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Notes -
Coming to the end of our third week without a Speaker in the United States House of Representatives.
We started the day with something like nine Republican candidates in the running. Eventually this was narrowed down to one by internal Conference voting. Then a sufficient number of Reps said they would refuse to vote for the winner on the floor anyway so now we're back to... internal Conference voting! I seriously do not understand the point of these votes. If Reps won't honor the result in sufficient numbers such that the winner can't actually be elected what purpose is the internal vote serving? I thought it was a meme when I someone on Twitter say (paraphrasing): "There are only two results some GOP Reps accept: We win and try again." Apparently their may be some kind of discussion about a joint Speakership between McCarthy and Jordan? I'm pretty sure Speaker of the House is a constitutional position, it has to be one of them. Would each candidates opponents really trust whoever was actually the Speaker? I can feel Hakeem Jeffries odds rising in real time.
We're about 3 weeks out from the end of the current CR on 11/17. There's some dark comedy in Kevin McCarthy losing his Speakership to avoid a government shutdown and then we have a government shutdown anyway. At least it'll be after Virginia elections so maybe Republicans can do well there!
Congress hasn't done anything in decades, there's no reason any of us should care about this sideshow.
They impeached Trump twice and passed a gun control bill. That's three things.
You make my point for me.
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This is just very obviously false? They fund the executive branch every year. There have been a bunch of changes in tax rates. The Affordable Care Act. Congress has passed tons of substantive legislation these last "decades."
I think it's an interesting question, though.
What if the House had literally passed zero legislation except for budget continuances since 1990. Would it matter? Would things be better or worse? I'd argue things wouldn't be much different and probably slightly better.
Since old laws are almost never removed from the books, the only way to prevent the entire system gumming to a halt under its own weight is to prevent the passage of new laws. Gridlock is good.
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What legislation has Congress passed in these last decades that secured positive outcomes from a Red Tribe perspective? Like, a Red Tribe law got passed, and straightforwardly achieved the goal it was written to achieve?
Can you clarify what a "Red Tribe perspective" is? I think the Bush and Trump tax cuts qualify straightforwardly. Or the cap on SALT deductions. Probably I could think of others.
All three seem like reasonable instances, sure.
What do you think of the argument in this thread that the Bush and Trump tax cuts were fiscally irresponsible? Likewise, I recall the cap on SALT deductions as being perceived as a partisan attack on Blue Tribe.
To speak plainly, the argument you're making is that Red Tribe would be better served working within the system. I'm asking for evidence that working within the system has a history of delivering significant value. Do you think the Bush and Trump tax cuts should be considered, by red tribers, to have delivered sufficient value that the last forty years of political effort was worth it? If not, what else might be added to make the difference? From forty years of effort, funding, activism, elections won, what of the Red Tribe agenda has been achieved?
Meanwhile, laws like this were passed to safeguard what I perceive to be a fundamental human right, and have been completely nullified through actions taken outside the legible system. Ditto for immigration; we won through the democratic process, enacted our preferences into law through the legitimate process, and accomplished precisely nothing because our opponents were willing to simply ignore or break as many rules as necessary to achieve their desired outcome. Ditto for police "reform". Ditto for education policy, and so on.
I guess I'm wondering what the alternative to working within the system is. What's the solution to immigration that doesn't rely on controlling the apparatus of the federal government? What's the solution to state's recalcitrance in respecting the right to bear arms other than trying to control the federal government and judiciary? You don't perceive working within the system as being a viable way to achieve your goals, alright, then what is?
Answering this requires understanding the grievance.
Reds oppose illegal immigration for two primary reasons: first, they think Blues are attempting to import an electoral majority, and second, they think the immigrants place additional strain on our social systems, economy, etc.
You can't stop immigrants and their kids from voting against you, but you can minimize the effect by obstructing and undermining the reach of federal law from the state level, as Blues routinely do regarding immigration enforcement and a host of other issues. If the Federal government escalates against this obstruction, there are a variety of mechanisms by which one can escalate back.
