I don't think I really need to pile on the GOP too much over the speakership debacle. They are doing a good enough job on their own making a spectacle of themselves.
There are fractures in both parties too be sure, but Nancy Pelosi was able to run a functioning house with a very narrow majority, similar to what we have today with the Republicans. The policies advocated by the squad are indeed vile and horrific yet they are relatively small in number and marginalized ideologically by the great majority of the Democrats.
The current House majority has not been able to breach their own internal divisions and shows no promise of actually being able to legislate and govern.
Vote after vote, the moderates are submarined and torpedoed by the Freedom Party radicals.
It is not hard to see that the name of the poison still infecting this house is Donald Trump.
The current nominee, Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, was one of the principal architects of the campaign to deny Joe Biden his duly elected position.
Johnson, a former lawyer, led an amicus brief signed by over 100 Republican members of Congress backing a flawed Texas lawsuit that asked the Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election. He also played a key role in crafting the rationale that many of his GOP colleagues used in justifying their votes to throw out the 2020 election results ― even just hours after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
“In formal statements justifying their votes, about three-quarters relied on the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Representative Mike Johnson, the most important architect of the Electoral College objections,” according to The New York Times.
I felt sort of sorry for Tom Emmer, the last nominee. He seemed like a decent guy who was interested in actually governing. But he voted to certify Biden and that was the kiss of death, even after he made a last minute attempt to placate the orange one and kiss his ring. Trump's handprints were all over the carnage.
Just hours after Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) won the Republican Conference’s nomination to be House speaker on Tuesday, former President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to deride the congressman as “totally out-of-touch with Republican Voters” and a “Globalist RINO.”
He then got on the phone with members to express his aversion for Emmer and his bid for speaker.
By Tuesday afternoon Trump called one person close to him with the message, “He’s done. It’s over. I killed him.”
The current party, which has exorcised establishment conservatives like Rove, Romney, Cheney and Jeb Bush is caught between going full blown MAGA, a position that is not popular with a majority of the American people and moderating its message in a way that can show that it is capable of governance.
It was interesting to see how Emmer was brought down. One of the sticking points was his support for gay marriage.
Minnesota Republican Rep. Tom Emmer’s support for legalizing gay marriage was a major reason his Tuesday tenure as the GOP’s speaker-designate lasted only four hours, a sign of how the extremism of the Republican Party is directly contributing to its now three-week-long struggle to elect a speaker.
Emmer voted for the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022, which turned the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling legalizing gay marriage into national law. His vote, which came after years of opposing gay marriage, put him in line with the overwhelming majority of Americans: Earlier this year, Gallup found that 71% of Americans support gay marriage, an all-time high.
One of his fellow representatives, Georgia Rep. Rick Allen, suggested that Emmer "had to get right with Jesus." Talk about a big tent strategy.
With Chesebro, Powell and Ellis ready to spill the truth and Meadows granted an immunity deal and already confiding that Trump knew that he had lost the election, one has to wonder what the next domino will fall and when this "Maga Movement" which is honestly about one authoritarian man, will lose its steam, if ever? Talk about a need for an exorcist. What a tedious and long running exercise in self delusion.
The ABC report states Meadows repeatedly told Trump in the weeks after the 2020 election that there was no evidence of any widespread voter fraud which cost him the race against Joe Biden. It said Meadows told federal prosecutors that he believed Trump was being "dishonest" in the early hours of November 4, 2020, when the former president claimed in a press conference "frankly, we did win this election," when a significant number of votes across the country had not been counted yet.
Vladimir Putin should be really happy.
*
Postscript: The new speaker. All of my"fiscally conservative, socially liberal" friends on the right should love this.
2 comments:
From my perch it looks like the Republican Party is fracturing. At present it is two parties under one umbrella and the small MAGA party is preventing the entire party from functioning. Ir looks like a split might begin if this goes on for awhile longer. Pushing against the split is the fact we have never had three parties here. Also, there is a lot of money involved in this and I don't know if the donors want a split or not. I think it would be good for the country if the MAGA fanatics started their own party but they are so delusional that they think they can take over the whole party and then the whole nation.
How do you spell clusterfu**?
The joke is on me. The MAGA faction's temper tantrum was so bad that the Republicans just caved and put a MAGA in the speaker job.
Post a Comment