Where does this idiosyncratic definition of “republic” come from that means something incompatible with “democracy”? I’ve heard it before (always in a US context), but the more usual definition of “republic” is just “a country whose head of state is not a monarch”.
It also is a prominent defense of unequal (by population; equal by states) representation in the Senate as a desirable feature rather than a defect in the US’s Constitutional design.
I think it comes from very specific, narrow, idiosyncratic understandings of democracy (unconstrained majoritarianism, either direct or representative) and republicanism (government by elected and/or appointed magistrates each and collectively exercising well-defined, limited authority.) Its a view in which democracy, like absolute monarchy, is the rule of men, whereas republicanism is the rule of laws.
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN, especially on flame-prone topics like partisan politics? We've already had to ask you this multiple times:
We want curious conversation here, not denunciatory rhetoric, fulmination, putdowns etc. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it.
p.s. No, this is not a function of which political side you're on. I don't know (I don't scan the comments for that) and it's the same either way.
> In many cases, the Freedom Caucus actually drives policy to the left, as they leave the leadership no choice but to use Democratic votes to approve must-pass spending bills or keep the government from shutting down. But this is exactly what many Freedom Caucus members desire: by withdrawing their support for leadership, they can position themselves as true and pure conservatives. When the leadership then has no choice but to cut deals with Democrats, the Freedom Caucus can hammer the leaders in public for being weak and unprincipled. In some sense the Freedom Caucus can’t lose, because every loss is just another betrayal by the hated GOP leadership, which is often exactly what they are seeking.
Interesting and probably accurate. But I think it underlines a more important point. The freedom caucus is basically an enemy faction to the mainline GOP. At some point they’re going to need to be disowned if they don’t fall in line. Probably quite soon if the orange loses the presidential run.
> some point they’re going to need to be disowned if they don’t fall in line
They're still being elected by their voters. In many cases, with high approval ratings. You aren't going to mute them without addressing their districts' problems.
They are a tiny minority. It makes no sense for them to have any influence whatsoever.
They are not really the problem. The problem is that your institutions offer no mechanism for a majority that agrees on a particular course of action to actually make it happen. Silly partisanship trumps running the country.
Perhaps you need to consider secret ballots in your legislature. That would eliminate partisanship in a trice.
> The problem is that your institutions offer no mechanism for a majority that agrees on a particular course of action to actually make it happen
Yes, it does.
What it also does, sometimes, is create incentives for that consensus on some important issues not to form for electoral tactical reasons that go beyond thr immediate issue, even where there would otherwise be consensus on the immediate issue. (Conversely, it sometimes creates a tactical incentive for majority consensus despite disagreement on the merits of the immediate issue.)
> Perhaps you need to consider secret ballots in your legislature. That would eliminate partisanship in a trice.
It wouldn't eliminate partisanship, but it would eliminate individual accountability of legislators to the electorate, making the system less democratic but equally problematically partisan.
Shrug. If they make an enemy of GOP leadership I could see a world where GOP leaderships decides it’s better to just cut them off. No more funding. No more Republican endorsement. They can just kick them out of the party. Would they be able to win elections as independents? Probably not imo.
It's a bit late for that, isn't it? 2019 was the last time that this was a practical option, at this point they're in a ride or die situation. None of the moderates are willing to declare themselves independent or split off as a bloc - they might get corporate donations but experience has shown that voters would punish them for their betrayal, even to the point of electing Democrats for one cycle.
> The freedom caucus is basically an enemy faction to the mainline GOP. At some point they’re going to need to be disowned if they don’t fall in line. Probably quite soon if the orange loses the presidential run.
They can't be disowned, practically, unless the rump GOP has a strategy for securing a majority without them (not just without those members, but also the people in the electorate and activist base thar share their views and are a significant share of the support for other GOP members.)
The whole speaker situation is the first time in a while I've seen Democrats effectively use game theory principles. Michelle Obama famously said "when they go low, we go high". This, sometime called bipartisanship, is provably a losing proposition in repeated games, like politics. One of the best strategies in the iterated prisoner's dilemma is tit-for-tat, which translates to "when they go low, we go low. when they go high, we go high". The downside of this strategy though, is that you can get trapped in a suboptimal state, where both sides continually fight against each other. The best strategy is probably something like a tit-for-tat with a rare, occasional olive branch. "When they go low, we go low, but every once in a while, we'll go high to see if the offer is reciprocated".
If the democrats had the wisdom to do so, they'd have backed McCarthy. Was he perfect (if you're a democrat)? No. Was he willing to at least keep the government from shutting down? Yes. You'd think that would be table stakes for speaker, but I digress.