Likewise, you can't stop immigrants and their kids from straining social systems in the area they settle in, but you can expedite their travel to Blue strongholds, at which point it's not really your problem any more, is it?
For gun rights, this means following the route of Marijuana legalization: degrade the public's respect for the law and its enforcers, encourage defiance and violation of the statues, undermine all efforts at enforcement, generate a social norm of scorn and shame for anyone who would cooperate with the pigs. Worry less about writing laws, and more about controlling social consensus. Make it clear that this topic is not subject to the democratic process, that it doesn't matter who wins the elections or what laws are passed, and do it on a scale and to a degree that enforcement is simply not worth the effort from the other side. Continue to advance technology that makes the laws completely unenforceable. If they push for it anyway, escalate, and keep escalating till they cave.
Blues have a workable strategy. Copy the elements that can be effectively copied.
Blue Tribe has demonstrated the capacity to defy our system of law when it runs counter to their perceived interests. I am more interested in securing an equivalent capacity for my own tribe, than in securing levers of power that evidently don't actually control outcomes. If given the choice between the capacity to set federal law or defy federal law, I would prefer the later; I am far more interested in not being controlled than I am in controlling others.
And the problem here is that gun rights people are mostly conservatives. You can easily get 12 conservatives on a jury to send a man down on a felony count for having a 15-round magazine in New Jersey, because they're conservatives. From that point of view, even if they think the law is wrong, they think that you don't just violate it, you follow the proper procedures. The fact that all the proper procedures were followed and gun rights were upheld does not matter; if following proper procedures didn't get rid of the law, you need to follow proper procedures some more until the correct result is achieved. If the people in charge aren't following proper procedures, why, you just follow the proper procedures to remove them, but as long as that law is in place you follow it or suffer the consequences. They can't stop thinking that way because the institutions are corrupted, because that would make them not conservatives, and they can't be other than that.
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Wheeeeeee!
Not enough effort. Please don't post like this.
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In a reversal of traditional stereotypes, the GOP is wracked by infighting while the Dems are maintaining party discipline.
The GOP is wedged. It does appear that the largest segment of the GOP is willing to go along with whoever, but there are more than enough intransigents to scuttle any candidate. The right-wing extremists have fully embraced the far left attitude of "burn it down, we'll sort out the details later" and are nearly as happy to have no speaker as to have one of their own. Anything done to appease them alienates the moderates (such as they are), and vice versa. The far right can't strike a deal with the Dems for obvious reasons; neither can the moderates, both because they're mostly not actually that moderate and because their own primary voters will eat them alive if they do (another leftist meme the right has embraced is purity spirals, see also: "Tom Emmer's not a conservative"). And the majority is so slim you have to satisfy everyone.
Meanwhile, the Dems are, at least for now, content to say "not my monkeys, not my circus". They've made noises about being willing to make a deal, but they don't have much reason to save a GOP speaker without major concessions. They believe, probably correctly, that the spectacle of the GOP being held hostage by its right wing and the looming threat of a shutdown will make them look good by comparison.
Not wanting a 9% of GDP deficit isn't extremism. Pretty much anywhere else in the world including the US up until a few years ago the current US fiscal policy would be called extremism. Not wanting 2 million illegal immigrants flowing into the country a year is apparently extremism.
The GOP promises its voters fiscal responsibility and reduced immigration. The voters get open borders, bailouts for wall street and billions for defence contractors and foreign wars. At some point the base has to demand that the GOP delivers on something for the non oligarchy. Continuing to vote for the GOP because the other side is scary and at some point they may throw you a bone goes against the experience of the last five decades. The GOP base needs to walk out until the GOP starts delivering.
Describing people like Jordan or Gaetz as merely being fiscally conservative is glossing over a few things.
