The Republican Party Is Unserious
Thoughts and rhetorical questions on this week’s political chaos coming from the GOP
House Republicans
How would you grade Mike Johnson’s speakership so far? Do you think Mike Johnson will last longer than a year?
Johnson just made a deal to keep the government open with a lot of Democratic votes, and only a slight majority of Republicans voted for it. This led to Steve Bannon calling him out as now being on borrowed time. Is Steve Bannon relevant? He owes 4 months in prison and a fine that he has delayed with several appeals. Will he have a “Mein Kampf” cultural moment while pretending to be a martyr?
The bipartisan deal kicks the can down the road and creates two new deadlines — in Jan. 19, and Feb. 2 — which will of course prompt further standoffs risking shutdowns again.
Who is an alternative if Republicans sour on Johnson?
Back to McCarthy? Jim Jordan? Another hail mary back bencher?
Is the Republican Speaker of the House an impossible job? Is the term “Republican speaker” now an oxymoron, because who can honestly be a speaker for this wild caucus tent cramming together roughly three groups: MAGA bomb-throwers, center-right normies who appreciate that the federal government exists, and 18 extra-moderate Republicans in districts that Biden won in 2020?
How will Johnson and the Freedom Caucus meaningfully legislate with a Democratic Senate and Democratic presidential veto to avoid those potential shutdowns early next year?
There is a lot of fighting in the GOP caucus
House Republicans are talking so much shit on each other, Democratic attack ads this cycle will be able to just use Republicans’ words against themselves. They are accusing each other of accomplishing nothing for the American people, breaking promises, obstructing government, etc.
Also, just a couple days ago, Representative Tim Burchette accused Kevin McCarthy of shoving him and punching him in some kidneys shots, calling him a “chicken” with “no guts.” Then Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullins challenged the head of the Teamsters Sean O’Brien to a fight during a committee hearing during his testimony. Violence is increasingly the acceptable manner of Republican conduct?
Is Congress getting more Parliamentarian now?
There are differing factions in the GOP House caucus that increasingly are not getting along: relative center-Right moderates/MAGA/18 Biden districts
There are increasingly bipolar, hyper-partisan Senate and House elections. For instance, 30 years ago, would Fetterman have won after having a stroke? Would Kari Lake have gotten so close in her election refusing to acknowledge she and Trump lost? Would Herschel Walker have gotten so close? Roy Moore? Probably not…
Are voters more aware now that the party differences matter more than individual candidates, and essentially are voting in a parliamentarian system where you’re voting for party and the party chooses candidates
Does this mean voters are getting smarter or dumber? Is it good for US democracy, or bad for US democracy?
US-China Detente
Xi and Biden are meeting face-to-face this week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is meeting with China’s Vice Premier
There are some cooperative initiatives, including a joint effort to crack down on the fentanyl trade and the reopening of military-to-military communications
Has the leverage changed now that China is overcounting its population by perhaps as much as 100 million people with a plummeting birth rate? And that China is suffering through a housing bubble of epic proportions? And seeing GDP decline for the first time in decades? Will China cool it with its Wolf Warrior Diplomacy? Did China just peak a few years ago, and Americans were too caught up in anti-China hysteria to notice? Has COVID and Xi’s mismanagement of the crisis — from hiding the pandemic at first, to not cooperating with health organizations, to his defiant refusal to buy Western vaccines, to his extremely strict Zero-COVID policy — hurt China more than we were capable of seeing given the CCP’s strict censorship regime? Could we be surprised by some mass protest against China’s Leninist government springing seemingly out of nowhere, or is China’s surveillance state too preemptively powerful?
The Belt and Road Initiative seems to be stalling out, and China has ongoing territory disputes and economic feuds with all of its neighbors. The South China Sea is a huge area of contention. Will China lash out at Taiwan to hide its weakness, or to give its surplus of economically frustrated young men something to do other than protest Xi? Is China ultimately even capable of invading Taiwan and landing hundreds of thousands of soldiers on the island? Would China risk suffering through the Western sanctions, and lost access to needed food and energy imports?