It's a no brainer, they'd have him McCarty the balls, Matt Gaetz looks like a jackass, and they can use the leverage they have to keep the house doing its job.
Instead, we have pandemonium, no speaker, no plan to ensure the government doesn't shut down in a month, and Gaetz has something to crow about. Do the republicans look like a clown show? Sure. Is that a better overall outcome for the country than having a (barely, semi) functioning House? No (even if you're a democrat).
The whole goddamn lot of the house ought to be ineligible for reelection for failing to govern.
>"In the end, they all voted to remove McCarthy. Many people wondered afterwards why McCarthy did not offer the Democrats a bargain in order to sustain him. The answer is that the logic of the procedural coalition wouldn’t allow it. As with the Speakership vote in January, McCarthy didn’t need one vote, one time. He needed an ongoing procedural coalition. Unless the Democrats were going to form a permanent alliance with him, saving him on the vacate vote wouldn’t have done any good. In fact, it would have simply turned more Republicans against him, as whatever concessions he gave the Democrats would have certainly moved policy to the left."
So it either had to be a fully negotiated, lasting alliance for the rest of this Congress, or nothing. McCarthy did not make any moves towards such a thing, completely contrary to your assertion that they'd "have him by the balls". On the contrary right after the vote for the CR he immediately went on TV Sunday to try to backstab Democrats and (preposterously) say they were at fault.
> Do the republicans look like a clown show? Sure. Is that a better overall outcome for the country than having a (barely, semi) functioning House? No (even if you're a democrat).
This presupposes that the Democrats prefer "a better overall outcome for the country" over "the Republicans look like a clown show". It seems like the predominating political theory of the day is that any bad thing is actually good, as long as you can convincingly blame the other party for it.
I mean nobody is stopping the Republicans from doing a sober self-assessment and agreeing among themselves on some sort of compromise - other than Republicans.
Besides the factional issues described in the article, they also have several loose cannons in their ranks; George Santos, credibly charged with numerous frauds; Matt Gaetz, who has had his own brushes with the law and is a gleeful consensus-wrecker; and multiple hardline ideologues like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, and Andy Biggs, who are out at the ideological wings of the party but also have an apparently bottomless appetite for publicity, because their antics generate a reliable flow of donations which makes them less dependent on leadership for campaign funding.
There are multiple 'games' being played. The article is about the game within the Republican party, between leadership and the Freedom Caucus. The Democrats are playing a different game with the Republican leadership, which isn't the core focus of this article.
In the game between Democrats and Republican leadership, McCarthy promised to work with the Democrats on several issues and then back tracked multiple times. McCarthy then assumed that the Democrats would simply support him since the alternative was the chaos we have now. Democrats intentionally adopted tit-for-tat, and 'went low', which is why McCarthy is now no longer speaker.
By playing hardball, the Democrats have increased the chances that the next speaker will be a moderate willing to have some semblance of bipartisanship.
At the end of the day McCarthy chose to do the right thing by keeping the government open and doing a bipartisan bill with the Democrats.
The reality of it is that parties are not in the United States Constitution, and our enshrinement of them is becoming an increasing problem.
So let’s set the record straight, it was not Republicans that provided 95% of the votes to punish McCarthy. It was democrats. And when they’re looking at President Trump‘s second term in January 2025, this will be on them. There was a moment to showcase good government and defy extremists, and they chose what was electorally better for them but worse for the country. like they did the same when they started giving money to the most insane MAGA clowns, because they would be easier to beat in a general election. When the government is shut down because moderates were purged by the companies and parties reveal their moral and ideological corruption like this it plays into populist hands.
The parties are cancer on America. They will kill the democracy.
The parties are cancer on America. They will kill the democracy.
What is your proposed alternative?
(also: I think the analogy is flawed. The cancer on America would be the media and other moneyed influence. The democracy has been brain-dead for two decades already, and the parties are the only thing keeping it on artificial life support. Pulling the plug will not magically make the patient better)
Why should a Democrat with wildly different ideology support McCarthy for speaker, especially in light of his bad faith such as raising a spurious impeachment inquiry against Biden? Why should they believe that voting for a speaker opposed to what they believe is best for the country is best for the country?
This is a failure of government and unity within the Republican party. If there is some moderate that could form a coalition between the parties, great. Wonderful. Let them be speaker. But no Republican has tried (or at least, no one has gotten even a single vote across party lines).
This clown show does not enhance the image of the Republican party, instead lessening it. It only heightens the image of the ultra-conservative because their base is not rational and doesn't recognize that any result will be touted as a win.
I think the Democratic leadership has enough wisdom to see that the best long term outcome is probably for the clown show to be on full display so that maybe next cycle the voters will elect fewer clowns and more people who are at least capable of keeping the lights on.
