The House has never removed its leader before.
I read Cassidy Hutchinson’s book, in which McCarthy comes off as a decent human being, which kind of surprised me. Unfortunately for him, his cowardly groveling and kowtowing to the nutbags did him no good at all in the long run. He’d have been far better off compromising with the Democrats.
(Matt Gaetz, by the way, comes off as a total creep in Hutchinson’s story, which probably comes as no surprise to most people.)
This ouster means that they can’t conduct any House business now, despite the fact that another shutdown is looming. The temporary speaker can’t conduct any business except when it involves electing a new one, and I can’t imagine how either party is ever going to produce enough votes to do that. It’ll be messy.
Shocker, the third straight majority Republican speaker after Boehner and Paul gets the hell out of dodge and wouldn’t be surprised if he retires. Funny how polices of obstruction, blame, and punish don’t actually turn into anything that actually helps anyone in the country.
Hopefully this will finally put an end to the BS omnibus bills that no one reads.
Hopefully this will hasten the end of the Republican party that no one needs. Indeed, when your opposition is imploding get the fuck outta the way!
You may not like the GOP these days. In fact, I don’t like the GOP much these days. But we need at least 2 functioning parties to have a functioning democracy. Maybe the GOP will implode and a new party will take its place. But more likely it will eventually reform itself when it gets tired of losing. I thought that was going to start happening after the disappointing 2022 midterms. But of course, the future Felon-In-Chief explained that the losses were due to fraud which has postponed the move back to the center the GOP needs to be successful.
If Matt Gaetz was so opposed to passing a short-term CR to keep the government open, he should have voted in favor of more of the budget bills. I am not a fan of McCarthy at all, but it’s kind of hard not to feel a little sorry for him. Running the House with a 4-vote majority would never be easy. But with more than 4 Matt Gaetz types in that majority? Talk about having to herd the cats!!!
There are only so many spending cuts you can expect to get when you only control one house of Congress. To make the reforms Gaetz says he wants, you need to control the Senate and White House too. Shutting the government down will only make it less likely that they win control of all of Congress and the White House in 2024. But Gaetz doesn’t care because he doesn’t really care about what’s best for the GOP or the country, for that matter. He is in a safe GOP district so he stakes out extreme positions and condemns compromisers as sell-outs and traitors. While removing the Speaker, will not help the GOP it will help Gaetz. Did you see how much press coverage he got over the weekend? He will turn all that into fundraising pleas that will net him even more small dollar donations.
Yes, if only there were 200 odd other people that he could have worked with instead of the dozen Matt Gaetzes…
But those people have socialist cooties, and working with them gets you expelled from the He-Man Socialist Cooty Haters Club!
Look, the Matt Gaetz/Lauren Boebert/Space Laser Lady clique only wants the government to continue to function if it does so on their terms. Compromise is treason. We can even see this in the Senate, where Tuberville is holding up military appointments for some ideological reason to do with abortion.
These are the kind of people the Republicans elect whenever they can now, because of the kind of people Rebublican voters are now. And UncleScoopy is quite right, in that what was once a lunatic fringe is far more than a fringe now.
I think the rich people the GOP serves will get sick of this at some point, but what do I know? Maybe they are like Elon Musk, or have read “Atlas Shrugged” way too many times, and are members of the fringe themselves.
I guess we all get to wait and find out, just like how people found out that the uproar of the 1850’s turned out to end in the Civil War. My god, do I hope that’s hyperbole.
No, Matt Gaetz/Lauren Boebert/Space Laser Lady et al only want to see their picture/vids in the media. Period, full stop!
I’m ready for my close-up Mr, DeMille.
Yielding back the balance of my time …
It seems to me that the big problem for the GOP now is the kind of person who votes for the GOP. Far too many of them are members of what was once called the lunatic fringe. The more gerrymandered the voting district is, the worse the problem for the GOP is. Statewide offices can still be won by GOP candidates who are not members of the lunatic fringe. That is why the US Senate is not such a shambles, and why someone like Kari Lake cannot win a governor’s race, while Lauren Boebert and the space laser lady can win US House seats.
