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Post by aj2hall on Feb 15, 2024 23:39:28 GMT
Sometimes, Republicans are their own worst enemy. Lately, they seem to be making the case to vote for Democrats. Between the chaos in the House, their inability to actually govern, their purely partisan attempts at impeachment, Trump's statements on NATO, Lara Trump as head of the RNC, etc their chances in November don't look good
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 15, 2024 23:46:22 GMT
Even conservatives are criticizing Republicans for some of their latest actions
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 15, 2024 23:48:56 GMT
The ineptitude of House Republicans has been on full display this week. Also obvious, how they are just doing what Trump tells them to do. Trump isn't even the official nominee, but he is clearly in control of the party.
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3boysnme
Full Member
Posts: 405
Aug 1, 2023 13:28:26 GMT
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Post by 3boysnme on Feb 16, 2024 0:01:13 GMT
The problem is that sane people like you and I, and the majority of the people on here, can see the obvious writing on the wall, but there are still so many others who are refusing to see that, or do see it but want to "stick it to the Dems!" I so hope all the sane people vote. Then in four years, trump will definitely be too old. Or sitting in prison. Which I cannot believe he isn't already there. SMDH.
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 16, 2024 0:19:41 GMT
The hypocrisy of the Republicans and Trump is astounding
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Post by sideways on Feb 16, 2024 0:20:09 GMT
Chances SHOULD be great. But republicans have gerrymandered and suppressed the votes so much in some places that it might be difficult for a democrat to get elected. Hopefully we have a very large voter turnout to counteract the damage. Democrats always do better when there’s a large turnout.
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Post by Scrapper100 on Feb 16, 2024 1:18:12 GMT
Even conservatives are criticizing Republicans for some of their latest actions I really hope this message gets spread far and wide but I’m sure it won’t make it to MAGAs. I don’t think anything will make a MAGA not vote for TFG they are fine if he was to become a dictator - seen way too many clips with people and they are fine with it as long as the dictator is TFG. When asked what they think about the border bill they are all for it and dealing with the issue when asked why TFG is against it they just get quiet and say I don’t know but I’m voting for him 🤦♀️ |
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Post by Scrapper100 on Feb 16, 2024 1:23:13 GMT
Chances SHOULD be great. But republicans have gerrymandered and suppressed the votes so much in some places that it might be difficult for a democrat to get elected. Hopefully we have a very large voter turnout to counteract the damage. Democrats always do better when there’s a large turnout. That’s what we are all hoping but also know that if he doesn’t win there will be repeats like last time only this time they know what doesn’t work. I just hope there isn’t violence. I just saw that Mike Roberts is also up for election in November so between that and MTG threatening him with being ousted he is doing whatever TFG says. |
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Post by dizzycheermom on Feb 16, 2024 1:32:41 GMT
I am so tired of hearing Nikki Haley bash Trump when she will absolutely turn around and vote for him.
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 16, 2024 2:20:35 GMT
I am so tired of hearing Nikki Haley bash Trump when she will absolutely turn around and vote for him. I think odds are good she will vote for him, too. But, as long as she's still running, she's helping make a case for the Democrats. And Trump has to contend with her as well as Biden. And oh yeah, his 91 felony charges. |
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Post by crazy4scraps on Feb 16, 2024 5:00:47 GMT
I just want to note that in the last several months I have been literally bombarded with text messages from all of these bots begging me to answer their polls, RE: Are you going to vote for Biden? Or, “Polls are showing Dems are switching parties! Please tell us you’re voting for Democrats!” Among other things. It’s gotten to the point that it’s just obnoxious now. I’m talking dozens of them a day and I have given up on trying to get off of these lists. FTR, I don’t really know how I got on them in the first place, other than about a year or so ago I kept getting actual phone calls from pollsters asking for someone named Joseph, and that’s not me. I’ve had my same cell number for over a decade so obviously someone got something wrong at some point and it has just snowballed. Yeah, I’m still voting for Biden but I’m also NOT going to reply to any of these stupid texts because that will just get me on a thousand more spam lists. I wonder how many other people like me are “still Democrats” but also just sick to death of all the spam so they just say they’re switching to voting Republican to get dropped from those lists?  |
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 16, 2024 22:55:29 GMT
On the chaos, dysfunction and inability of MAGA Republicans in the House to actually govern heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-15-2024T oday House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) canceled tomorrow’s votes and sent the House of Representatives into recess until February 28.
