LecternGate Goes from Strength to Strength!
OnlyKevin Movement takes flight in the House!
More from PodiumLecternGate: It seems rather quaint at the moment. But I wanted to flag to your attention that the blogger/FOIAer/gadfly/lawyer, Matt Campbell, who has close to singlehandedly made the podiumlecterngate into the story it is, has now unearthed pretty incontrovertible documentary evidence of document tampering by the Office of the Governor in Arkansas. Specifically, a representative of the office tried to get a state employee to change document to match the Governor’s cover story.
It’s complicated so you can see the details here. The gist is that a member of the Governor’s office, Laura Hamilton, was supposed to get the state employee to write “to be reimbursed” on the original invoice for the lectern. Hamilton ended up doing it herself. The state employee, clearly feeling like this sounded fishy, said something to the effect of ‘surely you want to date this addition you just wrote on the original document lest someone get the impression that it’s part of the original document?’ To which Hamilton appears to have said something to the effect of ‘um, no, that won’t be necessary.’
The state employee, Cassie Cantlon, wasn’t in a position to do anything about it. But she did write an email to file, cc’d to her supervisors as well as to her personal email, memorializing what had happened.
Campbell just got that email. Not good for the governor’s office.
OnlyKevin Movement Takes Flight: You’ll remember that I had this quaint idea that deposing Kevin McCarthy would be the easy part. It wouldn’t really count until they found someone to replace him. McCarthy himself destroyed my theory by his shock resignation. It doesn’t seem likely my theory will be vindicated. But it’s at least getting some support. There is a coalescing group in the House GOP conference that is going to put McCarthy’s name up for a vote against Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan in the caucus meeting tomorrow. Politico estimates their number ranges from 60 to 80 members. That’s nowhere near enough to win but plenty large enough to stop Scalise and Jordan in their tracks.
It’s not clear to me just what the goal or endgame of this exercise is and I’m not sure the 60 to 80 do either. My best guess is this is just saying we can shut things down just as well as you guys can and there are a lot more of us. And they’ll see what happens after that message settles in. At a minimum this seems sure to slow down the process of seating a new Speaker any time soon.