House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) called for Republicans to “get their act together” and elect the next speaker while slamming the “extremists” within their party.
Isn’t the point of the republican party to dismantle and shut down the government? Why would they “get their act together” when the literally platform on shutting down as much of the government down? This whole thing is going exactly the way republicans dream of. They have stopped any governing from happening which is the republican dream
By making the government a disfunctional mess and blaming democrats and spreading misinformation while pushing everything to a corrupt supreme court. Which is what they are doing
I guess I should have said ending democracy instead of ending the government.by getting rid of any functions of the government that insure democracy is the goal. Or the goal is destroying the institutions of democracy which defacto would destroy our government and institute a new type of government
They are ALL FOR big government. I don’t know where you are seeing them wanting the government shut down. They just don’t want a government that supports freedom for its citizens, but they’re all about ensuring governmental control.
Aliens didn’t body-snatch your esteemed colleagues. They’re the same assholes they always were. You just let them trick you into thinking they used to be sensible, and only now turned crazy.
The sad part of all of this is that traditional Republicans have handed the party reigns over to extremists for the illusion of maintaining power. Had they told their crazies to go pound sand and fallen behind Democrats they would likely be capable of course correcting to retain some level of competition with liberals. Instead they gave power to nut-bags who have pretty much ensured their eventual, permanent demise.
Instead they gave power to nut-bags who have pretty much ensured their eventual, permanent demise.
Which is what we can hope for, and it would be quite OK if it happens.
The only danger of a destruction of the GOP would be that the Democrats would eventually stay in power too long for their own good. This is not something against the Democrats, it is just pointing out human nature. Power simply corrupts, each and every time.
So one of the things the Democrats should do if they have sufficient pull is to get the voting system in order. Drop FPTP. Drop the way the president is elected and replace it by a more realistic one, one that actually represents the population. Remove the stupid “two senators per state” rule and replace it by one that actually represents the country - in the senate, a citizen from a flyover state has way more influence than those from the states with higher populace.
The fun thing here is that the US already had fixed these problems decades ago. Just not in their own country. When the Federal Republic of Germany (i.e. West Germany) was founded, they implemented a bicameral system and voting methods based on the known problems of the US voting system (and others, but primarily the US). Now the German system has it’s issues, too, but they are known, and a known problem usually can be fixed.
That’s what he’s doing here. If Democrats calls on MAGA to unite with the GOP, they can’t do it or it’ll look like they’re following the Dems lead, and they must disagree with Dems at all costs. So by simply stating the obvious path forward for the extremists, he’s poisoning the well and making it more difficult for that to actually happen.
That’s not how we’d get more parties with our voting system. If the GOP fractured because of this then there might be chaos for brief period of time, but sooner than later everything would get settled back to two parties. Our system is set up so that it just plain suboptimal to do otherwise.
We wouldn’t get more parties. I’m expecting eventually the Democrat party ends up in position as the right wing party and we get a “Progressive” party (or maybe some other name) as the new left wing party. It wouldn’t be the first time this happens, but I don’t know if it’s actually possible with the way media works now and how hated the name of the Democrats is on the right.
The voting system is designed for tactical voting between two major parties. It can’t support more. That needs to change. Maybe we could see that as things shift around though. Who knows?
Well, the only way to get there is to fix the US voting and representation systems. FPTP has to go, and all important points in the US legislative need to have proper, democratic representation instead of this “Two Senators per state, regardless how many they represent”. And while they are at it, make Gerrymandering impossible by removing the power to redrad the district maps at will. You will need an algorithmically method to draw district maps without any influence from race or political affiliation, simply based on the address of a person.
That will be a chance to stop the reduction of numbers of parties, as they suddenly get a voice for their concerns even when they “only” have e.g. 20% or just 5% of the voters. And this will also teach the parties the need to work together in a reliable way. Coalitions and stuff.
Look how other countries do it, learn what is good and what is bad with their voting systems, and implement the best solution that is acceptable.
The only way out of this situation is for 5 or more Rs to agree to nominate and vote for Jeffries. Otherwise there will never be a speaker until the Dems win back the house.
Well there’s Nebraska’s 2nd representative, and famous coward Don Bacon. Let it be known that when the time calls for a man to stand up for what’s right, Don Bacon will bravely turn tail and run back to whatever teet is drip feeding him table scraps.
Yup. Famous coward Don Bacon, ready to let you down.
It is absolutely wild to me that most major news organizations are completely ignoring the fact that the guy the GOP was trying to put into the speakership until a day or two ago is an overt white supremacist. Like… news anchors are straight up omitting that entire point. It’s not even being mentioned in passing comments.