Before recessing, Johnson refused to take up the national security supplemental bill the Senate passed early Tuesday morning, providing aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan and humanitarian aid for Gaza. Johnson said the House must “work its own will” rather than vote on the bill at hand because the measure did not include border security measures.
Yesterday, Johnson told House Republicans that the House will not be “rushed” into passing foreign aid, despite the fact that Ukraine’s desperate need for ammunition is enabling Russia to regain some of the territory Ukraine’s troops reclaimed over the past year.
But is it a rush? President Biden asked for additional national security funding in October 2023. A majority of lawmakers in the Senate and the House support such a measure, but Johnson bowed to the demands of MAGA Republicans and said he would not bring such a bill up for a vote unless it contained border security measures to address what they insisted was a crisis at the southern border of the U.S., apparently banking on the idea that such a compromise was impossible.
But Democrats were so desperate to pass the Ukraine funding they see as crucial to our national security that they agreed to give up their demand for a path to citizenship for the so-called Dreamers, those brought to the United States as children and reared here but now stuck in citizenship limbo. So, after four months of work, Senate negotiators produced a bill that offered much of what Republicans demanded.
Once it was clear a deal was going to materialize, Trump demanded it be shut down, likely because he has promised his base that on his first day back in office, he will “begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” and a new border measure would both undermine his campaign message and stymie his plans. Although the border patrol officers union endorsed the Senate national security measure that included border security provisions, Republicans killed it.
Senators immediately went to work on a national security supplemental without the border measure, passing it with 70 votes on Tuesday morning. Johnson indicated he would not take it up, right about the same time that Trump renewed his attack on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that underpins U.S. and global security.
“House Republicans are…siding with Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Tehran against our defense industrial base, against NATO, against Ukraine, against our interests in the Indo-Pacific,” the White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said yesterday, and President Joe Biden has repeatedly warned that “[f]ailure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten.” But Republicans, too—including Trump’s vice president Mike Pence—are begging House Republicans to pass a version of the measure.
Perhaps to pressure Johnson, House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner (R-OH), who is a strong supporter of aiding Ukraine in its fight against Russia, yesterday released information about “a serious national security threat,” urged all members of Congress to view the intelligence, and called on Biden to declassify all information relating to it. That threat appears to be antisatellite weapons Russia is developing, but they are not yet operational. Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) of the Senate Intelligence Committee expressed concern that the disclosure might have revealed intelligence sources and methods.
And now, rather than taking up the national security measure, the House has recessed.
National security and border measures are not the only things the House is ignoring. Since this is a leap year, putting February 29 on the calendar, the recess will give the House just three working days to pass appropriations measures for the 2024 budget before the stopgap continuing resolution to fund the government expires on March 1.
The appropriations process is so far overdue that it threatens to become tangled in that for 2025, which is set to begin March 11, when the White House is expected to release its budget proposal for the year.
While they have been unable to make headway on these measures, on Tuesday night, Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to impeach Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, blaming him for an increase in migrants at the border. Johnson has named as impeachment managers a number of Republican extremists, including Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Clay Higgins (R-LA), and Harriet Hageman (R-WY).
As Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan of Punchbowl News reported: “This is the most chaotic, inefficient and ineffective majority we’ve seen in decades covering Congress. It started this way under former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and has gotten worse under Johnson.”
Trump and his MAGA supporters are demonstrating their power over the Republican Party. Trump is trying to install hand-picked loyalists, including his daughter-in-law, at the head of the Republican National Committee, where she vows that “[e]very single penny will go to the No. 1 and the only job of the RNC—that is electing Donald J. Trump as President of the United States.”
When Trump was in office, his team installed loyalists at the head of state parties, where they have worked to purge all but Trump loyalists. MAGA Republicans are continuing that process. After Senator James Lankford (R-OK), a reliable conservative tapped by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to negotiate a border measure, produced one that favored Republican positions, right-wing provocateur Benny Johnson called those like Lankford “traitors…spineless scum” who must “be criminally prosecuted.”
