Opinion: Has the Republican Party proved to be so anti-government that it cannot govern at all?

stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to politics @lemmy.world – 326 points –
latimes.com

The broken GOP has a majority in the House in name only. It's giving frightening new meaning to the old saw about politicians' forming a circular firing squad.

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Short answers: "yes." Longer answer: "Yeah."

in any case, this is the crux of it:

Republicans have the majority in the House, but it’s a majority in name only. In reality, the House Republicans are an amalgam of competing factions, from right to far-right to extremist, and party members genuinely loathe one another more than they dislike Democrats.

If we consider that the freedom caucus is in the process of splitting of and treat it as though it were a third party.... then you would see that republicans don't have a majority at all.

The fact that the Republicans party still can't ban together and oust Trump is telling. It feels like most of the Republican candidates for president are competing to be Trump's VP

They missed their chance to oust him during the second impeachment.

If they had done it then, and voted to bar him from future office, we’d be in a very different place. But nobody listens to me. (Well, nobody that matters,)

They don't want to govern. What they want is to rule autocratically, and they'll solve their infighting problems by the winning faction simply purging its enemies.

They want to rule, and if they don't get to rule then they're happy to burn everything to the ground so that other people don't get what they want either.

And it doesn't matter if those "other people" are Republicans, too.

They want small government. Small, weak and unable to defend itself.

No they don't. There is nothing small about the government they want.

They will cut the government and not replace it with anything. They have no plan to improve the lives of the people that vote for them.

Like-minded conservative voters — small-dollar donors steeped in Fox News — bankroll the chaos agents

It's an interesting concept, to think that it's the small dollar donors enabling this. But I think that the real culprit here are the super large, dark money donors. You know, the ones that Republicans opened up the floodgates to as part of that Citizens United thing. Money is Speech, and all that.

I don't think that when the Supreme Court made that ruling, they intended for it to be a conduit for direct foreign influence on politicians. But the independent, unaccountable political spending that Citizens United enables has to be funded from somewhere. And it's trivially easy for these foreign sources to disguise their money trail to make things look legit. (Or, do you really think Bob Menendez is the only foreign agent in Congress?)

If you were a foreign power looking to neutralize the US Government, your best bet might be to use back channels to fund enough stubborn Congressmen to get them in office, and tell them to raise as much hell as they want to, and not compromise with anyone, because you will have their back.

yes. citizens unites is the worst thing we have politically. I would rid it above all other things as much of the rest would get resolved for the better by it not being a thing.

But that's the thing, like with most of our country those massive donors aren't evenly distributed amongst the party. The super super pacs seem to have settled into the people they felt most able to get their agenda done and left out the others and they have been working with literally a smaller budget from smaller donors and thus don't feel as beholden to making the system, that isn't working for them as much as their peers, keep working.

And then allowing money to speak and anyone with some money having a say just makes it worse and a thousand voices trying to be the loudest and the richest at the end of this road.

Yep.

So, with that out of the way. How's the weather for you guys?

Far too warm for my liking. I expect autumn to be cold.

Been freezing where I'm at. I'll trade ya

Finally getting that autumn cold snap with the changing of leaves here in New England.

Also, Republicans are fucking useless.

It seems like it. They purposely cause things to just not function, then say government doesn't work. In Oregon, they are trying to avoid purposely driven slow downs by keeping tabs on attendance for senators and if they miss like 10 appearances for voting, they are bared from running for office again. Measure 113 which was passed in 2022 in Oregon. However, it's being challenged currently, so we'll see what happens.

It's a good idea to force collaboration.

Edit: link to the actual measure for those interested.

So, our government is at a standstill because six(?), less than ten(?), people are pushing the lie about the 2020 election? This country seems to becoming increasingly fragile.

This may seem out of place but I'm still pushing the idea of Ranked Choice Voting resolving a lot of these issues. It's a seemingly reasonable method of ensuring the contentment of the vast majority of voters and taking down the power of polarization. The greatest threat is that to the extremist media.

It's giving frightening new meaning to the old saw about politicians' forming a circular firing squad.

If they only had the spine to pull the trigger.

Usually when a headline ends in a question mark, the answer is "no".

Except for this time.

For me, the worst part is they don’t even pretend anymore. They used to have constructive goals that could seem like a good idea to consider. I could listen to that and decide whether it seems good or not. But I don’t remember the last time I heard any positive goal from any conservative …..

maybe Romney a few years back was proposing something with actual family values, a benefit for kids, I don’t know if bigger tax break or healthcare or childcare or something, but it was drowned out pretty quickly with calls to break and destroy and ruin, calls to enrich the wealthy and remove support for regular people

This was true back under Reagan.

Hilarious to see folks running these Op-Eds forty years after it was obvious.