Photo via Chip Roy for Congress - chiproy.com
Rep. Chip Roy
Rep. Chip Roy
It should be obvious by now why the dysfunctional House Republican majority is incapable of passing funding to operate the U.S. government without bipartisan Democratic support. The majority of House Republicans no longer support the American government.
Every day is January 6 for the MAGA Republican extremists controlling the House. That will be the most important political issue facing America in the 2024 presidential election, but for now it’s also an enormous problem for the Republican party.
House Republicans are trapped in a box with their defeated ex-president and his most violent supporters who joined his mob attack to overthrow democracy and keep Donald Trump in power after Americans cast the most votes in history to end his presidency.
Because Republicans have done nothing for seven years to distance themselves from Trump’s election lies and open contempt for American democracy, it’s easy to lose sight of how politically destructive that’s also been for the Republican party.
But as 2023 comes to a close, some of the rightwing extremists who were most supportive of Trump seizing control of their party are realizing how little he has ever cared about using the presidency to benefit anyone other than himself.
What Have We Done?
Listen to rightwing Texas Congressman Chip Roy, the Machiavellian goateed Freedom Caucus leader who engineered removing House Speaker Kevin McCarthy for agreeing with President Biden to only slightly cut spending levels for the current fiscal year that began on Oct. 1.
“I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing — one—that I can go campaign on and say we did,” Roy angrily jabbed a finger in the air as he berated his colleagues a week ago. “Come explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done.”
There’s a very good reason why MAGA House Republicans haven’t passed anything at all on their own for an entire year. Hard-core Trump extremists are demanding hundreds of billions of dollars be slashed from federal spending to try to sabotage the continuing job growth, rising wages and declining inflation for working Americans in Biden’s steadily improving economy.
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It’s more likely to be vetoed by Biden to call more attention to Republican extremism, be rejected by a bipartisan majority of Senators whose statewide elections can’t be gerrymandered or finally wipe out the razor-thin House Republican majority in a high-turnout presidential election by continuing to flip moderate suburban districts to vote Democratic.
It has to be politically significant that even though House Republicans are controlled by a minority of hard-core Trump extremists, they continue to depend upon the Democrats Trump despises to pass important legislation. Speaker McCarthy was immediately removed from House leadership because he avoided a threatened Republican government shutdown over raising the debt limit by reaching an agreement with Biden passed with support from House Democrats.
Who’s This Guy?
Then, after rejecting the two most prominent rightwing Trump supporters for the job, Republicans elected Speaker Mike Johnson, a Christian nationalist member of the Freedom Caucus few Americans knew existed. The first bill Johnson passed delayed two deadlines for passing House spending bills to January and February relying on Democratic votes. He couldn’t pass the delay with Republican votes alone because the Trump insurrectionists voted against it.
Republicans continue to welcome Trump’s bigoted attacks on women, racial and religious minorities and LGBTQ Americans as an opportunity to roll back decades of progressive U.S. legislation and Supreme Court decisions protecting equal rights for all Americans.
More than 150 years after the Civil War ended, Trump created a radical, rightwing supermajority on the Supreme Court that has declared states’ rights victorious in that war. From now on, federally protected Constitutional rights for women to make their own decisions about their lives and affirmative action protecting equal rights to educational or employment opportunities for racial minorities will only exist in states where legislators or courts honor those rights.
It could take decades for presidents after Trump including Biden to restore a court majority enforcing Constitutional rights nationwide. Until then, Americans are using their right to vote while it still exists to restore Constitutional rights state by state for everyone in our democracy.
It took 15 years and three straight elections in what were previously low-turnout, April off year court elections for voters to elect a Wisconsin Supreme Court committed to protecting Constitutional rights and the rule of law instead of partisan, rightwing Republican politics.
The court is now discussing protection for abortion rights and creating fair voting districts to elect a state legislature representing the state’s more evenly divided population instead of corrupt Republican political gerrymandering. Voters are turning out in record numbers to protect abortion rights and reduce partisan gerrymandering even in Republican-dominated states.
That will never be more important than in 2024 when Democrats will be the only major political party to nominate a candidate committed to protecting the Constitutional rights of every American.