That demand for purity appears to be radicalizing the House as Republicans inclined to get things done, including five committee chairs, have announced they will not run for reelection. Meanwhile, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene yesterday said that British foreign secretary David Cameron, who is urging Congress to pass Ukraine aid, “can kiss my ass.”
But the MAGA agenda is falling apart in the courts. True the Vote, the right-wing organization that insisted it had evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, has told a Georgia judge that, in fact, it has no such evidence. Their claims provided the basis for the arguments about voter fraud highlighted in right-wing pundit Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules.
Today a grand jury convened by Special Counsel David Weiss, whom Trump appointed to investigate Hunter Biden, indicted former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov for making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record about Hunter Biden. Smirnov has been a key witness for Republican allegations about Biden’s “corruption” since Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) released Smirnov’s unverified claims about a year ago and other MAGA figures spread them. Matthew Gertz of Media Matters noted that Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity’s show highlighted these allegations in at least 85 separate segments last year, including 28 monologues. Now a grand jury has grounds to think Smirnov lied.
Trump’s personal problems also continue to mount.
Today Judge Juan Merchan confirmed that Trump is going to trial on his criminal election interference case, with jury selection beginning on March 25. Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has charged Trump with 34 felonies for falsifying business records in order to hide critical information from voters before the 2016 election. Prosecutors say that Trump defrauded voters by illegally hiding payments he made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about their affair before the election. As Andrew Warren put it in The Daily Beast, the case “is about a plot to deprive voters of information about a candidate for president—information that Trump and his allies believed to be damaging enough to hide.”
And yet Trump’s MAGA Republicans are calling the shots in the House, and their refusal to support Ukraine threatens to empower Russian president Vladimir Putin and thus to lay waste to the rules-based international order that has helped to prevent world war since 1945. Conservative pundit Bill Kristol noted earlier this month that “politics is often a stage on which people act in bad faith. Still, the demagogic opposition of House Republicans to the border/Ukraine bill, when they've all said the border is an emergency and that Putin should be stopped, is just about the baddest bad faith ever.”
The implications of that bad faith for the country—and the world—are huge. |
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Post by mollycoddle on Feb 16, 2024 23:16:02 GMT
Even conservatives are criticizing Republicans for some of their latest actions I really hope this message gets spread far and wide but I’m sure it won’t make it to MAGAs. I don’t think anything will make a MAGA not vote for TFG they are fine if he was to become a dictator - seen way too many clips with people and they are fine with it as long as the dictator is TFG. When asked what they think about the border bill they are all for it and dealing with the issue when asked why TFG is against it they just get quiet and say I don’t know but I’m voting for him 🤦♀️ Poor Brit Hume. Too late, Brit. Republicans look like a do-nothing Congress because they ARE a do-nothing Congress. What has the House done? Named a few post offices, did a revenge impeachment, and oh, yeah, declined to bring the immigration bill to the floor. The bill that was full of Republican gimmes. |
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Post by Scrapper100 on Feb 16, 2024 23:28:26 GMT
I really hope this message gets spread far and wide but I’m sure it won’t make it to MAGAs. I don’t think anything will make a MAGA not vote for TFG they are fine if he was to become a dictator - seen way too many clips with people and they are fine with it as long as the dictator is TFG. When asked what they think about the border bill they are all for it and dealing with the issue when asked why TFG is against it they just get quiet and say I don’t know but I’m voting for him 🤦♀️ Poor Brit Hume. Too late, Brit. Republicans look like a do-nothing Congress because they ARE a do-nothing Congress. What has the House done? Named a few post offices, did a revenge impeachment, and oh, yeah, declined to bring the immigration bill to the floor. The bill that was full of Republican gimmes.
The same bill they kept asking for for months and then when they get it including with all the things they want and excluding Dreamers - which TFG was all for on his first campaign but no against they still say nope because he wants the glory....
