Speakership is the fight we need

Republicans must choose between serving and being served.

The House scheduled a vote on the House speakership today, the chamber’s 17th such vote so far this year. In January, the House voted 15 times before finally giving the gavel to Kevin McCarthy. Yesterday, the House held its first vote on picking his successor.

The details of insider politics fascinates reporters and editors but not me because the larger story matters. The real story is a group of insiders keeping outsiders out. Think of it as a NASCAR race in which the pit crew (RNC) does all it can to thwart the driver, who in this case is the voters.

Both parties have this problem of leadership working against their supporters because the isolation and power of Washington separates the wheat from the chaff and puts the chaff in charge. Democrat leaders occasionally throw their voters a bone — free birth control! — to keep them from throwing their leaders overboard.

Republicans in Washington care not about their voters. Dude, where’s our wall?

Democrats threw a monkey wrench into the congressional machine when they voted to oust McCarthy, much to his surprise after he helped them pass a budget. Tut-tut.

Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times wrote, “For years, it has been evident that the Republican Party can’t govern. When Donald Trump was in office, it was revealing to see the extent to which Republican majorities in Congress struggled to write and pass any legislation of consequence. To wit, after an unsuccessful herculean lift trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and a successful effort to cut taxes (the lowest hanging fruit on the conservative menu), congressional Republicans essentially stopped legislating until they were dislodged from control of the House in the 2018 midterms.”

I am not going to argue with him because I agree with the parrot, but for reasons that he ignored. The failure is not that the party could not legislate conservatively. The problem is that the party refused to. I also agree that tax cuts are low-hanging fruits while spending cuts are deemed out of reach.

Republicans promise everything and deliver nothing. Dude, where are my J6 tapes?

Even after Republican voters elected a Republican House, a Republican Senate and a Republican president, the party refused to dump Obamacare because it grants so much power over health insurance. For example, Obamacare led to the transsexual surgery epidemic by making it illegal for health insurance not cover this experimental and dangerous form of plastic surgery.

HealthSherpa reported, “Federal and state law prohibits most public and private health plans from discriminating against a person because they are transgender. And this means that, on the whole, it is illegal for your health insurance plan to refuse to cover medically necessary transition-related care.”

That law actually is an executive order signed by Obama. So far, no Republican presidential candidate has said he will reverse that. House Democrats delivered Obamacare. House Republicans delivered nothing that their voters wanted.

You had better believe that every one of those butchers castrating and mutilating children for profit are kicking back money to the Democrat Party in campaign donations. The transsexual surgeons and at least 60 prominent hospitals — including Boston’s Children’s Hospital — got what they wanted out of Nancy and Zero.

The speakership is symbolic of the divide between leaders and voters. It dates back at least 50 years when Republican voters gave Nixon a 49-state landslide only to have Republican leaders demand he resign two years later.

Over what? Watergate? A third-rate burglary?

Obama had the FBI spy on Donald Trump and no one in Republican leadership has done a thing about it. Maybe the FBI has the goods on too many of them to get a majority to haul Obama before the cameras and make him explain the Russian hoax, but whatever the excuse is, Trump supporters will have none of it.

This proxy vote between good Republicans and the lazy ones has been more than 40 years in coming. Reagan was the answer to screwing Nixon over. He shocked Senate Republicans by flipping the Senate from a 41-58 Republican minority to a 53-46 majority — their first in 22 years. Reagan was a force to contend with.

Then came the first Bush and a retreat into the Party of Nothing. His lips said no new taxes, but his hand in your wallet said gimme, gimme, gimme. Three months before the Soviet Union collapsed, he cut a deal with Gorbachev for a new world order — which he announced in a congressional speech on 9/11 ’91.

Ten years later on the exact same date, we saw what that new world order was.

For the last 8 years and counting, Donald Trump has been the RNC’s 9/11 and they have done everything they can trying to thwart him. The Liz Cheney Wing of the Republican Party longs for the old days when they could send out press releases denouncing the most recent Democrat outrage while knowing full well they would do nothing about it. They survived the Tea Party, didn’t they?

Republicans undercut Trump’s campaigns of 2016 and 2020, as well as the campaigns of his supporters in 2022.

The payback came in January when Matt Gaetz humiliated McCarthy by making him endure 15 ballots before he got the seat that usually should pass on a voice vote. McCarthy’s problem was a thin Republican majority. It was thin because the party did too little to help Trump-backed candidates. A larger majority would have enabled McCarthy to breeze into the speakership with an endorsement from The Donald.

Last month, Gaetz humiliated McCarthy again, this time for working with Democrats to get around the Trump Wing of the party. Two can play that game and Gaetz did.

Democrats think they have Republicans over the barrel, as the cliché goes.

Politico reported, “As House Republicans gear up for yet another chaotic fight to choose a leader, Democrats are preparing to make them pay for elevating Jim Jordan — with their majority.

“It’s not clear whether Jordan has the votes to become speaker, but Democrats are still racing to villainize the Ohio Republican, who cofounded the hardline Freedom Caucus. Democratic leaders lined up after Jordan won the House GOP’s speaker election to slam him as an insurrectionist, citing his role in objecting to former President Donald Trump’s 2020 loss, and Democratic campaign hands are already hitching swing-district Republican lawmakers to him.

“Many Democrats see a possible Jordan speakership as essentially a sequel to the right-leaning agenda that Kevin McCarthy pushed during his nine months in control. But plenty of them see Jordan’s rise as a potential gift ahead of next year’s election, giving them a fresh chance to depict Republicans as rudderless and dysfunctional — not to mention helping turn the Ohioan into a symbol of Trump-first ultraconservatism, just as the GOP spent years casting former Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a liberal bogeyman.”

How did demonizing Nancy work out for Republicans?

Don’t get me wrong. It made many Republican voters feel good but House speakers are not in the forefront of the American mind the way Taylor Swift is. And that’s a good thing because she delivers, unlike the last four Republican House speakers — Pedo, Smokey, Sneaky and Dopey.

But maybe the embarrassment of having to do this all over again will have them saying we’ve gotta protect our phony baloney jobs — and do something.