The GOP promises its voters culture war, a fantasy where they're going to cut costs and cut taxes but not cut any of the services or subsidies they receive, and a muscular foreign policy. More or less in that order. And to their credit, they've done their best to deliver. It's just that there's no law you can pass that will make your kids stop calling you a bigot, cutting the deficit while cutting taxes without cutting services is harder than it looks, and muscular foreign policy sometimes leads to dodgy decisions that everyone swears up and down 20 years later that they didn't support it was those terrible no-good neocons.
Sure there is. Defund and deconstruct the institutions indoctrinating your kids into believing you're a bigot. Possibly destroy the industries that perform a similar function for profit; this means violating freedom of speech of course, but freedom of speech is a dead letter anyway.
Well-nigh impossible, in fact; similar to defunding the police while creating safer neighborhoods. On the other hand, it's entirely possible to get the reduction in spending via cutting services, which you then blame on the other side. This involves some amount of lying, of course, which politicians are naturally reluctant to do, but somehow I imagine they might find a way to get the job done.
And yet, Trump was the least warmongering president of my lifetime, and also simultaneously insanely popular within Red Tribe. This too, like most things involving politics, involves a considerable amount of dishonesty, as you note. Still, non-muscular foreign policy is a priority for me, and while I am not willing to lie to get it done, I don't care much if a few of the near-infinite number of lies others tell daily advance this cause as a byproduct.
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If you want a lower deficit the solution is to increase taxes. As a fraction of GDP primary government (i.e. non-interest) spending is actually lower in 2019 than it was in 2012. The reason the deficit is larger as a fraction of GDP is because the permanent Bush and Trump tax cuts decreased revenue even faster than spending has decreased. Between 2012 and 2019 primary government spending fell from 23.9% of GDP to 22.1% of GDP while revenues fell from 25.8% of GDP to 19.6% of GDP. If we repealed the Bush and Trump tax cuts our debt:GDP ratio would be on the way to 0.
Alternatively, cut spending, by any means necessary.
You might argue that grinding the government to a halt isn't the proper way to cut spending, and what they actually should do is go through the proper channels and propose specific cuts to specific spending, and then enact those cuts into law. Similarly, one might argue that the proper way to spend money would be to propose tax increases to pay for it and enact those taxes into law, not simply spend money on credit and then demand that taxes be raised to cover the bill. One might argue that the proper way to loosen immigration restrictions is to argue for a specific number of immigrants to be allowed in legally, and then enact that increase into law, rather than simply refusing for more than half a century to enforce the laws that have been duly passed. One might argue that the proper way to reform police and the justice system is to propose and then pass laws, not stoke riots nation-wide. And so on, and on, and on. Everyone is a big fan of the proper channels until those channels get in the way, and then it's time for bold Action. So it goes, no?
In this as in most things, it seems that the centrists want people to invest their efforts in the existing system, and can't understand why they don't. But the existing system is not handed down from divinity or an immutable physical fact of the universe, but rather an instrumental construction we built to achieve particular ends. If your moderate, reasonable centrism convinces a critical mass of people that the system is incapable of serving their values and interests, they will burn it to the ground and replace it with something else, and no appeal to the rulebooks will stop them. You can call this the actions of "sour grapes losers" if it makes you feel better, but that isn't going to help much if you can't actually stop them from doing it.
It is easier to extract value from Congress by destroying Congress than by using it as a tool, and so it is being destroyed. That this could quite plausibly result in short-term electoral defeat for Red Tribe is of less concern, when fewer and fewer Red Tribers over time believe that the current system is capable of serving their interests at all. In a population where trust in and respect for the democratic process and social institutions generally decline with every election, electoral loss is not an unalloyed detriment. Why worry about the laws passed, when the other side flouts them and you've concluded that you should as well?
I am all for taking effective action to achieve one's goals but have the actions of the more hard-right Members actually achieved any of their goals? What government spending has been reduced due to the current fight over Speaker? What spending is likely to be reduced? As best I can tell the current intransigence of some Members to get cuts even greater than were previously agreed to resulted in the current Continuing Resolution that does not implement those cuts. Members own actions sabotaged their goals! Over 100 Republicans voted for that Continuing Resolution. If we get close to another shut down do you think all those Republicans are gonna just throw up their hands and say "Welp, guess we're gonna have a shut down!" Or will five of them make some kind of power-sharing deal with Democrats and elect Jeffries as Speaker?
