When last we left the Congressional Republicans, they were happily sitting around a campfire singing "Kumbaya My Lord" ahem happily shivving their own Speaker - their second in a row - for actually allowing some legislation to reach the House floor, and for not being aggressive enough chasing after "Biden Crime Family" bullshit.
Speaker(ish) Mike Johnson promptly called a week's vacation - which Congressional Republicans do every other week anyway - in order to find ways to pander to the Freedom Caucus even further, to the point where he made a pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago to kiss trump's ring orange buttocks by announcing legislation to ban illegal immigrants from voting in elections (something every pundit noticed was a law already on the books, and was not a source of any mass voter fraud).
In the meantime, the House Republicans succeeded in doing something... which was the unnecessary, partisan, and purely performative impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas, on charges of failing to be absolutely cruel towards migrant families at the southern border. This was something that A) was never going to succeed in a Democratic-controlled Senate anyway, and B) papered over the fact that the House Republicans themselves refused to pass any meaningful border security bill - on trump's orders no less - because they didn't want to give Biden an election year win.
So earlier this week, the House Republicans made a big show out of signing the impeachment order and walking it over to the Senate for their process. There's a video of it somewhere, here we go:
It was, to be honest, performative nonsense.
And like all things done by these House Republicans, it fell apart within a day. It had to set a land-speed record for fastest dismissal of an impeachment (via Griffin Eckstein at Salon):
In a 3-hour proceeding, the 51-member Democratic majority voted to dismiss both charges on Wednesday, concluding that the charges did not reach the magnitude of “high crimes and misdemeanors” outlined by the constitution and avoiding a trial.
Republicans in the chamber objected to the lack of a trial in the matter, with Eric Schmitt (R-MO) describing the vote as “unprecedented.” The dismissal isn’t fully unprecedented, though, as the GOP caucus in the Senate attempted a similar move in 2021, when all but 5 voted to kill the impeachment proceedings against President Trump...
Majority Leader Schumer (D-NY) argued that a trial would set a dangerous precedent in future politically-motivated impeachment proceedings.
“For the sake of the Senate’s integrity and to protect impeachment for those rare cases we truly need it, senators should dismiss today’s charges,” Schumer said...
Schumer of course wants to keep up the pretense that impeachment is a functional system, when all evidence is pointing to it being a broken, partisan mess.
In the meantime, Johnson's attempt to appease the wingnut elements of his caucus went nowhere because his primary attacker Marjorie Taylor Trump Greene renewed her Motion to Vacate calls, and getting another congresscritter to sign on to her push. Alongside this was an effort by the Democrats and a handful of pro-Ukrainian Republicans to sign a Discharge Petition to bring the foreign military aid bills - Ukrainian, Israeli, and Taiwan - to the floor in spite of the Speaker's block.
Possibly in spite of Greene and her Freedom Caucus knee-capping buddies, Johnson made the move to have those financial military aid bills brought to a vote by this Saturday. Which of course enraged the pro-Putin Freedom Caucus puppets even more.
It will be nice if the House can function - even for a day - to pass something that will genuinely serve our nation's foreign policy interests and the defense of our allies.
But it's not stopping the clown car madness of the extremist Far Right desperate to crash every vehicle over the cliffs.
This is going to get crazier and crazier. Until we Americans vote these Republican crazy clowns out of power.
Get the damn vote out this November, people. And for the LOVE OF GOD - and women, and Blacks, and children, and families, and poor people, and... well, everyone who's not evil rich white guys - don't vote Republican.
1 comment:
The house GOP conference is quite successful at the one thing they believe their jobs to be: creating content for Newsmax and Fox News.
It would appear that the Democrats are going to get the work done yet again and get some funding to Ukraine and save little Mikey from the MTV, but as always when Republicans are involved, I'll believe it when I see it.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
Post a Comment