Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah said it well: “We stand wholeheartedly with Israel and support its right to defend itself.”
Yes. But if we are going to “stand wholeheartedly” for anything, the U.S. House had better get its act together. And soon!
On Oct. 3, at the instigation of spoilsport bad boy Rep. Matt Gaetz, House Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy was “deposed,” partly for daring to make a deal with Democrats not to shut down the government. Many Republicans were outraged by Gaetz’s sabotage antics. The trouble is, their justified outrage lasts about as long as a spring shower, and then those wavering jellyfish keep appeasing the extremists. Most keep trashing their credibility.
A Speaker of the House is required in order to proceed with any legislation. Extremist upstarts in the House – power-mongering grandstanders and loud-mouth show-offs like Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan and Lauren Boebert (to name just four) – are causing the Republican Party to implode due to their arrogant, divisive, legislative guerilla-warfare tactics.
Rep. Steve Scalise failed to get the speakership role after which Rep. Jim Jordan (Trump ring kisser and Biden basher) was nominated. As of this writing, Oct. 17, Jordan lost his bid for Speaker when 20 of his Republican colleagues refused to vote for him. His efforts to win the vote continue.
Serious, hard-working House Republicans look on, wringing their hands and rendered impotent by extremist crackpots.
Meantime, the genocidal Russian war against Ukraine continues as another vicious attack of unspeakable horrors happened in Israel and now in Gaza. This is NOT the time for the American Congress to be rendered ineffectual by a pack of obstructionist nihilists of the secretive House Freedom Caucus, whose subversive goal is more or less to dismantle the federal government and its institutions. It was founded in 2015 by none other than rabble-rouser Jim Jordan.
Previous House Speaker John Boehner called Jordan a “legislative terrorist.” Jordan was – and still is – a chief backer of the Big Lie (“Stolen Election!”) and regards the U.S. Constitution as a hindrance to his authoritarian schemes. Shades of Donald Trump.
Scenes from Israel were like a flashback of the nightmare images from the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States.
This is a catastrophic time: wars and rumors of wars; violence exploding here, there and everywhere; a climate out of whack claiming untold lives; spikes in drug overdoses; massive numbers of refugees fleeing violence and seeking any shred of hope; democratic institutions right here in this nation under constant threat from wackos. This is not a time for pathetic squabbling in the U.S. Congress. As the ostensible Leader of the Free World, America must stand up for freedom and democratic ideals, abroad AND here in America.
House extremist bullies keep feuding, fumbling, stuck in their own self-serving schemes, their discord, their inability to govern.
Contact your legislators. Push back! Tell them the U.S. Congress must be mended. Its members must learn again the democratic process of reasonable compromise can often help solve problems and prevent horrors – locally, nationally, globally.