Republicans Started a Civil War They Don’t Know How to End
Republicans Started a Civil War They Don’t Know How to End
Knocking off Speaker candidates is easy, but electing one is impossible so far.
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.
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The Republicans started an ill-advised conflict without an exit strategy? Who could've seen that coming!
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Surprisingly (and I think this is the problem), none of them.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.:-(
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You're a few hundred years too late on the last paragraph.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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"Government is broken! Elect me and I'll show you!" ;)
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I hate to say this, but doing nothing is the low bar, regressing a medium bar, and fascism the targer.
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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.
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*target
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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.
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They wanted dysfunction until funding Israel in a new conflict was on the table. Now they've caused a problem for themselves.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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."
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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.
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Your post brought me some hope so thanks. I won't quit but thanks. 💕
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“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)
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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.
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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.
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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!".
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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?
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No it’s better to make no deal and pout until you get your way. /s
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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.
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Amerikan Civil Jihad.
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Republicans, being hoisted: "wtf, that's MY petard!"
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He's not a "firebrand", he's a piece of shit
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Republicans: Drain the Swamp... into Congress?
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Have we ever had a government shutdown during a general election?
With how clearly this lays at the feet of the gop, how bad will this make them suffer if the government isn’t open during the election? What happens to the election even?
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With how clearly this lays at the feet of the gop
They were working the "It's the Democrats (and eight republicans) fault" angle really hard on CNN the other day, and with how their base is like, I'm not quite sure even that would stick.
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Since elections are administered by the states, I think there wouldn't be an issue there. Ironically the push for states rights means federal gridlock can't stop elections.
Republican leadership seems aware that when shutdowns and fuckery like this happens, they get the blame. Trump is making it worse for them by cheering for a shutdown.
I think the election would go very badly for them. We've seen Congressional gridlock for a long time, but never because the majority party can't agree with itself. I believe the situation is proving unpopular even with Republican voters, who themselves are split. Gaetz has opened up fault lines that can't be easily closed.
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epublicans
Are they generally rejecting their own “R” now as well?
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When it comes to electing a speaker, looks like it.
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They read a lot of e-books
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Ha, reading, hands-down the least believable excuse.
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Republicans have shut down Congress, this was their only goal, and they've been 100% successful in achieving it.
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the only solution: fight to the death. let C-SPAN air it
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Sell it pay per view and watch the national debt go away!
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There is more actual intelligence in that AI art than in all the Republicans in Congress. Could ChatGPT make a better legislator than Jim Jordan?
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House Speaker Camacho?
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Any day now.
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They don't want it to end. It's a scam. This is what Rs want.
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I think they wanted this at first ? Ahhh
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The House GOP is only 50.8%. It's barely a majority. In the Senate when it's 50/50 they read a compromise.
The media just needs to start reporting that it's not effectively a majority and maybe this would begin peeling the resolve of a handful of blue state reps to support Jeffries.
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Did you mean a handful of Republicans in blue states could support Jeffries?
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Yes obviously
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They do love to run their mouths
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I love watching their in-fighting and emasculating downvoting of each other. Of course, there are so many low cards in that hand - there's none among them really fit to hold office, let alone be considered real human beings. I'm loving this disintegration of America and watching it sink into its own morass of lowly ignorance.
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I’m loving this disintegration of America
I'm not, we've got shit to do, like aid to Ukraine. It's funny, yes, but we need a functional government.
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I like when they call each other things like cuckservatives.
Also, I see their literal Nazi (and donnie's BFF) is calling for excommunication of Jewish MAGAs...
https://crooksandliars.com/2023/10/trump-s-fave-neo-nazi-singles-out-maga
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I think someone from the California 32nd can help them end it.
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politics is ALWAYS TRASH its like red team go, no fuck you blue team go, have a pair of balls and realize they are playing you like a fiddle, the only answer is the rare as fuck middle ground and no one since ross perot even tried, 3% isnt gonna do it and you see now why the red team blue team strategy has survived so long, people are stupid and want to pick a side before even realizing what that side stands for, blue team is all about fucking normal people for profit and sticking in trendy gay black men wherever they think they can get the most political leverage from inserting them in that role, red team is all about being an asshole to anyone not on their "side" and pretending to care about the masses all while passing shitty bills that only make the rich get richer, wake the fuck up america you been geeting played like a pu nk removed the whole time the minute you picked a "side" its all the same side punk , and you wanna know the fucked up part, im a veteran for usa, i still do not stand behing the political fuckery going on and MOST DO NOT, open your eyes and read or talk to people from different states and regions, if you live die and only exist in one area you have zero right to judge another
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I'm sorry, but you could not be more wrong.
Democrats believe, truly believe, in a functional Democracy and Republicans believe, truly believe, that government does not, cannot, and should not function.
If you doubt this, I'll point you to the stated goal of noted Republican lobbiest Grover Norquist who famously stated:
Following that, he proceeded to get 238 Congressmen and 41 Senators to sign "The Pledge" and they have been operating under that guideline ever since.
https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/11/norquists-tax-pledge-what-it-is-and-how-it-started
So don't come in here with your "both-sidesisms". It's bullshit and everyone here knows it.
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What is the middle ground between freedom and fascism?
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So, "wake up sheeple", basically?
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I used to think this way, in part bc there's an aspect of this that is obviously true - conservatives and liberals from many states are not all that far apart. However, I do think we've crossed over into dangerous territory here, to the point where politics are not "merely" shitty as usual, but actually ends. It's like the difference between people who as they get older feel back pain, vs. outright dying. That is normal too I suppose, though it is our duty to be as diligent as possible to delay that eventual outcome for as long as possible.
I keep thinking like, if the question is "what is 1+1?", then Democrats will say -100000, then give contracts to the corps that bribed them, and while in the past Republicans might have done similarly, now they will pull out a gun and shoot you in the head (as their way of answering the question).
Thank you for your service. Indeed we all need to struggle as best we can to open our eyes to what is going on, bc it's not pretty. This nation that you tried to serve is hurting.