volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@erikalyn no wording matters in legislative procedure.

After all, it's entirely possible that despite the vote McCarthy would continue. What the vote actually did was to shut the place down until he did. So emphatically, the entire point of the maneuver was to shut the House down.

As for voting for Jeffries, a lot of people don't realize that this isn't merely about an individual sitting in the chair. To change the party of the Speaker would likely involve major reshuffling of committee memberships throughout the whole chamber, and given that Democrats were willing to shut the thing down, I don't think they would be willing to negotiate favorable committee memberships, leaving that plan a non-starter.

I don't think Democrats are willing to form a consensus leadership with all that would be involved in it. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but again, their voting record tells me otherwise.

As it stands the vast majority of Republicans are trying to exclude the nut jobs, but the entirety of the Democratic caucus is actively casting votes that make that impossible, so that's where we are now.

Republicans aren't going to vote for Jeffries because of the committee memberships on the line, and Democrats aren't going to step out of the way because they are getting political points out of it, no matter how destructive that is.

@ravenonthill yep!
And so companies also agree with you, they think they should spend money in sensible ways, and that's why they invest in CEOs sometimes with very large salaries, because they worry that trying to save money when hiring a CEO will leave them worse off in the long run.

So there you go. Pretty good explanation for CEO pay.

@trevorflowers

@erikalyn here's a link directly to the House clerk's office where you can see that no, the vote was not about McCarthy.

I can link to the rules of the House to explain farther, but that is harder to pull up because it comes down to pages in a really old book.

Yes, the story that went around was that this was about saving McCarthy, but that story was false. The question before the House was whether to declare the chair vacant and shut it down.

Republicans voted overwhelmingly against the nut jobs. Without Democrats' support the nut jobs would have been rightly just laughed right out of the room. It's only with Democratic cooperation that the nut jobs were allowed to stay.

Heck it's even possible that the nut jobs would have been expelled from Congress all together, but no, the Democratic support meant that instead of being kicked out they were instead effectively put in charge.

Thanks, Democrats.

https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2023519?Page=2

@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.

@SaanichGuy

@NanoBookReview Oh I'm certain of it, and yet I would say as bad as those effects are, they're not really comparable to Jim Crow.

It's like the person who is asked to work late too often comparing themselves to slavery. Yeah, certainly an issue, but orders of magnitude matter.

@ravenonthill so are you saying maybe we should... not spend as much money? :)

@trevorflowers

@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.

@SaanichGuy

@erikalyn nobody was asked to save McCarthy! I really hate that that narrative made the circles a couple of weeks ago.

The question in front of the House was not about saving McCarthy. The question was, do you want the house to keep functioning, or do you want these nut jobs to be in the driver seat, shut the whole place down, and then let them have huge amounts of influence to choose the next speaker?

(Well okay, the first part of that at least)

So Democrats backed the nut job effort to shut the house down, setting up this situation where they now have a huge amount of influence in what happens next.. Great.

So I'm saying we need to hold the Democrats loudly accountable for their vote to shut down the House and hand control over like this.

It has nothing to do with McCarthy. That dramatic storytelling got a bunch of clicks for certain journalists, but it was a gross misleading version of what question was actually before the chamber.

And yes, I was quite irritated about it🙂 because it lets elected official off the hook to buy that distraction.

@ravenonthill I mean if you want to burn your cash, Well it's yours to burn.

@trevorflowers

@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

@ChemicalEyeGuy

Keep in mind that with the first past the post voting system that is used almost everywhere in the US, political parties end up being a way to address the problems of that voting system.

It's a HUGE problem for people to waste their votes, casting votes strategically by guessing how their neighbors are going to vote, and their neighbors are doing the same strategy, so naturally people start to organize, and that's how you get political parties.

It's just people trying to overcome the problems with that voting system.

The real solution is to move on to a better voting system. Then we wouldn't need political parties to overcome those issues.

But so long as we keep this voting system, political parties are a solution to a very real problem, and we can't just do away with the solution without addressing the problem.

@heidilifeldman

@erikalyn stories about the rule changes have been pretty exaggerated. Heck, you could even say the nut jobs were fooled with pretty inconsequential rule changes that the idiots didn't realize were inconsequential.

For example, take the headline issue of the number of people required to move to declare the chair vacant. Lowering the number to one really doesn't matter if sanity is just going to boot the nut jobs out of the room anyway.

Unfortunately, Democrats backed the nut jobs and empowered them to shut the chamber down. The rules change didn't actually make a difference there so long as Democrats were willing to partner with the nuts.

And it still doesn't matter now because whether the rule is reverted, so long as Democrats are willing to shut the chamber down with the nut jobs, it means there are still votes to close the place regardless of the rules.

So long as Democrats are voting with the nut jobs, the nut jobs are basically in charge. So here we are.

People really need to reevaluate their decisions to re-elect their representatives based on this circus.

@erikalyn none have run for Speaker because given the Democrats' voting strategy they can't mathematically win.

So there's no point trying.

The current vote distribution gives all of the power to the nut jobs, which really stinks, but that's just the reality based on this situation.

@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.

@Jgmeadows

@squig@mastodon-uk.net meh, the simpler explanation is that he has a career of profiting off of attention even running for president gets him a ton of attention.

Which you are giving to him here.

So I don't think we need to assume all of these extreme explanations when the simpler explanation suffices.

@getalifemike this makes me think about the really fundamental philosophical idea that a person should not be punished for something they didn't do.

To hold automakers financially liable when someone kills a person with their product is to find them guilty of something they didn't do.

It's always a red flag that it's not such a good idea.

@erikalyn Well right, this is pretty much the natural and expected result since given the voting strategies, Republicans have no choice but to seek permission of a handful of awful members.

So long as Democrats continue to vote as a bloc, moderate Republicans don't have the numbers to vote a decent person in, so they have to court the extremists to get the vote over the line with awful candidates.

No matter what happens from day to day, we can expect this result from that situation.

@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.

@arush when did Trump shit on American Jews?

(I mean everything that comes out of his mouth is shit, but I don't remember a particular occasion)