The national legislature has us reeling toward a government shut down next week. One senator has severed the chain of command in the armed forces. Neither of these current legislative catastrophes has to do with their actual subject matter. The shutdown will happen because the House of Representatives is paralyzed over issues that have practically nothing to do with government spending. The military hierarchy is threadbare because of issues that have nothing to do with national defense. The cult of zygote-worship has destroyed the GOP at the polls, and now it appears ready to wreck the Republicans in Congress, and to take the rest of us down with them. From The New York Times:
Instead of revealing a path forward to keep the government open, Mr. Johnson spent the week trying and failing to push through two individual spending bills that collapsed for lack of G.O.P. support. It was yet another reflection of the rifts among House Republicans that have made their tiny majority ungovernable, leading to the ouster of their last speaker and so far confounding his successor, who is far more conservative and less experienced. “We have a lot of people that want to pass things with Republicans only,” said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the chairman of the Rules Committee and a senior member of the Appropriations Committee. “That’s one thing when there’s 240 or 250 votes. When it’s 220 and you’ve got as many individual personalities — and to be fair, different interests and different districts — that’s a risky game to play.”
And, well, cut off my legs and call me Shorty, but new Speaker Mike Johnson is no more capable, and far less competent, at getting things done than Kevin McCarthy was. Who’d-a thunk it?
But Mr. Johnson’s efforts to pass 12 spending bills to fund the government have hit the same obstacles that Mr. McCarthy faced as he tried to shepherd the bills through. Republican leaders pulled votes on both the Treasury Department bill and another to fund the Transportation Department because of deep divisions within their ranks…On Thursday, a bloc of them opposed the financial services bill because it contained a provision aimed at undermining a 2014 Washington, D.C., law intended to protect employees from being discriminated against for seeking contraceptive or abortion services. A group of conservatives also opposed the bill because it did not include an amendment that the House voted down prohibiting federal funds from being used to purchase a new building for the F.B.I.
Even Republicans are beginning to notice. Well, some of them, anyway.
The moderates said it was unconscionable for Republicans to attach unrelated anti-abortion measures to the spending bills just days after the party was clobbered on the issue on Tuesday in off-year elections. “We’ll see next week what we actually do,” said Representative John Duarte of California, who represents a district President Biden won in 2020. “A lot of it will have to do with, can we pass some clean appropriations bills and get the monkey business out of them?”
Meanwhile, over on the Senate side, Republican senators have spent two weeks shaking their fists impotently at their colleague from Alabama, Senator Coach Tommy Tuberville, who is stalling military promotions because the Pentagon pays female soldiers to travel to states wherein they can exercise their reproductive freedom. Alaska senator Dan Sullivan, a Marine veteran, is about ready to eat his desk in anger. From Al.com:
“By the way, [Chinese President] Xi Jinping is watching this right now, going, ‘I can’t believe they’re not letting these guys command. I’m scared to death of subs.’ He’s loving this. So is [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. They’re loving it,” Sullivan said. “How dumb can we be, man?”
Senator, this is a question with which I have been wrestling since the dawn of time. I gradually have come to the conclusion that there is no real answer to it—except, possibly, “Louie Gohmert.”
The fact is that the Republican Party has gotten itself in a box on abortion and, once in there, it has driven nails to secure the lid on the box for the foreseeable future. There is a large, well-financed, well-established faction within conservative politics—a faction, I might add, that feels it has been played for suckers by generations of Republican politicians—that will not move on this question, and that will attach its fanaticism to any and all issues, in any and all ways possible, and by any means necessary. The policies favored by this faction are hilariously unpopular almost everywhere, so much so that they’re millstones around the neck of every Republican politician, even the ones who have the slightest interest in, you know, governing. Now, however, this foolishness is coming to exact a national cost. Insanity…breaks out.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