MSNBC reported that a few house members wouldn’t vote for Scalise because of the white nationalist bit. So it isn’t totally ignored, but then again MSNBC would never miss an opportunity like that.
I also haven’t seen much coverage of the fact that the other front runner for speaker, Jim Jordan, turned a blind eye to and likely helped cover up the sexual abuse of college athletes.
Republicans havnt fundamentally changed since Reagan pulled the republicans off the cliff, All that has changed is saying the quiet parts out loud and proud.
50 years ago they still wanted the same shit, They just hid it behind coded and colorful language and only whispered it bluntly behind closed doors with close, trusted compatriots.
What used to be “the left” is now just a more moderate, reasonable right.
What used to be “the right” is not even on the spectrum anymore, its become a populist extremist reactionary fascism. It’s so far off the chart its on an entirely separate piece of paper.
Jeffries needs to just accept this fact and walk across the floor. Liberals are now Conservatives, and Conservatives are now Nazis.
Edit: Misread that Jeffries was a Republican, the fact he’s a Democrat changes the context a bit. He’s absolutely right but he’s basically just talking about what I re-iterated above, but its the republican “traditionals” that need to walk across the floor and stop associating with Nazis if they dont wanna go down with that ship.
The extremists they are associating with are just going to Crabs in the Bucket them, clawing them down with them when things go under. If they were smart they’d drop the screaming children and walk over to where all the adults have gone.
You don’t get anything positive done by negotiating with fascists, paleoconservatives and some of the worst libertarians and liars of no fixed ideology in the world.
Listening to them at all inevitably leads to outcomes much worse than no change.
No, there’s genuinely no advantage to negotiating with the nutcase section of the GOP. The only thing that achieves, over the past 30 years I’ve been watching politics, is shifting the Overton Window further to the right.
Democrats are already center right Republicans, they don’t need to move further right
Well, the political calculus suggests Jeffries only needs 5 Republicans to become speaker. That would be a wild display of incompetence by Republicans, which they have provided several examples recently, but that one would be a real gem. One for the history books
Whether he is a Democrat or Republican doesnt really impact the overall point of my statement mate, it’s tangentially related but not foundation to what I said.
Even ignoring the part where you didn’t realize Jeffries is a Democrat, this is just not a fair characterization of Democrats at all, as if they’re all the same.
Democrats in congress represent a broad spectrum from quite liberal to moderate conservative. Even by European standards.
I will just have to disagree. I think when you get down to brass tacks, basic stuff like human rights, freedoms, autonomy, etc are largely bipartisan.
For example, between traditional conservative and liberal discussion in a successful country where religion has been removed from the equation, they would both very much agree that women should be allowed to have bodily autonomy and be allowed to have abortions up to a reasonable limit, lots of countries typically go with 3 months. And thats just for healthy pregnancies, when it comes to physical problems usually the limit is removed.
The actual discourse between a liberal and conservative traditionally should be “who is going to pay for that abortion”, not if it can even happen at all.
The fact we havent even gotten that far in political discussion in the united states now means we are losing the ability to even benchmark how liberal vs conservative the Democrat party is, because we are no longer really debating “who is gonna pay for x/y/z”, its now being debated “should we even allow people to do x/y/z”
Which is no longer a Conservative vs Liberal discussion. It’s a traditional Authoritarian vs Libertarian discussion.
And if all the discussion has become purely Authoritarianism vs Libertarianism, we have gone completely off the rails because the United States is supposed to be a largely libertarian (within reason) government. It used to be the literal benchmark for Libertarianism, being extremely progressive in human rights. Letting your nation arm itself? Being one of the earliest countries to include women in voting? Every step of the way countries used to lag behind the US as it abolished slavery, brought it’s races and cultures together, women were walking topless down the street, people could own pretty much anything they wanted to via legal channels, you name it.
For the longest time whenever the discussions came up, it was more about $$$, who paid for what, what would vs wouldn’t be taxpayer funded. And a lot of stuff used to be taxpayer funded. The USPS used to be one of the shining examples of what a well oiled taxpayer funded system could look like.
But over time that has walked backwards and degraded, the Conservatives have largely completed their goal of slashing and hamstringing nearly every taxpayer public system of the US, the country is at best on life support now. Every single public system you can think of in the US is barely functioning at best, straight up privatized at worst.
Like the US has private prisons now, lol.
It stopped being a Conservative vs Liberal debate decades ago, it’s now pretty much entirely Authoritarian vs Libertarian now. The country stopped fighting for public funding and now the fight has shifted to fighting for basic human rights, the very principle the country was founded on hundreds of years ago.
The US has become the very precise thing the founding father’s explicitly tried to escape from.
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