Okay, but nothing like that critical mass exists. The people currently in the House that seem to have the perspective are, like, 8/435. The portion of the electorate even smaller. If a similar number of Republicans decide the status quo with the Democrats is preferable to the present chaos that's enough to shut them out entirely. The more painful this group makes things on more moderate Republicans the more likely this is to occur and the less likely they are to achieve any of their goals.
The idea that Red Tribers don't believe control of the United States government could serve their interests seems obviously false? Both in terms of their beliefs and in terms of reality.
They are achieving more than compromise would, because compromise would significantly benefit their enemies with no appreciable benefit to them. No compromise under present conditions is ever going to deliver anything that Red Tribe actually values.
The first step to reducing government spending is to make securing that spending non-trivial. It seems to me that they are accomplishing that much at least. They are impeding business as usual, and making the members of their own party justify their cooperation with Democrats rather than allowing that cooperation to be a fiat accompli. You are watching a civil war within the Republican party; why be surprised that this civil war generates chaos and disruption?
Then you attempt to primary those Republicans, hammer them mercilessly, make their lives a living hell and drive them from office in disgrace, if possible. If you manage to replace them with an actual Red Tribe champion, that's a win. If the democrats win the seat instead, well, you've replaced someone who was willing to vote with the democrats when it counted with someone who votes with the democrats all the time, but on the other hand you've also shown that efforts to work within the system result in losing to the democrats, which encourages the Red Tribe public to reject the system.
The worst outcome, from a Red Tribe view, isn't the Democrats sweeping government. That's just the cue for another round of escalation. The worst outcome is a Republican party incapable of operating as anything other than controlled opposition, a party whose primary function is to waste the time, effort and resources of its base on the illusion of meaningful action while accomplishing nothing of value, ever.
Yet! Growth mindset!
Achieving that critical mass is the most straightforward method of advancing Red Tribe values. "Cooperation" of the familiar sort, where Blue tribe gets what it wants and Red Tribe gets fucked, moves us further from that critical mass, obstructionism and chaos moves us closer.
Then let them do so openly, and let them be seen doing so openly. Generate common knowledge that a large proportion of the Republican establishment would rather concede to the democratic platform rather than secure the interests of their base. The fact that the base's demands are often contradictory or impossible changes nothing, and is by no means unique to Red Tribe.
Red Tribe goals, at this point, are pretty clearly unachievable within the existing system. Intransigence reduces the likelihood of achieving things through the existing system from a nullity to a nullity, while increasing the likelihood of achieving solutions outside the existing system. That is a positive trade.
Complete control of the United States Government could perhaps serve our interests, but such control is not a political possibility under the current system. Control of the portions accountable to actual elections has delivered little of value after decades of effort. Examples abound of Republicans winning elections, winning majorities, winning court appointments, passing laws, securing court decisions, and then watching in stupefied amazement as those laws are simply nullified via malicious compliance or outright defiance by Blue Tribe. The game is rigged. There is no benefit to pretending otherwise, and there is no benefit to continue playing. The proper response is to play the actual game according to the actual rules: secure your values at any cost.
There's going to be a presidential election a year from now. It seems obvious to me that by the end of that election, trust in our political institutions will be significantly lower than it is now. Given the evident results delivered by our political institutions, this seems like a straightforwardly positive result to me. If you think you can change that by appealing to "moderate republicans", by all means do so.
What I'm going to say may sound a little rude. That's not intentional; seems inherent in what I'm asking.
My read of US and international politics says that the probable result of a giant fight over the 2024 US election looks basically like "PRC blockades or invades Taiwan anticipating the USA being too fucked up to intervene, WWIII, nuclear exchange occurs, SJ is torn out by the roots in the aftermath due to half of the Blue Tribe being dead and the other half discredited".
