Lotta truth in this, from Steve M.:
Members of the right-wing rank-and-file just want someone or something to hate, and they’re not picky: Show them a clip of George W. Bush standing on the 9/11 rubble with a bullhorn and they’ll cheer. Show them a clip of Trump denouncing W for lying about Iraq WMDs and they’ll cheer. They don’t know what they believe. They just want enemies. They want an angry champion who seems conservative and who appears to have the strength to kick the asses of those enemies, whoever the hell they are this week.
I still see a Republican crack-up, though. It’s not that I don’t think the party isn’t elastic enough to snap back into form after the Trump supertanker passes through the channel and re-docks at his gaudy Tower at 725 Fifth Avenue. It’s just that the party is going to be a lot smaller and it won’t be able to use all its weapons effectively anymore.
Trump has been a very important component to what’s going on, but he had nothing to do with the demise of Eric Cantor or John Boehner, and I don’t think Jeb Bush would have won even if Trump hadn’t entered the race. There’s been a reckoning coming for a while now. Trump didn’t start it, and it won’t be finished when he’s gone.
Too bad that the Democratic Party, which has a lot of its own similar problems, won’t be able to take advantage of it anytime soon.
The market for supply-side, trickle-down, float-all-boats bollocks has collapsed. Sadly for establishment Republicans, adherence to it remains the indelible terms of the Faustian bargain struck with corporate America by Reagan, Norquist and Kemp decades ago.
Listening to Ryan today apologising for the “makers and takers” remarks which formed the substance of his campaign in 2012 is like watching a lizard hopping around on a hot tin roof. “No matter how cynical you become, as Lily Tomlin once said, it’s hard to keep up.” Personally, I don’t see how the Republican party survives this; a rump of their party has essentially bolted. How do they recover the recalcitrant and keep the inexhaustible gravy train rolling along? It’s not in their DNA; they don’t even really get it yet. If Ryan’s recent effort was their best shot they’re doomed.
Count the insurgent candidates who gauged this ideological ‘market correction’ and you will have our two survivors.
The market for supply-side, trickle-down, float-all-boats bollocks has collapsed.
But Trump isn’t selling that. And Bill Clinton is now denying that he ever did.
The GOP and DEM marketing campaigns in this election cycle might make a difference as to who wins, but the day after, they’ll all get back to shoving the more of the same product on the country. And in 2008 the GOP marketing campaigns may look and sound a lot like Sanders ’16. Too bad Americans like fakes instead of the real thing.
pitiful too b/c with the R collapse Bernie could win and retake the House
Retaking the House would also require DEM candidates that could walk the Bernie talk. They are currently in very short supply among DEM House and Senate members and it’s way outside their comfort zone.
Marie, I’m beginning to wonder — are you invested at all in the Democrats winning in November? Or do you not care, because it won’t make any difference?
Not a snarky question (and I have great respect for your opinions and knowledge as I’ve said before). I’m just beginning to wonder.
It always makes some difference. Given a choice between heading for the abyss as 60 MPH or 30 MPH, I always choose 30MPH because it offers some chance to derail it before plunging over the cliff. In the social/legal realm, the DEM train appears to be stalled which is better than what was happening for a couple of decades.
The ’90s cured me of any delusions that the DEM party economic policies were much different from that of the GOP. Not that the biggest winners and industries are exactly the same from the policies of DEMs and PUBs; only that most of the people lose regardless of the specific winners. (And no, I didn’t vote for Nader in 2000 even though I appreciated and agreed with his critique.)
Did I have “hope” in 2006 and 2008? Absolutely. GWB and the GOP Congress had been a disaster. However, little of that disaster has been unwound. It’s mostly just been incorporated into the way things are. I liken it to the 1947-49 Congress that wasn’t “do nothing” but do a lot to stab unions in the heart and build up the National Security State. They were ousted in the ’48 election and then they and Truman proceeded to do nothing to unwind Taft-Hartley. And the very slow death of private sector unions began.
What did DEM Congressional and Senate candidate run on in ’14? As far away from and to the right of Obama as they could (and there’s no real estate between Obama and a moderate GOP of three decades ago. An assessment that Obama himself agrees with. Why would I view Nixon’s policies and record more favorably today than I did in real time?). Exactly why should I get excited about any of them two years later? Because HRC is hugging Obama (which may not last after she secures the nomination)?
