Summary
The House GOP’s new rules package aims to weaken minority party influence while advancing a pro-corporate agenda.
Key provisions include shielding the House speaker from bipartisan accountability and fast-tracking 12 GOP bills without allowing amendments, including measures to sanction the International Criminal Court (ICC) and protect fracking.
Democrats, led by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), criticized the package for ignoring economic and social issues like inflation and housing while prioritizing tax cuts for billionaires.
Republicans plan to offset these costs by slashing social programs, sparking warnings of further congressional dysfunction.
Yeah, actually, they did. Millions of Democrat voters stayed home. Every single state shifted right.
You’re in the minority party. Republicans have control of all 3 branches of government, and many state governments shifted right.
Simply put, what the fuck are you going to do about it? Democrats have exactly zero power outside of sitting back and watching.
And yet they’ll still somehow get blamed for everything that’s coming.
No shortage of people that just stupidly (or with an agenda) blame dems for the shitty republicans. People on lemmy saying Reagan was Carter’s fault, for example.
That’s how abusers think. “Look what you made me do.” Look how you made me stay home and not vote so now we have trump.
More recent example: People on Lemmy continuing to blame the return of Trump on Biden and Harris. Harris wasn’t the perfect candidate, so of course the only reasonable thing to do was stay home and let Trump return to power. I mean, Liz Cheney showed up on stage to support her that one time. What else were voters supposed to do? This was all Harris’s fault, dammit!
As an outsider, Harris is worse than “not a perfect candidate”, she’s a really bad one.
Anything to avoid taking responsibility for their words and actions.
I don’t blame Harris but I do blame Biden. Biden should never have run in 2020 and certainly not in 2024. He was a failed presidential candidate in 2008 and earlier, but he used his association with Obama to win despite being a terrible candidate. His ego almost got Trump a second term in 2020 and ended up getting us a Trump term in 2024. Trump is not a good candidate, he’s not supposed to win. He only won and came close because he had the incredible good fortune of running against Hillary Clinton once and Biden twice.
It’s not their fault in the sense that Harris was a bad candidate or Biden was a bad president compared to his peers. They were both fine but they largely stuck to early 2000s platforms (or at least could not overcome that perception) and people clearly want something different. Many can tell that the trajectory of the past isn’t going to work out for them. Trump isn’t a good response to that but Democrats are perceived to be categorically opposed to acknowledging the sentiment and adjusting course. It’s not exactly rational but it is understandable that people in a bad spot aren’t particularly concerned about things getting worse because from their perspective things are already pretty bad.
Here’s the part where I have to strongly disagree with the rationale.
I get it. You’ve (proverbially speaking) been in a hole for 4 years, and all you’re being offered is a rickety old ladder that looks like it’ll fall apart as soon as you go up a couple of steps. I can understand why the guy saying he might drop a nice shiny new ladder might look more appealing. But that’s not what’s going on here.
The guy saying he might offer you a shiny new ladder is also the same guy who was responsible for throwing you into this hole 4 years ago in the first place. And in fact, he’s not even holding a ladder this time. He’s promising to throw you a shovel and telling you to dig deeper.
That’s why I disagree. It would be one thing if Trump were throwing around the usual empty GOP promises. But Trump, Vance, and Musk have all come out and repeatedly said they were going to impose hardships on the poor, they were going to impose tariffs on virtually everything, and acknowledged that prices would likely continue to go up, not down.
I understand wanting someone offering a better ladder if you’re in a hole. But my god, the last thing you do is vote for the guy with the shovel.
A rickety ladder would have been fine. What we were offered was a choice between a shovel and dynamite.
You absolutely do not get it.
This, exactly. Most voters are poorer today than they were four years ago. Biden would have been considered a decent or even excellent president in the eighties or nineties, but his slow and steady policies were not up to the task of solving the damage being inflicted on people by late stage capitalism.
And in a completely tone-deaf move Harris refused to criticize this approach and promised to be four more years of the same thing. To voters, that read as “Four more years of your budget getting tighter and tighter.” Against that, anything became a good option. Trump is the equivalent of solving a problem by throwing a molotov at it, sure, but from most people’s point of view, at least it’s a throw of the dice. They figure a chance of things getting better is more than no chance.
