House Republicans haven’t been terribly successful at many things this year. They struggled to keep the government open and to keep the United States from defaulting on its debt. They’ve even struggled at times on basic votes to keep the chamber functioning. But they have been very good at one thing: regicide.
On Friday, Republicans dethroned Jim Jordan as their designated Speaker, making him the third party leader to be ousted this month. First, there was Kevin McCarthy, who required 15 different ballots to even be elected Speaker and was removed from office by a right-wing rebellion at the beginning of October. Then, after a majority of Republicans voted to make McCarthy’s No. 2, Steve Scalise, his successor, a number of Republicans announced that they, too, would torpedo his candidacy and back Jordan instead. Finally, once Republicans finally turned to Jordan as their candidate, the largest rebellion yet blocked him from becoming Speaker. After losing three successive votes on the floor, the firebrand lost an internal vote to keep his position as Speaker designate on Friday.
The Republicans started an ill-advised conflict without an exit strategy? Who could’ve seen that coming!
Surprisingly (and I think this is the problem), none of them.
The ones who voted against McCarthy’s ouster might have seen this coming. (Though plenty just wanted to keep the shitty status quo that was keeping Ukraine unfunded).
I was really nervous that the Dems fucked up in voting him out, and that we’d end up with a worse speaker (like Jordan), but been pleasantly relieved by the holdouts who seem to want a slightly less insane speaker.
They’ve even struggled at times on basic votes to keep the chamber functioning.
You seem to be assuming that proper functioning was their goal. They were sent there to tear it all down, which is precisely what they did. Never forget that they play by an entirely different set of rules.
Not to mention all of their dysfunction and obstruction is just a smoke screen so the wealthy can continue extracting wealth from our economy and offshoring it. Republicans are in government to ensure that the status quo does not change unless it’s for the benefit of the ultra wealthy or fundamentally religious.
The Republican end game is to turn the USA into something resembling Mexico or India where the wealthy can do whatever they like at our expense.
Except that many who support it do not know that is the goal. They think it’s about morality somehow, like abortion=murder but somehow school shootings are meh, whatever.
Religion getting involved in politics doesn’t always lead to a bad outcome - e.g. that’s how slaves were freed in the UK - but it sure does create a pipeline where people can be fed whatever misinformation, anti-vax, anti-science, anti-facts, etc. Ironically Jesus Himself says things like “don’t put heavy burdens onto others without offering to help them”, “workers deserve their (living) wages,… that very same day that they work even so don’t withhold it for days just bc it is convenient for you - they also have needs and you must be considerate of them”, and my personal favorite, “test EVERYTHING against what you KNOW to be true” i.e. be skeptical, but unfortunately Christians aren’t listening to Jesus anymore so much as whatever they are fed from the pulpit.:-(
Religion isn’t bad itself, it just either breeds or is an indicator of highly gullible people, giving fash types an easy target
You’re a few hundred years too late on the last paragraph.
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That is what both Hamas and also Israel are doing right now, and somewhat the Republican party in the less literal sense. So… I hope it does not come to that! Although it’s weird to think of siding with Jesus against the church, to be whipping the people who have corrupted its original message of “love your neighbor”.
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oops can’t fund school lunches or ukraine defense if there’s no functioning house, whooops! oh no, who could have seen this coming (cues howler monkey greene)
They didn’t care before, but now they have a new conflict in Israel. They tied the government’s shoelaces together at just the moment they needed it to function so they can help kill brown people and get their god to start the rapture (who is apparently too helpless to do it himself).
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Less that they don’t know HOW to end it and more that they don’t WANT it to end.
They are perfectly happy with a non-functional government, it’s what they have wanted all along. The less that actively gets done, the happier they are.
Look at Jim Jordan - 16 years in the House, ZERO bills passed.
The incompetence is the point.
They sell their voters a vision of a swamp filled with child molesting, corrupt politicians and the they fulfill that vision once elected.
“Government is broken! Elect me and I’ll show you!” ;)
I hate to say this, but doing nothing is the low bar, regressing a medium bar, and fascism the targer.
Like a ratchet effect: make gains whenever you can, then hold the line (doing nothing) until you can “progress” again:-|. Say what you will about the ethics of that, but it is strategic. As Jon Stewart said, “liberal media aims to be correct, while conservative media is effective”. We should learn from that. I’m not saying copy, and quite frankly I’m not sure what, but open our eyes at the very least, e.g. as you said by recognizing their deeper intentions.
*target
I feel like they have gone too far off the deep end recently. You have to present some modicum of competency to get elected, usually, even if you just plan on shitting the place up.