I am legitimately not sure whether you 1) disagree with that forecast, or 2) think that this outcome is worth it because Red wins the culture war. #2 is, after all, a coherent position, if one I disagree with.
I wouldn't rate that the most likely outcome, but it certainly seems a plausible one.
The question is, why is it plausible? Why would China taking Taiwan result in WWIII and a nuclear exchange? It seems to me that it shouldn't, given that Taiwan is not part of the US, and that any fight over it that I can see would be a conventional one over a limited context on the other side of the world. Why can't one side or the other simply lose, and then let it go, or even limit the escalation to a strictly conventional context? Why would the whole world need to pile in, and why would it need to go nuclear?
If China simply takes Taiwan, there's no need for WWIII or nukes. Likewise if we attempt to intervene, and it turns out their missiles are better and we lose the battle and a bunch of ships. In either of those scenarios, we could, and arguably should, accept the outcome and move on. Likewise if China fails to take Taiwan, or we successfully intervene and stop them. Whichever side loses, the correct move seems to be to accept the outcome, adjust to the reality, and move forward accordingly.
If either side can't do that, it seems to me that they're being some combination of crazy or evil. The plausible path to the scenario you describe would be for the losing side to double-down and escalate the conflict, and to keep right on doing it until the wheels come off. I don't think people should do that. To the extent that people are prone to doing stuff like that, I think they shouldn't be in charge of important things like defense, diplomacy, or government. Unfortunately, it sounds an awful lot like the sort of thing our current establishment would do... But that's just another reason to try and get rid of them as soon as possible.
It's certainly not the outcome I'm hoping for. The outcome I'm hoping for is a collapse in federal power and a retreat back to actual Federalism; the dream is that we all agree that this constitution thing isn't working so hot, and that we'd be better off simply letting individual states do as they will within their own borders, while maintaining some framework of common defense to handle the tanks and nukes. Bonus points if this involves securing the borders, pulling back from our commitments overseas, and attempting to mind our own business rather than attempting to police the entire globe.
To the extent that such an outcome is unpleasantly likely, I'm not sure what Reds are supposed to do about it, or why avoiding such an eventuality should be a consideration in their strategy for dealing with Blues. If the position is so precarious that our fight with blues threatens to destabilize everything, then perhaps Blues should not have pushed matters to such a point. If stability is their concern, they are free to secure such stability at the low, low cost of halting their present offensive, or perhaps even retreating from some of the ideological ground that they presently hold.
As things stand, I perceive Blues to be, effectively, a hostile foreign power. They are not my countrymen in any sense that matters. Their leaders have frequently mused about how it might be necessary to crush us militarily, just as we've mused the same about them. Such musings seem, to me, to be a reflection of the fundamentally incompatible values that lie at the heart of the Red/Blue divide, and give the Culture War its unique character. China, at least, is far away; it is not obvious why I should be more worried about their designs on Taiwan than about Blues designs on the power to control my life, and that of my children, and their children.
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I have to ask - although keep in mind I live in Australia and haven't been paying much attention to politics recently - has this had a huge impact on people's lives (outside of congress)? Because from my perspective it all seems like business as usual - without your posts I don't think, from the outside, I would have even noticed*.
I mean, it's obviously not good, I don't mean to defend the republicans or anyone involved, but it kind of feels like congress is just a glorified school council - no actual functions, just there to trick kids into caring about voting.
The USG can continue to function to a significant degree despite congressional sclerosis because most day to day functions of government are handled by the executive branch. As long as you keep paying for it, the wheels keep turning. Even if you stop paying for it, it can keep functioning for a little while.
Congress has a lot of actual function, it just doesn't do them because it's gridlocked (well, a lot of them are also done by the Senate, which has its own issues, but 'can't form a majority' isn't one of them) (Congress also gets more done than people give it credit for, though they often try to hide that fact). There is a lot of leeway in executive discretion, especially on foreign policy, but eventually you need Congress, to pay for it if nothing else.
