When the Republicans finally get around to selecting a new speaker, maybe the winner should take the oath of office using a copy of The Lord of The Flies instead of the Bible. Seems to me a book about squabbling children would be most appropriate. #uspolitics
@Jgmeadows It really needs to be emphasized that the #Speaker is elected by the whole house, not just the majority party.
Folks misunderstanding that is a large reason why we're in this mess in the first place.
@Jgmeadows I know you are, but that's not really the story here, and that's my point.
The GOP is largely unified. 90% of the members are on the same page, as evidenced by the voting roles and their ease of selecting a majority leader.
The problem is that electing a Speaker isn't up to the GOP. It's up to the entire House. So if you're focusing on GOP infighting when talking about electing the speaker, you might as well be talking about your infighting with the guys at the bar.
It's really not core to the process, and focusing on it lets other officials off the hook for their responsibility to get it done.
Every single member of the house needs to be held responsible for their votes that shut down the House and keep it closed for legislative business.
@volkris Sorry, I'm not going to blame the Democrats for not voting for an election denier.
@Jgmeadows I'm emphatically saying we should blame every representative for how they DO vote, not how they don't.
Democrats voted to shut down the House setting the stage for Jim Jordan to become the leading contender for Speaker.
If you really want to focus on Jordan for some reason, well, keep in mind that Democrats basically voted to support him.
It's cold comfort that Democrats later chose to vote in a way to keep the legislature shut down rather than for him to take the gavel, but it's a situation they set up with the votes they actually made.
Let me know when you criticize Republicans for not voting for Hakeem Jeffries as speaker.
@EFreethought @volkris I wouldn’t expect them to. When was the last time either party voted for a candidate from the other side when they had a majority?
My comment was meant for the other guy who wrote that Dems put us in this position. GOP is in majority, so it is up to them to run the House, not run it into the ground.
@EFreethought Thanks for clarifying.
@volkris @Jgmeadows do you still believe in Santa Claus? Everything is so partisan in the US.
@SaanichGuy Each and every representative in the House was elected by their district.
If we decide to elect people who toe a line with a political party, well we get what we vote for.
We should probably stop re-electing these jerks, but step one in that is calling them out for what they actually do.
And then voting for other people next time.
@volkris @Jgmeadows a common set of national election laws and non-partisan area design would be great starts.
@SaanichGuy @volkris Full disclosure writing as a Canadian watching, horrified, from north of the border. While it's not a perfect institution, I really like the fact that we have a non-partisan organization called Elections Canada that sets electoral riding boundaries across Canada. We have no shortage of politicians who would be all over gerrymandering if given half a chance.
@Jgmeadows people down here don't realize just how complicated districting really is because not only is it inherently complicated trying to figure out where to draw those boundaries, but now we have a whole series of state and federal law contradicting each other that both reject and require gerrymandering.
Take the recent Alabama case where it's been under. Reported that what the Supreme Court actually said was that the state was required to gerrymander, faulting the state for being out of compliance with federal law because it didn't gerrymander enough.
Yeah, just wrap your mind around that. That's how nuts the whole situation is.
@SaanichGuy @volkris We're at a point where everywhere is poisoned by partisanship.
@Jgmeadows I really think the real problem comes down to lack of reliable information, we have people being told sets of facts that are drastically different, and people don't have a good way of reconciling the stories that they are being sold by the ones who are supposed to be telling us all the truth.
If we can't agree on whether water runs uphill or downhill, how can we even start to address all of the more complicated questions that arise from that.
So I think it's not so much that everything is poisoned by partisanship, but that partisanship is growing to fill the vacuum as people struggle to deal with these disagreements of fact.
IMO that's the core problem, and if we had a way to address it, a lot of other problems would fade.
@volkris @SaanichGuy Misinformation and disinformation are key weapons in promoting extreme partisanship.
@Jgmeadows meh, I guess, but the problem is that the misinformation and disinformation is coming from sources that are not supposed to be political in the first place.
When you have major newspapers misreporting information on a daily basis, that can't be excused as just common partisanship. That is a much deeper problem.
And that's what we're facing right now.
@volkris @SaanichGuy Every media source is biased one way or another, to one degree or another. Sadly we don't see a lot of media literacy or critical thinking.
@Jgmeadows just to be clear, I'm referring to reporting that can't be excused by meer bias. I'm talking about major journalistic outlets misreporting everything from results of elections through results of scientific studies.
Just really inexcusable reporting.
In fact, one of the big ways I experienced this is when I start pointing out to scientific friends that the journalist misreported on a paper in my field, and then my friends start noticing journalists misreport papers in their own fields, and then they start noticing more and more misreporting after that.
This goes beyond just media source bias. This isn't a reporter, having a different idea about whether the temperature outside is a bit warm or a bit cool. This is literally misreporting a yes for a no, the number of votes cast, whether an indictment has been handed down, serious factual inaccuracies.
In this environment where different people are told substantially different factual claims, it's really obvious that stuff like political intrigue is going to step up to fill the vacuum.
So yeah, this is an ax I grind. It's a good bit of why I'm on here in fact, just to vent about the state of factual reporting in the world today.
@volkris I’m referring to the infighting of the GOP.