Americans Love A Good Rebel, Right? Bad Rebels... Not So Much

The Amy Gardner-Marianna Sotomayor headline early yesterday morning was House Rebels Pushed To Change Congress. Will They Make It Harder To Get Things Done? I thought to myself, “Self, this is going to be a negative story about the GOP fascists. BUT, you’ve always been a rebel in everything in your life; keep an open mind.” And do we really want Congress— particularly this Congress— to get things (ANY things) done? They’re off to a terrible start with one anti-Choice bill and one bill to protect rich tax cheats.

As far as the “rebels,” their demands for “single-subject legislation, more time to read bills and the right for all members to propose amendments,” that’s all much-needed improvements over the authoritarian way the two party establishment prefer Congress operate. Gardner and Sotomayor ask “whether those changes will allow anything to get done.” Let’s hear the argument against the reforms.

“Republican and Democratic critics [meaning the establishment] alike say the concessions— most of them part of an informal agreement between the 20 dissenters and McCarthy— will allow a small group of lawmakers to grind the legislative process to a halt.” Maybe not so terrible with this Congress and when it’s a Democratic Congress— if the rules don’t change— it could force the establishment Dems to pay more attention to non-establishment members.

But they quickly veer away from the reforms to scare tactics about “high stakes,” “budget battles,” and “a looming deadline to raise the nation’s debt limit and avoid a catastrophic default.” If that’s what the Republicans want to do— default— let the voters decide what to do about them.

Their next paragraph is weird: “By several measures, the House has grown unwieldy over successive speakers from both parties.” OK. “Unwieldy” means something along the lines of “too big or badly organized to function efficiently,” unmanageable, unmaneuverable…” They then mix up the problem for the establishment with the problem for the “rebels” or reformers: “Rank-and-file members have little opportunity to debate or amend bills largely written behind closed doors in leadership offices— let alone read them.” Yes that was a real problem— under Boehner, Ryan and Pelosi. That’s what the rebels want to ameliorate and what the establishment is seething over.

Congress enacts fewer pieces of legislation, and those bills have grown longer, according to a Brookings Institution analysis— in some cases by thousands of pages. Members regularly complain of hidden or unrelated provisions tucked into legislation.

The holdouts last week were trying to change that, they said, and exact fiscal demands from McCarthy that are likely to dominate the legislative calendar this year.

…After witnessing the difficulty of getting a majority of their colleagues to elect McCarthy as speaker, some Republicans privately worry that their razor-thin four-vote margin will make it difficult to reach consensus on several urgent fiscal matters that loom.

That’s right. And it means the mainstream conservative Republican majority will have to compromise— either with the fascist fringe or with the Democrats. And then, at least in theory, the voters will decide if they did the right thing or not. Democrats— both the mainstream establishment types and the partisans who are eager to give the GOP a black eye— are claiming the sky is falling because of the new rules. They “say they fear the new rules governing how the House operates will make it difficult, if not impossible, to get basic things done. They argue the concessions McCarthy made to the rebels were more about political expediency than about trying to improve the workings of Congress. On Tuesday, Pete Aguilar, a coked up imbecile, read some talking points he was handed claiming “the GOP rules package ‘is laying the ground work toward dysfunction, defaults and potential government shutdowns that none of us want.’” Probably true, but that says something about the fascists who have been elected, not necessarily about the quality of the reforms themselves.

Unlike Aguilar. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) is no fool. She’s a close ally of Pelosi’s, a former landlady to Rahm Emanuel and the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee. She “accused Republican leaders of having ‘traded away the well-being of the American public, and our national security, for personal gain. For a vote. No way to run a government and no way to govern.’” Again, that speaks to the quality of the elected officials in question— the subpar leaders like McCarthy, Scalise, Emmer, etc and the members of the fascist fringe, like Boebert, Perry, Gaetz, Traitor Greene, Biggs, Jordan and their newest ally, George Santos— but not really about the utility the reforms themselves.

