other momentous things that happened during the past week.

This column, of course, measures weeks from Friday afternoon to Friday afternoon. As we were writing last week, the House of Representatives was still deadlocked over who would become the next speaker. This continued far into the night, until Kevin McCarthy finally emerged victorious. Weakened, bloodied, diminished... but finally victorious.

The whole comedy of errors lasted through the fifteenth vote, which hasn't happened since Civil War times. This was not an ideological battle, as some in the media portrayed it (the "hard right" versus the rest of the Republicans), instead it was a battle over how nutball-crazy the next House will truly be. And the nutball-crazy faction was the true winner here, extracting pretty much every concession from McCarthy that they demanded.

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Attorney General Merrick Garland has now announced the appointment of a special counsel to look into President Joe Biden's apparent mishandling of classified documents. This bombshell hit the political world earlier today and everyone has been furiously reacting ever since. Personally, when we first heard the news (earlier in the week) that an organization that Biden created (after he left office as Barack Obama's vice president) had turned over classified documents to the National Archives, we took a "wait and see" approach to writing about it. Now that the other shoe has dropped in a dramatic way, though, it's time for some reactions.

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Just for the record, that headline in no way refers to the current news frenzy over President Joe Biden's apparent retention of classified documents at an organization he controlled. It is indeed a subject worthy for another column, mostly to scoff at the false equivalency being offered up by the Republicans. There is an enormous difference between what Biden's team did and what Trump and his team were caught doing. In Biden's case, the documents were found and immediately they did the right thing -- they notified the National Archives and voluntarily turned all the documents over. Trump refused official requests for over a year, lied that he had turned over all the classified documents, got subpoenaed, lied some more about turning them all in and finally had a search warrant executed which turned up over 100 more classified documents. But there are plenty of people currently pointing all of this out, which is why this column is not about this at all. Biden's assumably accidental retention of a handful of classified documents may have been a political mistake (since already team Trump is saying "See? Everyone does it!"), but it is not the biggest one Biden has made to date.

The biggest political mistake Biden has made as president was to undercut -- twice -- the efforts by congressional Democrats to deal with the debt ceiling while they still had the chance. Later this year, this may come back to bite not just Biden but all of us. In what could be a catastrophic way.

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The 2024 campaign has begun. Not the big one -- not the race for president, that already started when Donald Trump threw his hat in the ring laughably early, in a naked attempt to avoid justice. Instead, this one is closer to home for me. Representative Katie Porter announced today that she is running for Dianne Feinstein's Senate seat. Which means California may get the first truly open Senate race since 1992 (when Feinstein first got elected). And since it's California, there is no real question of a Republican winning the seat, since they are all but irrelevant out here.

The news comes as somewhat of a surprise for only one reason: the timing of it. DiFi (as I like to call her, for no particular reason) has yet to announce whether she will run for re-election or not. To be blunt: she should not. She is currently 89 years old and she is, not to put too fine a point on it, not exactly compos mentis all the time. It's an open secret on Capitol Hill that Feinstein has degenerated mentally to the point where her short-term memory is all but non-existent. She asks people the same question twice, minutes after asking for the first time. She has already stepped down from leading the Senate Judiciary Committee and the position of president pro tem of the Senate (which would have put her third in line to the presidency, after the speaker of the House), because those around her (Chuck Schumer, in particular) are well aware of her diminished capacities.

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After an excruciatingly-long battle, newly-anointed Speaker Kevin McCarthy began business in the Republican House of Representatives today. He's already reportedly having problems with the first order of business -- voting for a package of rules the House will operate under for the next two years. Some (especially on the left) are making bets on how long McCarthy will even be able to keep his gavel, since one of the new rules will allow any one House member to call what is essentially a "no confidence" vote to oust McCarthy at any time. Or to sum all of this up, the rollercoaster ride we all went through last week doesn't look like it's about to end any time soon.

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Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez summed up the week better than anyone else, we thought, with her remark: "In chaos, anything is possible, especially in this era."

This is where we find ourselves on the fourth solid day of watching C-SPAN broadcasting what is normally a pretty sleepy affair: the vote to elect a new speaker of the House of Representatives. Normally, that is singular: "vote." We haven't had more than one vote in 100 years, in fact. But this week, we are already up to 13 votes, with the 14th scheduled (possibly, they could just adjourn again) for 10:00 Eastern time tonight. And nobody's sure if there is even an end in sight.

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To sum up today's proceedings in the House of Representatives, we turn to the esteemed and well-respected political thinkers Monty Python's Flying Circus:

[One man waits behind door with a large mallet... the door opens and second man enters the room.]

"I want to compl..."

[Second man is immediately hit in the head with the mallet.]

"OW!"

"Hold your head like this and then go: 'Waaah!' Try it again...."

[Hits second man on head again with mallet.]

"WHOA!!"

"Better, better, but: 'Waah! Waah!' Hold your hands here." [holds hands to head]

"No!"

[Hits second man on head again with mallet.]

"WAAAH!!!"

"That's it! That's it! Good!"

[Moves to strike again.]

"Stop hitting me!"

"What?"

"Stop hitting me."

"Stop hitting you?

"Yes."

"Oh, uh... what did you come here for?"

"I came here to complain."

"Oh, I'm sorry, that's next door -- it's Being Hit On The Head lessons in here."

"What a stupid concept!"

This is all a scene from the classic "Argument Clinic" sketch, of course. And for the life of me I can't think of a more appropriate commentary on the spectacle that Republicans are continuing to put the entire country through. Except in this new version, they just keep at it over and over again. Nobody has the common sense to call an end to what is nothing short of slapstick/physical and very dark comedy. It's like the Three Stooges trying to run a chamber of Congress, to use an American example. Or maybe Laurel and Hardy is closer, with their tagline: "Now look what you made me do!"

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