Competent leadership went out the window with the rise of the Tea Party over a decade ago now and it’s only gotten worse.
They threw out all the old guard who knew how to compromise then. But it was the rise of the Alt Right that turned it actively dangerous.
They wanted dysfunction until funding Israel in a new conflict was on the table. Now they’ve caused a problem for themselves.
They struggled to keep the government open and to keep the United States from defaulting on its debt.
Writer seems to misunderstand, it was never the goal of the Republicans to do either of those things. Those were threats they were making unless they got their way.
Frankly if Republicans are caught in a war, civil or otherwise, that they themselves started, they should just look to their role models through history for guidance. Lose the war, surrender, and maybe go out on their own terms in a bunker somewhere.
They never thought they their tactics would turn inward, nor that some Republicans actually wanted to do their jobs instead of purely obstruct.
The GOP civil war has been a long time coming, and they truly deserve every moment of it.
Republicans Started a Civil War They Don’t Know How to End
Anybody with a tiny knowledge of American history will know how to end it. Just look at how we ended the American Civil War, and then do the same to MAGA. Appeasing them doesn’t work. Fight them directly. Eject them from the GOP and force them to start their own party. Find your own people to run against them in their districts and campaign hard. Get rid of MAGA like the plague it is.
I’m sure they’re afraid that Democrats will take advantage of the situation and gain more power. During the American Civil War, France invaded Mexico because it had the opportunity while the US was distracted. But the US had no choice but to focus on our own issues. All that other stuff had to wait while we sorted our own shit out.
The same thing goes for the GOP. They’ll have to work with the Democrats to get anything done at least until they can sort their shit out. This is one of those situations where the moral solution aligns very well with the practical solution.
I mean I get what you’re saying, but this was their solution. They aligned themselves with these nutjobs precisely because they saw the demographic shift in the US and feared they would never win another election. There is no second-place, as far as they’re concerned. This is what ‘at-all-costs’ looks like. It was this or political irrelevance. Changing their values meant losing their identity, which would be equivalant to death.
Eject them from the GOP
this would require republicans to grow a spine (not likely given their opposition to stem cell treatments) or have a sense of basic decency, love for their country, all things we know the GOP will not manage any time soon.
We should reanimate Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and just turn them loose on the caucus.
If Lincoln was alive today, he’d be a Democrat.
After he fucking strangled Trump. For sure.
They would have assassinated him already.
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You know when magas have been promising another civil war, I didn’t predict it was going to be amongst themselves like this. But they did warn us it was coming.
The moment they aired the clip of Gym telling the reporter, “The American people don’t want us to work with the democrats” I laughed my motherfucking ass off. No, Gym. We want you to go away and some of you to go to jail for a long time because you broke your oath to the constitution and attempted to end it.
I mean, the only way for it to ever end was total fascist victory or total Republican destruction. There was no other endgame, and they had to know that. Which makes what they were hoping for obvious. Thankfully they were never going to win it fair and square, and their cheats aren’t working for now. Hopefully this is the last gasp for the GOP.
So… If the GOP crumbles, do we get a new Left of Left I can vote for? You know, someone that actually wants to fund the elderly and healthcare and basic human rights, stop the war on drugs?
My “if I could wave a political magic wand” solution would be:
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The Republicans all but disappear. Maybe they would get 1% of the vote every election cycle, but nobody would take their candidate seriously. They’d get, at most, one piece per election cycle saying “looks like the Republicans are running a Nazi Klansman who wears his hood and waves around a Nazi flag at every event. And on actually important political news…”
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The Democratic party would split. One faction would be the Centrists. They would effectively be a “conservative” party in that they would be to the right. However, they would support LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, etc. They might not support universal healthcare via Medicare For All, but they’d want as many people to have affordable health care and health insurance.
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The Progressives would split off from the Centrists. They would push for things like Medicare for All and other major policy changes.
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First Past The Post would get replaced with Ranked Choice or Approval Voting so that third parties could thrive. I prefer Ranked Choice, but Approval Voting is likely easier for the masses. In fact, they pretty much use it all the time on social media. “If you want to vote for Jack Johnson, click the ‘like’ button next to his name. If you want to vote for John Jackson, click the ‘like’ button next to HIS name.”
1, 2, and 3 are all but inevitable; it’s just a matter of when.
4 will be trickier, but we’re seeing experiments going on with it all over the place. I’m hopeful it’ll happen more broadly sometime in my lifetime.
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I mean… democrats in aggregate are conservative as all fuck. Biden stated “things will not fundamentally change” which is as conservative a sentiment as anyone could say. Anytime anything that doesn’t directly benefit the rich is proposed, democrats are lukewarm at best.