So no it has not had a noticeable impact on people's lives? No wonder a third of the country hate both parties.
What noticeable impact would it have on people's lives in Australia if parliament couldn't form a government for a couple weeks due to infighting?
The inability to elect a speaker will become a lot more noticeable if it carries on into November and the government shuts down.
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It's really a marketing failure, if anything. While Congress doesn't get as much done as IT wants (and promises), legislation that changes American Life writ large is still somewhat common. When it happens, they don't often talk about it very loudly. The election cycle is basically every two years, but many of these big bills take about three years to come to fruition or be noticeable (just to throw out a typical number). They manage to pass at least two bills per year I'd estimate that have a noticeable impact on the median American. So there's often an awkward timing thing where they can't take credit too quickly, or people get impatient, but often they wait too long and then it becomes awkward to take credit because the other party might now be in power and they don't want to make their opponents look good.
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The average American probably hasn't seen much impact due to this Congressional deadlock. When Americans interact with the government in their day to day lives it's generally with some executive branch agency. Congress is most relevant here as the entity responsible for passing an annual bill funding the operation of these agencies. Since the House's last action before McCarthy was removed was passing a spending bill keeping executive agencies funded through Nov 17th there hasn't been much impact. If we make it to the end of the current Continuing Resolution without a Speaker or another funding bill the impact will become more apparent as various federal agencies cease operation due to lack of funds and a bunch of employees are furloughed.
Still won’t be super relevant unless the shutdown drags on.
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Can any republican supporters here or people who feel they can speak for republican supporters post their reactions to/opinions of this saga?
From the perspective of a moderate dem, basically pro-Biden guy, this really cements my view that the new crop of republicans are embarrassingly unserious clowns with no skill or interest in governing, and the people who elect them are just burn-it-to-the-ground sour grapes losers.
I know the “Russian interference” or “Chinese interference” is a dumb conspiracy theory but if I were a KGB guy this is exactly the kind of outcome I’d be aiming for.
Does anybody actually like what’s going on?
I must say this whole frame is very frustrating. Republicans see someone borrowing half a trillion in debt almost monthly to behave rejected governing. Or someone in charge of the border to have abandoned their post.
It seems like when Republican dysfunction is brought up it’s “they don’t take governance seriously” but when dem dysfunction is brought up it’s “policy differences.”
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Dems in safe seats (Biden+30) in congress are all ideologically on side with the base. The ones who make cross floor deals are in more marginal seats that they are afraid to lose.
The Reps in congress are very different. A lot of them in safe seats try to keep their public profile low and vote to keep the Rep DC power brokers happy in the hopes of lining up a lucrative job post office.
They form a decent chunk of the R congressional congress but their views have no electoral support. They lie at election time and they'll lose if they are exposed. However they are used to running things in DC (on the R side) without any questions from the base and expect that arrangement to continue.
So this is a precursor to cleaning up the house caucus. Ken Buck has upset local supporters so much that he lost his sweetheart deal for his congressional office and is being evicted.
I'm not particularly concerned about congress being locked up. When it's "functional" it's just going to dump billions into things I don't want it to while performing pantomime investigations so they can claim they are holding Biden accountable.
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The government is dysfunctional. Being efficiently dysfunctional is not a good thing.
The reasons that Matt Gaetz etc. ousted McCarthy was because some of the terms he agreed to to get their votes he ended up violating. The main one was that they wanted to split "omnibus" bills into specific limited scope spending bills.
I say good.
I think the Liz Cheny/Mitt Romney/GOP Neocon wing of the republican party are being childish.
I also find the Democrat language around this annoying. If they care so much about getting the government running, put together a few people to vote for Jim Jordan and be done with it.
The Approps committee passed all 12 of the spending bills like they were supposed and McCarthy was trying to hold votes on them like he was supposed to, the Freedom Caucus were the ones stopping him.
