If the world were not so perilous at this moment, if we were not faced with the prospect of a government shutdown shortly before Thanksgiving, we might well be tempted to laugh at the House Republican cultists who prove anew each day that even if they were handed maps of the human anatomy, they still wouldn’t be able to find their own asses.
As you probably know, their week-long quest to replace ousted Speaker Kevin “15 Ballots” McCarthy has gone as smoothly as the Titanic’s Atlantic crossing. They’ve given us a scintillating contest that pitted white supremacist Steve Scalise (who has called himself David Duke “without the baggage”) against election denier/demagogue Jim “Gym” Jordan – a joust that climaxed yesterday when Scalise, a narrow favorite within the chaos caucus, decided to pull out because he can’t win sufficient cult votes. But Jordan probably can’t win either, thanks to his well-earned reputation for being an odious extremist – a potential turnoff for the “moderate” members who got elected in blue districts.
At one point the other day, Jordan reportedly told Scalise: “America wants me.” That guy writes his own punch lines.
Michael McCaul, a relatively rational Republican who chairs a foreign affairs committee, committed candor yesterday with this hallway remark: “I just made (members) aware that we’re living in a dangerous world. The world is on fire. Our adversaries are watching what we do…Every day that goes by it gets more dangerous. One of the biggest threats I see is in that room.” He was pointedly referring to the meeting place where the cult’s chaos agents continue to wreak havoc and grind governance to a halt.
Jeff Timmer, a former Republican strategist, has a pithy take: “Observing the House GOP electing a speaker is like watching a monkey trying to hump a football.”
When the MAGA-infested Republicans retook the House in the ’22 midterm elections, the safest prediction on the planet was that once they got the gavel, they’d screw everything up and bare their moronic behavior to the world. The only surprise, in the current spectacle, is that they’ve proven to be even more imbecilic and incompetent than anticipated. Their ideology, such as it is, seems to be inspired by Sid Vicious, the Sex Pistols punk rocker who declared, near the end of his short life, that he wanted to “cause as much chaos and disruption as possible, but don’t let them take you alive.”
Its not worth my time to explain why the Republicans can’t find a new Speaker; much of the opposition to Scalise, for instance, was fueled by petty grudges, the kind that enliven lunch hours in a middle school cafeteria. But what ‘s truly hilarious (on this point, we’re free to laugh) is that some in the cult insist that the House Democrats should step up and hose down the dumpster fire.
Hang on a sec. The racists and election-deniers and insurrection-defenders and political suicide bombers are torching one of our legislative chambers…and it’s the Democrats’ job to bail them out and save them from themselves? Ah, no.
They’re responsible for the cesspit they’ve dug for themselves; as former Florida Republican congressman David Jolly pointed out yesterday, “The last two decades of the GOP have led to this moment. They created it. They repeatedly campaigned on it. They asked to be rewarded for it. Now they can’t govern. Pretty simple story.”
And pledging themselves to a felonious sociopath – someone who thinks that a scorched earth is governance – has been the self-destructive coup de grace. Political analyst Josh Marshall says: “It’s like the virus escaped the lab.”
They dug their own cesspit. It’s on them to extricate themselves. Or they can crawl to the Dems and beg for help – by promising, in return, to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the ’20 election and that they were wrong when they voted to overturn his win…but they’d never do that.
Presumably – let’s hope that this presumption bears fruit – they’ll find a way to at least keep the government open and pass emergency aid for Israel and Ukraine even as they continue to thrash for a long-term solution. But for now, they’re saddled with the humiliating reality that nobody on that ship of fools can cobble together the necessary 217 votes to win the Speaker’s chair. Indeed, Republican congressman Doug LaMalfa lamented yesterday that “I don’t know if Mother Teresa could walk in there and get to 217.”
Whereupon Norm Ornstein, the veteran congressional analyst, tweeted the line of the day: “Ha ha. With this Republican caucus, she would be subpoenaed.”