I really hope that people see this selfish me, me, me and realize that they - none of them care about our country just their careers and what they can get. If this was a real problem then they would pass the most comprehensive bill in decades. well I think most of us do think it is an issue and want something to be done but they just want to be able to point to it and say see look what Biden has done when he is following the law - title 45 expired when the pandemic was over - 33 of 35 policies that TFG was doing were deemed illegal and had to be stopped on the border. We need new tougher laws and both sides seem to agree on that - at least do something even if it isn't perfect.
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Post by mollycoddle on Feb 17, 2024 0:00:15 GMT
Poor Brit Hume. Too late, Brit. Republicans look like a do-nothing Congress because they ARE a do-nothing Congress. What has the House done? Named a few post offices, did a revenge impeachment, and oh, yeah, declined to bring the immigration bill to the floor. The bill that was full of Republican gimmes. The same bill they kept asking for for months and then when they get it including with all the things they want and excluding Dreamers - which TFG was all for on his first campaign but no against they still say nope because he wants the glory.... I really hope that people see this selfish me, me, me and realize that they - none of them care about our country just their careers and what they can get. If this was a real problem then they would pass the most comprehensive bill in decades. well I think most of us do think it is an issue and want something to be done but they just want to be able to point to it and say see look what Biden has done when he is following the law - title 45 expired when the pandemic was over - 33 of 35 policies that TFG was doing were deemed illegal and had to be stopped on the border. We need new tougher laws and both sides seem to agree on that - at least do something even if it isn't perfect.
Yup. This is going to be a major campaign issue, esp since that bill was full of things that Republicans wanted. How will they try to defend themselves? Lying is almost certainly the answer. But it’s not gonna work. Anyone who can read can find out what the bill contained. I think that this will be a real poison pill. |
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Post by Scrapper100 on Feb 17, 2024 0:10:51 GMT
The same bill they kept asking for for months and then when they get it including with all the things they want and excluding Dreamers - which TFG was all for on his first campaign but no against they still say nope because he wants the glory.... I really hope that people see this selfish me, me, me and realize that they - none of them care about our country just their careers and what they can get. If this was a real problem then they would pass the most comprehensive bill in decades. well I think most of us do think it is an issue and want something to be done but they just want to be able to point to it and say see look what Biden has done when he is following the law - title 45 expired when the pandemic was over - 33 of 35 policies that TFG was doing were deemed illegal and had to be stopped on the border. We need new tougher laws and both sides seem to agree on that - at least do something even if it isn't perfect.
Yup. This is going to be a major campaign issue, esp since that bill was full of things that Republicans wanted. How will they try to defend themselves? Lying is almost certainly the answer. But it’s not gonna work. Anyone who can read can find out what the bill contained. I think that this will be a real poison pill. But they won't they will just believe the lies unfortunately. I hope that the word gets out and that it really was what they asked for no demanded and then they wouldn't even bring it up for a vote knowing that is would pass but that TFG said no. He is up for reelection so I think he is really afraid of TFG and also MTG because she is threatening him to if he doesn't tow the line - she will then oust him. But at the same time at least then the bill would be voted on. The good of the people and all. |
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Post by mollycoddle on Feb 17, 2024 0:26:42 GMT
Yup. This is going to be a major campaign issue, esp since that bill was full of things that Republicans wanted. How will they try to defend themselves? Lying is almost certainly the answer. But it’s not gonna work. Anyone who can read can find out what the bill contained. I think that this will be a real poison pill. But they won't they will just believe the lies unfortunately. I hope that the word gets out and that it really was what they asked for no demanded and then they wouldn't even bring it up for a vote knowing that is would pass but that TFG said no. He is up for reelection so I think he is really afraid of TFG and also MTG because she is threatening him to if he doesn't tow the line - she will then oust him. But at the same time at least then the bill would be voted on. The good of the people and all. Trumpers will believe the lies. I am hoping that a number of moderates and independents won’t. As for MTG, that’s why she is now an impeachment manager for the Mayorkas impeachment. They’re afraid of her. They know that she’s an idiot. She is going to beclown herself. It’s funny and sad. Look what the Republican Party has become. |
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Post by Scrapper100 on Feb 17, 2024 4:35:14 GMT
I just looked and MTG is up for reelection this year. I’m sure she will be voted back in but it sure would be nice for her to be sent packing. I to would like to see the Republican Party recover I find that hard to even imagine at this point.
