"There is a growing sense of two competing political universes in America. President Biden and the Democrats are doing the hard work of governing the country while Trump and MAGA extremists are play-acting in the pretend world of performative politics.
Governing is hard. Stoking outrage with lies is easy."
What drives Trump supporters, John Pavolvitz asks? His answer: spite:
"MAGA voters would rather give a strident middle finger to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton even at the expense of the air their kids breathe and the schools they attend."
They're happy to tear it all up — for themselves and their own children — as long as they feel they're owning the libs.
"The attempt of a Republican minority to impose its will on the majority of Americans appears to be sparking a backlash. In today’s election in New York’s Third Congressional District to replace indicted serial liar George Santos, a loyal Trump Republican, voters chose Democrat Tom Suozzi by about 8 points."
"It is bad for democracy when a major party no longer cares about attracting majority-rule support. When it is resigned to working around democracy—through voter-suppression, gerrymandering, and the rest—rather than through the bigger-tent logic of majority rule. …
"The Trump wing of the Republican Party isn’t interested in policy—it’s interested in sending signals. The MAGA crowd would rather impeach Mayorkas, even if they know he won’t be convicted and it won’t change anything, than enact a law that actually affects the border. The point is expression, not legislation."
"None of this [dysfunction] is new information. The GOP isn’t in Washington, D.C. to solve anything. They’re there to literally bring the federal government to its knees until it can be turned into an engine for authoritarian intent. They’re not there to address any issues, especially if it’s during a Democratic presidency."
"We now have a Republican Party where power, divorced of any cogent, animating policy aims, is king. Spectacle, muscle flexing, reflexive opposition and, most importantly, owning the libs, is the currency of the realm. That dynamic not only allows for no compromise, but makes compromise with Democrats a capital crime —" (continued in /2)
"even when that posture consistently leads to outcomes farther from this hard-right group’s stated goals, since they completely remove themselves from the negotiating table. …
For a party so lacking a coherent worldview, where doling out losses and humiliations and bending the knee to Trump are the only guiding stars, it’s no wonder that basic governing has become impossible."
"The storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, which sent Graham and his peers of both parties running for their lives, was a revolutionary act that declared nothing to be off limits to the pursuit of power."
"Extremist Republicans today shut down House business by refusing to pass a procedural vote to take up a spending bill, as they had threatened to do in retaliation for the passage yesterday of the continuing resolution to fund the government into the new year."
"This is the fourth time the extremists have defeated special rules in the House this year, and as deputy chief of staff for Representative Don Beyer (D-VA) Aaron Fritschner pointed out, their doing so is highly unusual. In the previous 20 years the House voted down no such measures at all.
Although they were in the middle of a 17-vote series, the Republicans then recessed the House until after Thanksgiving."
"Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) angrily said to his colleagues: 'One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did. One! Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me, one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done besides, "Well, I guess it’s not as bad as the Democrats."'"
"I’ve never before seen so many Americans who actually hate America enough to support someone so determined to destroy it. It’s like a family watching their home burn inviting the arsonist standing beside them with gasoline and a lighter to run the Neighborhood Watch."
"In one of the first tests of Mike Johnson’s (lack of) leadership skills, he proposed a $14 billion supplemental funding bill for aid to Israel that included offsetting cuts of $14 billion in funding for the IRS. Cutting funding to the IRS will cause reductions in tax revenue and increase deficits."
"Even as Americans watch as the mean-spirited, violence-threatening, authoritarian face of the GOP rears itself, they are being taught a valuable lesson that would never have occurred had Democrats simply done the 'nice' thing—the “expected” thing—as they nearly always do, in keeping Rep. Kevin McCarthy afloat."
"The MAGA party is a pro-chaos party, straight out of Steve Bannon’s playbook. Whatever their name implies they’re about, they have as little to do with making America great again as Trump’s “stop the steal” slogan had to do with protecting election integrity."
"Not for the first time, we must observe that among the many things the Framers could not have foreseen is the state of today’s Republican Party: devoid of any respect for institutions and hell-bent on writing blank checks to the biggest extremists in its midst. That the GOP has made a farce of such a basic task as electing a leader should really come as no surprise to anyone."
"It’s been quite some time since Republicans have shown any kind of interest in performing the basic functions of a majority party in the legislature. …
So let’s be realistic about their current struggles. The Republicans’ basic problem isn’t that they broke the House of Representatives—the problem is that they’ve finally perfected their approach to (not) running the joint."
"I think the big story of the last American decade has been the attack on institutions, and the failure of those institutions to repel the attackers. But that story is driven by a key institutional actor - the Republican Party - injecting people who openly despise those institutions into positions of leadership. Trump is the most obvious example. But every Trump needs his Jim Jordans."
"Jordan has been in Congress since 2007. Not once during the past 16 years has any of the legislation he’s sponsored become law. Just three of his bills have passed the full House:"
The fact that ALL Republicans would rather fight over Scalise (who attended a neo-Nazi event) or Jordan (who allegedly covered up rampant sexual abuse) rather than simply work with Democrats to elect a Speaker says it all.'”
~ Brian Tyler Cohen as cited by Heather Cox Richardson
"They can’t run their caucus. How can Republicans run a country?
It would be tempting to compare the House GOP caucus to the Mickey Mouse Club. But at least the Mickey Mouse Club had a leader. House Republicans are nowhere close to being able to say the same."
"McCarthy thought he could harness forces of disruption. Instead they devoured him.
As far back as 2009, the future House speaker tried to channel the anti-politician, tea-party wave building into a political force, but the movement crushed him."
~ Paul Kane
Destroying is what destroyers do. Unleash those energies, and there's no controlling them.