> I think the Democratic leadership has enough wisdom to see that the best long term outcome is probably for the clown show to be on full display so that maybe next cycle the voters will elect [more Democrats].
That's not wisdom, that's cynicism and selfishness.
> The Democrats seem to be the single party that is capable of governing. It’s not selfish to want to replace dysfunction with function.
Not really. The Democrats take deliberate action to cultivate and perpetuate that dysfunction for partisan advantage. They scream about the danger of "Ultra MAGA" Republicans while supporting those very same people in primaries, and they refuse to take very easy actions to stabilize the system (e.g. not siding with Matt Gaetz's antics). That shows they're not interested in "replac[ing] dysfunction with function" but rather with acquiring power.
And the idea that the Democrats are the only party "capable of governing," is just propaganda or marketing. If you think about it carefully, "governing" is subtly redefined as being in relative harmony with Democratic party priorities.
> Not really. The Democrats take deliberate action to cultivate and perpetuate that dysfunction for partisan advantage. They scream about the danger of "Ultra MAGA" Republicans while supporting those very same people in primaries, and they refuse to take very easy actions to stabilize the system (e.g. not siding with Matt Gaetz's antics). That shows they're not interested in "replac[ing] dysfunction with function" but rather with acquiring power.
We're going in circles here. "[The Democrats] acquiring power" in this case, IMO, is replacing function with dysfunction. And the Democrats were trying to stabilize the system. After Gaetz made the motion to vacate, there were active discussions happening between moderates from both sides to pass rule changes to go along with saving McCarthy's skin. McCarthy decided to blow that up by not waiting for that to play out before holding the vote. One of the very few things that I'm in wholehearted agreement with Matt Gaetz is that a clear majority of the House did not trust McCarthy's word, and rightfully so. The Democrats have no obligation to save someone that they don't trust on the assumption that the Republicans would be unable to agree amongst themselves on a replacement.
> And the idea that the Democrats are the only party "capable of governing," is just propaganda or marketing. If you think about it carefully, "governing" is subtly redefined as being in relative harmony with Democratic party priorities.
Thank you for reminding me to think about it carefully. Ok, I've thought about it carefully. When I speak of the capability of governing, I'm speaking pretty close to literally. When the Democrats are in power there is no risk of the government shutting down and there is no risk that making our debt payments will be used as a hostage to achieve policy goals.
>> And the idea that the Democrats are the only party "capable of governing," is just propaganda or marketing. If you think about it carefully, "governing" is subtly redefined as being in relative harmony with Democratic party priorities.
> Thank you for reminding me to think about it carefully. Ok, I've thought about it carefully. When I speak of the capability of governing, I'm speaking pretty close to literally. When the Democrats are in power there is no risk of the government shutting down and there is no risk that making our debt payments will be used as a hostage to achieve policy goals.
You're not thinking that carefully. There's no risk of those things happening when Republicans are in power either. Shutdowns happen when the government is split and Republicans and Democrats refuse to compromise.
And your comment is a good example of the kind of propaganda rhetoric I was talking about: two sides won't come to an agreement, but half that equation is forgotten to take shots at the enemy. It's pure myside bias.
> You're not thinking that carefully. There's no risk of those things happening when Republicans are in power either. Shutdowns happen when the government is split and Republicans and Democrats refuse to compromise.
And your comment is a good example of the kind of propaganda rhetoric I was talking about: two sides won't come to an agreement, but half that equation is forgotten to take shots at the enemy. It's pure myside bias.
Well sure, if you don’t have a particularly good understanding of how the House works, then one might be tempted to lazily both-sides these fiascos. In reality, the House is a body dominated by the party in the majority. They have absolute control over the agenda. In the latest near shutdown drama, the Republicans were only trying to solve the issue themselves. There was no compromise for the Democrats to agree to. Once it was clear that he couldn’t avert the shutdown this way, McCarthy sought a compromise solution to get Democrats on board, and they quickly agreed. So stop with the gaslighting. As for the debt ceiling nonsense that only happens when Republicans control the House and there’s not a Republican President, no, you don’t reward hostage-taking.
> Here is a simple test to see if the republicans are ready to govern, select a speaker.
And here's the real test if Democrats are serious about being the responsible party: help deal with pricks like Gaetz instead of complaining while simultaneously chanting "not my responsibility."
Selecting a speaker is the job of the whole house, and there's nothing stopping Democrats from voting for a moderate Republican (and maybe they should stop trying to get those guys primaryed).
If they're not willing to do that, they should drop all the rhetoric about responsibility and dysfunction and say what they really want: a government that's as dysfunctional as possible whenever they're not in control.
