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The government is dysfunctional. Being efficiently dysfunctional is not a good thing.
The reasons that Matt Gaetz etc. ousted McCarthy was because some of the terms he agreed to to get their votes he ended up violating. The main one was that they wanted to split "omnibus" bills into specific limited scope spending bills.
I say good.
I think the Liz Cheny/Mitt Romney/GOP Neocon wing of the republican party are being childish.
I also find the Democrat language around this annoying. If they care so much about getting the government running, put together a few people to vote for Jim Jordan and be done with it.
The Approps committee passed all 12 of the spending bills like they were supposed and McCarthy was trying to hold votes on them like he was supposed to, the Freedom Caucus were the ones stopping him.
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This reads as hilarious to me. I've been reading some reviews and excerpts about the Mitt Romney book that came out recently that seems to be relatively unvarnished. And it's pretty clear based on what's described that a lot of right-wing senators aren't really being very honest about their true feelings. Contrast that with the dealmaking wing of the GOP. I don't understand how compromise became a dirty word for modern right wing Republicans. Suddenly making a deal is a betrayal and childish, which is not only ignorant of how politics with a slim majority literally must work, but is incredibly hypocritical because of the aforementioned pageantry on the far right while the middle literally just wants to get shit done.
I think Matt Gaetz is a performative blowhard, but also might have been totally within his rights to push to oust McCarthy. That's not really the issue. The issue is what came after, where by most accounts Jordan cynically tried to politically kneecap Scalise for his own benefit before the whipping even got started, and earned too much ill will in doing so. It wasn't even very ideological, though it could have been. And now no one has the political stature to be a replacement. This was all so, so predictable.
They're convinced that the GOP's problem is a lack of will, rather than that their political objectives are difficult, dubiously popular, and involve making tradeoffs their voters won't actually like. In fairness, in the context of intra-party negotiation, intransigence can be a benefit. Cutting a deal with the opposition is a lot more costly than cutting a deal with your own hardliners. They're also trapped by their own voters, to whom they have generally pitched the idea that there are an abundance of free lunches to be had if only the "establishment GOP" weren't too weak to eat them.
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Name a compromise in the last 30 years that secured anything you think a Republican should consider to be a positive outcome.
"Compromise" becomes a dirty word when it's used to describe you being relentlessly fucked without apology or mercy.
The Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform is the canonical example. I agree that is going to slip out of "last 30 years" soon.
The dealmaking around the 2013 sequestration got the Republicans 5 years of below-inflation discretionary spending growth and most of the Bush tax cuts made permanent - that was a better deal for Republicans than either constant law (and full expiration of the Bush tax cuts),constant policy (red ink as far as the eye can see), or implementation of the sequester as originally agreed (which would have cut defence more and other discretionary spending less).
I don't even know if MAGA conservatives want to cut Social Security and Medicare, so I don't think their failure to do so reflects bad dealmaking.
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It wouldn't be a few people voting for Jim Jordan. It would be the entire Dem caucus peeling off a few moderate Republicans to install the most liberal Republican in the House with the understanding he wouldn't block any bills or launch any investigations into Biden. But that's not going to happen, since Jeffries already has unanimous support and already gets a plurality of votes overall. Jim Jordan wouldn't accomplish the goal of getting the government running again because his supporters are voting for him under the premise that he'll prolong the gridlock. That's why there isn't a huge push to name anyone, and the current circus only benefits Democrats.
How does the circus benefit Democrats?
It makes Republicans look incompetent. Choosing a Speaker is supposed to be simple. So much so that the last time a Speaker election required more than a single ballot was in 1923. You have to go back to the 1800's to find a Speaker election that took as many ballots as McCarthy's. It also means Republicans aren't able to advance any conservative agenda, via either legislation or committee. Who are the independents, the moderates, the fence-sitters, looking at this Speaker fight and going "More of this please?"
Without the Senate and with an opposed executive, there's no way to advance a conservative agenda through legislation anyway. This is another reason the speaker fight is more contentious: actually getting a speaker is lower-stakes than usual.
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