My Johnson...sorry, Mike Johnson...is about to run into the same problem every Republican Speaker has faced since the emergence of the Chaos Caucus in 2010: Republicans don't understand that our government is designed to run on compromise, and therefore we are going to get an unnecessary government shutdown around the holidays.
While Longman places this at the feet of the House caucus, I think it's worth considering how almost no one values the idea of compromise anymore. In fact, before the Chaos Caucus took over last fall, the Democratic House and the nearly evenly split Senate managed to pass a bunch of compromise bills (the so-called Shadow Congress). They only did so because no one was paying attention. As soon as the idea of some sort of compromise legislation became public, it would be impossible to pass.
We have this rickety, archaic 18th century form of government that isn't working because one party assumes that marginal control of one half of one branch means they get to call the tune. There are echoes of this in leftist complaints about Biden not being able to give everyone a pony, but it's much stronger on the right. Put another way, there is no way the House GOP's behavior would pass a middle school civics class.
No comments:
Post a Comment