Seeing the Republicans self destruct in culture war garbage and just straight up bafflingly spiteful “policy” is amusing, but there’s another effect of the Republicans’ dick measuring contest to see who is more reactionary: They’ve gone off the rails moving right and democrats have been more than happy to shift into the moderate to center right voids that have been freed up. There is no viable left in this country. Bernie and AOC are not only outliers, but AOC in particular has blunted the more prickly parts of her platform and conceded quite a bit when it comes to votes and stances on policy.
AOC in particular has blunted the more prickly parts of her platform and conceded quite a bit when it comes to votes and stances on policy.
That’s called “leadership”. Politics is the art of the possible. It’s not a feel good love fest where everyone hugs and agrees with you.
AOC and others have been very good at moving Biden to the left. This presidency has been one of the most productive for the left wing of the Democratic Party. They passed a single bill that cut prescription drug prices, funded climate change legislation, and funded the IRS to crack down on rich tax cheats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act
What more could they add? Everyone gets a puppy and can kick Clarence Thomas in the groin one time?
What more could they add?
Packing the court and ejecting the coup participants would be nice. Not to mention patching the holes the GOP poked in the ACA. Closing more tax loopholes for the 1%.
Beyond that? Medicare for all, UBI, an actual privacy law that does anything at all, some sort of legislation on police brutality and racial profiling, something to fix gerrymandering, a proposal to eliminate the Electoral College and First-Past-The-Post, a bill to end Citizens United…the FCC is actually moving forward on Net Neutrality now, so that’s cool. But there’s plenty more they could do.
and can kick Clarence Thomas in the groin one time?
Well hang on a second. I think we should hear the cons of this proposal.
I said “What more could they add?”
None of that would pass.
Ah, I took your ad absurdum suggestions at the end the wrong way. I assumed you meant that they were so ridiculous because all of the reasonable things had been exhausted, not that they were the most bipartisan options that would be rejected.
I’d also like parental leave and 20 ish days min vacation, Alex.
Your country is so fucked
can kick Clarence Thomas in the groin one time?
They would have my vote.
You start off the negotiations with far left position of two kicks to his groin. One kick is the compromise position.
I’m aware that you can’t caucus and get anything done as a frothing at the mouth socialist in today’s climate, but the compromise approach is a slippery slope
Unfortunately for her she is the left’s poster child, so gets it from both sides. I’m still largely a fan and agree with her a lot more than I don’t, but some of her recent decisions rubbed me the wrong way
Compromise is literally the way liberal democracy is designed to work. This is supported by a massive volume of literature going back as far as Locke and Hume and Rousseau. I have no idea how you could even type such a statement in good faith.
It just reeks of nihilism. How can you seriously read the previous 200 years of European history and come to the conclusion that nothing has changed? That people’s lives aren’t better? That they aren’t happier, or living longer or more free?
I mean Christ, I want to abolish capitalism just as much as the next guy, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend that the current system is irredeemably evil when it’s made a comparative fuck ton of progress towards post-scarcity socialism compared to any other period of human history.
The current system is irredeemably evil though, isn’t it? It is destroying us in an ever tightening death march of greed instead of saving the planet. It is starving and imprisoning, as a means to provide slave labor, instead of using surplus labor to actually feed, clothe, and shelter us all.
Right, humans are historically shitty. The point is that we have mitigated a significant amount of historic evil in the past 200 years, and have a framework for continued progress.
Utopia is a journey, not a destination. But we have objectively never witnessed a greater rate of progress in recorded human history.
AOC
It’s almost like the weight of actual responsibility has a tendency to moderate political views. It’s easy as fuck to be an armchair politician. It’s much more difficult to actually govern when you have to attach your name to policy.
The sad thing is the number of people who will read this and still cling to their naive politics, and take the intellectually dishonest path because they are unburdened by any kind of pragmatism.
Saying “things will not fundamentally change” was such a masterstroke, if his goal was to keep the right at their usual simmering level of hate while also upsetting most of the people who had to hold their nose to vote for him.
I can’t see how it did any favors for him, except in the eyes of the corpora- oh…
He’s known for making stupid unproductive off the cuff comments. It’s one of his trademarks. What really matters is that when it comes down to the work of crafting policy, he’s actually a very skilled politician. Whether one agrees with said policy is another matter, but no one can argue that he doesn’t get things done.
Since fascism has no endgame–only eternal struggle–it was more a question of the fascists destroying their own country or not before they get cleared out.
It wouldn’t take much of a push for the GOP to crumble right now.
Here’s hoping. Let’s get shoving.
