House Republicans flailed through a second day of multiple balloting Wednesday, unable to elect Rep. Kevin McCarthy as House speaker or to come up with a new strategy to end the political chaos that has tarnished the start of their new majority.
For a fifth time, Republicans tried to vote McCarthy into the top job as the House plunged deeper into disarray. That came moments after the fourth vote showed 20 conservative holdouts still refusing to support him, unchanged from the previous time around and leaving him far short of the 218 votes typically needed to win the gavel.
What did people expect, when they elected jackasses like Boebert, Gaetz, MTG, Gosar, Issa, Clyde and the rest of the Caucus of Bozos? None of them are there to govern, to try to do the people's business. They're bomb-throwers, nothing more. And because the GOP shanked the midterms, McCarthy needs the support of the lunatics to gain the speakership. McCarthy isn't giving up. He's measured the drapes, he believes that he's entitled to the job. So, for the time being, the locked-ward lunatics have the keys to the madhouse.
What's it going to take for McCarthy to realize that he can't pander enough to the crazies to win, and that, if he does win, he will be so neutered that he will be a speaker-in-name-only?
His other course is to freeze out the crazies, go full-moderate and cut a deal with enough Democrats to get to 218. Which should be a deal that cuts out the crazies altogether. And that will so enrage the base that the GOP will implode in 2024.
Or enough of the Democrats and the non-crazy Republicans pick someone who is not in the House to be Speaker. But that's a high-odds bet, in case you're gambling on this insanity.
Biden and McConnell just took a trip together. From my WEBN days
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X95qte7Pa10
https://webn.iheart.com/
I'm selling popcorn futures.
ReplyDeleteAlso comfy loungers, time to sit and watch the
combined dumpster fire, and clown car show.
Likely the burning clown car show.
Eck!
First, as long as the Republicans perform the circular firing squad, they can't actually DO anything, so that is a good thing.
ReplyDeleteAnd second, there are much worse things than working with the Democrats to get a majority to install him as Speaker. That is likely the only way that both sides will work together, if McCarthy owes them for electing him leader. That probably would mean that he would have to appoint some Democrats chairmen or chairwomen of committees. A fair mix would not be a bad thing, especially since the Republicans didn't exactly get a clear direction to go from their electorate. I suspect that the people who voted for them mostly want they to grow up and stop acting like they are still in Jr. High, and work for the good of the nation instead of for themselves and their rich friends. They have a chance to show that they care about America. If they blow it, 2024 looks like a very big bloodbath for them.
Kevin is the only "young gun" left standing, and if he had any brains he would have figured out what felled the other two. But he doesn't have brains, only ambition.
ReplyDelete-Doug in Sugar Pine
That's the plan, man: get nothing done, Our Do-Nothing Congress taking obstructionism to a whole 'nuther level. NAZI gutter radio host John Fredericks calls House Republicans failure to elect a Speaker of the House the third-greatest day in our America First, populist movement.
ReplyDeleteFor those who haven't been paying attention, "America First!" is, was and always will be bedfellows, butt-fuck-buddies, with the NAZIs. I can't find a better example, here at the start of day 3 of this, of the repubs clearly planning to get nothing done. They're not there to conduct the business of governing the country, they're there to throw bombs.
I fail to see how failing to get anything done is a good thing ...
Would someone please press the Big Red Switch and reboot the Right? It's been fun watching it set its ass on fire, to watch the Leopard eat its face while being clueless that the Right is the Leopard, but....will the adults please step in and stop them before the Leopard dines on America as collateral damage? Will someone please page Ike and Herbert Walker....and yes, it really has been that long since the Right began walking the road that ended up here...
ReplyDeleteTwo years of this madness until the next election?
It's been fun watching their karma catch up with their dogma (to say nothing of fear, hate, proof by assertion and victory through being the loudest asshole in the room), but it's time to send for The Men In White Suits. Two, three days is amusing; two years will be catastrophic.
It is happening here.
The problem, Stewart, is that their primary voters keep selecting these crazies. The Republicans would have a three or four vote majority in the Senate if their voters hadn't chosen nutso candidates that were beaten like gongs. So they wound up losing a seat.
ReplyDeleteThe pie-in-the-sky reboot I asked for would have to also apply to the base and the malign Prof. Harold Hill media. You might think, ala What's the Matter With Kansas (written in 2004), that reality would do that, but then as now, our species capacity from self-delusion, blaming someone else, hating Others, etc. is limitless, even with doom in their face.
ReplyDeleteWish we didn't have to go along on their Tilt-a-Whirl......
Part of the problem goes back to the Democrats. They gave money to people like John Gibbs to win his primary, since they knew he was a much easier win for Hillary Scholten. That is partly why the Republicans had some bad candidates. The fact that the Republicans are too stupid to see this and act accordingly is their own fault.
ReplyDeleteNow that Gibbs has lost, you must see how low the mighty have fallen. They just appointed him as the new county administrator for Ottawa county here in Michigan, just one county below me. It contains the huge city of Grand Haven. The county board had 8 new members added and sworn in. The members were far right members of a group "Ottawa Impact", who were among other things, dedicated to fighting Covid mandates and diversity efforts. So they were part of the 11 member board that put the basically far, far right Gibbs in charge of a small city that for the most part is liberal leaning, although not super leftist. More like the liberal people of old that my dad and mom would recognize and support.
I am convinced that the far left and the far right have kidnapped the nation from most people who do not support their agenda. I remember growing up and as a Jr. High student voting in a mock election for George McGovern vs. Richard Nixon. It had nothing to do with the Vietnam war, of which I supported our military members completely. It was based totally upon his liberal policies of helping those less able to help themselves, what is now called social programs.
At the time, instead of food stamps, now bridge cards or the like, the government through the FDA, delivered actual surplus food to needy or elderly people in their homes, helping not only the hungry and low income people, but also helping farmers with excess crops ensure that they had a market for their food. I am sure that the government did studies that showed that it was inefficient to do it that way, but my grandparents received food that way, and it was a big help to them. They had been laborers their whole lives and they only had social security to live off of, since that generation never had much of an incentive or even ability to save for retirement.
If the Democrats can ratfuck the Republicans into choosing unelectable idiots, that's the Republicans' problem. Democrats didn't tell Republicans to choose Dr. Fucking Oz (PA), or Lenora Levy (CT),for just two examples.
ReplyDeleteMurc’s Law is beloved by major columnists, both-siders and Radical Centralists
ReplyDeleteMurc’s Law
The widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics.
By attacking the Democrats for not blocking a tax bill that they unanimously opposed, you revealed yourself to be a firm believer in Murc's Law.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=murc%27s%20law
That anyone with two brain cells to rub together feels that telling the truth about Republican candidates is somehow against the unwritten Marquis of Queensbury rules regarding American politics is most curious. The Democrats, AFIAK, didn’t recruit John Gibbs, giving money to him is protected by a Supreme Court ruling equating money with speech, and the Republican constituency, such as it was, was also free to donate to the more moderate candidate and counter the threat of an extremist from their own side. To quote Peter Finley Dunne’s fictional character Mr Dooley, politics ain’t beanbag.
Let me end with a quote from somebody who knew a thing or two about cosmic horror, and politics.
As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.