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MAGA Speaker
So now we get to say that we believe in Big Mike, right?
Rep. Mike Johnson (R-Loooozeanna) knows his way around a swamp. I never heard of this cat when his name popped up about three days ago — I thought it was supposed to be Byron Donalds, who is a good guy and swift on the mic, but is a first-termer (maybe second). We don’t want ossified business-as-usual types, but despite how much I like Donalds (he is really good at media pushback), considering him for Speaker smacked of a desperate diversity swerve. Donalds deserves better and so do we. I’ll be happy to support Donalds later.
Ol’ Gramscipedia says that Mike Johnson (who?) took his station in the House of Representatives in January of 2017 — yup, he’s a MAGA Baby, baby! As many of us have discovered in this lightning round yesterday and today, he’s solid on all sorts of crunchycon goodness, including J6 and the 2020 election. Democrats are in hysterics. Direct hit!
So, guess what — the Gaetz maneuver worked perfectly. He tipped the ball and after several bumps, somebody absolutely spiked it off the opposition’s head, DOINK. I understand that Johnson’s Speakership went through on the first vote with zero otherwise votes from Republicans. That right there is the legendary no-wipe!
KEVIN WAS THE SNAKE!!!pic.twitter.com/xiKBfnsC5G
— il Donaldo Trumpo (@PapiTrumpo) October 25, 2023
I confess to a tiny bit of schadenfreude, but mostly I hope to hear grace and constructive brainstorming for the future from people have been shouting about how the stupid, treacherous, no-plan-having, Worse-than-Worthless Eight have screwed us –screwed! they said — for all eternity and so forth.
Mark Levin, among others, has been unusually caustic, shooting all up in this tent. I’ve responded a couple of times on Twitter (not that he reads me) saying calmly that I love Levin’s stuff, but that I disagree, and that this is a risk for a reward, and that we were losing anyway. The only thing we had to fear was Republicans voting for a Democrat! How would that have been the fault of the Eight?
So I will be quite happy to let bygones be bygones, and just let the House get to work, hopefully not robbing us blind, hopefully not disappointing us more than the usual, and hopefully holding the Democrats’ stupid ideas out over the balcony and dropping them one by one until they capitulate. It will be a nice change from the internal squabble. Let’s start with regular order and separate appropriations!
Peace? All is forgiven, for the low, low price of climbing down a bit and admitting that Gaetz got it right. Not that it was a slam-dunk, but it was a risk run for great reward, and it worked — the bogeyman lefty Republicans did not after all vote Democrat, and we got a Speaker whom the Democrats loathe, because he doesn’t take their guff. That means that we the people don’t take their guff. Win-win!
Deal?
Published in General
I’m pretty baffled as to how no Republican apparently voted against Johnson.
Didn’t they all want McCarthy again, “or bust?”
Or something.
Makes me wonder what the whole fracas was about to start with.
“Kick out McCarthy? Nooooo!!! Don’t do THAAAATTT!”
Why the hell not?
Yes, I’m quite pleased. One thing, maybe now the DecorumCons will be just a little bit less structurally decorous and just a little bit more of the DeploraCon.
The Democrats need to track down the vile wretches among them who enabled this insanity by voting along with Goetz to remove McCarthy and discipline them severely.
Oh wait … it was all of them …
Good. Now give us the J6 footage. Every second of it. Public-domain internet by noon on Thursday.
Be sure to alert the inmates on 4chan.
Okay, I just added the Gaetz clip from Bannon’s War Room podcast. Wow. Wowwowwow.
This ought to help cool off some of the righteous indignation about those dirty MAGAcons dragging us through this destructive process, etc.
I am feeling twinges of genuine optimism. Think I’ll go to bed.
I’m sure things will look worse in the morning;)
FWIW Ben Domenech says:
Yes, it was really uplifting. It’s funny, though. I now have to celebrate twinges.
But I did celebrate. But it wasn’t a happy dance, like when Trump was acquitted in his first impeachment. After so many impeachments and trials and crazy rulings, each good day seems like just a rest stop on a long trip.
I was honestly expecting pages of comments stating that Mike Johnson was secretly in bed with Soros, Fauci, and the Devil himself when he is not channeling his inner Arizona lawyer. I had not heard of the guy, but I figured anyone who could actually get a solid voting block in the House would not be popular here.
Definitely a pleasant surprise.
I’m not going to change my view that Gaetz took a massive risk here. Hope is not a strategy, even if it sometimes succeeds. Better to have some potential speakers ready to roll out.
Desperation is a motivation.
Is that a bad thing? (truly asking) Ideology is not personality.
