southernhybrid
Contributor
I'm gifting an article by Dana Millbank about how insane and dysfunctional the Republican Congress has become. It's a very long piece which can be listened to or read and I hope at least a few of you will read it, especially anyone foolish enough to be voting for the MAGAs in the coming election.
https://wapo.st/3ZqzGnZ
The following is just a little taste of what's to come. Read on.....
https://wapo.st/3ZqzGnZ
The following is just a little taste of what's to come. Read on.....
The Lord works in mysterious ways. Six weeks after his improbable rise from obscurity to speaker of the House in late 2023, Louisiana’s Mike Johnson decided to break bread with a group of Christian nationalists. He gave the keynote address (at the Museum of the Bible) to the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, a group whose founder, “proud” Christian nationalist Jason Rapert, has said: “I reject that being a Christian Nationalist is somehow unseemly or wrong.”
Rapert’s organization promoted the pine-tree “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which was among the banners flown at the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021 — and which, by total and remarkable coincidence, was proudly displayed outside Johnson’s congressional office.
Confirmed speakers and award recipients for the gathering Johnson addressed included: a man who proposed that gay people should be forced to wear “a label across their forehead reading, ‘This can be hazardous to your health’ ”; a woman who blamed gay people for Noah’s flood and more recent natural disasters; and various adherents of “dominionist” theology, which holds that the United States should be governed under biblical law by Christians.
“I’ll tell you a secret, since media is not here,” Johnson teased the group, unaware that his hosts were streaming video of the event. Johnson informed his audience that God “had been speaking to me” about becoming speaker, communicating “very specifically,” in fact, waking him at night and giving him “plans and procedures.”
God, said Johnson, told him that “we’re coming to a Red Sea moment” and that Johnson needed to be prepared — to be Moses! Throughout the speakership battle, “the Lord kept telling me to wait,” Johnson recounted. “And it came to the end, and the Lord said, ‘Now, step forward.’” Johnson told them that “only God saw the path through the roiling sea.”
Those seas have not calmed much since. In 11 months as speaker, Johnson has led the House Republicans not to the promised land but into deeper water, where they have been thrashing, splashing and dog paddling without end. Johnson inherited a dysfunctional House GOP majority from Speaker Kevin McCarthy — the first in history to be ousted midterm — and managed to make it even worse by catering to the whims of former president Donald Trump even more than his predecessor had.
At the moment, Johnson and his caucus are in a typical crisis of their own making. The government runs out of money in less than two weeks, and Trump has ordered Johnson to shut it down if Democrats won’t swallow a poison pill that makes it harder to register to vote. But after a seven-week summer recess, Johnson tried to put the plan on the House floor last week — only to pull it because he didn’t have enough Republican votes. He’s trying again this week, against long odds.
Today, Johnson’s run looks anything but heaven-sent. In the first 18 months of this Congress, only 70 laws were enacted. Calculations by political scientist Tobin Grant, who tracks congressional output over time, put this Congress on course to be the do-nothingest since 1859-1861 — when the Union was dissolving. But Johnson’s House isn’t merely unproductive; it is positively lunatic. Republicans have filled their committee hearings and their bills with white nationalist attacks on racial diversity and immigrants, attempts to ban abortion and to expand access to the sort of guns used in mass shootings, incessant harassment of LGBTQ Americans, and even routine potshots at the U.S. military. They insulted each other’s private parts, accused each other of sexual and financial crimes, and scuffled with each other in the Capitol basement. They screamed “Bullshit!” at President Joe Biden during the State of the Union address. They stood up for the Confederacy and used their official powers to spread conspiracy theories about the “Deep State.” Some even lent credence to the idea that there has been a century-old Deep State coverup of space aliens, with possible involvement by Mussolini and the Vatican.
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