I think that if the Republicans lose more real power on the national level, the wealthy 0.1% who mostly fund them will lose interest in doing so, and will try to form a new party to advance their interests in the name of “conservatism”. To me, the Republican brand seems as tainted as K-Mart, or Ayds Diet Candy, or Bon-Vivant Vichyssoise.
So it will need a cool name. How about “X”? Dang, already taken. Ooh, maybe the “Objectivist Party”! That sounds cool, and like a good thing. I hope I get credit for it.
Know nothing party? Damn, that’s also been taken. 😛
I didn’t worry much about the “lunatic fringe” when I thought they really were a fringe – maybe 10% of the country at most. The problem is that I was wrong, or perhaps their numbers have been magnified recently by the echo chamber effect of the highly specialized and targeted modern media. It appears that about 30% of the electorate is simply untethered to reality and can’t tell the difference between “facts” and “political witch hunts.”
Take, for instance, the documents case. There is absolutely no conceivable reason to think he is innocent. He did everything they accuse him of. He has even bragged about it. He is tied to the crime by a string of eyewitnesses, video tape, audio tape, and the actual documents that were present at Mar-a-Lago. As I’ve noted, anyone else would simply have surrendered the documents in response to the subpoena, but if they didn’t and were caught red-handed, they would cut a deal because there is no possible legal defense, other than perhaps insanity. His only hope is to get a mistrial because some brain-dead Trumpie sneaks into the jury pool.
And yet, the Trump base responds to this dose of reality with “It’s a witch hunt.” You ask them to look at the charges, review the facts, then offer any possible reason why he might not be guilty, and they simply change the subject.
Well, that’s the response of 30% of the electorate. That’s no longer a “lunatic fringe.” That’s a whole party of lunatics.
A parallel. In 1924, the Nazi party pulled 2% of the vote. In the German elections of 1932, Hitler got 37% of the vote. That’s how rapidly a lunatic fringe can expand when it builds a case on grievance.
I remind myself that my expectations are probably too high, because 30% of the population has an IQ of 92 or lower, but that just gets me depressed. It basically means they are nearly immune to logic and reason, and highly susceptible to whichever misleading, simplistic spin they are being fed by Hannity and his ilk.
Talk about the idiocracy – we have a United States Senator who could not name the three branches of government, so his learning effectively ended around third grade.
It seems to me that we, as Americans, are trapped in a deep chasm, and it’s difficult for me to imagine a way out if the GOP manages any gains in 2024.
The same Senator who said his “Daddy was fighting Socialists in Europe”.
From Alabama where a third grade education is the rule.
My counter to these issues is to go back to Eisenhower’s policies as a baseline for Republican’s when they say shit like this. Eisenhower would have been considered a progressive liberal in today’s age – but ran as a Republican AND also fought Nazis.
Bring back the wealth tax to what it was with Ike was in charge, with as much infrastructure spending. What’s the counter to these people trying to retrofit some authoritarian dictatorship with socialism if the the same policies of Eisenhower were brought back?
At some point Trump is going to pass away, and his followers are going to have to find the next Trump, and it’s likely not going to be found. They’ll probably go even deeper into nuts land saying he faked his death and say he will come back on a spaceship like Heaven’s Gate or something.
His sons or daughters don’t have the ‘it’ factor, and the nutjobs like Gaetz and the infighting remaining with no authoritarian followup isn’t going to do it. It will collapse just like the Tea Party will.
Hitler was 43 years old in 1932, at least Trump will be 78 in 2024 and not exactly the model of fitness for his age.
While I have unflattering thoughts about Michael & Indy, you, Scoopy, are expressing the closest to what I truly believe.