Not holding my breath 😭
Did anyone actually learn a lesson from this? That you don’t have to go along to get along?
But they want to get along. We are their enemy, not them.
Why is the theme to the Magnificent Seven playing in my head? When it was Gaetz and the Crazy Eights.
Glad the Republicans finally came to their senses and elected somebody. I wish Mike Johnson a long and prosperous (in a political sense) career as House Speaker, and I hope he’s re-elected in January of 2025.
No, I haven’t changed my mind about Gaetz’s move.
It’s possible to hold all the above thoughts in mind at the same time, especially this early in the game, when “giddy with victory” might be something of an overreaction. Mild hopefulness, with fingers crossed, is probably the right note to strike.
It is, and it’s a potent one. It works in both directions, though. As in “Durn it. This guy is making us look like fools. We need to get rid of him by any means necessary, so we can get back to work for the American people.” And, “Durn it. Now we’re making ourselves look like fools. We need to elect the ham sandwich whose name is on the next ballot no matter who it is, and get back to work for the American people.”
Me neither, but possibly for a different reason.
Events will unfold as they must, and we will see over time whether the Republicans have hit upon a “village Hampden [with a] dauntless breast.” Or not. For the sake of the country, I hope it’s the former, but only time will tell.
The reality is, the Lecture Wing of conservatism is all about the now. If they make a mistake, they ignore it and move on. See every last accusation that Trump would not govern as a conservative. Nary a peep of “Well, I was wrong”. No, it is always on to how they are right, now.
It is really clear that nothing bad happened in the last month with no Speaker. The Nation was not in danger. Nothing was lost. It was fine. All the predictions of chaos and others, some of which I worried about, are shown to have been hot air in the wind.
Those spouting that nonsense, should be able to say, like I am here, “I was wrong”.
But, most of them won’t. Because it is only the Deplorcons who are wrong. Always, they are wrong.
I’ll just drop some of Big Mike’s hits here as I come across them.
Here he is grilling Garland on a conflict of interest back when Jerry Waddler had the chair (Justice Subc?):
I think there have been any number of people who have said they were wrong about Trump’s conservative credentials and acknowledging that he did much good for the Conservative cause while President. Yea, even on these very pages.
I’m not ready to dismiss the position of Speaker of the House of Representatives as some sort of useless barnacle on the stern of the ship of State. Last time I looked, the Speaker was two heartbeats away from the Presidency. That–in and of itself–is significant. No Speaker? Hello, President Patty Murray!
The fact that so many of these positions are–on so many occasions–filled by incompetent, greedy, self-aggrandizing, useless fools and worse, shouldn’t diminish the majesty (small “m”) of the office itself, nor cause us to give up on the underlying purpose and structure of the federal government, which needs to be fixed, not jettisoned.
Events, dear boy. Events.
I’d by that except for all of the support for “Impeach, Remove, Bar from Office”. Trump has faced unprecedented attacks, and too many on the right were perfectly ready to turn on him. Too many on the right have nothing to say about the persecutions of Trump supporters. They just want Trump to go away, regardless of what he did. And frankly, She, many of the detractors are simply unwilling to grant Trump any credit. Cocaine Mitch gets it.
Taking a lot of ground there from what I said.
22 days without a Speaker was not a threat to the Republic. Nothing you can say is going to change my mind on that, because the facts over that 22 days is the Republic went through it and was A-OK.
Frankly, a little turn over is quite Jeffersonian. Not the blood-spilling kind. May be good for the health of the body politic.
A promising start. Only 51 years old.
I still don’t understand what you and others think was risked. Was Republican control in jeopardy? No, not really, unless you feared flushing out a sizeable chunk of fakers who’d only vote for a Democrat over anyone else. In which case “control” would have been too loose a term for me to have used for what we have.
Nor do I understand what you think Gaetz was after. To my understanding Gaetz was after behavior change, not kingmaking. Maybe he’ll achieve that behavior change or maybe he won’t, but the worst outcome was going to be status quo, continuation of business as usual.
I think Mike Johnson was on Trump’s impeachment defense team. We’ll see where that goes now.
I already said on another post that I’m known in my family as the risk averse one but I was with Gaetz all the way on this one. Real Desperation!
Here’s a longer version of the Matt Gaetz clip with Bannon. Worth the time (13m), goes deeper into detail, discusses Johnsons and the McCarthy shenanigans, and deliciously covers the moment when Steve Scalise realizes it was Barzini uh, I mean McCarthy all along. The reason Scalise isn’t speaker? Kevin McCarthy was knifing all of them trying to get his seat back.
Yes, he was, and works with Jordan on the Weaponization of Feds committee.