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 17, 2024 11:02:04 GMT
It would be great if voters held Republicans accountable but I’m not holding my breath. Regrettably, many of the MAGA Republicans are from deep red, heavily gerrymandered districts
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 17, 2024 11:04:37 GMT
Wonder if he’ll find a way to have the RNC his defamation and fraud fines
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 19, 2024 0:10:10 GMT
The threat of MAGA violence against anyone in the judicial system, law enforcement, journalists etc is alarming. I thought about the threat of political violence this week when the former Georgia governor testified that he turned down Fani Willis' offer to prosecute because he didn't want bodyguards for the rest of his life. I blame Trump but other Republicans are at fault for silently standing by or jumping on the defund the FBI bandwagon when they searched Mar-a-lago. www.nytimes.com/2024/02/18/opinion/magas-violent-threats-are-warping-life-in-america.htmlAmid the constant drumbeat of sensational news stories — the scandals, the legal rulings, the wild political gambits — it’s sometimes easy to overlook the deeper trends that are shaping American life. For example, are you aware how much the constant threat of violence, principally from MAGA sources, is now warping American politics? If you wonder why so few people in red America seem to stand up directly against the MAGA movement, are you aware of the price they might pay if they did?
Late last month, I listened to a fascinating NPR interview with the journalists Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman regarding their new book, “Find Me the Votes,” about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. They report that Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis had trouble finding lawyers willing to help prosecute her case against Trump. Even a former Georgia governor turned her down, saying, “Hypothetically speaking, do you want to have a bodyguard follow you around for the rest of your life?”
He wasn’t exaggerating. Willis received an assassination threat so specific that one evening she had to leave her office incognito while a body double wearing a bulletproof vest courageously pretended to be her and offered a target for any possible incoming fire.
Don’t think for a moment that this is unusual today. Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s federal Jan. 6 trial, has been swatted, as has the special counsel Jack Smith. For those unfamiliar, swatting is a terrifying act of intimidation in which someone calls law enforcement and falsely claims a violent crime is in process at the target’s address. This sends heavily armed police to a person’s home with the expectation of a violent confrontation. A swatting incident claimed the life of a Kansas man in 2017.
The Colorado Supreme Court likewise endured terrible threats after it ruled that Trump was disqualified from the ballot. There is deep concern for the safety of the witnesses and jurors in Trump’s various trials.
Mitt Romney faces so many threats that he spends $5,000 per day on security to protect his family. After Jan. 6, the former Republican congressman Peter Meijer said that at least one colleague voted not to certify the election out of fear for the safety of their family. Threats against members of Congress are pervasive, and there has been a shocking surge since Trump took office. Last year, Capitol Police opened more than 8,000 threat assessments, an eightfold increase since 2016.
Nor is the challenge confined to national politics. In 2021, Reuters published a horrifying and comprehensive report detailing the persistent threats against local election workers. In 2022, it followed up with another report detailing threats against local school boards. In my own Tennessee community, doctors and nurses who advocated wearing masks in schools were targets of screaming, threatening right-wing activists, who told one man, “We know who you are” and “We will find you.”
My own family has experienced terrifying nights and terrifying days over the last several years. We’ve faced death threats, a bomb scare, a clumsy swatting attempt and doxxing by white nationalists. People have shown up at our home. A man even came to my kids’ school. I’ve interacted with the F.B.I., the Tennessee Department of Homeland Security and local law enforcement. While the explicit threats come and go, the sense of menace never quite leaves. We’re always looking over our shoulders.
And no, threats of ideological violence do not come exclusively from the right. We saw too much destruction accompanying the George Floyd protests to believe that. We’ve seen left-wing attacks and threats against Republicans and conservatives. The surge in antisemitic incidents since Oct. 7 is a sobering reminder that hatred lives on the right and the left alike.
But the tsunami of MAGA threats is different. The intimidation is systemic and ubiquitous, an acknowledged tactic in the playbook of the Trump right that flows all the way down from the violent fantasies of Donald Trump himself. It is rare to encounter a public-facing Trump critic who hasn’t faced threats and intimidation.