A free country isn’t viable in the general case, long run. We had our one chance to springboard off of a world war & fulfill FDR’s dream of us. We did that. We had a good run. We thought it was a perpetual motion machine, but it never was that. Under the right circumstances it might stay on track & to some extent self-correct even longer & truer than it turned out to. But it was going to crack & break eventually.
I’m saying this because both Michael & Indy have the misguided idea that the U.S. or the G.O.P. might still return to its glory days, somehow. That’s not going to happen, simply because the world is different. Too many people know too much of the wrong things about the workings of the world to get back the traction we had back then for a set of ideas that sort of worked in those days, but aren’t actually good ideas even in an ideal world, let alone today’s real one.
It’s not simply a matter of having the right leaders, or the right policies. Let’s say we could have Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts for the whole country. Would it be a good thing? Well, we’ve seen a part of that vision, at least: it’s called Obamacare. It’s a hodgepodge instead of a system. We’ve seen that our emergency response to a pandemic is likewise a hodgepodge instead of a system. See, that’s baked-in whenever we follow thru on conservative ideals.
But it’s not the fringe that believes in conservative ideals. It’s centrists & independents, too. People who think they’re smart. They went to college & all. It’s snake oil. A package of Oscar-Mayer bologna sold to us by the likes of Milty Friedman & Newty Gingrich. Shady characters.
So, get rid of Matt Gaetz, Ron DeSantis, MTG, Boebert, & what’ve we got? Is it really possible to have a great country where investment bankers are better compensated than kindergarten teachers? I think not. I’d argue that teachers have a far more positive impact on our country. If we paid them like we pay a banker, we’d have our best people in that job, doing so much more good there than they do wherever they are, now. But no, that’s just one more reason we can’t have nice things.
Sorry, I’m a windbag. I’m aware.
Tax reform…increase taxes so that the obscene accumulation of wealth we currently see is attenuated.
OK, thank you for playing. It’s not a serious discussion anyway.
Second, changing what a whole civilization considers valuable via tax tweaks is a pipe dream. Leftists entertain fantasies like this. They often possess tip-top minds, but their synapses are squandered. The populace doesn’t magically decide one day to play nice with “less deserving” people. That’s why leftist systems devolve into totalitarianism.
Anyway, wealth inequality isn’t in itself the problem. It’s a signal that something’s amiss. Our real problem is that our culture sees market price as the sole legitimate way to measure how valuable anything is, including people. Rich people believe, circularly, that they “deserve” their wealth because they have it. The market system gave it to them, so their worthiness is thereby validated. Maybe you believe this isn’t a completely nutball belief, that’s OK. But the fact is it’s totally mainstream among the rich. It isn’t considered even the slightest smidge off the rails.
The problem for self-government among free people is that consensus is unattainable. Short of that, the form of government almost doesn’t matter. Any residual “fringe” will erode away all of your skillfully carved art, over time. Your stability will fluctuate. Within reasonable limits at first. Someday, though, you’ll fluctuate into The Twilight Zone. Where, as Scoopy aptly put it, you find yourself trapped in a deep chasm.
Wealth inequity IS the problem, because there are a finite amount of resources, and when the system itself is created to devolve into nothing more than a casino where the rules are set by the wealthy and system funnels more and more over time out of the lower and middle classes and up to them it’s not sustainable. When the top 1% of the world host as much wealth as the bottom 50% combined, there is a major problem. When the top 1% hold 50% of the stock market and the top 10% hold
There are three forces at work in society: the government/state – backed by physical enforcement to impose its values, the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which can vary in its influence but today mostly dominated by for-profit LLCs/venture capitalists/investment firms, and then there’s the citizens who were born into the borders established by the state who are hopefully protected and have their needs fulfilled by the two establishments above.
You don’t want any of the three to be overly powerful. No one want to live in a state controlled dystopia like China, and no one wants to live in a society where knowledge and effort from one person to another have no difference in value in equal disbursement. A perpetual drug user that’s a drain on the system shouldn’t be allotted the same amount of exchange value in currency as a brain surgeon. But neither of those are happening or anywhere CLOSE to what is happening right now in the US.
