Have you noticed the rush of House Republicans calling it quits in the last few weeks?
Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) announced his exit Nov. 1. He explained that to be a member of the Republican House majority means putting up with the “many Republican leaders [who] are lying to America, claiming that the 2020 election was stolen.”
Buck is predicting that even more House Republicans will leave “in the near future.”
The day before Buck said good-bye, House Appropriations Chair Kay Granger (R-Texas) also quit. Granger had been a leader among House Republicans who prevented the far-right, election-denying Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) from becoming Speaker of the House.
Also in October, Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) said she was quitting. “Right now, Washington, D.C. is broken,” she said. “It is hard to get anything done.”
This isn’t a victory. They will just be replaced with Trumpites.
Trumpite replacement candidates have been losing close congressional seats to Democratic challengers so this may open up some pathways to retaking a majority.
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I’m not saying get complacent, but looking at the all the elections from 2020 on, it’s less of a risk & more of a pattern.
Exactly. The ones that are closer to being moderate (there are currently no moderate Republicans in the house) are leaving. They’re less crazy in general, so not only are there fewer Republicans to push back against the MAGA crowd, it leaves spots open to be filled by even crazier Republicans.
Yeah, I feel like the sinking ship is a “sane Republican party”. We’re just going to see more Boebert’s, MTG’s, and Jim Jordan’s in Congress now, which will lead to even more dysfunction and gridlock.
They know that they will be primaried by MAGoos, and will lose.
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The fact that there’s even a debate to be had about whether it’s a victory just shows how fucked up our system of government is—in this case, our electoral processes. Government policies in a democracy should be highly predictable based on what’s popular with the voting-age public, but instead, the policy effects of something as minor as some people retiring are so unpredictable we may as well be trying to read the future in chicken entrails.
I think part of that reason is due to the fact that half of Congress has an arbitrarily capped headcount and we’re no longer able to represent the popular opinions of the constituency. Last I checked, we should have something like 3x the representatives in the house that we have currently.
We also need to ditch the electoral college. There’s no reason to have it any longer. We won a civil war that forced the South to start evolving beyond chattel slavery to prop up their economy, there’s no need to continue with that farce.
The numbers I’ve seen are that if the House wasn’t capped it would have around 10,000 members.
I agree with your points but I don’t think they go far enough. Approval voting (or RCV) and proportional representation are needed.
Oh for sure, I’ve advocated for that for several years. Here in multinomah county, Oregon USA, we went with a version of RCV and our next election will be run that way. There’s a lot of detractors, and while I personally would have preferred STAR voting, I think almost anything is better than FPTP.
You’re right, I was off by a factor of 10 or so on the rep count.
Do you want to take a guess which party is making RCV illegal & already has done so in Florida?
We have computers and Internet and broadband. We could figure out 10,000 representatives.
the whole federal government leans toward rural conservatives. every state gets two senators regardless of population. there’s a ceiling and a floor on house reps, so big states are underrepresented and little states are overrepresented. the president is picked by the electoral college, which favors smaller population states. SCotUS is picked by the already biased president and the senate, which has the heaviest bias.
That is why the system needs to be transformed into a multi-party system. From now on, both parties will become more and more extreme.
I’ve been voting in elections since the 90s and it’s always been this way at least since my dad was voting in the late 60s.
Breaking away from two parties is great talk, but there seems to be a lot of pushback from folks that are, for over reason or another, married to FPTP voting. We aren’t ever going to move past the two party system until FPTP is thrown in the trash heap and private monetary political donations are banned outright.
Also, no idea why anyone down voted you.
Guess which party is trying to outlaw other RCV & already has in Florida?
Did you like the chaos of not having a House Speaker as a small faction turned against the majority and held the entire chamber hostage?
If so, then you would love coalition politics because that’s a regular occurrence. If you consider the Freedom Caucus as a separate party in coalition with the GOP, then their antics will be familiar to anyone living under a multiparty system.
Multiparty systems don’t solve the problem of extremism, they normalize it. In Italy, Israel, and now the House, leaders must appease extremist factions to stay in power.