How can I help??
Protest every stupid thing they do. Get local and state Republicans out of office, too. Support good journalism.
Nothing new, unfortunately; but we’re hopefully in the final stretch.
Your post brought me some hope so thanks. I won’t quit but thanks. 💕
“My vote counted less than everyone else’s vote,” said Don Bacon, an anti-Jordan moderate from Nebraska. “In America, all of our votes count the same.”
This is an ironic complaint coming from the Senator from Nebraska (population 2,000,000). His constituents enjoy Senatorial votes that are ten times more impactful than a resident of New York (population 20,000,000)
That, and generally republicans proudly support the electoral college, a system that intentionally weighs votes unequally, and destroys any chance of 3rd party candidates. So it is double ironic.
Which is exactly why the Senate is there, to be honest. The Federal government shouldn’t be legislating things that can change at a whim. They’re the element of temperance.
If anything is going to change it needs to start at the State level.
In my opinion virtually all governing should happen at the State level but there’s a lot of fascists that disagree with local governance.
His comment wasn’t irony, there’s no national referendum process for a very good reason.
The US is an outlier among our so-called peer democracies in having a functional (as opposed to purely ceremonial) upper house. Everyone else has done away with it and they seem to have improved for it. I don’t find any of the arguments in favor of keeping the Senate convincing. They all seem to amount to a version of institutional inertia, or, “it’s the way we’ve always done it and I’m scared of change!”.
They’re all much smaller, both area and population wise. Hence why I suggested those decisions happen at the State level.
Someday, maybe, someday they’ll learn that leading often includes making the tough decision. Which includes compromise and gasp dealing with Democrats!
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You mean leadership isn’t just shouting angrily into a mic?
No it’s better to make no deal and pout until you get your way. /s
The 1st American Civil War never ended, it just went cold for a few decades. It started heating up again with Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, and has just been getting hotter ever since.
Amerikan Civil Jihad.
Republicans, being hoisted: “wtf, that’s MY petard!”
Can’t we just move on without them? They’re bad for America anyways.
Unfortunately no, not until we vote enough democrats in
I always wondered, is it still a legitimate democracy of there are only two parties?
No. It’s not even a legitimate democracy when there are any representatives. Just look at how often Congress goes against the will of the majority.
A legitimate democracy would be direct voting, but most people who support democracy don’t support it.
Direct voting has some definite drawbacks mostly involved with the amount of time it takes to fully read and digest each instance of bill making. Everyone has an opinion but just check around here and you will see how often people will comment without doing so much as an easy google search to bring up the specifics about how programs work. I don’t think that I would want that principle dictating my life. Legislation requires briefs and budgets to be read and attempted to be understood and that means time. If you didn’t put a stipulation on everybody having to sit through the brief then basically you are voting continually on unnuanced, pop culture ideas of how something works. If you put the stipulations of having to participate in the brief then you have a system that favors people with free time… Time for that kind of pursuit favors people who don’t need to spend every minute trying to work to make it to the next rent payment.
Like it or not the act of voting on legislative matters to make a body of government run should be a full time gig. I personally throw my lot in with the idea of Democratic lotteries where anyone can volunteer for a random chance at a seat for a term but winning requires that you accept all responsibility to do the job properly. If you slack off, try and break the rules or can’t show up you lose the spot. I have more trust that the demi random sample of people in the system will more represent a reasonable approximation of the overall will of the people then the politicians that get elected usually because the can sort of perform like parrots saying the best catchphrases they think people want to hear to solicit votes.
Also since the system would have no campaigns it would partially eliminate the possibility of having politicians and outside business interests in bed together. It would mean you’d have to crack down on the possibility of winning candidates being bribed for kickbacks upon exit from political power… But our current elected system has this problem anyway.
Direct voting has some definite drawbacks mostly involved with the amount of time it takes to fully read and digest each instance of bill making.
So? People can vote for the bills they want, and ignore the ones they don’t. They’ll still have more power than they do now.
Funny. You use “allowing other people to make decisions for you” as though it’s a drawback to direct voting when that’s all a representative democracy is.
I would rather the people making choices on my behalf be held to some basic level of account then basically leaving it to a series of Facebook polls. In a democracy at some level someone else is always determining the rules that bind the individual. You as an individual are beholden to whatever principle fuels the majority of vote casters. I actually have no issue with allowing people to make the vast plethora of nessisary mundane decisions for me in a government setting but I would like those decisions to be backed up by accountability and be presented so that all side of the issue can be weighed appropriately and care be taken to make sure binding law is made carefully.
