For all the drama, House Republicans have passed only 22 bills into law this session. One established a commemorative coin, and two renamed medical centers.
They got hammered in 2022 midterms. That was the canary. Half our country is going to shit. They will try to take us with them. Tossing Mike Dbag as the speaker was a dog whistle to evangelicals that didn’t work except for the most radical of their cult.
Nobody wants conservatives around anymore because they are con-artists and liars who are only interested stealing tax dollars and ruining our democracy.
Democrats have long used the cons as their bullies to push get certain things done (and push a liar war in Iraq and Afghanistan) but that linear setup has been weaponized into destroying each other by foreign and domestic terrorists.
the “trio of Democrats censured by the House this year marked a milestone not seen in more than 150 years, raising questions over whether the historically rare form of punishment is becoming weaponized in the lower chamber.”
If you for even a moment pretend there’s any doubt about it, you’re an idiot, a cowardly journalist or both.
One was for competently chairing a committee, another for speaking truth to power about Palestinians not being disposable sub-humans and the third for pulling a childish prank that was still more professional than 99% of what any of the Republicans have done this year.
The guy who pulled the alarm deserved a censure. You don’t fuck with fire alarms. I’ll agree, Republicans do some stupid, unprofessional shit, and more than a few deserve a censure, but let’s not defend the guy who made the building less safe because he was late to a vote.
It was a regular fire alarm. He approached the fire door, accidentally knocked a sign down, and pulled the alarm. I buy his story that he thought it would open the doors. I just think that’s still an exceptionally stupid thing to do.
The guy who pulled the alarm was a hero who took one for the team. Let’s not pile on the guy who interrupted a legislative stunt to push voting on a bill without reading it, with a schoolkid prank
I disagree. Since they can’t fine each other, censure is the strongest condemnation short of being stripped of committee assignments. While what he did wasn’t great, it was nowhere near serious enough to warrant censure.
You don’t fuck with fire alarms
Yeah you do. Schoolkids do it all the time.
but let’s not defend the guy who made the building less safe because he was late to a vote.
I’m not saying it wasn’t a bad thing to do but he didn’t make the building less safe. That’s a ridiculous hypothetical based on assuming likelihood of an extremely unlikely confluence of events.
You need to relax with the learned alarmism, pun intended.
He did plead guilty and paid a fine, because pulling the alarm is a crime. I’m not being alarmist, activating the fire alarm costs real money, draws the attention of fire fighters, wastes the time of everyone in the building that must evacuate, and reduces the likelihood that anyone will take the next alarm seriously. It’s not a felony, but it’s not harmless.
It’s a crime when kids do it, too, but usually they don’t prosecute it. However, this is a Congressional Representative. Whether we do or not, we should expect more from our elected officials than we expect of school children.
I also think you’re putting too much weight into a censure. It has all the teeth of a strongly worded email sent to an unmonitored inbox. You’re correct that it is the strongest form of condemnation, and I do think the GOP is abusing the censure, but I don’t have a problem with Congress formally disapproving of an adult member of Congress pulling the fire alarm. It wasn’t an aide or a teenager on a school trip or a confused septuagenarian Senator.
The other censures are pure theater, and the more censures they hand out, the less anyone will care.
Journalists don’t seem to know how to report on politics when people are not acting in good faith. Why assume that Republicans stated motivations are genuine at this point? Republicans know that they will always be given the benefit of the doubt by the media and that their radical messages will be transmitted directly to their supporters and then sanitized and normalized when repeated by other media outlets.
Journalists don’t seem to know how to report on politics when people are not acting in good faith
This is exactly it. They either don’t know how to react to it or they simply refuse to acknowledge it out of fear of jeopardizing their disingenuous absolute neutrality facade.
Why assume that Republicans stated motivations are genuine at this point?
Literally no good reason.
Republicans know that they will always be given the benefit of the doubt by the media and that their radical messages will be transmitted directly to their supporters and then sanitized and normalized when repeated by other media outlets.
Yup!
Sartre described their bad faith perfectly when he talked about antisemites:
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
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