We need to get away from American politics and look at how coalition governments work elsewhere in the world. Yes, they can be messy, but it forces the parties to sit down and TALK to each other and make some concessions to make it work.
Just like marriage. Both people are no longer single. They are now living together, they have to make concessions and agree on a common set of rules, norms, etc. The same thing happens in a coalition government, the parties make concessions to make it work and agree on a middle way. That cannot happen in a two-party system.
Right. Coalition governments tend to have a few crazies around the fringes. The difference is that they stay at the fringes, because more reasonable heads are collaborating to form a majority. You don’t have the current situation where the loons are dictating everything while being made up of about one half of the majority party.
Loons dictating everything while being barely a fraction of majority is exactly what you have in Italy and Israel, which are among the purest examples of multi-party democracy.
Italy’s leader is now a literal fascist, and Israel is run by a right-wing nutjob bending the knee to nutjobs who are even more right-wing than he is.
What you’re seeing are outliers. Take a look at this list of coalition governments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_coalition_governments
There are plenty of functioning European countries (since we’re talking about the US) that have functioning and “normal” coalition governments.
It also depends on the parties that won and the system used to elect these officials. For example, if the most left-wing party came first, but the other two centrist parties came second and third, if the most left-wing party wants to govern, it will have no choice but to make some concessions in order to govern and put policies on the table that all parties will agree to.
Yes, you can add Hungary and Turkey to the list of fascist-enabled coalitions. And more where open fascists are elected to parliament, like the Dutch PVV and the Austrian FPO. These serve to normalize fascism even if they remain outside of the ruling coalition.
Meanwhile, two-party governments have basically no elected representatives from openly fascist parties. If third parties were viable, David Duke would be in Congress.
If you want to look at how coalition governments work elsewhere, you need to look at Italy and Israel. Those are among the purest multi-party systems.
In both countries, it is true that some parties sat down and “made concessions”. But in both countries, the parties were the mainstream right and one or more fringe fascist or outright racist parties. As the price of staying in power, the mainstream right “conceded” that open fascists and racists have a legitimate place in a ruling coalition.
In a two-party system, I am at least thankful that extremists tend to paralyze government, not empower it.
The failure of the two party system, unfortunately, is the fact that one party is always the leader. In the case of the US, it’s the GOP. The GOP has successfully taken control and shifted the Overton Window in the country further and further to the right since 1945. It will never reset back to an equilibrium with the structure that we have currently. Electing a Democrat only loosens the noose, it doesn’t remove it.
Disagree. The GOP candidate won the national popular vote only once in the last eight presidential elections. They have not passed any significant national legislation in that time. Meanwhile Democrats have enacted health care reform, climate investment, and now pro-choice laws.
The GOP can only hold on to power via voter suppression / electoral tricks, and that strategy won’t work forever.
I respectfully disagree. I think the GOP will keep marching towards the far right, but that will cause the Democrats to move to the center
There’s nothing extreme about the Democratic party. Get some fucking perspective.
Rats fleeing a sinking ship that will be replaced by bigger, shittier rats.
Nice. Instead of staying to fight for America, they turn tail and run like the yellow bellied cunts they are.
How many years did they spend sweeping the ground ahead of Trump and his cronies to support them and bring us to where we are today - only to act like they are taking some principled stand in quitting now?
They made this bed.
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I admit I was semi-consciously thinking of sweepers in curling when I wrote that.
What else you expect? If they legitimately try to govern or talk sensibly, they get primaried. The GOP is so completely broken, there’s no point trying to hang in there.
“right now Washington DC is broken”
Oh Debbie, it’s not Washington honey. It’s one specific party that happens to reside currently.
Both can be true at the same time. The system itself is broken, and the fact that it allows fascists to gain so much traction is a symptom of that brokenness.
I feel like both parties are broken. There’s a systemic failure at large.
We really need to get special interest money out of politics to keep lifers out past their usefulness. People too old to make actual decisions are only there because they are being propped up by the party so more money can be raised.
