Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) did not mince words about the state of the House Republican conference on Friday, saying it's in a tough spot at the moment.
Hell of it is, they basically had nothing on him. He's my Congressman, so I was drooling at the prospect of seeing him in a concrete and steel box.
His buddy that got convicted, and was expected to flip, didn't. Nada.
The girl (now a woman) involved now has an OnlyFans site. She refused to testify and the prosecution didn't really want her because of what defense would do to her credibility on the stand. Ain't fair, but it's reality.
Sorry folks, he skated. Kills me to say it, but he deserved to when we couldn't bring solid evidence. And unlike Trump, Gaetz was smart enough to STFU while the heat was on. Rest of the country probably missed it, but I didn't. The man was real fucking quiet there for a minute. Now that he's free and clear, the mouth is back in action.
Yes and no. There wasn’t enough to file a legal case against him, but Republicans certainly had enough via texts and Venmo to remove him from their ranks.
“You know how you make America great again?” Graham asked in 2015. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” Then, on the same day Trump essentially clinched the GOP nomination, the senator predicted, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it.”
Trump has completely destroyed the Republican Party.
Not only has he destroyed the Republican Party, he has inflicted significant damage to the very fabric of the United States. He has sown discourse discord, conflict, and division that could take decades to undo. How sad.
Controversial opinion I don't think he did honestly. I think his damage was short term. He busted open a lot of bullshit and made it clear why we shouldn't be this way, and I think seeing voters in the last two elections has made that clear. We'll see if the momentum continues but Americans made it clear tbh, we ain't into it.
More than one thing can be true at once. Their own gerrymandering played a huge role as well by creating hundreds of districts that are so safe that the real election is the primary, not the general, so the way you win is by always tacking to the right and being more and more performatively batshit crazy.
The Republican party: please see us as the victims even if we've directly cultivated this outcome. How would we know it may cause us problems and not the Democrats? Seriously this isn't our fault, the government is only on hold due to Democrats not voting for a speaker. Send donations so we can get more Republicans to argue with next term.
Honestly it really is the democrats fault. How could they not have done more to stop us from hurting ourselves? Vote for us again to make things all better.
Sorry Kev, but no, the problem is not the crazy right, it's endemic. You spend the last several decades assembling the most craven, ignornant, zealous voter base and now you're acting all surprised that the loonies are running the asylum. Even your most moderate members know they can't be seen working with Democrats or they face retribution from Trump and The Base.
I've been saying this for a long time, the only thing that will ever get the GOP back on a small-d democratic path again is a long, long walk in the wilderness. They need a decades-long time out to think about all the harm they've done to this country under the guise of 'patriotism' and 'christianity'.
Yep, the problem is that the "mainstream" GOP is so off the rails that they don't even recognize extremists for what they are and they are so deeply unpopular that they have to cheat and actually court people from every fringe to have a chance of winning.
I've thought this for a while. An interviewer asked him if he knew he would get Democratic votes for that 45 day funding bill. If he hadn't, I bet Gaetz wouldn't have triggered a recall.
They gave democrats no time to read it, and barely any time to get to the hill for the vote on the first place. Arguably, the only reason they voted for it at all is because of the congressman who pulled the fire alarm, giving dems time to read and see it was a reasonable bill.
But, if the dems hadn't had time to read the bill, they likely would've voted against it on the premise of not voting on something they don't understand hasn't read, and someone they inherently don't trust presented under shadycircumstances. Then McCarthy would've had a shutdown like Gaetz wanted, but, one he could've blamed on the dems, for not voting for this very reasonable extension bill.
who could have predicted that radicalising the party to the far right and fully immersing it's members in a bubble of right wing twitter, blogs, and media would lead to this
yep. Institutionalized racism, misogyny, homophobia, and white Christian separatism as party platform. No matter how "conservative" Republicans claimed to be, The Southern Strategy was the core value and singular driving force for the past 60 years. MAGA isn't a symptom, it's result
Why else was/is GOP leadership shitting themselves over immigration? The "other" is always an easy target to get the morons onboard, but even more so, they didn't want to see demographic change. Their whole platform relied on it.
McCarthy is selling himself short here. He deserves at least a little credit for this clusterfuck as well. All of these cowards deserve credit. After January 6 they all had the chance to stand up and do the right thing and wrest control of the GOP from Trump and the crazies, but no, they were all too scared.
While I hate her politics, I have nothing but respect for Liz Cheney.
I hate that we have to give props to Cheney for not doing a fascism. Talk about low fucking bars. And assuming the country doesn't fall apart and we somehow survive the infestation of christo fascist scum, we're still gonna have begin the arduous process of clawing the Overton window back from the position where pieces of shit like her look somewhat normal.
This was incredibly predictable. The second the GOP didn't smash the "break glass to deprogram fascists" button after the insurrection, this was always their likely path. These people are in open rebellion against democracy and we should really start treating them more like traitors.
I've been saying even before J6 that we should be treating them and their programming like a Fifth Column, meaning their Tokyo Rose channels - Faux, hate radio, ONAN, etc....
You are misquoting the comment above yours. The title of this post is an example of a member trying to exclude himself from the rottenness of the party.
I like ranked ballots more. Just a bunch of easy binary decisions of which candidate I like more. With the other ones, I feel like I'm betraying my favourite if I rank or approve of anyone else equally.
No, the two party 'system' is a natural byproduct of how our current election process works. If we saw the rise of a third party, it would eventually supplant one of the existing major parties, just like we've seen in the past.
The question is whether the new conservative party would push even further right wing as a whole. The Republicans had a schism in the late 2000s when the Tea Party was formed. When that movement was absorbed back into the Republican party, their ideology was pushed further to the right.