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After a brief victory lap in the wake of Republican Glenn Youngkin’s Virginia win, and a week of Democratic hand wringing and finger pointing, it looks like the Republicans are back to bickering, backstabbing and infighting, this time over 13 defections on Biden’s infrastructure bill. That’s because they’ve put themselves in the same “no-to-everything” position they put themselves in during the Obama years, defining themselves by the oft-mentioned “Cleek’s Law,” thus leaving the few remaining sane Republicans at loggerheads with the wackos who dominate the party.
Republicans are increasingly divided over the bipartisan infrastructure bill that will soon become law, with tensions rising among GOP members over whether the party should remain united against all aspects of President Biden’s agenda or strike deals in the rare instances when there is common ground.
You can almost imagine this playing out on a split screen. One one side, we see Mitch McConnell saying he was “delighted” by the bill; on the other, we see the monkeys in the House Republicans are flinging poo and masturbating in public.
The tensions are highest in the House where some members who voted for the bill have been the subject of heated criticism from colleagues — led by Trump loyalists Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) — and who have received menacing and threatening messages at their offices.
Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) — a moderate who voted for the infrastructure package — said during an interview Monday evening on CNN that a caller left a message with his office that was filled with expletives and called him a traitor. “I hope you die,” the caller said, adding that he hoped everybody in his family died as well…
Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.) defended his vote for the bill Tuesday, saying it will help improve the “atrocious state of our infrastructure” while noting his office has received a “substantial amount of troubling phone calls.”
Katko tries a tactic that sex columnist Dan Savage once described as “How’d THAT happen,” bemoaning the incivility of it all.
“Ronald Reagan cut deals all the time with Democrats for the good of the country. That is what we’re supposed to do. This isn’t a zero-sum game,” he said Tuesday in an interview with Spectrum News. “There’s always going to be people in the cheap seats who are going to be naysayers, but that’s the nature of the business. But the bottom line is, we got to move this country forward.”
Mr. Katko seems to be confused—the Republicans have approached politics as a “zero-sum game,” playing “heads I win/tails you lose,” for decades. Maybe someone should remind him that’s he’s a member of a party that claims the Democrats are running a Satanic pedophile ring out of a pizzeria, that they’re baby-killing communists, socialists, and liberal fascists perpetrating the coronavirus “hoax” in a plot to destroy America and apple pie, and ultimately kill God. Once you’ve worked that hard to characterize your opponent as an existential threat to your entire way of life—and possibly to God’s Creation—how can you possibly work across the aisle with them, why would you be surprised by the backlash from your more maniacal colleagues, who seem to truly believe all that horseshit? HOW’D THAT HAPPEN?
Anyway, you will not be surprised to learn that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has nothing to say about his members being attacked by his radicals—and really, what COULD he say anyway? He knows who runs the party, and sure as hell isn’t Kevin McCarthy.
Former president Donald Trump has led the call to trash the bill while deriding Republicans who voted for the measure, saying they should be “ashamed of themselves” for “helping the Democrats.”
[…]
Former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said in interview on Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room”podcast Tuesday that all 13 members should “absolutely” be stripped of their committee assignments by House leadership in the coming days.
“These people voted for Joe Biden, for an infrastructure bill that will clear the way for more socialist spending that will, quite frankly, gives Joe Biden a win,” Meadows said. “I don’t know how you can send a clearer message than saying, ‘Listen, obviously you’re not on our team. We’re going to give that leadership position to somebody else.’ ”
[…]
Trump has since amplified the suggestion to punish the 13 Republicans who defected, a rallying cry that started among the former president’s “America First” supporters in the House over the weekend.
It’s quite a public crack-up, with Republicans hitting social media to blast their colleagues and call for their punishment—there’s that unity I’ve come to really appreciate about the party. All this just a week after their “big romp.”
I have little more to add to this story, other than pointing and laughing. Is it too much to hope that the clowns driving this car crash and burn in 2022?