Weird, I feel like “both sides” rhetoric is delusional and anyone spouting it at this point is covering for fascist garbage.
Democrats have a corporate tit sucking problem and aren’t doing enough. Republicans are trying to burn down the planet by doing the opposite of whatever knowledgeable people tell them should be done. These two groups are not the same, OBVIOUSLY.
Every group has problems, Democrats are not angels. This is not news to anyone. “Ackthually, both sides” isn’t a well considered rhetorical position, it’s a suicide note.
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The post I replied to was not a well reasoned critique of the Democratic party; it was a false equivalency. Mine, however, did contain a fairly specific critique of Democrats. I have adopted the nuance you mentioned. The question is why you’re choosing to ignore that.
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The whole system is broken, though. Just because one is worse doesn’t mean the other is perfect.
“The whole system is broken” is so nebulous a critique as to be meaningless. The system exhibits specific problems for which there are certain rememdies. The reasons for the lack of attempt for these remedies range from corruption to lack of political will.
If what you’re actually saying is “we need to burn it all down and start over” please kindly say so and you’re welcome to go on my block list with all the other Saturday Morning Cartoon Revolutionaries without the faintest conception of the vast ocean of suffering you would unleash on your countrymen.
It is nebulous, but I’m the one that phrased it as system. The comment you replied to listed parts of the system specifically that they felt were problematic and applied to both parties. It’s by no means them saying both sides are the same, though.
Meh. I’m a gradualist. I think there are ways to incrementally improve the world that aren’t impossible to implement.
Both parties are indeed broken. Until we can get corporate money out of politics we will continue to have corrupt politicians who only serve their corporate overlords.
That’s effectively what I was saying, but I’m being downvoted into oblivion. Very reddit-like: no room for nuance or discussion.
Thanks for seeing through that.
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What do upvotes and downvotes mean here anyway?
Easier to quit than actually try to fix what you broke in the first place.
why put themselves at risk confronting the problems in the party, when they can just leave, with their money and influence, and let the crazies run the nuthouse
So the bastards are quitting the machine they built after it got out of hand and are leaving it to be run by crazy bastards.
Yeah, but they’ll be safe, because they were a Republican once, right? Right‽
Assholes rather flee than work with Democrats. Fucking trash
More importantly, flee rather than fight the crazy
Rule: They are not allowed to become Democrats.
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We don’t need a more conservative Democratic party. They can go sit on their thumbs.
The simple fact that you still subscribe to the two names begin different “parties” is telling.
The simple fact that you still subscribe to the two names begin different “parties” is telling.
The political equivalent of “we live in a society”
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She’s only salty that Trump co-opted the religious right out from under the noses corporate GOP by out-crazying them.
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I for one don’t think they are choosing to leave. I think they are being forced to leave. The GQP is holding Kompromat over their heads, and because they didn’t support Qult45 are being forced out, less all the evidences against them all come to light.
The Moderates and old guard are leaving to be replaced by extreme right wing types.
There really aren’t any moderates.
The moderates are the Democrats (on average). The majority of the Republican party supports treason so any that call themselves Republicans fall into that label as well.
Fuck ‘em.
Now this is the Great Replacement theory I’m interested in. Soon, the right will only be Trump and his luddites.
Every Republican still in the House next year will be forced to run for reelection while possibly supporting a convicted felon at the head the GOP ticket. They will also have to say they believe the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
Anyone want to bet against that happening exactly that way?
If they aren’t voting blue, they’re doing fuckall.
Are*
Or more colloquially: they’re*
Edit: Ah yes, the cowardly, infantile downvotes. You’re more like Reddit every day, Lemmy. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Agreed, edited.
Any that don’t work against MAGA are complicit. Leaving what’s left of the Republican party to the MAGAs kills any chance of eventual recovery of the American political system. There are enough knee-jerk single-issue voters that will only vote against Democrats to do severe damage. If these cowards stayed to moderate the extremists, recovery might have been possible, but they will wash the political blood off of their hands, hide, and watch it burn.
