Discussion for article #233671
Isn’t “Republican Control” an oxymoron?
Aren’t these the same guys who gave us the Great Recession?
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Governing requires working together for a common good; a concept altogether foreign to the GOP. It would be like finding subtlety in a Mel Brooks movie.
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What’s interesting to ponder here is that this article makes clear what we’ve known for a while now. Boehner doesn’t have control of enough votes in his caucus to pass a bill that will both pass the Senate and get a signature from Obama. (The Keystone bill is the object lesson here.) So, say Boehner decides he has no choice but to put the clean DHS bill up for a vote, thus gaining its passage with Democratic votes, and then enough members of his caucus defect to depose him as Speaker. Whoever replaces him will likely be a Tea Party guy . . . but he’ll have the exact same problem Boehner has: control of some but by no means all Republican votes (this time, the moderates may be the loose cannons)–and in any event, there still won’t be enough votes to override vetoes (and judging by the conservative sites I visit, those folks still don’t seem to have figured out that Republicans don’t have enough votes to accomplish that).
The conservative folks simply have not demonstrated that they can think strategically or long-term, so it will be interesting to see what kind of lemonade they make out of this lemon.
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F*k those guys. Seriously.
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I knew it would be impossible after saying NO to everything for the last 6 years all of a sudden you are going to come in and start governing and you picked up more crazies than you had before,after the last mid terms.Popcorn down here .
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Anyone who has been paying attention who did not see this coming is an American exceptionalist…nearly everyone else understood this would occur but you…
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It’s an old story: Republicans in “control” of Congress = Lunatics in “control” of the Asylum.
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“…given Democrats’ aggressive use of the filibuster.”
I think this may be a bit of an overstatement. Whether or not Democrats are going to be as aggressive as Republicans in using the filibuster remains to be seen. We can hope.
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That sums it up. They’re thugs and nihilists. They would burn down the 3 branches of our govnt if they could get away with it and profit from the ensuing chaos.
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We know everything the Republicans are against. But we don’t know much about what they are for.
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Republicans can’t even cooperate with themselves. Whoda thunk?
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“Not with a bang but a whimper…”
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Silly libs expect the GOTP to use sugar with their lemons to get something drinkable.
The Teahadis are using napalm instead 
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In the US constitutional system of checks and balances the inability of Congress to do much is not a bug, but a feature. There have been occasional exceptional periods, often in times of crisis, like 1933 and 2008. There was also the period of 1964-66, which was largely driven by the Kennedy assassination. In the long periods between such spurts of activity, very little has gotten done. After all, to really do anything significant, a party would need to control the White House, the House of Representatives and have 60 votes in the Senate and 5 votes on the Supreme Court. Not likely to happen. To overturn that is going to require constitutional changes. One would be to eliminate mid-terms and make the voters live for 4 years with their electoral choices, as is the case in every other country.
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“McConnell needs bipartisan support”
Government is McConnell’s solution.
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More and more that seems the only explanation. These people are against democracy, civil rights, compromise, history, science, modernity, complexity, diversity, progress, communication, and reality itself. The few things they say they’re for—the popular vote and the Constitution come to mind—are instantly rejected when they produce results these people don’t like. I think they’d like to live in an eternal, unchanging, paradisal world where you’re never scared or confused or confronted by something you don’t like—who wouldn’t?—but as far as I can tell they’re not consistently for anything a sane society could achieve in the real world. We’re living through a very curious period.
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Congress needs to get out of Washington. Let’s transport all 535 members to a different American city or town every, oh, three months. First stop. Owsley County, Kentucky. Followed by Detroit. That would give them the right balance of white and black poverty, joblessness, heroin addiction, crumbling infrastructure, bad schools, and poor public transportation. Maybe, then, they’d reconnect with the American people. See them as real, not as groups to be insulted and marginalized. And maybe they’d stop manufacturing crises–shutting down the government, infighting, XL pipeline. Are these really the pressing issues of this nation?
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True enough, but was there ever a time when the government couldn’t accomplish its most basic functions, paying the bills and so forth, without repeated and potentially catastrophic crises?
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No, it’s never been as bad as it is now. But when the structure itself enables such behavior, it is only a matter of time before it happens and happens again. It’s like a poorly designed intersection-as long as there are no bad drivers, traffic can probably muddle through, but at some point, you really need to look at redesigning the whole thing.
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