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This reads as hilarious to me. I've been reading some reviews and excerpts about the Mitt Romney book that came out recently that seems to be relatively unvarnished. And it's pretty clear based on what's described that a lot of right-wing senators aren't really being very honest about their true feelings. Contrast that with the dealmaking wing of the GOP. I don't understand how compromise became a dirty word for modern right wing Republicans. Suddenly making a deal is a betrayal and childish, which is not only ignorant of how politics with a slim majority literally must work, but is incredibly hypocritical because of the aforementioned pageantry on the far right while the middle literally just wants to get shit done.
I think Matt Gaetz is a performative blowhard, but also might have been totally within his rights to push to oust McCarthy. That's not really the issue. The issue is what came after, where by most accounts Jordan cynically tried to politically kneecap Scalise for his own benefit before the whipping even got started, and earned too much ill will in doing so. It wasn't even very ideological, though it could have been. And now no one has the political stature to be a replacement. This was all so, so predictable.
They're convinced that the GOP's problem is a lack of will, rather than that their political objectives are difficult, dubiously popular, and involve making tradeoffs their voters won't actually like. In fairness, in the context of intra-party negotiation, intransigence can be a benefit. Cutting a deal with the opposition is a lot more costly than cutting a deal with your own hardliners. They're also trapped by their own voters, to whom they have generally pitched the idea that there are an abundance of free lunches to be had if only the "establishment GOP" weren't too weak to eat them.
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Name a compromise in the last 30 years that secured anything you think a Republican should consider to be a positive outcome.
"Compromise" becomes a dirty word when it's used to describe you being relentlessly fucked without apology or mercy.
The Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform is the canonical example. I agree that is going to slip out of "last 30 years" soon.
The dealmaking around the 2013 sequestration got the Republicans 5 years of below-inflation discretionary spending growth and most of the Bush tax cuts made permanent - that was a better deal for Republicans than either constant law (and full expiration of the Bush tax cuts),constant policy (red ink as far as the eye can see), or implementation of the sequester as originally agreed (which would have cut defence more and other discretionary spending less).
I don't even know if MAGA conservatives want to cut Social Security and Medicare, so I don't think their failure to do so reflects bad dealmaking.
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It wouldn't be a few people voting for Jim Jordan. It would be the entire Dem caucus peeling off a few moderate Republicans to install the most liberal Republican in the House with the understanding he wouldn't block any bills or launch any investigations into Biden. But that's not going to happen, since Jeffries already has unanimous support and already gets a plurality of votes overall. Jim Jordan wouldn't accomplish the goal of getting the government running again because his supporters are voting for him under the premise that he'll prolong the gridlock. That's why there isn't a huge push to name anyone, and the current circus only benefits Democrats.
How does the circus benefit Democrats?
It makes Republicans look incompetent. Choosing a Speaker is supposed to be simple. So much so that the last time a Speaker election required more than a single ballot was in 1923. You have to go back to the 1800's to find a Speaker election that took as many ballots as McCarthy's. It also means Republicans aren't able to advance any conservative agenda, via either legislation or committee. Who are the independents, the moderates, the fence-sitters, looking at this Speaker fight and going "More of this please?"
Without the Senate and with an opposed executive, there's no way to advance a conservative agenda through legislation anyway. This is another reason the speaker fight is more contentious: actually getting a speaker is lower-stakes than usual.
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Yeah. The government establishment mainly does things I don't like, half or more of Congressional Republicans don't want to stop it, and I hope none of them can have their way. The current crop of Republicans are unserious? For the last 30 years serious Republicans have sold the base out on immigration while they debate which new countries to bomb. They've always been clowns. It's just now that the base has started to fight back that they're mad about it.
The smart move would have been to elect Jim Jordan, because it would please the base, and then MAGA would be left holding the bag when Republicans inevitably screw it up. ("We told you so!") But centrist establishment Reps couldn't stomach this and voted against Jordan, because they're all petty small-minds. (Aside: Democrats are largely also petty small-minds.) It's like when McCain stabbed Trump over healthcare, or when NeverTrump tried to throw the election, or when Romney and Cheney voted to indict. Did they think the base would never hit back?
