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Notes -
Following up on my post from yesterday welcome to day 2 of the United States House of Representatives attempt to choose a Speaker. The current favorite is former House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) though he has been unable to gather the needed majority (or even plurality) of votes of members of the House needed to secure the Speakership. As of the third ballot yesterday there were some 20 Republican holdouts against McCarthy, of which he needs at least 13 in order to get more votes than Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) the Democratic Party nominee for speaker. The fourth ballot is currently underway and interestingly the Republican protestors seem to have changed their candidate from Jim Jordan (R-OH) to Byron Donalds (R-FL). Overnight it seems Trump has re-endorsed McCarthy for Speaker, we'll see if that moves the needle for the Republican holdouts. As of the time of this writing Donalds has acquired 7 votes, more than enough to keep McCarthy from acquiring the majority and likely guaranteeing a fifth ballot.
Assuming McCarthy eventually becomes Speaker (something I still think is the most likely outcome) how does he effectively run the House? The Republican majority is quite narrow (222-212) meaning the defection of only five Republicans can sink any legislation he wants to bring. Effectively this is a similar problem to the one Democrats faced in the Senate this last term, where the support of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were required for them to effectively utilize their 50+tiebreaker majority.
ETA:
At the end of the fourth ballot the results stand at:
Jeffries - 212
McCarthy - 201
Donalds - 20
Present - 1
So Trump's continued endorsement does not seem to have moved any of the holdouts to McCarthy. One member (I missed who) changing their vote from McCarthy to Present has to be concerning for McCarthy. Since election requires a majority of votes cast for a person (Present votes don't count) if more Members follow it decreases the total needed for election. If those Present votes are coming from McCarthy then that moves Jeffries closer to being elected Speaker, as the current plurality vote haver.
I wonder if this is the new strategy from moderate Republicans. Threaten to vote Present and lower the threshold and get the Democrat selected Speaker unless the holdouts get behind McCarthy. Presumably the holdouts would prefer even McCarthy to Jeffries. It would take 12 (I think) members voting Present to put Jeffries over the top, assuming he gets all 212 Democratic Party votes.
ETA2:
At the end of the fifth ballot the results stand at:
Jeffries - 212
McCarthy - 201
Donalds - 20
Present - 1
No movement from the prior vote. Trying to understand how one side or the other break the stalemate here. Doesn't seem like anyone has attempted to put forward a compromise candidate. Seems unlikely McCarthy supporters are persuaded to back the HFC candidate in the needed numbers, though they have peeled one off and another is voting Present. Seems unlikely the HFC members come back to McCarthy. In 1855 when the House had failed to choose a Speaker after two months and over 150 votes the majority agreed to elect whoever got a plurality as Speaker to finally end the voting. Maybe that's a possibility here but would be pretty risky since Jeffries has consistently been the plurality winner. All it would take is 6 HFC members staying strong and you'd have a Democrat Speaker of a majority Republican House (who could immediately remove him if they wanted).
ETA 3:
At the end of the sixth ballot the results stand at:
Jeffries - 212
McCarthy - 201
Donalds - 20
Present - 1
Still no movement. No idea how this stalemate gets broken.
ETA 4:
After returning at 8pm ET the House adjourns until noon tomorrow by a vote of 216 to 214.
The main difference between the Democratic issues with the Senate in the previous Congressional cycle is that the Democrats actually needed to try to get legislation passed. The Republicans in the House don't have that burden, as any partisan policies they'd try to enact would just get instantly shot down by the Senate or the President. This makes the Speaker's job a lot easier since all he really has to do is obstruct Biden's agenda, and maybe have enough unity to launch performative investigations like the Dems did with the Jan 6 commission.
I agree that trying to pass meaningful legislation with a majority that's this slim and rowdy would be very difficult if not outright impossible, but McCarthy doesn't have to do that.
IMO those are not performative investigations to me like Jan 6.
The gaslighting, censorship, big-tech/alphabet agency merger etc are very real issues to me. I don’t see a way to deal with them without having hearings. Msm won’t cover it. Official corruption by Biden is a lesser but still important issue. COVID/Fauci investigations. These are the only issues that matter to me.
Would also like some antitrust investigations and discussions on how to deal with Aaple, Amazon, and Microsoft. Non of these companies exists today with the antitrust enforcement microsoft faced in the early 2000’s.
The information environment has collapsed in this country. The focus of this house should be on working to illuminate this issue and working to improve the information environment. None thing else matters.
And it would be nice to begin to work on the next big thing. The social media wars of 2015-2022 are nothing compared to Turing Test passing AI chatbots hitting the market from 2025-2035.
