That’d be appropriate. Ohio could erect a statue.
Yeah, he has presidential aspirations and this Congress would pretty much ruin those.
This crisis is producing some pretty entertaining rumors. One that’s been flying around is that the House will appoint someone who’s not in Congress to be Speaker, since the Constitution doesn’t explicitly say the Speaker has to be a House member.
The most entertaining variant of this rumor is that the outsider the House will turn to as a savior is Mitt Romney. Which just goes to show how delusional some people in DC are: Romney is no rallying point for the party, and in fact the Freedom Caucus, the group that caused the crisis, considers Romney to be a RINO, a loser, and, the worst thing imaginable, the architect of Obamacare.
Yeah, it’s absurd. It’s all absurd.
Ha! That would be outstanding, pulling a non-Congresscritter in. Do they have to be alive? I bet everyone would vote for Ronald Regan!
We’re saved! Gingrich open to return to Speakership. And now I’m imagining this great silver Speakership descending on the Mall with the 5 CE3K tones playing…
Honestly, Gingrich actually knows how to get shit done, and the lunatic fringe wouldn’t be able to call him a RINO simply for compromising to accomplish things.
C-SPAN is the new Reality TV.
Reality is becoming the new Reality TV. And it’s weird.
The version I heard was even better in that it suggested Boehner would only return after the House Freedom Caucus was entirely crushed as a block of influence within the party. And indeed, the Freedom Caucus has already had its first defection from a Congressman who said that their involvement in the leadership crisis detracts from their initial objectives and undermines the ability for conservatives to effectively govern.
So, in this scenario the Republicans don’t just reluctantly stick with Boehner as the least bad option, they give him their vote of confidence after he squelches all opposition moving forward.
And yet the GOP’ers who complain about Obama’s “Imperial” Presidency would want an un-elected person with no responsibility/accountability to be 3rd in line for the Presidency. Oh dear lord.
An interesting article on the Freedom Caucus’s litmus test/entrance exam:
For McCarthy, the document helps explain why he dropped out of the race. If he doesn’t agree to the demands of the House Freedom Caucus, he cannot secure enough votes to become speaker. But if he does agree to their demands, he will unable to pass legislation that is necessary to avoid disastrous consequences for the country.
McCarthy said that, even if he managed to get elected speaker, he doesn’t see how he would be able to have enough votes to extend the debt ceiling and keep the government open.
Asked by the National Review if he thought the House was governable, McCarthy said, “I don’t know. Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom.”
And of course, this inability to govern may have significant financial impact:
“We will not mince words — this is the political equivalent of a dumpster fire,” said Chris Krueger of Guggenheim Securities. “We are increasing our odds from 30 percent to 40 percent for some kind of accident that would keep Congress from raising the debt ceiling in time due to brinkmanship, procrastination or political gridlock."
The bottom line is that both parties and their representatives need to realize that the other side has roughly 50% of Americans on their side and attempt to govern America with that in mind. However, only one party has litmus tests set in stone like the ones illustrated above, and that is a HUGE part of the problem.
Chris Hayes interviewed a member of the “Freedom caucus” and he denied any litmus test (from Alabama, don’t recall his name.) His claim is they want leadership that doesn’t dictate from the “top down”, and when asked who would be a good candidate for Speaker he rambled off members of said Freedom Caucus (roll eyes.) After that a former member of this Freedom Caucus (former Florida rep who left after a cocaine conviction that was subsequently expunged. Nice how that works out for some while others rot in jail for ten years for the same crime) but who claimed when he was part of congress, even after leadership blessed whatever crazy shit they wanted to bring to the floor (I’m paraphrasing) a certain member would change their mind and withdraw support.
Haha. Dean correctly labelled the 40 some odd Tea Party block nihilists. gg GOP creating a monster you can now not control.
Assuming the crazy “let it all burn” faction doesn’t suddenly become rational, how does this get fixed? I wonder if the democrats will need to step up and work with moderate republicans to elect someone who won’t allow the country to default on its debt. That sort of cooperation hasn’t happened recently, but it’s possible.
I’ve heard Pelosi interviewed on this subject, though, and she was firmly in the “LOL, let them sort it out themselves” camp. Politically, it’s probably smart to let the GOP demonstrate its inability to actually govern. But I wonder if the democrats don’t have to be the adults in the room at some point.
I see no reason at all for the Dems to bail them out. If Boehner stays on until the mess is settled, maybe he will actually get a few reasonable things done with R/D support now that he has nothing to lose. That may be the best scenario overall.
People really don’t want to confront the reality of this situation. There simply isn’t anything the Democrats can do in this case. They can’t be the white knight riding in to save the country any more than Mitt Romney can.
First and most obviously: the Dems are the minority party. It’s not like they have the power to send the Freedom Caucus to bed without any supper all by their selves. Being the adults in the room is all well and good, but the adults are, by the vote count, simply not in charge.
Second, any attempt by a Democrat to strike a deal with GOP “moderates” first is doomed: anyone the Dems reach out to will be seen as irrevocably tainted by the GOP. (Scare quotes for “moderates,” because there are no actual moderate GOPers in the House with any clout; people like Ryan and Boehner are not in fact moderates but merely the slightly-less-radical members of a deeply radicalized group.) What GOPer is going to say, “Nancy Pelosi called me with a plan to fix all this, and I think it’s a really good idea?”
The GOP is tearing itself to shreds, but the GOP is the majority party. The only solutions to the GOP tearing itself to shreds are going to be provided either by the GOP itself or by the sheer attrition of time. Either the GOP will somehow get the Freedom Caucus to simmer down, or the Republicans will need to take the initiative to reach across the aisle and make a deal with Democrats, at the same time abandoning/repudiating the Freedom Caucus. Until that happens, there’s not much the Dems can do but listen to the fiddle music while Rome burns.
Only way this gets fixed is by the purity of fire. The Freedom Caucus is going to have to cause such damage that they become hated by everyone. They’re far from doing that at this point. Either that or demographics are going to have to change so that Dems win the House and they can use Republican tactics to railroad the Republicans (and that prob means killing the filibuster)
Part of the problem goes back to gerrymandering. Instead of governing, many of the Rep. members are constantly running scared of getting primaried in their “safe” red districts in the next election if they so much as even hint that Obama or any Democrat is anything but the Anti-Christ.
That’s what McCarthy said as he dropped out, “maybe we have to hit rock bottom.” But rock bottom could be devastating to our economy, perhaps the world economy. There has to be a way to prevent 40 ignorant asshats from wreaking that much damage, just because their backwater constituents think Obama is a muslim terrorist and Planned Parenthood is selling black market baby parts.
Maybe some moderate GOP congressmen will realize that their re-election is less important than the fate of the world economy. Maybe.
It’s not gerrymandering - it’s the collapse of the conservative wing of the Democratic party. It’s the fact that these representatives face no real opposition in the general elections.