The likeliest outcome here is this drags on until a Government shutdown is back on the table, at which point the "adults in the room" solemnly gather together so they can elect some milquetoast as Speaker and go back to funding wars. I'm not expecting anything particular or good out of this fight. But I'm happy they're fighting, and I imagine that some day soon the stakes will be higher and the odds will be better. One day soon it won't just be business as usual!
I don't really think that's a fair characterization. You mentioned for example distracting the base with empty immigration promises. But wait. Who killed the 2013 Gang of Eight immigration reform bill that passed the Senate and died in the House on Boehner's watch? A serious bipartisan effort that passed 68-32? A real, not-vaporware bill that both gave a path to citizenship alongside border security improvements and expanded employer verification? Yes, short sighted right wing House members under Boehner's weak speakership. Sound familiar? Meanwhile, I don't see a strong correlation between centrists and war hawks. Some prominent Iran hawks for example include a wide range of Democrats and Republicans both and of various polarities. You have Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton and McCain historically on the GOP side, to name a few. Hardly close allies.
The current feelings are largely, I think, largely a reaction to the Republican Congress largely sitting on its hands out of spite during the early Trump administration. The refusal to fund the border wall was especially egregious, in my opinion. This lack of accomplishment with a unified government firmly convinced a lot of people that the Congressional Republicans did not really support the things they claimed to.
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Blech 🤮
This is exactly what I don't want: Republicans who work with Democrats on sweetheart deals that include "path to amnesty" (now) and "border security improvement" (later!). But maybe you aren't familiar with the history of Congress's empty promises to fix the issue.
None of these guys are actually conservatives aligned with the base, they just play one on TV. Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton especially are the worst fakers. Ted Cruz is nominally more conservative, because he's so unlikeable that this is his only play. But otherwise all of these guys are the exact type I described: they will sell the base out on issues we care about so they can get another crack at bombing Iran, which is the serious, bipartisan compromise.
I don't want serious bipartisan deals. I want the right-wing Obamacare, where the whole party gives me what I voted for even if it's controversial. I want the right-wing Nancy Pelosi, who will hold half of Congress against a hostile President and Senate and not blink, and nobody goes on TV and says Pelosi is being irresponsible and needs to be adult in the room and give up every point. I don't want Repubublicans that appear serious to you, a centrist Moderate Biden-voting Dem -- not because I'm mad at you personally or acting out of angry animus, but because I'm tired of electing Republicans who appear more reasonable to the other guy than to me.
And that's why the Republicans can't win. If they set out a hard line against the Democrats, the TV will say they are irresponsible and intransigent. If the Democrats set out a hard line against the Republicans, the TV will say the Republicans are irresponsible and intransigent.
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Yep, from my perspective the longer Congress does nothing the better, I'd love to see the whole machine lurch to a messy stop. Daily entertaining updates is just icing on the cake.
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I listen to talk radio and the conservative hosts are calling it a clown show. Armstrong and Getty have repeatedly played whimsical clown music while describing Speakership updates.
Armstrong and Getty are somethin else. They are so incredibly unknown among any of the right people, but they've been doing their thing for 25 years or so.
I used to listen to them while delivering flowers in Sacramento in the mid-2000s. The effect of aging has not yet affected their voice/delivery. They haven't skipped a beat.
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I agree with you that, with a few exceptions, the current crop of Republicans are a bunch of clowns. But unfortunately my only alternative is voting for people who actively hate me for who I am and my beliefs. I say this as a white male who believes that racial disparities are primarily genetic and that many of the differences between men and women have a biological basis. These are scientific beliefs that in a sane world wouldn't be controversial. Sadly, in our world they mark me as scum to anyone on the left half of the country so I'm forced to throw my support to the other side. And if that other side is a bunch of clowns then I'm giving my support to a bunch of clowns because i sure as hell am not going to give it to the people who hate me.
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The countries that actually influence US policy prefer to direct the golem rather than render it inert.
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