House Republicans haven’t been terribly successful at many things this year. They struggled to keep the government open and to keep the United States from defaulting on its debt. They’ve even struggled at times on basic votes to keep the chamber functioning. But they have been very good at one thing: regicide.
On Friday, Republicans dethroned Jim Jordan as their designated Speaker, making him the third party leader to be ousted this month. First, there was Kevin McCarthy, who required 15 different ballots to even be elected Speaker and was removed from office by a right-wing rebellion at the beginning of October. Then, after a majority of Republicans voted to make McCarthy’s No. 2, Steve Scalise, his successor, a number of Republicans announced that they, too, would torpedo his candidacy and back Jordan instead. Finally, once Republicans finally turned to Jordan as their candidate, the largest rebellion yet blocked him from becoming Speaker. After losing three successive votes on the floor, the firebrand lost an internal vote to keep his position as Speaker designate on Friday.
I mean… democrats in aggregate are conservative as all fuck. Biden stated “things will not fundamentally change” which is as conservative a sentiment as anyone could say. Anytime anything that doesn’t directly benefit the rich is proposed, democrats are lukewarm at best.
Seeing the Republicans self destruct in culture war garbage and just straight up bafflingly spiteful “policy” is amusing, but there’s another effect of the Republicans’ dick measuring contest to see who is more reactionary: They’ve gone off the rails moving right and democrats have been more than happy to shift into the moderate to center right voids that have been freed up. There is no viable left in this country. Bernie and AOC are not only outliers, but AOC in particular has blunted the more prickly parts of her platform and conceded quite a bit when it comes to votes and stances on policy.
It’s almost like the weight of actual responsibility has a tendency to moderate political views. It’s easy as fuck to be an armchair politician. It’s much more difficult to actually govern when you have to attach your name to policy.
The sad thing is the number of people who will read this and still cling to their naive politics, and take the intellectually dishonest path because they are unburdened by any kind of pragmatism.
Saying “things will not fundamentally change” was such a masterstroke, if his goal was to keep the right at their usual simmering level of hate while also upsetting most of the people who had to hold their nose to vote for him.
I can’t see how it did any favors for him, except in the eyes of the corpora- oh…
He’s known for making stupid unproductive off the cuff comments. It’s one of his trademarks. What really matters is that when it comes down to the work of crafting policy, he’s actually a very skilled politician. Whether one agrees with said policy is another matter, but no one can argue that he doesn’t get things done.