Where I may deviate from the Sanders/Warren focus on income/wealth inequality argument is that it’s more holistic than their argument. Less measured in stuff and dollars and cents and more in quality of life and basic sense of security. But that’s a more difficult argument to make even if it does translate into better health and sense of happiness or well-being.
Private sector unionization was at its highest in the 1950’s, years after the passage of Taft-Hartley. Singular government actions are almost never completely responsible for broad outcomes.
Of course Taft-Hartley undermined Union strength and organizing capabilities, but it was and is possible to succeed under its restrictions. I find a better explanation of the dive in private sector unionization in the fact that the Republicans decided more and more firmly over the decades to align itself viciously against the Labor movement, causing their elected and judicial allies to make thousands of law and regulatory changes which have collectively been much more destructive than Taft-Hartley itself.
Go back and view President Eisenhower’s 1956 nomination acceptance speech at the Republican Party convention. He looks to the section of the Convention audience under the AFL-CIO sign and says “our friends in Labor are a strong and necessary part of the Republican Party.”
While the Republicans were almost never as Labor-friendly as the Democrats, there used to be more narrow Party polarization on the issue. Now the conservative movement attacks working people for political gain. To me, Trump’s success shows that there are limits to how hard this strategy can be driven.
Unfortunately for Trump, his anti-corporate-trade-deals position will be shown in the general election to be the limits of his economic populism. He has been allowed to avoid having his history of brutally fucking over Union-represented and unrepresented workers, consumers and small business owners because his primary competitors don’t really care to defend those constituencies.
The Democratic nominee will have no ideological problem raising these issues in the general election, and it will be important for them to have the funds to do so through campaign ads and direct voter contact, because we know the mass media will do their best to suppress these campaign issues.
Trump thinks the Federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is too high. Sad, he said, but our workers have to compete with workers from other countries. Yes, it’s a completely unresolvable position with his populist position on trade, but Trump doesn’t have a set of competent positions that work together. His trade position is theoretically a middle class position, but it’s quite heavily laden with racism. The minimum wage is not a position which is so easily racially coded, which makes it one of the areas, along with Trump’s opposition to Unions and good labor laws, which reveal how he really feels about the white working class.
You didn’t ask me, but I’m very invested in the Democrats winning. However, I’m not invested at all in the path the Democratic Party is taking because I know that it won’t win under its own power.
It’s like being assigned as a project manager to a project which has several awful decisions baked in that you can’t change. You’re locked into a contractor notorious for delays because you’re trying to win diversity rewards, your cash flow is literally negative and you’re going to be recycling shit out of the basement warehouse for six months because two of your company’s customers went bankrupt, your senior engineer is the only one with any experience at all on using the radiation-removing equipment yet he’s going through an ugly divorce, and you’re positive that because of environmental concerns it’ll lead to a lawsuit but the VP of engineering and sales said that ‘they’ll take care of it’.
There’s quite a bit you can do to change the degree of failure of the project. And if you work very, very hard you might be able to keep it afloat long enough for the senior management behind this project to pull their head out of their ass. But all of the same, you’re on a course of failure. Your choices are spectacular failure or slow, grinding failure where you hope you can pad your resume long enough to get a better job.
The Democratic Party right now is committed to a course of action that bred failure in the past and doesn’t promise any medium-term gains. They take centrist positions that are unpopular or dismotivating with the must-have Millenial demographics; they have a hunger for idiotic wars that have thankfully not blown up in their face yet; they have no goddamn clue how to reach outside of the West Coast, Northeast, and urban centers; and they set up the economic system for future disaster and resentment with their stupid neoliberal policies. Seriously, Hillary Clinton partisans no-shit tell me that the earliest we can expect the Democratic Party to win the House under their own power under their current trajectory is around 2024. MAYBE. You know how gerrymanders are.
Why should Marie3 or any reasonably smart cookie invest more than the bare minimum of energy into a project whose above-average case scenario is ‘nothing gets much worse over the next 8 years’?
That’s pretty much real life, in a nutshell.
Real life also has successful projects, capable project managers, projects completed on time, within budget and with quality results.
The fact that many projects are successful doesn’t make it any easier for those left holding the bag in those projects that were not.
