Getting Media Attention

Did you hear about Pres. Biden's speech in Canada's House of Commons?

Note: This site can also be accessed by entering FeathersOfHope.net in your browser window.

For new readers, here are links to a few previous posts that will bring you up to date on what the Feathers of Hope network has been doing :

• Wait, Exactly How Will We Do This? — (January 28)

• Replacing McCarthy - A Progress Report — (February 16)

• Moderate Republicans? Really? — (March 2)

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The only feasible way to remove and replace Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House, and thereby diminish the power and influence of MAGA extremists in the chamber, is for a cross-party alliance of moderate Republicans and Democrats to temporarily join forces and form a majority voting bloc. They can then “move to vacate the chair”, and elect a new Republican Speaker who owes nothing to the minority MAGA group.

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Last Friday afternoon President Biden addressed Canada’s Parliament. The half-hour speech elicited at least two dozen ovations and frequent cheers as Mr. Biden recounted the many ways our two countries are working together in manufacturing, clean energy technology, building co-ordinated supply chains, and providing bedrock support for NATO and NORAD.

Significantly, he also pointed out, “when the middle class does well, the wealthy do very well.  No one gets hurt. . . . We understand that economic success is not in conflict with the rights and dignity of workers, or meeting our responsibilities addressing the climate crisis, but rather those things depend on that.”

It was a substantive and inspiring address, one that should reassure those worried about Mr. Biden’s capacity to continue serving as president. Here’s a link:

Set aside a little time, and listen to at least 4 or 5 minutes of it. You can pick it up almost anywhere: 3:00, 8:00, 11:00, 14:00, 20:00 are a few good places. But be sure to listen to the last few minutes, starting at about 27:00. He brings everyone in Parliament to their feet.

What’s that, you say? You didn’t know about this speech? You mean you didn’t see the New York Times story on page A13 of Saturday’s print edition? You missed the two-paragraph mention of it on Washington Post’s website Friday afternoon?

Well surely if you watch MSNBC you’d expect to have seen at least a clip of the MP’s standing, cheering and applauding. But no. None of MSNBC’s prime time shows on Friday evening even mentioned Biden’s speech, let alone devote a 7-minute segment. (To be fair, MSNBC did broadcast the speech live in the late afternoon. But that was all — not a word about it since.) So what does it take to get media attention?

Well, at the same time Mr. Biden was speaking in the Parliament of our closest ally, there was “Breaking News” that a threatening note was received by Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg. Some anonymous guy somewhere wrote down 6 or 7 words ending with a string of exclamation points, mailed it with a little harmless white powder, and that note is what dominated the news on Friday afternoon, and into the weekend.

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Now obviously we aren’t in the business of sending threatening notes. But the Friday p.m. news cycle illustrates what it takes to become part of the national narrative at any given moment. The note sent to Alvin Bragg is just another idle threat among many seen by public officials all the time, hardly newsworthy. And yet it crowded out far more substantive stories, and the lesson is clear. Threats get attention.

We need to robustly call attention to the most serious and immediate threat to our republic: MAGA extremists in Congress who are planning to default on our national debt. This is no idle threat. The hard-line far-right House members who blocked MCarthy’s election to the Speakership in January have vowed that they absolutely will not accept a debt-limit increase no matter what. So there’s no point to postponing a response or engaging in the charade of “negotiations”. The threat needs to be recognized and confronted with the utmost urgency before even more damage is done.

So our task beginning this week is to start being heard. What we’re advocating needs to be talked about across the country, in online forums, in print and broadcast media, and in the halls of Congress.

Introducing an idea onto the media stage is more difficult than one might expect.  Being a good idea is not nearly enough reason for someone to devote a column or a TV segment to it.  Even the President of the United States addressing the Canadian Parliament doesn’t necessarily attract media attention.

So while we ourselves don’t want to be threatening, we do need to convey in no uncertain terms that there is a serious imminent threat. And crucially, we are presenting a plausible solution.

To be clear, what we’re talking about is Kevin McCarthy’s refusal to fulfill his duty as Speaker of the House regarding passage of legislation necessary to raise the country’s authorized debt ceiling. Contrary to the general impression conveyed by most pundits and “analysts”, the deadline for doing that has already passed. We are now in a countdown period. The Treasury Dept. is using various accounting maneuvers to delay an actual default for as long as possible. In other words, the Speaker’s refusal is a daily breach of his sworn duty.

To be even clearer, the reason for McCarthy’s inability to pass enabling legislation is that he explicitly promised the minority MAGA extremists in the House of Representatives that he would oppose raising the debt ceiling, even though it’s a Constitutional obligation, in exchange for their votes electing him Speaker last January. It is a wholly corrupt agreement, and an ongoing display of his impotent leadership.

This week, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) shone a bright light on McCarthy’s failure as both Speaker and Republican leader: “Speaker McCarthy has failed to unite his conference behind a single proposal that can win 218 votes. . . . Those on the MAGA right want to pull one way, and those who are mainstream want to pull another way, and he can’t bring the two of them together.”

The obvious solution to this impasse is what we are advocating: a cross-party alliance that can produce 218 votes to vacate the chair, replace McCarthy with a mainstream Republican, and pass a bill raising the debt ceiling without conditions.

Since you can’t replace somebody with nobody, the logical replacement candidates for the Speakership would be Dave Joyce (R-OH 14), chair of the mainstream Republican Governance Conference, Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA 1), co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, or Don Bacon (R-NB 2), who publicly endorsed the idea of a cross-party alliance last November as being the best alternative if McCarthy were to be unable to garner enough Republican votes to be elected Speaker in January.

This current brinksmanship would be dangerous in any case. But with bank failures of the last few weeks vividly illustrating how fragile is the current international banking system, any hint of a possible American default on its debt has the potential of itself being catastrophic.

To an extent not being publicly acknowledged, we are now on a tightrope. The deadline has passed, and bond markets are already stressed. Another unexpected economic shock could disrupt the Treasury Department’s accounting tap dance and tip us into default with little warning. There’s no more time to waste bowing to the MAGA obstructionists. And a majority of House Members knows this full well.

This activist network exists for one reason only.

We have joined together to become an organized force, committed to using our voices to publicly advocate rather than just to talk among ourselves. Specifically, our current objective is as follows:

The extremist MAGA minority faction in the House of Representatives will be isolated and marginalized by having Speaker Kevin McCarthy removed and replaced. Recognizing that in the last election Republicans won more House seats than Democrats did, a Republican member should move to vacate the chair. And a Republican who owes nothing to the MAGA Members should be elected by majority vote to become Speaker. Advocating for a moderate Republican Speaker also allays any suspicion that the proposal is just an attempted liberal power grab.

To this end, it’s time for us to begin writing, calling and emailing as many political jourrnalists and broadcast personalities as we can think of, alerting them to both the urgency of the threat our country faces, and to the very practical, simple solution we are suggesting. Likewise, we should begin raising the subject with House members, both Democrats and moderate Republicans.

Names and contact info will be listed soon in a separate post on this site so everyone will have somewhere to start. But we each need to exercise our own initiative to write or call anyone whom we know have platforms of their own: columnists or bloggers whom we read, local political clubs and organizations, whatever you can think of.

Keep in mind that this is an ongoing project, that to be successful we need to be persistent. One letter, email or phone call will not be enough. The more people we contact and the more often we remind them, the more likely we’ll begin to see conversations in the media. That is our most immediate goal.

Fortunately, we can be confident that any honest discussion about the nature and extent of this threat, and about all the potential alternative courses of action, will lead to the same most plausible solution:

Remove and Replace Speaker McCarthy !