What is happening is these made up institutions called LLCs run by the wealthiest in society funnel money more and more to wealthy through a series of lobbied for laws over decades, that do just that. And then they actively seek out more and more, because infinite greed and growth is the primarily objective of these sociopaths.
The issue is, they’re hypocrites with meritocracy. They take the collective knowledge of the public domain and open source knowledge over decades created for the public good, federally funded taxpayer programs over decades, and the enforcement of the state to leverage power to obtain more and more.
Take Musk for example, he’s working off DECADES of knowledge of publicly funded space programs for SpaceX. He’s used tons of governmental funding for Tesla, not to mention the tech side of decades of public invention and innovation. And of course, Twitter, where the networking protocols were established by DARPA, underlying OS logic worked on by Bell Labs/Cal Berkley, etc.
But what does the public get out of all this funding? Nothing except an opportunity to funnel more money to him through purchases, that they’ve ALREADY paid over decades in taxes to fund inventions to lead up to his empire. A system that creates rules to funnel him more money and rewards sociopath corporate Darwinism. Why exactly should the taxpayer NOT be able to act as a venture capitalist in this case, and the collective whole represented by the state ask that he runs these ventures as Type B public good corporations or non-profits?
There lies the casino in the system – the public who fund over time things for the good of society, or good men for good reasons come up with things for society – have virtually no say in how collective knowledge or funding is used to help the country, employees, and consumers and get no ‘return’ on it like a venture capitalist would.
That’s the point. The rich is always wins just like the house, not because they’re more intelligent, harder working, or provide more value. They are because a series of invented rules codified into law causes it to be that way.
It’s the reason the house always wins at Blackjack – because its embedded IN the system itself. And they keep manipulating the system to win even more. New rules: the house doesn’t bust at 22, it wins, but the player can only go to 21. The player has to hit on 17. Etc, etc. The rich don’t win by merit, they win by manipulating the system in the same way through laws.
I’ll play along as well ie increase the social security tax limit on rich folk. Social Security solvency problem solved.
We now return everyone to the real world of special interest lobbyists and the best conservative scotus bribe $$$ can buy!
Vito Corleone has to be smilin’ somewhere. 🙂
Shallow, shameless coward who stupidly tried to walk down the middle of the road and got hit by traffic. His emails revealed that he despised Trump & was appalled by Jan 6 , but publicly he continued to suck his dick so that he could ‘look cool’ to extremists and move up. When the going got tough, he privately sucked up to Dems and finally got caught. Can’t have it both ways in that twisted party, Kevin.
I’m glad he’s gone, but it’s a bad sign that the new guy’s first action was to kick Pelosi out of her office. Way to tackle the big issues, guy. Forget the impending shutdown; more important to rush to disrespect the former speaker, to look cool to the boyz in the hood. They’re all the same. Just power-crazy creeps who yank each other’s cocks for favors so they can continue committing crimes behind the scenes. None of them would piss on Trump if he was on fire, but they pretend he’s their God so they can get away with shit like he did, and does.
There’s no Savior. This shit will go on when idiots keep electing tiny-brained, attention-seeking psychos like Gaetz, Jordan, Boebert, MTG and their ilk. I guess it’ll take the party going to jail en masse before normality starts to take over. Decades from now, probably. Better still, I hope a giant asteroid wipes us all out like the dinosaurs, and some other species can give life a try. Carlin would love that, wherever he is.
I too couldn’t believe that the priority of the speaker pro tem (not an actual replacement) was to pull some weak playground shit on Pelosi.
No, that’s a lie, I completely believe that’s what passes for leadership in the GOP.
This country is now a shitshow.
Not gonna sit here and listen to you … badmouth the United States of America!
Gentlemen!
The speaker was ousted because he worked with Democrats, and how did the fringe do such a thing… by working with Democrats.
Irony isn’t yet dead…