They're "performative" in the sense that little action is likely to be accomplished besides throwing mud at the other side's reputation. Partisans almost always believe investigations against {ingroup} are silly and frivolous, while investigations against {outgroup} are important, serious, and likely to uncover heinous crimes!
Not sure what impact an R House would have on investigations into antitrust stuff, since I was under the impression that fell under the domain of the FTC, which is nominally under the control of the Executive, although I've never really understood who gets to order the regulatory agencies around.
Raising awareness is enough for me. Free speech is as much about a culture of free speech as specific laws.
Impeaching Biden is pure partisanship but I think it’s deserved due to the first impeachment being about investigating Bidens corruption.
Granted McConnell is probably just as corrupt as Biden.
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Wait until you learn these chatbots and AIs are almost universally trained to be woke... https://reason.com/2022/12/13/where-does-chatgpt-fall-on-the-political-compass/
Imagine a world where everything we do relies on AIs as much as we rely on the internet, and where there's no possibility for AI to express a non-woke opinion or give a non-woke advice.
I assume chatbots won’t have the same network effects as social media so we will end up with all sorts of chatbots.
I understand that making and training a chatbot currently requires some hardware, manpower, time and knowledge (which is probably patented up to high heavens). So I'm not sure how high is the barrie to entry there - i.e. would be something akin to Parler/Gab/Rumble possible?
Can you even patent things like this? I’ve never heard of say calculus being patented, hardware to a great extent is commercially available.
Even if you could patent say something specific - don’t these guys don’t even know what the AI does to make a response? So it would be a vague patented.
Why not? Software and algorithmic patents are still very much a thing. In fact, I happen to be on a couple of them myself (through my employer, so I don't really own anything). You can't patent facts, but you can patent algorithms and means of achieving a goal - which is what training a model is. You can't patent calculus, but you can patent something like this: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7840625B2/
Vague patent + expensive lawyers = trouble for the newcomers. It's like the rhino case - rhinos are said to have poor eyesight, but with their mass it's not really a problem for them. They can trample you in so many ways that do not require precision. Avoiding them would require precision. Same here - not being smashed by a vague patent would be a problem for newbies, not for the incumbents.
Also, I think you are not entirely correct about the epistemic situation there. What is going to be patented is how you code & train the model, and this is pretty well understood. What is not very well understood is how exactly each piece of training data influences the model parameters and what exactly you need to do for a given model to make it to return a given result, and given the result, how to trace its emergence from the training data. I.e. if your model says the cat is a dog, it's hard to figure out why it happened and which parameters you need to update to fix it. At least this is my understanding of it. But it's a hard problem in general - e.g. see the halting problem and its various consequences, or in general how hard it is to debug programs. That doesn't prevent anyone from patenting algorithms.
Interesting but past me.
Are these things open sourced? Which might prevent patenting if the first discoverer open sources it?
Could be some interesting legal challenges. And if the GOP can win elections they could always just pass laws getting rid of these patents. It would seem wrong to have AI locked up in a few mega corps and everything’s controlled by lawyers.
So maybe change the law. I don’t think society would like 3 megacorps controlling AI and 350 million Americans with no AI.
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I'm less sanguine. The resources necessary to train a 10 trillion parameter AI won't be available to scrappy young startups. Governments and woke megacorps seem poised to dominate the AI landscape.
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The House could spend the entire next term on Hunter Biden and the Twitter files, and even find smoking guns about Joe Biden's involvement, and the MSM still wouldn't cover it except to complain the Republicans were obstructing the passage of necessary legislation. Nobody would be moved because no one would hear about it except Fox News watchers. So such investigations would indeed be entirely performative.
You need to fight the battle. Maybe it doesn’t get thru. But the alternative is surrender. What else can you civil war? You need to try talking to people before you escalate.
Also eventually you can abolish the alphabets to help you get the message out.
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How is any investigation into Fauci not performative? I understand that a lot of people didn't like his recommendations, including myself at times, but the guys was an advisor. He had no real power when it came to the pandemic, just outsize influence. And this influence is completely Trump's responsibility. There was no natural reason for Fauci to be the face of COVID—the head of the CDC would have made more intuitive sense then an infectious disease expert from NIH—but Trump and his advisors felt that a respected expert would be more credible than a political appointee. And when the respected expert who was appointed for his credibility started saying things that Trump found politically inconvenient, now he needs to be behind bars. Trump tried to minimize Fauci's role but by that point he was already America's accepted expert and would still make a ton of TV appearances. Any congressional hearing is just going to be a bunch of scientifically illiterate politicians arguing with one of the nation's leading experts. They may get a few soundbites that will be replayed on Fox News that they can use for fundraising, but other than that the whole thing will be quickly forgotten.