It’s one thing to be stuck trying to make a 4-year death march project work because it’s a 120k/year job, you’re 63 years old, and it’s in the middle of the Great Recession. I don’t resent the New Democrats for their ideology in the 80s-90s after Traditional America stabbed the Rainbow Coalition/New Deal Dems in the back. Clinton was really the best we could do with Ralph Reed and Pat Buchanan ready to push the buttons of ‘the liberals want to force your kids into having GAY ATHEIST SEX’ any time the Democratic Party wanted to make a targeted economic appeal.
However, why are we sticking with this strategy after 2008? Obama showed us a way forward. It didn’t involve sucking up to the plutocrats and neocons in order to have enough money and media access to pick off people on the margins of the GOP. We motivate our base voters with a combination of economic and social liberalism and use economic liberalism as a carrot to pad the margins with people turned off by economic centrism and social liberalism.
We’re not stuck trying to babysit a doomed project because there are no other current job prospects. We’re just doing it because we’re too scared or stupid to go on a few weekend job interviews in a 5% unemployment market with a ton of job openings in better-run companies.
Pretty much agree with Deathtongue & Marie; both comments well-said but coming from slightly different directions.
Frankly I’m totally FED UP with the Democratic party at the national level. They’ve basically abandoned their principals – if they ever had any – and are just as elitist and uncaring about their “constituents” as the GOP is. From where I sit, the bulk of Senators and Congress members are in it for the MONEY. Period.
I live in CA, so take “my” two Senators… PLEASE. DiFi?? Boxer??? Need I say more? Seriously, neither one even approaches being what an Old School Democratic Senator is, and both are rapacious, money grubbing, war-mongering greed heads. I should support them?? Vote for them?? WHY?? Please tell me. Oh really? They’re “better than” a Republican?? I guess, but boyohboy it’s getting harder and harder to define where/how/when they are “better.” Mainly just on some wedge issues, and that’s about it.
Even low info voters are starting to wake up and see that the D Team really isn’t “representing” them and their needs very well these days, and frankly, one can only go so far in terms of hiding behind Republican skits and whining about obstructionism. Yeah, that is a fact, but WHAT has the D party really really DONE to counter that obstructionism? WHERE is the D party at the state and local levels to counter what the R Team has done there???
I could go on, but I think people here get the picture. I’m deeply cynical. I’m on the extreme left edge whatever that means these days. And, imo, I think, for what it’s worth, there is some (at least limited) value in real criticism from the left. No I refuse to walk lock-step and just go along to get more of the same old same old.
The D Party “should” wake up and start serving their constituents. Will they? I guess time will tell. I support politicians who show some promise – or real action – for supporting the citizens (at least some of the time) v only grubbing for more money from the elites.
No, Trump is not selling that. Jeb! and Mario and to a lesser degree Kasich were selling that. And look where it got them.
Cruz is pretending not to sell it but would sell a rat’s ass to a blind man for a wedding ring if he had the opportunity.
Trump may not be selling that, but lord knows he’ll be neck deep in it if he wins. He’s another plutocrat; he IS the Republican Establishment, he’s just found a new way to sell their poison to the rubes.
This is no more the end of the Republican Party than 2006 or 2012 was.
Remember the jubilation? Remember the sombre dissections of the failings of the GOP?
Remember what happened in 2010 and 2014?
They’ve doubled down on all the stuff they thought was wrong,and won, and they may well win again.
For gods sake the GOP pretty much controls the whole damned country! Look at the states! They’re turning state after state into third-world status: Kansas, Wisconsin, North carolina, Mississippi, and on and on. And they keep getting voted back into power, because they keep their base TERRIFIED.
Look at the House! We don’t have a chance in hell of winning it back.
We MIGHT get a razor-thin margin in the Senate if everything breaks just right.
The White House isn’t some great prize…it’s a goddamn LAST STAND.
If there is a major terrorist attack in the US before November we’ll vote ourselves into a virulently right-wing police state that’ll make the classic banana republics look like a paradise.
We’ll gleefully vote in the Republic of Gilead just out of insensate, gibbering fear, because we’ll have the media pounding it into our heads 24-7.
I just hope it isn’t Cruz, because he might just be lunatic enough to bring about the Apocalypse because Daddy says it’s time…
Which seems pretty unlikely, I reckon he’ll feed selected plutocrats and Villagers into the wood-chipper of public disapprobation whenever he needs to distract attention from his own problems.
