Liz is gone!

 

A long held plan to punish the truth telling Liz Cheney, the leading Republican woman in the U.S. House of Representatives, and daughter of former Vice President, Dick Cheney, came to a vote on Wednesday, to oust the third highest ranking member from her role as chair of the GOP House Republican Conference .

Defying Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in her insistence that Donald Trump lied about a stolen election, and the illegitimacy of Joe Biden as president; plus his exhortation of the well planned insurrection on the U.S. Capitol on Jan 6, she has called into question the fealty oath in the GOP, Trump, or nothing, as the party has decided to strip her of her role in a secret ballot, behind closed doors.

Adding to the arena of name calling, bashing, and being “off script'' is that party loyalty is necessary to take back the House in the upcoming midterms, say GOP leaders.

While that may be true, the story is deeper than a mere power play. On one hand, party loyalty is needed as Biden’s popularity and higher ratings are reality, as is his general level of support, (near 60 percent), for his infrastructure and job plans, and overall affability, is making it hard for Republicans to make the case that he needs to be reined in.

McCarthy has done a 360 from the phone call he made to Trump as his office doors were being bashed, and glass being smashed, as the insurrectionists were forcing their way into the capitol. Responding to the call, he replied, "Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are."

The reply from McCarthy: "Who the f--k do you think you are talking to?”

Fast forward, and we then saw McCarthy making pilgrimages to Palm Beach to pledge allegiance to what Meghan McCain has called the “Cheeto Jesus.”

McCain, the daughter of the late John McCain, another female scion of a stalwart Republican family, has gone on to say:  “it’s the most asinine politics I have seen in a really, really long time,” reported The Hill.

She concluded by adding, ominously, “See where this lands us in midterms.”

An important factor is that a woman from a storied family is being bashed, creating a gender gap in the minds of  some Republican suburban college educated women, many of whom voted for Biden in the 2020 election; and turned the tide in earlier local elections, and may do so again in the 2022 midterms, where the entire House is up for election.

Once again from The Hill: “House Republicans are playing to districts that are more ideologically conservative, where crossing Trump will be big fodder for a primary challenger . . .”

Of course this is all catnip for many Democratic officials, and strategists, who hold a thin margin in the House; and, don’t be surprised to see the heir apparent, New York legislator, Elise Stefanik, as a token, who walks the line, a role she has burnished by being a cheerleader for Trump, after public condemnation for his and who vociferously supported him after Jan. 6, despite earlier opposition to his tax cuts.

Former Rep. Barbara Comstock, a Republican of Virginia, noted, “Any woman who would take that position under these circumstances, it’s not going to do well for them or for the party,” adding pithily, “Then it’s OK to be a woman who smiles and reads the talking points. That’s not where you want to be. That’s no equal.”

In short, GOP women are now, in the parlance of the day, “woke”

Ironically, gender warfare, and fractured politics aside, the course of events has turned the head on the so-called, “cancel culture” that Republicans and conservatives decry.

Cheney whose cause has been championed by some liberals, is a purebred conservative, albeit one from the mold set by old school stalwarts such as Henry Cabot Lodge, John Rockefeller, and Mitt Romney, an ally.

This mold has disappeared over the last few decades where the “reactionary” label has been hung from GOP necks, and some see Cheney’s actions, not merely supporting Democracy, patriotic as it be, but perhaps one of several possible paths: a run for the presidency;  becoming an independent, as a check on GOP excess, and if only the former, taking her cause to the bully pulpit as a candidate against Vice President Kamala Harris, the heir apparent, for the 2024 presidential election.

On Tuesday, in what has been labelled as a defiant speech, Cheney said, ""Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar," and. "I will not participate in that. I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law, and joins the former president's crusade to undermine our democracy."

She also added a warning: "Today, we face a threat America has never seen before. A former president who provoked a violent attack on this Capitol in an effort to steal the election has resumed his aggressive effort to convince Americans that the election was stolen from him," Cheney said. "He risks inciting further violence."