However you want to call it — Southern Hemisphere, Developing World, Third World — China has tried to brand itself as the leader of the non-Western world, and is it working? There’s a lot of grumpling about history, colonialism, American hegemony, etc., but the Southern Hemisphere countries haven’t been exactly anti-colonialist with regards to Russia’s invasion and attempted modern colonization of Ukraine. Is calling this sort of sphere-of-influence invasion of another country “modern colonization” an appropriate or accurate term? Say what you will about the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, at least we really did try to build, train, fund, and support independent governments so we could leave. It didn’t go great, but — unlike in Ukraine — the US did not just steal all its money, take its resources, and keep it under US control indefinitely like Russia is trying to do with Ukraine.
Broader Foreign Policy
Do you have any thoughts on the growing isolationism of the Republican Party, and how soft they’re being on our geopolitical rivals, or how borderline treasonously enamored they are with dictators? The exception is China — Republicans are extra hawkish on China. But how many members of the Freedom Caucus would be willing to vote for funding Taiwan’s long-term resistance to a Chinese invasion?
Three war hotspots: the US defending Ukraine against Russian aggression, arming Taiwan against Chinese aggression, and supporting Israel against Iranian-influenced aggression. Is this America doing too much? The three situations are quite unique. How willing would you be to have America potentially fight three wars at a time? At least with Ukraine and Taiwan, we are standing up for our values of democracy, self-sovereignty, and the freedom of small nations to not be invaded by bigger nations. That’s noble. Israel and Palestine is a much more complicated, knotted situation where I can’t follow the threads of blame or the threads of opportunities for peace.
Some have described a new Axis between Russia, China, and Iran. Is that a legitimate alliance, or do each of the three just have individual and selfish reasons to harass the status quo American-led, rules-based world order? China is not flooding weapons to Russia or even really feigning moral support for Putin’s war in Ukraine, although the Chinese are buying much of Russia’s energy exports and in that way helping fund the war in Ukraine. With Iran, who knows how much money Iran is making by selling Putin so many suicide drones to use in Ukraine, so that connection might just be a sign of financial self-interest rather than a sign there’s any actual mutually aligned military pursuits.
The GOP’s legislative chaos: the House punted on aid for Ukraine and even Israel until after Thanksgiving.
Do Republicans just kind of want to cave and roll over on all three? Will that be a future regret or Chamberlain-like blinking*? [*In reality I think there is a strong case that Chamberlain made a wise decision for British preparation to delay the inevitable war a little longer.] If Biden wins a second term and continues supporting all three, will the US overextend and spread itself too thin? Has pavlovian US support for Israel finally crashed to a halt with blossoming anti-Zionism and anti-colonialism on the far Left, and the always-there slow-burn of anti-Semitism on the far Right? Is it causing the US geopolitical damage? Domestic stability? Could this fracture the Democratic Party at a crucial time when coalitional cohesion is required to stop Trump’s blatant vows of fascism?
Should we go to war in Taiwan? Will the current Ukraine-Russia battle lines be the new borders, like a demarcated Korea situation? If Republicans stop US funding, will Europe step up and pick up the slack in supporting and funding their Ukrainian shield against a new era of Russian imperial aggression?
What happens if Trump takes over? He’s definitely going to give up Ukraine. Should the next and possibly last funding package Democrats can pull off for Ukraine be big enough to help Ukraine stand up on its own without Biden?
Trump wants America to just leave NATO… the alliance that keeps America on the same team as our Western, cultural best friends, who just happen to be the most industrialized, richest, most modern, militarily sophisticated nations in the world. It’s only in China and Russia’s interest for us to willfully and belligerently tell these allies to “fuck off.”
Trump
Trump is vowing to overhaul the DOJ, prosecute Biden and his other political opponents, deport Muslims.
Steve Bannon, arguably to some degree Trump’s Rasputin, is calling for deporting 10 million people, while Trump has suggested we need some kind of concentration camps for immigrants and migrants and refugees.
Trump spent Veterans’ Day saying America’s enemies are within, and are “vermin.” He, or someone around him like Stephen Miller obviously chose that word specifically. Isn’t this the Hitler playbook? Trump wants to deputize National Guard troops and police to round up immigrants with vibes of German brownshirts or Italian blackshirts. Are we moving closer to 1933?
