The children's corner

Well. Our friends on the other side of the aisle keep speaking darkly about "civil war", "national divorce", and casting the United States as a failed nation. Who knew that the actual civil war would be among the GOP?

When a political party gets taken over by a cult leader, this is what happens. Compromise goes out the door. Accommodation is anathema. Common sense gets jettisoned for ideological purity.

But although Trumpism is the current manifestation, let's not fool ourselves. We saw the same thing in the Republican majorities from 1995 to 2007. The writing was on the wall back then. The latent authoritarianism was already manifesting itself. Newt Gingrich's Contract with America differs in degree from MAGA, not in kind. We saw this going back to Richard Nixon and him taking onboard disaffected Dixiecrats fulminating over the journey towards racial justice. We saw this in Ronald Reagan's embrace of the Religious Right, which at its core is authoritarian. We can go all the way back to Joe McCarthy. The rot has been rampant for decades. Trumpism is merely its current expression.

But now the disease has progressed to a terminal condition. The patient is gasping for air. The House GOP is trying to turn a five-seat majority into dictatorial rule, and that's just not possible. Red states are trying to impose their medievalist notions on blue states on whose economies they rely to fund their own failing governments. That, too, is untenable. 

These are children who have never been told "no". They think that the world owes them wealth and power, when nothing of the sort is true. In their bubble, they believe that the majority is with them; in fact they've been handed defeat after defeat. They lie about everything. They lie that Donald Trump won in 2020. They lie that the 2022 midterms were not actually a crushing defeat for them. They lie that their agenda is massively popular. They lie.

This GOP representative has a cogent observation:

GOP Rep. Johnson on his party: You have members that crave chaos, you have members that never actually figured out how to work with any other human being to find common ground ever pic.twitter.com/eT3QlAEZK5

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) October 5, 2023

The question, of course, is: What will he do about it? Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has two hundred thirteen solid votes locked in for the speakership. Will Mr. Johnson and four other Republicans cross the aisle and end the madness? Or, as always, is this just more pabulum to vomit out at the mainstream media to get bookings and attaboys? At some point you need to stop saying nice words and act on them. You need to take a stand against the dysfunction. Because the fact is that the members of which Mr. Johnson speaks are driving the Republican car. And he and most, if not all, of his colleagues are too frightened of losing their sinecures by opposing them. Enough speechmaking; now is the time for action. Otherwise, the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again after repeated failure will continue.

A House under a Jim Jordan or Steve Scalise speakership will not be better. The party is fractured, and the civil war is in its Battle of Bull Run phase. Like the Confederacy, the Republican Party is a cancer which must be excised to save the Republic. Party loyalty and ideology pale in comparison to that. Will enough of the House GOP caucus recognize this? I'm not sanguine. But then again, a Speaker has never been ousted before Tuesday. We are in a time when marvels and wonders occur. Next week should be edifying.

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