I'M NOT SURE JANUARY 6 IS ABOUT TRUMP ANYMORE

A concession Kevin McCarthy has made as part of his desperate effort to be elected Speaker of the House tells us quite a bit about how prominent angry Republicans really feel regarding the effort to steal the election for Donald Trump:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy spent the first two days of the new year trying to shore up GOP support for his bid to be Speaker by releasing a series of proposals aimed at winning over hard-right detractors who stand to torpedo his ascension.

... buried in the text was [a] provision that could be highly consequential for the new Congress being sworn in on Tuesday: language that would effectively gut the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), as the independent panel faces pressure to investigate lawmakers who participated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

It appears that many House ultras won't vote for McCarthy no matter what, but many of them are likely beneficiaries of this rule change, and he presumably hopes they'll either back off their hardline resistance to him on the first ballot or come around to him later.

Some of the defectors also happen to be among the lawmakers who stand to benefit the most from a castrated OCE. Last month, more than 30 former members of Congress of both parties requested the ethics panel to investigate the lawmakers who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021 attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election....

It's almost as if January 6 has taken on a new meaning: It's now less about restoring Donald Trump to power and more about the right to engage in a January 6-style insurrection and get away with it. We can also see this in right-wing extremists' focus on the fate of January 6 defendants and prisoners, who are said to be incarcerated in an "American gulag."

A decade ago, I criticized Occupy Wall Street because, after a while, the participants seemed more concerned with their right to continue occupying Zuccotti Park than with economic inequality. I have a problem with "black bloc" anti-fascists, for whom smashing shop windows seems to be an end in itself, not a means of fighting fascism. I think Trump's movement has reached that stage now -- the participants' fight is the main point, and Trump's fate is secondary. We'll see if that's still the case when Trump's campaign begins in earnest. But right now the movement doesn't seem to be centered on Trump at all.