Trump is doing the textbook domestic fascist playbook, and calling his liberal enemies “Communists,” which is stupidly blatant hyperbole if you consider for a second how centrist the contemporary Democratic Party is. It’s also a rich insult considering every time Trump thinks about Xi Jinping he remarks how smart, strong, and tough Xi is… last time I checked, China and Xi were communist.
Other GOP Candidates
Are these GOP primary debate worth having at all?
What are the Republican candidates’ strategies? VP or other cabinet position? Hoping Trump gets imprisoned or dies, and they might somehow be the last Republican candidate standing? They aren’t being very tough on Trump at all, and their infighting isn’t helping decrease Trump’s huge margin.
Tim Scott is out after moving the national conversation imperceptibly if at all, and Nikki Haley is gaining.
Has Ron DeSantis helped or hurt his future presidential prospects?
Dumb Idea of the Week
Vivek Ramaswamy said he’ll lay off 75 percent of the federal workforce, then moderated and called for half of “federal bureaucrats” to be fired.
He says it would be legal if the randomized mass layoffs were based on the last digit of federal employees’ Social Security numbers being odd or even. What could go wrong?
Matt Iglesias broke down that topic on his recent newsletter and showed that 70% of the jobs the government employs are involved in defense and security-related agencies with the top being Veterans Affairs — largely VA hospitals which are government run — at 18.8%, followed by the Army, Navy, Homeland Security, Air Force, Justice Department, and Defense Department. Obviously Republicans want to kill the Justice Department because the Attorney General and Special Counsel Jack Smith are being so mean to Donald Trump, but how effective pragmatically or even politically would it turn out for the rest? Vivek would just willy-nilly fire half the Army and Navy? And layoff all the people who spend their careers gathering intel on terrorists trying to attack our country? And he’s going to fuck over our veterans, whose governmental services would lose more jobs than any other department in the government?
Is Vivek an epic moron? Shouldn’t more Republicans be immediately calling this guy out for wantonly calling for wrecking the government and essentially our nation?
Will Republicans ever again be patriotic about our government? They just can’t accept that a more competent federal government will actually be less wasteful. If the government doesn’t employ people to do the jobs necessary to carry out its functions and responsibilities, it’s just going to have to contract out those roles or responsibilities, which means less oversight and less ability to control costs over those privatized companies… which actually often quickly inflates and bloats the government more than just hiring government officials in the first place.
2024 General Election
Any early, wild predictions?
Trump vs Biden, it’s like a parliamentarian system where neither candidate is that popular or exciting, and you’re really just voting for who is going to fill out all the jobs of the bureaucracy.
Possibilities that are definitely going to be wrong, but a year out from the election seem potentially plausible in my political day-dreaming:
1. There’s a non-zero chance that Democrats and Biden could win a landslide. Like what if the GOP removes Johnson, and there are more Speaker problems where another stretch of having no speaker stretches on and infuriates voters? What if the Freedom Caucus really forces a protracted shutdown?
2. What if Trump is convicted and imprisoned while humiliating himself with embarrassingly horrendous behavior, like he really goes wild lashing out on Truth Social threatening his judges and juries and cooperating witnesses? Or there are public revelations of extreme criminality with regards to the classified secrets he was hoarding throughout Mar-a-Lago and unprecedented national security leaks that finally opens Republican voters’ eyes that he’s a con man? What do we expect Trump was doing with all those boxes of classified documents? How many other countries’ spy networks bought several spies membership to all of Trump’s clubs? And he constantly needs money. Doesn’t it sound Trumpy to sell state secrets? He’s already shown he has no qualms about extorting other governments around the world like he did with Ukraine. And he doesn’t even need to sell them to be a national security threat. He loves just openly bragging to people about things like the Iran attack plans he was waving at a random reporter. I’m sure he liked to brag to random Mar-a-Lago members in the dining hall about things he knew or had seen.
Thanks for your eyeballs!
—Dash MacIntyre
My new prose poetry book, Cabaret No Stare, is available now. If you like the themes, attitude, and humor of my satirical work, you’ll like my poetry as well!
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