Congress must increase the debt limit this year or put the nation at risk of defaulting on its debt— an outcome that all agree could cause the dollar’s value to plummet and cripple financial markets around the globe. Yet many Republicans, including the dissenters, want to exact dramatic cuts in domestic spending in exchange for avoiding such an economic emergency. The legislative branch must also fund the government by Sept. 30.

House Republicans are staunchly against passing a single legislative vehicle filled with trillions of dollars, informally known as an omnibus bill, over the traditional process of passing 12 individual appropriations bills. Congress hasn’t passed separate appropriations bills in both chambers by the mandated Sept. 30 deadline since 1997, when Bill Clinton was president.

According to an agreement between McCarthy and the dissenters, Republicans will reject any omnibus bill sent by the Senate even if the 12 separate bills fail to pass. They plan to support only short-term funding until their bills are adopted, putting Congress in a tenuous position almost 10 months before the government funding deadline.

Many Republicans say now that the fireworks have faded, their conference is united behind this plan.

“What you saw last week, there was conversation about change in the way that Washington works,” said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (LA), who supported McCarthy all along but is now embracing what the dissenters fought for. “And that’s really at the heart of what the rules changes addressed last night that was passed overwhelmingly by our members, because Washington has been broken.”

There are reasons amendments have been barred at various times on the floor of the House. For instance, members of the minority party have tended to gum up the process with “poison pill” proposals designed to dilute a measure or make it harder for members of the majority to vote for it.

That could have particularly dire consequences during an appropriations process in which each of a dozen spending bills is considered separately. The longer the process lasts, the greater the possibility of a government shutdown.

Maybe it’s time to put on your big-boy pants and figure out how to deal with poison pills outside of creating an authoritarian speakership. And we all know that omnibus bills are generally horrible and anti-democratic ways to run a government. The heart of the problem Gardner and Sotomayor identify is a problem with a dysfunctional electoral democracy that has been corrupted by Big Money, gerrymandering and other anti-democratic devices to dilute the legitimate interests of the working class. “Pelosi,” they wrote, “held a narrow majority in the last Congress, but she struggled far less with party unity, at least out in the open, than McCarthy has. Experts say that may reflect an asymmetry between the parties: Democrats, including those on the far left, want something out of government and have an interest in seeing it continuing to function. Republicans on the hard right believe government is far too big and many are open about wanting its functions disrupted.” The voters should be able to sort that out. Why are the Democrats incapable of getting them to do so? Maybe their lesser-of-two evils— or two VERY evils— is what the problem is, not being able to study a bill for 72 hours before voting on it. The duo of Washington Post writers noted that “[Newt] Gingrich defended the dissenters’ push for a balanced budget. But he criticized their apparent willingness to risk default on the nation’s debt if they don’t get the budget cuts they seek— a scenario he called ‘the fiscal equivalent of a nuclear weapon’ that could spook investors from putting their money in the United States, cause the dollar’s value to plummet and potentially cripple financial markets around the globe.”

“[Chip] Roy, the Texas Republican,” they wrote, “disputed the idea that he or his fellow dissenters would allow the nation to default. For him, last week’s showdown was largely about demanding budgetary reforms— cuts in spending— in exchange for support for increasing the debt limit. ‘Not one member of the United States Congress wants to default,’ he said. ‘But under no circumstances should we bless a so-called clean increase in the debt ceiling without meaningful spending reform.’”

That’s where compromise comes in... and setting a record for voters to consider the next time members are up for reelection. Maybe if parties treated voters like rational beings, they would behave rationale beings. That might be more challenging for the political establishment-- not to mention for frauds like George Santos (or Anthony Devolder or who ever he is). And, on that note... on Thursday, Jake Tapper asked Paul Ryan about the Santos mess. Ryan toldthe CNN audience that it isn’t as case of “an embellished candidacy. It’s a fraudulent candidacy. He hoaxed his voters, so of course he should step down.”