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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!
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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