The threats drive decent men and women from public office. They isolate and frighten dissenters. When my family first began to face threats, the most dispiriting responses came from Christian acquaintances who concluded I was a traitor for turning on a movement whose members had expressed an explicit desire to kill my family.
But I don’t want to be too bleak. So let me end with a point of light. In the summer of 2021, I received a quite direct threat after I’d written a series of pieces opposing bans on teaching critical race theory in public schools. Someone sent my wife an email threatening to shoot me in the face.
My wife and I knew that it was almost certainly a bluff. But we also knew that white nationalists had our home address, both of us were out of town and the only person home that night was my college-age son. So we called the local sheriff, shared the threat, and asked if the department could send someone to check our house.
Minutes later, a young deputy called to tell me all was quiet at our home. When I asked if he would mind checking back frequently, he said he’d stay in front of our house all night. Then he asked, “Why did you get this threat?”
I hesitated before I told him. Our community is so MAGA that I had a pang of concern about his response. “I’m a columnist,” I said, “and we’ve had lots of threats ever since I wrote against Donald Trump.”
The deputy paused for a moment. “I’m a vet,” he said, “and I volunteered to serve because I believe in our Constitution. I believe in free speech.” And then he said words I’ll never forget: “You keep speaking, and I’ll stand guard.”
I didn’t know that deputy’s politics and I didn’t need to. When I heard his words, I thought, that’s it. That’s the way through. Sometimes we are called to speak. Sometimes we are called to stand guard. All the time we can at least comfort those under threat, telling them with words and deeds that they are not alone. If we do that, we can persevere. Otherwise, the fear will be too much for good people to bear. |
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 19, 2024 0:22:07 GMT
the chaos in the House and their inability to govern www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/17/speaker-johnson-fails-act/House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has held his position for barely four months, not long by anyone’s standards, but long enough to ask this question: Does he have any major priority other than survival?
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Johnson has spoken repeatedly and sometimes vehemently about pending issues. He has called for tougher policies to halt the surge of migrants coming across the U.S.-Mexico border. He has said he favors additional aid for Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression and more assistance for Israel in its war with Hamas. But he has delivered on none of this, even when given the opportunity for action.
Johnson’s actions fall far short of words. In fact, they have been in conflict. Johnson keeps finding loopholes or excuses or rationales to avoid acting on the very priorities he claims to support. He is another exhibit in what has become the story of House Republicans, which is a failure to meet or even recognize the demands of governing, one of them being a willingness to compromise.
On Friday, the world was shaken by the news that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had died in a Russian prison. Johnson said in a statement that Russian President Vladimir Putin must be met “with united opposition,” adding, “As Congress debates the best path forward to support Ukraine, the United States, and our partners, must be using every means available to cut off Putin’s ability to fund his unprovoked war in Ukraine and aggression against the Baltic states.”
One means for supporting Ukraine is legislation approved on a strong bipartisan vote in the Senate that would provide $95 billion in assistance for Ukraine and Israel, humanitarian assistance for Gaza and other funds. But Johnson immediately denounced the bill.
“House Republicans were crystal clear from the very beginning of discussions that any so-called national security supplemental legislation must recognize that national security begins at our own border,” he said in a statement. Calling the Senate bill a “status quo” measure, he added, “The mandate of national security supplemental legislation was to secure America’s own border before sending additional foreign aid around the world.”
It was an exercise in circular logic by the speaker. Previously he had declared as “dead on arrival” in the House a bipartisan Senate proposal that included provisions to secure the border as well as aid for Ukraine and Israel. That bill was the result of months of difficult negotiations among Republican and Democratic senators. Those talks had begun only because Republicans had insisted that Democrats and President Biden act on border security, saying they would not accept an Ukraine-Israel funding bill without something on immigration.
The proposal amounted to the most conservative bipartisan immigration legislation proposed in decades. But once former president Donald Trump denounced it, it had no future in either the Senate or House. Republican senators ran away from the measure, and it was defeated there.