April Jobs report does a freefall

 

The April Jobs Report released on Friday by the US Dept. of Labor shocked many economists who after the March numbers of 916,000 non farm jobs expected 1.2 million or more in a trajectory that was only up, or a blockbuster to say that America was back on track, but now are singing songs of lamentation with an abysmal 266,00 jobs, one that also sent the markets reeling.

Some of the news was anticipated by Wednesday’s ADP jobs report, a culmination of private jobs that while often yards away from Labor’s figures, showed some increases, notably in large business with a 277,000 increases, but otherwise offered a modest picture.

March was also revised downwards to 770,000 leaving no joy, but some serious head shaking in the halls of academia, as well as on Capitol Hill. It also forced the Biden administration to admit that the slog ahead was indeed much longer than they anticipated, and that their jobs plan was needed now, more than ever.

A wide variety of economists made rosey forecasts for April including Jeffereies who came in with one of 2.1 million jobs, and as CNBC noted was “by far the highest estimate on Wall Street.”

When asked, about the moribund report, President Biden told reporters that the “climb is steep, and we’ve got a long way to go,” and “we are still digging our way out of a very deep hole."

Grant Thornton’s chief economist Diane Swonk, perhaps said it best when she told The New York Times, “It turns out, it’s easier to put an economy into a coma than wake it up.”

Even a 1.2 million increase would leave employment 7.3 million short, said Capital senior U.S. economist Michael Pearce in his interview with CNBC on Wednesday.

A wide variety of economists made rosey forecasts for April including Jeffereies who came in with one of 2.1 million jobs, and as CNBC noted is “by far the highest estimate on Wall Street.”

Ben Herzon, executive director of U.S. economics at the financial services company IHS Markit, was sanguine, when he said,  “A single report with unexpected weakness in job gains is not a cause for concern.”

Some welcome news on Thursday, was the decrease of unemployment benefits to those applying for them. Those figures showed 505,000 people filing for state programs, falling for the last four straight weeks, after peaking at six million last spring, according to the Times. 

That acceleration showed mostly in April in the fields of leisure and hospitality that came close to the private employers in the earlier ADP report of 237,000, with the Labor Dept. giving a strong figure of 300,000.

In keeping with these strong figures the increase among Americans getting vaccinated to the tune of 30% also gave a shot in the arm to the numbers, along with a corresponding increase in more business’s reopening.

There was a side note that these restaurant employers were finding it hard to attract and retain skilled workers. This has been a steady issue, and the void has been attributable, say some, to extended unemployment benefits, and stimulus checks from the Biden administration.

To no one’s surprise this has come from Republican critics of Biden efforts, and state leadership in red states, bending an old trope that offering even a mild increase in state unemployment benefits is a disincentive to look for earned labor.

There is no evidence to support this assertion, and others attribute it to a cushion that allows many restaurant workers to look for better paying, more stable jobs, without the low wages, grubbing for tips, and the physical drain of a fast paced job, where workers are on their feet for hours.

The Institute for Supply Management, added that “finding and retaining labor, skilled and unskilled is highly challenging and frustrating,” and that “as the challenges continue, we are not accepting all the work that we could if we had the labor."

For women workers, especially those with children the partial openings of in person learning, especially on the elementary level, affects their ability to take work, and with the addition of meal preparation and assisting with remote learning is a real drain.

It also might be one reason while labor force participation increased from 61.4 percent to 61.7. 

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen echoed the president, by saying, in her remarks to the Times, that “although she was expecting to see more substantial job growth last month, the labor market was stronger than the headline numbers suggested. She pointed to an increase in hours worked by employees and a decline in workers who are involuntarily working part-time for economic reasons.”

The United States, while still a wealthy country faces, as does it counterparts across the globe, the real problem of recovery: jobs that may never come back, consumer hesitancy, and change in taste, leading to, as Adam Posen said to Bloomberg News, “transitionally more unemployment” adding, “there’s no good government fix for that “