Direct voting takes a very simplistic stance regarding law. It imagines that by chipping in for the things you personally care about things will get done… But behind every law there is a web of things that require careful consideration as to things like exact wording, how it dovetails into previously existing law structure, giving chance for expert opinion to be consulted and to present their case in regards to predicted outcome, reasonable debate towards reaching concensus… For everything. A staggering amount of minutiae designed to keep the process stable and fair.
making choices on my behalf
That’s the thing. They’re not making choices on your behalf.
Hence the “see how often Congress ignores the will of the people.”
The problem isn’t “other people make decisions”, it’s “not everyone has the time or energy to make good decisions”.
Take Brexit. That was as direct a decision as I can think of, yet no one knew what it really meant, and many were intentionally mislead. I’d love to live in a country were everyone has the time and will to research and verify all the facts, but that’s a losing proposition when people are working multiple jobs and still going hungry. Buying people’s votes could be even easier, especially for those who don’t care.
“not everyone has the time or energy to make good decisions”
That’s what I pointed out when I said people can only vote for the bills they care about and ignore the ones they don’t.
Brexit is an example of the will of the people going against their own interests, but what about when Congress goes against the will of the people with a detrimental effect?
Is direct voting perfect? No. You will always be able to find issues with anything suggested. Is it better than a representative democracy? Probably, but not enough nations have implemented it so we don’t have much data to go on.
Buying people’s votes could be even easier, especially for those who don’t care.
This is when you start going into fantasy world territory. There’s no way in hell it’s cheaper or easier to buy individual votes than lobbying and campaign contributions. First of all, it’s illegal. How would you set something like that up so it’s easy for people who ‘don’t care’ while keeping it away from law enforcement? You can’t. All that may happen is small-scale vote buying, which already can occur.
Anyways. Thanks for being a fine example for why we don’t make progress. Better the devil we know, right?
You have a phone in your hand. Voting and tabulating is viable. Banks and the military use very secure methods.
Is so simple it’s stupid. But no one has wanted to hear that for the decade I have been saying it. Democracy can change with the Internet.
As a web developer,
.
No software is perfect. The military can keep their systems secure by having strict standards for troops to adhere to. If you are a soldier and decide to livestream your troop movement on Tik Tok, there WILL be consequences. If you’re lucky, you’ll just get kicked out of the military.
As for banks, again, they can control most of their usage from bank to bank. When it comes to the user to the bank, they have procedures in place but it isn’t 100% secure. Hackings can happen. One of the common hacks is to send users a notice of some banking problem and a link to “the bank’s login page.” The user types their information in, the hacker stores this, and the user is then sent to the bank without any clue that they’ve just been compromised. The hacker then logs in at their leisure and transfers money. Banks have systems to claw that money back, but it’s not foolproof.
If we had voting for political offices online, you’d have systems hacked, showing that they were voting for A when the vote sent in was really for B. You’d have text messages sent to users telling them to check their voting status, those users’ usernames and passwords would be harvested and used to cast votes regardless of what the person wanted. You could even break into servers and change vote tallies.
This is all difficult to impossible because the voting systems aren’t online. You would need to go to each system to do this. It would take a long time and would result in you being spotted, stopped, and arrested. Put it all online and any hacker in any country could determine who our elected officials were.
There are plenty of ways to do zero trust voting without too many hoops. It’s not like we need to completely eliminate other forms of voting either. But I’d argue that letting me sign an email with a PGP cert and publishing the email’s hash for me to verify is more secure and more “secret” than mail in voting is now.
The primary rationale behind representative democracy is that it fosters a certain level of technocracy by default. To the extent that our collective “goal” is to collectively implement evidence based policy, then there needs to be a mechanism for expertise in that framework. Representative democracy accomplishes this in two ways - by allowing the direct election and appointment of subject matter experts to policy making positions, and via fair and transparent expert advisory pipelines to elected officials.
Regardless of whether you believe that humans are good or bad or dumb or smart or free, the individual human focus simply does not have the capacity to delve deeply into every possibly complexity of every possible policy. So either we restrict society to a much simpler form, or we require representative democracy.
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People will actively lower their standards so they’re not disappointed when they don’t get what they want.
Both parties have separate voting bases and funding bases, which have some overlap but ultimately different priorities.
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This is just factually incorrect. Even assuming you have no awareness of the history of direct democracy in action or what that history implies about its feasibility, there is still no mainstream political science framework in which pure direct democracy fully defines the word “democracy.”
Yes? What kinda question is that?
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He’s not a “firebrand”, he’s a piece of shit
Republicans have shut down Congress, this was their only goal, and they’ve been 100% successful in achieving it.