Johnson knows that to put the newly passed $95 billion aid package on the floor for a vote would put his speakership at risk. Not to do so threatens the future of Ukraine’s efforts to hold off the Russians. Biden put the House on notice on Friday during an appearance whose main purpose was to hail the courage of Navalny and to blame Putin for his death.
“History is watching the House of Representatives,” he said. “The failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten. … The clock is ticking, and this has to happen. We have to help now.” He expressed exasperation that the House is in a two-week recess at a time when it could be acting to help Ukraine.
Johnson is an accidental leader. He is the product of a dysfunctional Republican majority that ousted Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) from the speakership after less than a year in office and then pummeled other prospective candidates for the top job until, exhausted and embarrassed, House Republicans settled on the little-known Johnson.
He was put in the position of trying to lead with the narrowest of majorities and in the face of a faction of hard-right rebels who can neither be persuaded nor appeased. It is a difficult job, made the more so by Johnson’s lack of experience in high-stakes governing. That is an explanation but hardly an excuse for what he has done to date.
Johnson is a leader in name only, buffeted on all sides to the point of immobility. His lone success, if it can be called that, was House passage of a resolution to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The margin was by a single vote, and it came a week after Johnson and company were embarrassed by the failure to pass a similar resolution because Republican vote counters were outfoxed by House Democrats.
House Republicans found no high crimes or misdemeanors, the standard for such a rare step. Instead Mayorkas fell victim to policy disputes between Republicans and Democrats and to the administration’s failure to move more quickly and decisively to deal with the problems at the border. There is virtually no chance a trial in the Senate will result in the secretary’s conviction. Senators probably will make quick work of their responsibilities.
The decision by House Republicans to go ahead with the impeachment of Mayorkas amounted to performative politics in the extreme. As others have said, if lawmakers want to solve a problem, they have to introduce legislation and then get enough votes to pass it — and in the Senate that still means 60 votes, not a simple majority.
Johnson has chastised Democrats on immigration, pointing to legislation Republicans approved last year on a party-line vote and asking why the Senate has not taken it up. In a divided government, neither party fully gets its way. But House Republicans, hamstrung by their tiny majority, refuse to compromise. They look inward rather than outward.
A decade ago, Lamar Alexander, the former senator from Tennessee, once said that the division inside the Republican Party was not one of moderates vs. conservatives but rather “between conservatives who think their job is finished when they make a speech and conservatives who want to govern.” By that measure, things have only gotten worse in the past decade.
The GOP’s tiny House majority shrank by one this week when Democrat Tom Suozzi, a former member of the House, won the special election in New York in the district once held by the disgraced George Santos, a Republican who was expelled from the House for ethical reasons. Some Republicans wrote off the loss as to be expected in a district Biden won in 2020.
Republicans had sought to make immigration the central issue in the election, as a flood of migrants into New York has strained the city’s and the state’s capacity to handle them and heightened public attention. Suozzi took up the call to deal more stiffly with the border surge but also called out the hypocrisy of congressional Republicans for killing the bipartisan compromise. He won the election by eight percentage points.
Johnson and his Republican colleagues face another round of decisions when they return from their current recess. One will be aid for Ukraine and Israel. Another will be how to keep the government funded, an issue that long has divided Republicans in the House. That issue ultimately was McCarthy’s undoing, when he put on the floor a funding bill that was approved with Democratic votes.
Johnson’s speakership could hinge on how he navigates these issues. His tenure could end quickly or continue through the year. At that point, voters will decide whether they want Republicans to remain in the majority or take power out of their hands and give it back to the Democrats. Johnson’s first months as speaker have been difficult but perhaps nothing like what awaits him. |
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 19, 2024 0:35:59 GMT
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 19, 2024 6:45:47 GMT
In a sign of just how massively unqualified she is to be head of the RNC, Lara Trump is confused about the date of the election, mistakenly saying it’s in December
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 19, 2024 23:35:14 GMT
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 20, 2024 2:57:03 GMT
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 20, 2024 9:31:22 GMT
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 23, 2024 12:10:22 GMT
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 23, 2024 12:19:57 GMT
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 23, 2024 15:10:59 GMT
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