The House GOP as extremist performance art is starting in earnest this week. From now on, it will be a downward spiral into time-wasting, MAGA performative bullshit. All on the public dime.
It is what we were promised, after all.
Except, of course, that promise was broken. Note the date stamp on that, Nov. 25, 2022. That was before the knock-down, drag-out fight he had to become Barely Speaker. After four-plus days and 15 rounds of balloting, McCarthy just didn’t have time or energy for . . . the Constitution. Go figure. It still hasn’t happened.
RELATED: House descends into extremist nonsense, Senate twiddles thumbs
They’ve moved on to other things, which are also nonsense. Like voting to denounce the horrors of socialism, one of the gotcha votes they’ll be bringing to the House floor this week. When it was introduced last session by Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL), it was adopted as the “bill of the month” by FreedomWorks, the Freedom Caucus-affiliated dark money launderer.
They applauded the resolution for outlining “the history of socialism as a failed ideology that has resulted in the deaths of over 100 million people worldwide.” That’s in the text of the bill, too: “Whereas socialism has repeatedly led to famine and mass murders, and the killing of over 100,000,000 people worldwide.”
Ironically enough, this is also the week that the House is going to be declaring the COVID-19 pandemic over, saying that healthcare workers shouldn’t be subject to the vaccine mandate, and that protections that allow federal employees to work remotely should end. In three years, more than 1.1 million people in the U.S. alone have been killed by COVID-19. Worldwide, that’s 6,759,755, according to Worldometer. Russia, China, and India are vastly underreporting deaths, so that’s a significant undercount. Additionally, a new report published in JAMA finds that COVID-19 is the eighth most common cause of death in children in the U.S.
So, you know, perspective is sometimes helpful, even though it is never welcomed by the GOP.
Another fun fact from this bill, they have a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.”
It’s not Jefferson. It’s Antoine Destutt de Tracy, a French economist and philosopher Jefferson was translating. Granted, Jefferson wrote that sentence out in his 1816 translation of “Treatise on Political Economy,” but he didn’t originate it.
The other thing that’s just a bit telling about this resolution is that it includes Donald Trump’s BFF, Kim Jong Un, in the list of baddies, along with a number of other world leaders Trump at some time or another has emulated.
Seems like a resolution denouncing authoritarianism and fascism would be a lot more appropriate for 2023.
Meanwhile, they are still demanding debt ceiling negotiations with the White House, but have come up with absolutely nothing to bring to the table. Expect this to be the norm for the whole of the session.
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