Well, well. McCarthy actually acted for the good of the country

The House passed a mostly "clean" 45 day spending bill to avoid shutdown and did it with with a lot of Democrat votes. McCarthy basically told the Freedom Caucus to take a long walk off a short pier and dared them to try to remove him.

A good many centrist Republicans also voted for the measure. Perhaps McCarthy has decided to be the Speaker of the WHOLE House.

Be it noted...McCarthy and his Republican supporters just defied Donald J. Trump in the process.

I wonder what Jeffries' price will be?

 

What is best for the country should always come first. Reduction of the polarity and extremism is welcome.
Imagine how match good can be done for the country if more cooperation between the parties was frequent occurrence.

 

McCarthy had no choice. The people who were blocking him didn't want to compromise. They would have voted against a bill they themselves wrote. Theirs was a mission of destruction, the nihilism portrayed by a toddler who is angry and confused and can't see straight. Just like their voters.

So, McCarthy could turn to the Democrats now or after a shutdown, but it was inevitable that it would happen.

 

The extremism is coming from one party alone. Who threatens democracy? Who restricts voting? Who works to take away rights gained? Who threatens violence? Who threatens to shut down the government? Who trucks in lies and conspiracies as their mainstream thinking?

Which party is led by a man found to have caused business fraud and sexual assault? A man who is faced with 91 felony counts and is the runaway candidate for their nomination for president?

It's not to say there isn't extremism on the Left; there is There always has been. But even at their height, the hippies and the war protestors didn't run the government!

No, this isn't a both sides issue. One side is utterly frightened by pluralism, democracy, equal representation, and an economy that is leaving them far, far behind. So, they resort to burn-it-down tactics. This was one of them. January 6th another. There will be more.

 

Maybe not for awhile. McCarthy burned his bridges with the Freedom Caucus while probably pleasing the larger group of GOP House members that want to do stuff and get reelected (and who voted for a fairly clean spending bill). The Democrats are probably enjoying the "incredible lightness" of having actual power while in the minority.

Once again, this time with feeling...the Freedom Caucus has no real power. It's a very nice thought for me and (secretly) for the Speaker of the House.

 

I see extremism coming from Left as well. It depends on issues and political ideologies. One side has heightened need for order, structure, and cognitive closure while other side
individuals more on openness to new experiences, cognitive complexity, and tolerance of uncertainty with lower likelihood to use violence against adversaries.
Antifa and black bloc, for example, are centered around a broad opposition to fascism but are otherwise left open for individual interpretation.
The far left encompasses multiple ideologies, but security experts believe that a large percentage of far-left radicals subscribe to at least one of three main classifications: anarchism, communism/socialism/Marxism, and autonomous radicals.
Remeber during the mid- to late 20th century, far-left groups dedicated to causes such as Puerto Rican independence carried out bombings and other violent attacks across the United States.
There are studies that took a look and made comparisons between different ideologies, right, left, Islamist etc.

M Crenshaw, Ed., Terrorism, Legitimacy, and Power: The Consequences of Political Violence (Wesleyan University Press, 1983).
Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (Columbia University Press, 1998).
G. Sibley, D. Osborne, J. Duckitt, Personality and political orientation: Meta-analysis and test of a threat-constraint model. J. Res. Pers. 46, 664–677 (2012).
Onraet et al., The association of cognitive ability with right–wing ideological attitudes and prejudice: A meta–analytic review. Eur. J. Pers. 29, 599–621 (2015).
V. Caprara et al., Basic values, ideological self-placement, and voting: A cross-cultural study. Cross-Cultural Res. 51, 388–411 (2017).
Y. Hasson, M. Tamir, K. S. Brahms, J. C. Cohrs, E. Halperin, Are liberals and conservatives equally motivated to feel empathy toward others? Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 44, 1449–1459 (2018).
And many more

 

I like Rich's reply to this. Here's the part I'm referring to in Rich's post that you responded to.

 

I was looking at representation of extremist groups in government etc. Both enjoy that.
As mentioned earlier far right is different from far left in Ideology and way they act. But point well taken that line was crossed in 2020.