I'm not sure the difference is there. If whatever the guy says is getting done, then it's power. If the guy says knowingly false things, or gives advice that is not to the best interest of the advised, that's fraud. Just like if you hire a lawyer, he doesn't have the power to force you to follow his advice, but if he lies to you and defrauds you, he is still liable. There's certain relationships where there's an assumption of trust and duty of honest service and government advisor is certainly one of such relationships.
To a measure, any investigation would be performative because DoJ under Biden (well, actually under any Republican too) would never prosecute a Democrat, and especially not Fauci, and the House has no power of independent prosecution, as far as I know. That said, just airing out all the dirty laundry has its own value, as would having Fauci on witness stand and having him publicly declare he didn't know about anything bad and forgot everything he was doing (which he inevitably will, as does everybody in such a situation). It's not justice, but at least it'd be a tiny step in a direction of justice. Sometimes, however sad it is, it's the most we can hope for.
Comparing Fauci to a lawyer that has a fiduciary duty to his client suggests to me that you don't actually understand the responsibilities and law surrounding what the poster you're reply to alluded to. These two roles are nothing alike.
I am not claiming they are legally the same thing. I am claiming there are many situations (all of them legally different, yes) where you have no power to force somebody to follow your advice, and yet have the responsibility to give that advice honestly and with the interests of advised in mind. And if you do not do that, you will be considered doing something wrong and likely be open to sanctions. How exactly the sanctions would look like in each particular case, and what laws govern each particular case, is immaterial - what is material is the responsibility.
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Nothing alike legally, perhaps, but laws are just fever dreams BS'd up by some guy in a powdered wig. Whereas: morally? Why is it not analogous?
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How about funding and covering up GoF research in China?
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Your ignoring that Biden was president for most of the time and Fauci got worse after Trump was no longer president. At that point anything he did was rubber stamped.
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They are performative in the sense that they don't result in any legislative action, but like you I think they are warranted and will be fascinating.
I eventually want legislative action, but the hearings this year will be about raising awareness, changing public opinion, and setting justifications to gut the fbi/cia/etc when the power occurs.
And perhaps greatest of all convincing the American people about the power of free speech.
And on Fauci I do want him to answer some hard questions on COVID. He has said before he tried to manipulate people with his policies and I want a much more thorough interview on that. I also want to hear a lot more about his view on masks. He flip flopped on masks. And his private communications indicate it was his true belief masks weren’t effective. The government has never released data on why they changed their mind. I’ve been banned on enough sub Reddit for being anti masks that I’d love to hear the “expert” tell us why he flip-flopped. And like maybe point to some science
Hasn’t Fauci already testified in front of the senate?
Under democrat rules. Interview will be different if under Republican.
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Agreed, and I'll tack something else on - many people currently aligned with the American right (myself included) don't really care if the federal government "gets stuff done". Sure, there are affirmative policies that I'd like to see happen, but I'd be more than happy to settle for a simple paralysis of the federal government in the short run. I'm not getting the ATF abolished in any case, so just not cracking down with additional restrictions would be better than the alternative.
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That’s a good point.
Frustrating, that the defectors may see no consequences for making everyone else’s jobs harder. But I suppose that’s arguably their mandate.
What's the argument for cooperation? Recent developments have convinced a lot of Republicans that the existing system is no longer workable. Will cooperating help fix that regrettable state, or will it simply enable the forces that created it?
Conversely, what important work is this obstructionism blocking? If they all fell in line, what desirable outcomes might we reasonably predict?
Suppose a number of Republicans defect and elect a democrat speaker. This would likely be a disaster for the Republican party... but the Republican party has already been a disaster for its constituents. The likely long-term outcome seems to me to be a purge of the GOP establishment. Why should this be considered an unacceptable outcome to someone who views the GOP establishment as their enemy?
were oversight and investigation happening? If not, then they aren't being stopped so much as delayed in their start, and my understanding is that one of the questions being answered here is whether they'll start at all, and if started, whether they'll be pursued aggressively.
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It becomes an issue if there's actually some critical, bipartisan matter that needs legislative attention and the GOP's inability to form a governing coalition in the house is the major holdup.
However, as you've noticed and mentioned the issues that get bipartisan support are usually ones that favor the establishment's existing agenda so the only question is whether the voting public will take issue with it or not, I'd say.
With all that said, this entire situation really, REALLY pales in comparison to the revolving door of Prime Ministers that the UK experienced in 2022, so in my mind taking some time to build an actual coalition around an agreeable leader is a very worthwhile endeavor that doesn't reflect poorly on the GOP in and of itself.
True, but they have had two months to do that since the elections, and given the lack of progress to date, including no progress whatsoever during 24 hours of focussed attention on the issue and 6 roll-call votes, it isn't clear how taking more time is going to help.
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