Terrified and angry.
You might want to read his tax plan when you get a minute.
I just don’t get the logic I read in these comments threads.
I remarked in another thread that Sanders voters are precisely the demographic that do not turn out to vote in mid-term elections, and thus the Democrats get their ass handed to them on a plate. The replies to that were, well, Sanders voters see no difference between the two parties, as least as far as issues they care about are concerned, so why should they bother voting?
Now here I’m reading the same people–well, I think the same people–wailing and gnashing their teeth about the fact that the GOP has been systematically gutting state governments. Excuse me, but is that not of concern to the Sanders voters? Do they actually think that if Democrats were in power in those states that they’d be disinvesting in public education and attacking reproductive freedom…which, a little bird tells me, are issues of concern to Millenials?
I’m sorry, but when I try to find some consistency between these two lines of commentary, I realize there is none.
Another thing. When GOP voter suppression works incredibly well in Arizona, and the response from younger members of my extended family is to scream that it was a plot by Hillary Clinton supporters to derail Bernie Sanders, then I know we are truly fucked. Fucked by ignorance.
Look: there were hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops willing to risk the almost certain outcome of death and imprisonment of themselves and their families at the hands of the communist party enforcers for desertion in the face of the genocidal Nazi army. There was certainly a superior choice between ‘fight and have a high chance of dying, but protect your country and family’ or ‘desert and have a high chance of dying, put your country and family at risk’ yet many, many soldiers still took the first choice. This aspect of human psychology holds even when the stakes are much higher, so I think it’s a waste of time to whine about people whining.
Sorry, many soldiers took the second choice. I wish this damn board had a 5-minute window for editing posts.
didn’t see your comment about that. but you’re wrong about Sanders voters, or at least you can’t generalize. I am a Sanders voters and i vote – same with other Sanders voters who comment here to the extent that any let on. maybe you underestimate the Sanders appeal – I think a lot of ppl do. he attracts regular yellow dog dems, as well as first time voters and the disaffected.
“… he attracts regular yellow dog dems…”
I’m the very definition of yellow dog and you got that right. But where are the support troops? You got Dennis Kuchinich and ???. No one. Without a presence in the Senate, the House and state leges he’s worse than helpless. He’ll feed the inevitable “they just can’t get anything done” blue dogs.
Revolutions occur from the bottom up. Not the top down. You want an effective Bernie who no one doubts can win and who will blow these assholes out the water? Elect about 2000 of them to the state leges, the city councils and about 50 to the congress and Senate.
The world will be your oyster. Until then? Get Clean for Gene.
I hope Bernie will eventually turn his focus or, more especially that of his supporters, to down ticket races. Races where leg work, effective campaigning and less money have a chance to win the day.
This is exactly why the Democratic Party is not going to go anywhere under current leadership. We buy into this facile ‘Great Man’ theory where leadership is fungible at all levels of the government hierarchy — and it’s been especially bad during the Obama administration.
Tell me, why should Sanders’ endorsement actually do anything if the Democratic Party by-and-large stays the same way it is? Sanders’ endorsement and calls for his new potential voters to work downticket ain’t going to work if the reason for them to reject mainstream Democrats in the first place still exists.
Nah, man, if you want Sanders’ efficacy to actually translate into downticket votes, you can’t just slap his advocacy onto the same-old, same-old. The only way it’ll work is if the Democratic Party takes the campaign to heart and rebrands under its own power or the leftist wing of the Democratic Party pulls a Tea Party and declares open war on the establishment.
“…or the leftist wing of the Democratic Party pulls a Tea Party and declares open war on the establishment.”
This is exactly why Bernie decided to run as a Democrat instead of Independent or third party. The political revolution was a declaration of war on the Establishment. This was an attempt to rebrand the Democratic Party, ironically, not to something radical but a transition back to the ideas of FDR’s New Deal updated for our times but disengaged from Big Money. The mechanics of this political revolution would open the recruitment doors for New Deal Progressive candidates then literally upend the current Democratic Establishment using an involved, energized and expanded primary voter base made up of people who have never before had anything to vote for. This inside track was exactly how the Tea Party advanced except it was corporatist funded. Go to the window, see the crowds, change your tune or look for another line of work. Winter is coming.
