Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Republicans In Flight 2018 Edition

"Only Barnes can kill Barnes." - the movie Platoon

While discussing the apt - yet tragic - metaphor of having a train full of House Republicans crashing into a garbage truck, we should consider the real train wreck going on with Republicans coping with a world dominated by their Almighty Shitgibbon.

What's happening is that despite the control the GOP holds over all three branches of federal government - they hold the Executive with trump, they hold the Legislative with control of the House since 2011 and the Senate since 2015, they hold the Judicial with five Supreme Court seats - there are an abnormally high number of vacating and retiring party leaders. In the fashion of rats abandoning the ship.

The latest one looking to get out of Dodge before the bills come due is a familiar name: Trey Gowdy, he of the "We'll Get You to Confess You're a Witch, Hillary" from not so long ago.

To the Talking Points Memo article (via Cameron Joseph)!

House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) won’t run for another term, he announced Wednesday, making him the latest GOP chairman to announce he’s heading for the exits in recent months.
“I will not be filing for re-election to Congress nor seeking any other political elected office,” Gowdy said in a statement. “Instead I will be returning to the justice system. Whatever skills I may have are better utilized in a courtroom than in Congress, and I enjoy our justice system more than our political system.”

Gotta admit, the "return to justice" excuse is a fresh one, a lot better to buy than the "wanna spend more time with the family" we usually get.

But let's read a little bit between the lines, shall we?

His announcement makes him the ninth Republican committee chairman to announce he’s leaving, the second this week alone...

Joseph is referring to New Jersey's Rodney Frelinghuysen (gesundheit) clearing out from the powerful Appropriations Committee, something you don't walk away from because that's the committee what controls where the spending money goes.

The overall number of departing Republicans is intriguing:

House Republicans have been retiring at record rates this year, outpacing even previous wave elections. There are now 34 GOP lawmakers who won’t be back next year...

And this is still early. The Primaries are a few months away, and there's a likelihood that a number of incumbents are getting in-party challenges that could knock "safe" veteran seats off with more radical Far Right candidates that could lose the General Election in November.

As it stands, there's 238 Republicans and 193 Democrats filling the House. That's a 45-seat difference. All the Democrats have to do is flip more than 50 percent of those seats while retaining their own and they regain control of the House. That's 23 seats to gain.

There's 34 retiring Republican congresscritters. Granted, some of those are "safe" districts, but given the power of incumbency that allowed for a near-lock on those "safe" seats. Many of those "safe" seats are likely going to be toss-ups, where Democrats have a legitimate chance to win because an axiom of American politics is that the party in control of the White House during midterms tends to lose seats due to voter dissatisfaction.

All those toss-up seats. All those chances for Democrats to control the House - the Senate's math is harder to reach since only 1/3rd of that chamber is up for a vote - and break the grip the GOP currently holds on us. It's also a chance - with the chamber that controls the purse-strings and holds oversight powers - to finally force trump to answer for his bullshit.

It's odd, don't you think, for the party in power to start losing so many of their own party leaders like this, especially as the Republicans are working overtime to further suppress voter turnout among Democratic demographics.

There's three key factors: 1) The Republicans just passed their massive Tax Cut gift to the super-rich. Now they need to get out of the way before the economic fallout from that bad idea hits everybody. 2) A number of these incumbents are seeing shrinking support even in their "safe" gerrymandered districts, as the Game of Demographics that favored them is finally slipping. 3) The party has a huuuuge albatross around their necks called donald trump. His constant unfavorable numbers make him toxic to the GOP in the General election polling. Just look at Alabama, where TWICE trump went in that state to campaign for "his" favored Senate candidate only to have BOTH candidates lose (Strange in primary, Moore in general)... in an otherwise solid Red State where trump's current value was zilch.

The pundits are looking at what they're calling another Wave Election - which given the hyperactive state of partisanship in the country now seems to be every 6 years instead of 20 - that favors the Democrats in ways the GOP suppression efforts can't contain.

For all the slavish devotion the current GOP leadership has towards trump, the "sane" members of the Party have to be looking at the polling numbers and running for their lives. trump's leadership - or lack thereof - normally requires a political party to answer either by standing up to his inept and corrupt ways (which some try but then find themselves disinvited from Fox Not-News), or by surrendering to trump's corruption and risk getting sucked into that black hole with criminal charges sooner or later.

The third option is to run. And so they are. In numbers that can well give the Democrats the House this November.

Get the vote out, America. GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT, DEMOCRATS. To all the Indy voters out there, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD VOTE FOR THE DEMOCRATS this 2018.

Make more Republican rats flee for their lives.

1 comment:

dinthebeast said...

Personally, I want to see Hunter, Rohrabacher, and Nunes turfed out this year.
There are a few more California Republicans to go along with them, and Issa isn't running (except away) this time, so we can do our part in flipping the requisite number of seats because of our un-gerrymandered districts and the fact that the state went for Hillary by thirty points.
I dug into the district-level voter make up recently, and there were five, if I remember correctly, Republicans in even up or +D districts, and a few more in R+3 or less.
We really need to come through this time because we can, read that the Republicans aren't cheating the vote here like they are in other likely to flip areas.
I'll do everything I can.

-Doug in Oakland