politics

Reading that summary just tells me that everything is for sale in congress. Votes. Elected officials. Bills. Citizens. Everyone is constantly trying to get leverage to get what they want, and the country is caught in between them.

The GOP is a political mafia whose donors believed they had whipped the Democrats into servitude. Good for democracy.. down with the Grand Old Pedophiles

Jeff is awesome. I hope he sticks around for a while.

My sense is that if he had felt it were at all possible for him to stay in power by working with the minority party, he absolutely would have done it - he just knew it wasn’t.

aye, i think he saw the wind was blowing against him either way, so he decided to get up and lambaste the Dems on the way out

Now this is a meme worth reviving!

“Now look what you’ve made me do!”

It's like a weight lifter who only works their biceps. They have one trick, and they're discovering the limitations therein.

They got voted out by their own party and still went for that bicep curl of "blame Democrats;" It just exposes their withering weakness when it comes to actually trying to negotiate in good-faith.

You left out the most relevant part where they them blamed Obamq

they very clearly have a set of goals and a platform, and that platform is pander to the hyper-weathy donors who drive their politics.

and thanks to Citizens United (or the NRA) many of those are foreign

If you look at it from another angle, that of using any tactic necessary to destabilize the work of government and to bring it to a publicly screeching halt as unpredictably, insanely, and often as possible, AND you look at it from the POV of who would benefit from seeing that happen, it makes a lot more sense.

But the strange thing here is not that the GOP outed its own speaker (they did it to Boehner in 2015) nor that they made a clown show of it, nor even that McCarthy seemed to go out of his way to renege on enough deals to make it happen.

To me, the truly strange thing is that part of McCarthy's election, one of the things he agreed to in order to be elected as speaker, was the specific change in the rules that allowed him to be ousted with Just One Vote.

House rules change every session; in and of itself a rule change is to be expected. But not this one.

Yet this particular rule change was demanded of McCarthy before he could get enough votes to be elected, AND he agreed to it . . . AND lately, seemed to want to ensure it would work. He went to Nancy Pelosi privately asking her advice before blasting her in the press; he did everything in his power to ensure he got NO Dem assistance in keeping his seat when it would have been nothing for him to at least keep from shitting on them publicly, and he made sure to piss off even his own side throughout.

Another thing. Speakers come and go, and many Speakers leave and become Speaker again, like Sam Rayburn and Tip O'Neill. But with the Pelosi/Hoyer office evictions it's like McCarthy is not only burning his election down now, but making absolutely sure no one will ever suggest him for Speaker again.

All this is is to say that whoever/whatever was behind that highly irregular change in the rules regarding ousting the Speaker was planning this from the beginning of the session, and when the time came, McCarthy wanted out badly enough to force it to happen, and in such a way that he will never be Speaker again.

And now there are just 44 more days before the next shutdown, with aid to Ukraine up in the air, and a next-to-useless pro tempore speaker who really can't do shit in terms of directing his party or getting legislation to the floor: for most intents and purposes, the US House of Representatives right now is leaderless.

EDITED to add links

Just once I'd love in passing on the floor of the House from a Dem, "blah blah blah, for example child raper Matt Goetz, blah blah" with a casual hand gesture in that monster's direction

Who on the house floor actually occupies this position. It's only rhetoric used in debate netween regular people.

Nothing like Jordan seeking the spotlight to give journos a reason to look into why his nickname is "Gym".

This couldn't possibly backfire, could it?

That should be quite the circus.