 

The appalling Matt Gaetz has announced that he will file a motion to remove McCarthy soon. Here's where it gets interesting. If Jeffries has the Democrats' support Gaetz, he will succeed. But if the Democrats vote "present", he will not. So what will be Jeffries' price?

 

How does the vacate process work? Is a new Speaker of the House named in the vacate order or is it a two step process? If it's a two step process then we might be without a Speaker until after the 2024 elections. I'd guess that it happens at the same time though.

 

Please share with us the Democratic equivalent of the Freedom Caucus and support it, please. I contend that no matter who you choose, they will not have come close to the stunts, verbiage, and anti-American acts conducted by that group.

 

I think center moderate voice in GOP will prevail. Gaetz will use the situation but the Speaker McCarthy will remain in his current position till next elections.
Many in GOP are in search of center moderate way not that MAGA camp is weak but the wind of change is blowing in GOP.

I took a wide range of years snapshot in my earlier comments. And I didn't say that sides are equal.

 

I'm a little unclear of the parliamentary processes, but I believe it is two steps: voting to bring it to the floor and the vote itself.
If a motion to vacate comes to the floor, it bumps everything else and must be voted on before the House can take up other business.

Normally, the Speaker would (hypothetically) bottle it up. (There's been only one in our history, and that was brought about by the Speaker himself.) But McCarthy changed the rule to get the Freedom Caucus to support his bid for Speaker, and now anyone can bring up a motion to vacate. I think it would still have to go before a rules vote, but if someone has the votes to remove McCarthy, that rules vote will be a formality.

The real question is whether or not Democrats would go along. Do not assume they will. They're not saying--and for good reason. They'll wait until it comes to a vote and McCarthy comes to them. Jeffries is going to want some sweetheart stuff to go along with retaining McCarthy. Ending this phony impeachment of the president would be a start.

If McCarthy doesn't deal, Democrats will likely vote to vacate and then watch the Clown Caucus do it all over again. But as McCarthy knows--just as Ryan and Boehner learned--there is no way to hold the Republican majority together on anything meaningful. Too many nihilistic bomb-throwers uninterested in governing, preferring the performance politics demanded by their voters.

Nancy Pelosi had similarly slim margins, but she didn't have these problems. Of course, Kevin McCarthy isn't half the woman Pelosi is. And, despite Lerner's assertions to the contrary, she didn't have anything like this to deal with. Under her leadership, Democrats were remarkably disciplined.

 

Talk about role reversal! Will Rogers mentioned not being a member of any organized political party; he was a Democrat. The shoe is now on the OTHER hoof!

 

It seems that you're agreeing with Rich's post that you responded to.

I too hope that the moderate voice in GOP prevails. I'm just not as hopeful as you.

If Trump was the only problem then I'd agree with you. But he's not. The problem is that I don't think Trump is the main problem. He generally tries to tell people what it is that they want to hear. It's true Trump has made things much worse by encouraging racism, anit-LGBTQ+ leanings, and anti-democracy inclinations, but all of those things would still be an integral part of many in the Republican base. For example, the Republican racism was put on the table when the 1964/1968 equal rights laws were passed and most of the racists in the country (like my parents) migrated from Democrat to Republican. The anti-democracy inclinations have been around since before Trump because the Republican party is concerned about their shrinking base as immigrants come in and minorities have a higher birthrate than the white population. The Republican party in 2012 did an analysis of their loss. They concluded that the Republican party needed to make themselves more attractive to minorities to improve their long range aspects. Trump shit all over that plan in 2016.

 

I thought I'd link to an article on the Republican "autopsy" of the 2012 election.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/03/what-you-need-to-read-in-the-rnc-election-autopsy-report/274112/

 

Well, you can't beat somebody with nobody which is why Mr. Biden will be the Democrats' nominee in 2024.

When the somebody is an incumbent, beating him with somebody else is also difficult. The thing about incumbents who got there through contested elections is that they are proven winners. Good candidates are reluctant to take them on. This can have unfortunate consequences. Ted Kennedy was not someone I liked or respected but the Carter nomination was doomed and we all pretty well understood that. The country ended up with eight years of the Cardboard Messiah.