The House GOP conference chaos all boils down to one thing: Supposedly moderate Republicans allowing the extremists to run the show. Again. Still. They let the Tea Party types take over in 2010, and they hardened into the Freedom Caucus and they’ve fallen even deeper into the extremism of Trump’s white supremacist, insurrectionist, anti-constitutional MAGA party.
These same moderates are now, after all these years, supposedly “finding their voice.” A sort of spokesman for the group, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, says he’s been warning about this since he got into office in 2016. He says that he told his leader, Speaker Paul Ryan, that he needed to “take the high road and do what we don’t need to be doing right now, but what we should be doing, which is reaching across the aisle and building two-party solutions—or we can continue down the erroneous path of single-party solutions,” Fitzpatrick told The Washington Post. “At some point, somebody’s got to change that trend.”
They didn’t listen to him then, he says, and the problem has become “exponentially worse.” Fitzpatrick has been serving as co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, a group whose solution to problems seems to have been both-sidesing the “extremes” of their parties. There are (or were before the election) 56 of them in this session of Congress. Thus far their achievements in fixing things are underwhelming.
Another one of those moderates tells the Post that it’s time for his group “to flex our muscles a little bit more and say, ‘We’re going to govern America.’” That’s Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, who has spent a lot of time in the past few weeks talking to reporters about how the moderates are going to rise up. “There’s a small number that want their way or the highway. Well, that’s how we fail. We can’t let 2 percent or 3 percent drive the whole Congress.”
There are two other groups of Republicans, the GOP Governance Group and Main Street Caucus, which have about 50 Republicans each—most of them the same members. They do outnumber the Freedom Caucus and other maniacs, officially, for all the good it’s done them thus far.
But there’s good news, they say, because the Freedom-y guys don’t want to let Democrats have any say in any of this so they’re willing to try to compromise with the moderates. “I have probably had more conversations with my colleagues in the Freedom Caucus in the past two weeks that I have in the past five years. To their credit, they’ve been coming up to me on the floor, wanting to work together and I’m very encouraged by that because they understand the tight margins,” Fitzpatrick said.
While they’re busy talking to reporters about how they’re going to be a force, Kevin McCarthy is talking to the maniacs, hearing all their demands. Those demands are getting more and more outlandish by the day as the crisis for McCarthy deepens.
By the way, as they are positioning themselves as “moderates,” here’s what Bacon has to say on reproductive freedom: “I stand with life and voted against the extreme federal pro-abortion bill today. It would have led to taxpayer funding of abortions and would remove late term abortion bans among other adopted pro-life laws in place by various states, including overturning Nebraska’s ban on dismemberment abortions which has wide support in our state. I’m grateful for the pro-life women in Nebraska like Deb Fischer and Jean Stothert, as well as those in Congress who spoke out for life today.”
That’s not anybody Democrats in any number are going to feel compelled to help out here. So far one, the completely predictable Rep. Henry Cuellar (not really a Democrat from Texas) is the one who has gone public saying he’d help get some other Republican elected speaker.
The math problem for these guys is getting 168 or so Democrats to say they’d be willing to boost a Republican to speaker. Good luck with that.
These people built this mess. They, along with all the other conservative pundits and commentators and operatives who built an increasingly reactionary and white supremacist-aligned party, allowed Donald Trump to become their standard-bearer, who followed Sen. Mitch McConnell’s lead of lying and cheating and doing anything to win created this mess. They’ve got to fix it.
In the meantime, we’ll enjoy their watching their circus.
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