The same thing is most likely going to happen up here in Canada soon. If we end up with Pollievre it won’t be because anyone likes him, but because no one likes the alternatives.
Biden and Harris deserve plenty of blame over Trump winning
They’re just plenty more blame to go around
Biden should not have run, period. You’re oblivious.
Bingo. So many donvict supporters pulled this shit when donvict “won” in 2016 - “Obama and Hollywood made me do this. You deserve tRump.” And yes, that is totally abuser type of talk.
It is expected that the demons on the right - like Tucker Carlson [1] - will use this kind of talk, but what is so damned infuriating is when the Enlightened Centrists ™ and the “liberal media” say it as well.
[1] Tucker was saying that at some point, he may have to turn to fascism because of what the left Made Him Do, because “too woke” or something.
And they’ll continue shifting right, blocking a meaningful progressive agenda, and promote neoliberal “nothing will fundamentally change” policy until they are completely consumed/eliminated by the fascist plutocracy.
I mean, there’s always options, though if things start getting out of hand I suspect it’ll be narrowed down to some rather extreme options
The republicans have held the minority many times and obstructed the fuck out of our government. If Dems really care they can do a lot to prevent shit in congress.
We will see how much they actually care in the next 2 years
It’s a show. The only thing established party leadership cares about on either side is lining their pockets. The longer they keep us arguing about their disfunction, the more they rob from us. One class. Working class.
It’s easy to obstruct when you have any 1 of the 3 (house of reps, Senate, or presidency). They have none. The only tool they have is the filibuster and we’ll see what happens there.
It’s also easy to obstruct if you don’t care about having a functioning government at the end of the day.
This will be gone the nanosecond it becomes inconvenient.
Jokes on the Republicans-- Democrats like to watch [their party get effed]. So republicans are giving the democratic leadership exactly what it wants. We win again.
Good news! That’s what they’d be doing if they had power too!
/s
We need a DNC chair that’s not afraid to normalize primaries against Dem incumbents.
Otherwise someone in Pelosi’s district for example has no say in their representative, a bad incumbent would just deptess turnout until they die in office or a Republican flips the seat.
When an incumbent is defended no matter what and has millions in dirty money from the last general it’s not a fair primary.
And for Dem voters, active primaries turn into increased general turnout because people are invested in the process.
The issue is the DNC has been run by people who put “party loyalty” above all else, which sounds OK until you realize the loyalty isn’t to voters, it’s to donors.
“Blue no matter who” doesn’t work on Dem voters when they didn’t have any say in the candidate. It’s not uniting, it’s blindly following. And Republicans will always be better at that.
DNC needs to change how their primaries are run.
Politics aside, no way some outsider like Trump would ever win a DNC primary because of how they run them vs the RNC. I think the Dems ignore voter wishes then surprise Pikachu face when the milquetoast establishment candidates don’t get people fired up to vote.
That hasn’t always been the case, after Obama they made many changes like the “victory fund” that can be undone by a new chair.
I know you meant trump as an outsider to Republicans, but he gave so much to the DNC the Clinton’s came to his wedding. There are people just like trump giving to the DNC still. With the access trump got, he could be called a political insider for neoliberals. trump gave for decades and he isn’t the type to throw money around for no reason.
Not every single state, Washington went more left.
I think you meant to reply to the person who said:
Unless this is one of those things where if anything wasn’t explicitly refuted in a reply people act like you agree with it.
The house can’t do much, but the senate can use the same tactics Republicans did and block up everything.
Until the GOP gets rid of the filibuster. Which will happen the nanosecond Democrats use it to block Trump’s agenda. And then Senate Democrats can just pull up a spot on the bench next to the House Democrats so they can sit back and watch with them.
Yep. Democrats didn’t because it goes against norms, but Republicans don’t have any care about norms if it gets in their way.
They do if they think it would seriously harm then later.
Getting rid of the fillibuster at the wrong time could backfire. They need to get rid of it at a time when they might never lose power again if they do it.
That time is probably now.
Ha ha not Washington