The GOP’s Poop Flinging Monkeys Continue To Fling Poop

I love it. Except for this one thing.

Image created with Open AI

by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC – Two years ago, Nancy Pelosi was re-elected Speaker of the House by a majority of 216 House Democrats – all but one of the caucus’s members. Despite her party’s narrow majority of around 222 members, give or take, Pelosi was able to pass 327 bills through the chamber, most of the time with the unanimous or near unanimous support of her party.

Today, at the beginning of the 118th Congress, the Republicans now hold the same majority: 222 seats. Yet, as of this writing, the Republicans have tried six times to elect a Speaker and failed every single time.

So much for the old stereotypes about herding cats. The Democrats are now the party of unity and normalcy, while the Republicans couldn’t find unity with both hands and a flashlight.

Why? 

This week, it’s the 20 or so members of the rodeo clown caucus – the insurrectionists, fascists, and weirdos who, ever since 2016, can’t stop cosplaying as Donald Trump. The truly bizarre thing is that they believe they’re doing the right thing. They believe they’re asserting their political capital, even though they have none, by forcing Kevin McCarthy to agree to their terms. According to reports, he’s agreed to their demands, and yet they continue to vote against him, embarrassing their party, embarrassing McCarthy, and mocking the democratic process.

This is what happens when a party convinces its voters that extremists are normals and actual normals can’t be trusted. In this case, we’ve all observed through great pain how the Republican Party has diligently, and over the course of 40-plus years, groomed its voters into believing that fascist idiocracy is worthy of electoral support and deference. 

Soulless far-right political consultants, dark money groups, and media empires, driven by huge paydays and generational wealth, have successfully brainwashed upwards of 70-80 million Americans into believing the Republican Party is the only solution to a made-up crisis: a completely bogus epidemic of socialism, intellectual scolds, news media liberals and, depending on which Republican you ask, pederast death-cultists who harvest the blood of children for the adrenochrome. 

It’s the consultants along with the Red Hat entertainment complex that’s so badly divided the nation by forcing one of our two major parties to dedicate itself to the acquisition of political dominance at the expense of sane, reasonable conservative policymaking. If a demographically endangered party can win – despite its marginalized numbers – by constantly indulging the worst instincts of its voters, why not?

Now that these monsters, stitched together by consultants perched atop mountains of dark money, have won a narrow sliver of DC power, they feel as though they’ve earned the capital to throw some weight around. But what they’re really doing is making sure they lose power in two years – perhaps permanently.

And I love it. 

Except for this one thing.

One of the possible side effects of the Trump-style grabassery we’re observing on the floor of the House is the further erosion of democracy. It might actually be a deliberate attempt to illustrate to poorly-educated fanboys how our constitutional system is growing increasingly dysfunctional and should therefore be replaced by a tinpot dictator who, by the way, should seize power by any means, even if he or she loses an election. After all, elections are all rigged, Congress is a quagmire, and GRRR! something something antifa.

Additionally, if there’s no functioning House to pass appropriations bills, it’ll be that much easier to drown government in the bathtub by starving it of money. Yes, Republicans are bad at governing, but I’d wager much of the incompetence is deliberate. Obviously, it’d be more “normal” if the Republican House merely blocked all spending bills under the leadership of a speaker and majority leader, but if the House doesn’t even exist as a legislative chamber, they get the added benefit of proving Congress to be useless and therefore expendable.

I doubt it’ll come down to that, but the decades-long Republican disruption of normal American politics has been a baby-steps process: small moves, year by year, election by election, leading to kooks like Trump and Trump-adjacent disruptors. In this case, they’ll probably, at long last, elect a speaker – this time. Maybe next time they’ll elevate the ridiculousness to the next level by refusing to convene. After all, legislating isn’t really a priority these days. Trolling liberals via Fox News and social media is what drives popular support for the Republican Party.

The bottom line is that even if they finally land on a consensus speaker, 1) they’ve already proved themselves to be unserious goons who can’t muster a majority to elect a speaker despite having a clear majority, and 2) an actual functioning Republican House under a currently unknown speaker will further solidify the party’s reputation as poop-flinging monkeys who have no business visiting Washington as tourists, much less voting members of Congress. In other words: it’s a lose/lose proposition.

Meantime, it’s up to the rest of us under a Democratic big tent to be the grownups in the room. The future of democracy and, indeed, the future of humanity demands it.

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