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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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It still baffles me that out of ~~535~~ 435 house members, 8 of them are running the show
Put slightly differently. Eight members of the house can cause total gridlock because the other 427 can’t even countenance taking a single step of compromise - and not even compromise on an actual law - compromise on the person who presides over the process.
The problem isn’t really the eight. The problem is that the process has gotten so fucked we can no longer work around a 1.8% nut job rate.
Edit: math
While you are kind of correct, grouping the democrats in as part of the group that won't compromise is not fair. They've come to the table with demands for compromise, and they didn't start this problem so it's not theirs to clean up. It's the right and moderate right that aren't compromising.
Indeed, the problem has been that Democrats have been compromising to keep the government running for decades, and it finally came to a point where the other team decided they could start getting away with anything.
Fault and fairness are irrelevant; they’ve never had anything to do with how government functions and damn sure don’t look to start mattering any time soon. A two party system this polarized simply will. not. work.
Which is exactly why it's important not to bail the republicans out of their self imposed ongoing schism. They need to be broken up and that can't happen unless they repeatedly fail to caucus together on even simple procedural tasks like electing a speaker. This is an ideal problem brought upon themselves to show they are already not a single unified party. Just a loose agglomeration of shit stirrers. Two bad kids in their granddad's trench coat.
I certainly wouldn’t say that bailing them out is the best choice, either from a moral or a practical point of view. My point was merely that the eight nutters here are not the real problem. They are merely symptom of much more grave and perhaps systemic threats to the governmental system.
... which Republicans have a large hand in perpetuating.
I'm not saying Democrats are the saints and angels, but they're a damn sight better than their red-faced counter-parts. What little enabling their members do pales in comparison to the enabling of the Republican party.
Wholesale change needs to happen. And moving The Leftovers party out of it's middle-of-the-road approach is part of that, but it's not even close to a majority. Trying to lump the two together as some sort of "everyone in government is bad!" approach is disingenuous and antithetical to seeking change.
If you want to see a solution, stop trying to generalize the problem. We've had generalized "solutions" for decades, and it's done nothing but slow the degradation a little bit at best.
Your assumption that I’m making an argument to moderation is fundamentally incorrect and a little insulting.
My assumption is that you're casting too wide a net because you're just tired of the status quo, but you don't really know who to really blame. So you're blaming everyone.
You're talking out of both sides of your ass.
They are relevant when it comes to elections. And that's all that ultimately matters in our system.
Lol. Tell that to Al Gore.
?
He was blamed for being boring, which he was. That was his fault. He didn't contest Florida enough. That was his campaign's fault.
I think the concept was that he lost even though he won.
Democrats are open to compromise.
They have indicated that they are willing to support empowering McHenry until January.
Democrats are also willing to support other Republicans as Speaker, provided Republicans offer something in return.
But they aren't willing to support election deniers (like Jordan), and they won't support people who previously reneged on deals with Democrats (like McCarthy).
Not that it matters, because Republicans refuse to support anyone who needs Democratic support to become Speaker.
I just want to say that while people who refuse to acknowledge that Biden won the 2020 election should be rightfully called election deniers, Jordan's role is so much more involved: he actively attempted to get the election decertified and throw the vote to Trump.
That makes him at least one of the figureheads of an attempted coup d'etat, someone who tried to end democracy in America in order to install an unelected leader in the White House.
If he had succeeded, America today would no longer be a democracy, a nation where the electorate chooses its representatives.
If it was up to Jim Jordan, we would now live in a dictatorship, with Trump as the unelected ruler who would no longer be beholden to the will of the people or the rule of law.
this shit show is made by republicans, continued by republicans and is entirely republicans fucking it up. Considering McCarthy failed to abide deals he had already made, why should democrats trust him to honor a second deal?
if republicans were even nominally bipartisan- like, you know, any reasonable body would be if the majority was led by exactly 4 votes- we wouldn't be in this mess.
If the number of seats in the House had not been frozen a century ago, this would not be a problem as it would provide representation proportional to population (as outlined in the US Constitution), rather than artificially amplifying the voices of low-population states. As it stands, citizens in Wyoming (pop. ~577k, 1 rep) have any twice as much representation per capita than those of Delaware (pop ~1.003M, 1 rep), while both have a single Representative. Compared to California (pop. ~39.24M, 52 reps), which has a ratio of 1 rep:~755k people.
There is, to be said, an issue of maintaining the level of proportionality originally intended (1 rep : 30k people). This would require over 11k representatives today. However, using the "Wyoming Rule", where the number of seats is proportional to that required to provide one Representative per population of the least populace state (currently Wyoming), the number is only about 575. That's much more manageable and would do a better job of providing equal representation and making gerrymandering harder.
It's 435 in the house and 100 in the Senate.
You're right. To be honest the website FiveThirtyEight always fucks me up on that number for some reason
Those are the number of electors in the electoral college when electing a president.
Also the number of votes needed by Gore to win florida in 2000. Unhappy little coincidence.
Because McCarthy gave away guaranteed power to avoid compromise with any Democrat.
McCarthy made the deal that allowed the 8 to oust him.
In an ideal world, the speaker is supposed to be the most centrist person, but when you have parties of hardliners and refusal to make comcessions, you get the shit thats happening right now.