The astonishing response so far has already proved the electorate is more than ready for this kind of political revolution. This response has also unmasked the corrupt ugly face of the Clinton Machine clinging to power no matter the cost. This exercise has cost the Democratic Establishment, much of the media plus certain pundits any hint of creditability as being fair or deserving the progressive mantle of being for the people. The process has been revealed as so undemocratic, corrupt and rigged that it maybe be impossible for the Democratic Party to ever accept reform from within.
If what I say is true, where do we go from here to hold these people accountable if they manage to consolidate their hold on power? They will never open the recruitment door to New Deal Progressives if the DNC has anything to say about it. They will never give us anything unless we take it. They have the money but we have the people.
What if we formed a new Progressive Party then recruited all the people under 30 along with all those others disgusted with the behavior of the Democratic Establishment to join us? What if in 2018 we ran real progressive candidates against the Republicans and republican Democrats? If they’re worried about us giving those republican Democratic seats to the Republicans, tell them to withdraw their republican Democratic candidate and we might caucus with them. The possibilities are truly intoxicating.
I would still prefer to do this from inside the Democratic Party but what can I say? They rigged the rules and now they must unrig the rules; your call, Democrats.
Do what the Tea Party did: declare the establishment as cuckservatives who only want to sell their voters out to suck up to elite.
Bernie’s revolution is missing the crucial answer of ‘what do we do when establishment Democrats like Clinton and DWS and Reid don’t want to go along with it?’ And honestly, he and Warren’s not going to give an answer. The Tea Party/alt-right has an easy answer to this question: primary their asses and take electoral scalps until they beg for mercy. Even if it causes them to lose some crucial victories, that kind of brinksmanship scares the GOP elite enough into not hiding behind the ‘surely you don’t want Jones to come back’ canard that the Democrats use on the left.
Warren and Sanders’ answer? ‘They’re still Democrats and good people, certainly better than Republicans, so if they’re not on board we’ll do some of this vague activism shit and bring them around’.
I think we must keep trying within the dem party. the reality is that ppl are really hurting. that’s what gives Sanders’ direction momentum. imo what Clinton machine would implement for government is something like the Clinton foundation – occasional benevolences hiring teens to hand out water or bandaids, but mostly sitting on their $ and paying their friends
I, too, am the very definition of yellow dog. fortunately Bernie understands what’s required to restore our democracy; it won’t be over in July 2016 whether or not he gets the nomination, at least there’s that much of a bright spot on the horizon. I don’t agree with Deathtongue that a failed HRC presidency gets us anywhere except increased suffering, same with Trump victory which I’d say is 50 50 if HRC is the nominee.
Er, have you seen Chicago under Rahm?
Chicago residents claim to loathe Rahm, but they still got their asses down to the polls last week and the majority voted for one of Rahm’s fellow travelers. Can someone loathe Rahm and love Obama? Only if they compartmentalize their brains.
There is a movement but you still don’t see it, maybe never will. The system was just fine producing unheard of wealth, a little to the left, a little to the right but always with a solid center content to let one party have Congress and the other the Executive or vice versa. Everyone lived the good life and had a real chance to rise to the top, to become rich; America, where Meritocracy is King.
But then something went horribly wrong. It was like a snake, desperate to expand every quarter starting to eat its own tail, drinking its own blood. When I say blood I mean the wealth that is necessary for our everyday lives providing the fuel to make our children’s lives better than our own. As the snake got stronger the rules started to evolve so the wealth began draining more and more to the top 10%. I know we always say the top 1% or even the top .01% as the final resting place for that lifeblood wealth but it is really the top 10% where the Establishment Republicans and the professional class Liberal Democrats live, a magical place where the only important competition is for the favor of the Big Money Masters.
As George Carlin once said, “The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
That movement we’re talking about is all those people waking up and they’re pissed. This movement is evident on both the left and right expressing itself in each respective party. It’s going to be interesting to watch both parties try to repackage this and sell it back to the people but it’s not going to work. This is an angry electorate that will not go back to American Dream sleep without a real solution or maybe some brutal satisfaction.
The very survival of the two parties depends how they deal with this inequality fueled movement as it grows larger and larger. The survival mechanism of any political party is its ability to align itself with these kinds of mass movements. The best aligned party becomes the winner, a feature of our experiment with democracy.
The Republican Establishment is weak inadvertently putting the Republicans in a stronger alignment position giving them the best chance to win. Simply put, the aligned Republicans will want to burn the thing down and kick some ass while doing it. Some cheap victories will only make them stronger, something we’ve already witnessed in Europe not that long ago.
The Democratic Establishment with its neo-liberal machine is much stronger being able to possibly resist that alignment but if successful putting them on a clear path to defeat. Unless something changes, the real crack up is coming on the Democratic side, not if, but when. By crack up I mean the fracture of the Democratic Party. The future political spectrum could well look like this: ultra right Republicans, republican Democrats and New Deal Progressives, sort of the way it already looks with the republican Democrats becoming the minority party.
This cycle may be the last real chance for the Democrats to break their alliance with Big Money realigning with the people as New Deal FDR Democrats, something that had kept them in power for 40 years through some really hard times.
Spot on.
“The survival mechanism of any political party is its ability to align itself with these kinds of mass movements.”
I don’t see how this happens without overthrowing the moneyed leadership at the top of each party. They will fight realignment tooth and nail. The question is how we get the leverage to pry them out. The Republican dissidents have found ways. We need to take what we can (and can ethically live with) from their methods and apply it to the Democratic Party.
People in the lower levels of the Democratic Party have to become comfortable with seeing the people at the higher levels of the party as obstacles or even enemies. That’s exactly how the Tea Party was able to do it. Because if you’re not willing to take that step, the Democratic Party can marshal its institutional power into electoral advantage.
We’re not there yet. We’re not even close to there yet. Witness most Democrats’ extreme reluctance to openly talk about the failures of the Obama administration. Even when we deign to talk about his neoliberalism or American exceptionalism or record deportations it’s done in hushed tones and with a healthy slather of ‘but he’s still the best we could’ve done’. You’re not going to be able to unseat the establishment in a reasonable time frame if you’re not ready and willing to take on Democratic orthodoxy and leadership.
Donald Trump had the right idea. He took on the Republican Party head-on. When the GOP played its trump card of ‘George W. Bush kept us safe and to talk about it in other terms is treason’ Donald Trump looked the party in the eye and told them that George W. Bush was a fuck-up and his policies were garbage.
Compare that to Sanders. He’s been getting better about it (too little, too late) but he’s just been unable or unwilling to talk about the Democratic Party’s neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and clientelism head-on. @therealdonaldtrump was right. Sanders blew the election when he refused to make Clinton’s e-mails an issue.
NEITHER of the so-called movements you refer to (presumably you mean Trump and Sanders) is doing a thing to advance their agendas. What they’re doing is going to rallies and then leaving and telling each other how the Great Man they just listened to is leading a revolution. Good Gawd, I live with a 25 year old who keeps talking about how the sainted Bernie Sanders is leading a political revolution. After telling me this, he doesn’t tell me what he’s doing as part of that revolution; he takes another hit from his bong, or tells me another story about the Evil Clintons.
You mean besides making a play for demographics necessary to break the Republican gridlock?
As for Sanders, I don’t give a shit how inchoate or haphazard his political revolution. The first step in any democratic mass movement is to win elections with your agenda. As long as Sanders’ Presidential Election demographics are more favorable for breaking gridlock than Hillary’s, I’ll support him over hers. We can worry about organization and legislation writing when we cross that bridge.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign can’t even get us to the river and they want to talk about how unrealistic Sanders’ agenda for crossing the river? Give me a fucking break.
Yes, as if “Hope and Change” was some sort of agenda blueprint. In truth, Obama wasn’t at all revealing as to what he hoped to accomplish and much less how he would get it done, other than claims that transparency and bipartisanship would carry the day for him. The HRC ’16/Obama ’08 folks demand from Sanders what they didn’t from Obama and don’t even acknowledge that Sanders is politically an open book.
I’m with Steve M on this one, Boo.
“The increasing narrative of anger and corruption that puts all the blame for everything that’s gone wrong in America on the other party.”
Haha. He got the wrong end of that stick as far as Dems go. We know the culprits we might have any influence over.
A very good point: Bring back pork barrel appropriations and give House leaders some ability to control members besides rank partisanship…..”stripping Cannon of most of his authority and devolving considerable powers back to individual members, who had increasingly chafed under their marginalization.”