Besides the fact that this argument is addressed in the article, consider the calculus from the Democrats' POV: They'd prop McCarthy up for the sake of continuity but with absolutely zero guarantees that he would come through on promises, and zero chance they'd get any credit for it from Republicans. At the next election Republicans would blame the Democrats for anything that went wrong, and their base voters would also blame them for letting the GOP get away with stuff.
It might seem unfair of me to say that Republicans would just be complete hypocrites like this, but consider the phenomenon of politicians taking credit for public works projects or similar even when they voted against the law that appropriated the funding for them.
Much of the US's governance relies on politeness, the assumption of good faith, and adherence to norms. It was a system destined to fail as soon as defectors realize the power they stand to gain by deliberately bringing the system to its needs (and then blaming their opponents for it, trusting that their own constituents are too gormless to realize or care).
In contrast, here's how the old Venetians elected the Doge, in a process so complex that it was presumably impossible to game to anyone's advantage:
"First, thirty members of the Great Council were chosen at random. Then nine of those thirty were chosen, again randomly. Those nine members picked the next set: forty people from the Great Council. And those forty? Twelve, randomly picked from their number, moved on to the next step. Those twelve chose twenty-five; those twenty-five were randomly pared down to just nine. Having fun yet? This set of nine members chose forty-five more; eleven were picked – again at random – from those forty-five. The eleven chose forty-one members. Those forty-one (finally!) voted for the doge. There were some additional checks against skulduggery. Each noble family couldn’t have more than one member in each group, and members couldn’t vote for their own relatives. Every time a set of members voted for the next group, more than a simple majority was required: around three quarters of the voting group had to agree. (For the final election, just 25 of the 41 had to agree.)"
It's worth considering how old the US version of democracy is, and how many systems came after.
Americans have a deep reverence for their personal brand, but it's worth considering they don't install their government model on countries they conquer. Japan, Iraq, Germany, etc are all Parliamentary.
This often had more to do with adopting a system that has some familiarity to the conquered country. In the example of Japan, allowing an emperor as a more permanent figurehead.
That’s not the reason that we spent the 20th century installing governments that look conspicuously unlike our own: it’s that the US model has been known to have several severe, practically irreparable flaws for more than a hundred years, among the kinds of people who study governments, and those same sorts of people had some say in how we set up new governments, and evidently not a lot of pressure on them to make those look like ours.
We can’t fix ours in-place—technically, yes, but practically, no, largely for game-theoretical reasons—so we’re stuck with, effectively, an obsolete constitution. Fortunately, those who’ve set up new states in our name haven’t been forced to install that same known-bad model, so they’ve done better.
> the US model has been known to have several severe, practically irreparable flaws
It's also a different context. The problem with presidential systems is they become despots. That historically hasn't been a problem in America, because it's a big country with multiple power centers.
A typical characteristic of a parliamentary system is that there's a system to trigger a snap election if nobody can command the confidence of the parliament. Unless the parliament you're copying is Norway's, which apparently serves fixed four year terms no matter what, this kind of nonsense wouldn't go on for long.
Except in most parliamentary systems (any that I'm aware of), this kind of impasse would trigger an election. In the US you just get unending gridlock.
> his kind of impasse would trigger an election. In the US you just get unending gridlock.
True. Would not help us before November 17th, though.
Also, parliamentary democracies do fall into the trap of back-to-back snap elections. Given the current situation is likely to change within thirteen months, I'm not seeing a fundamental advantage to a parliamentary system with respect to this dynamic.
That's fair. Israel's parliamentary system is famously dysfunctional (perhaps because they don't have a solid constitution) and systems like the UK and Japan are also moribund in many important respects, partly by design.
The UK is a bad example of a parliamentary system, because it's even older than the US and even more systemically broken. Can you believe it, the US actually learned from the UK's system and didn't make all of its mistakes (though it did make some bold new mistakes).
Agreed, a parliamentary system alone wouldn't fix the overall zero-sum dynamic of two parties. IMO that's why the most stable parliamentary democracies also tend to have proportional representation.
> Much of the US's governance relies on politeness, the assumption of good faith, and adherence to norms
This is more a post-War (or post-New Deal) problem. If the federal government shuts down, towns and states still function.
The problem is so much more, today, is interstate and global. As a result, the tendency towards gridlock absent consensus, previously more a feature than a nuisance, is now careening towards something existential.
> In contrast, here's how the old Venetians elected the Doge, in a process so complex that it was presumably impossible to game to anyone's advantage:
It's not particularly complex. The numbers may seem arbitrary (there's actually a deep logic to them, although they may have been found by trial and error) but you don't need to understand the numbers to understand the process: each jury elects a set of people for its successor, and then a random subset of the elected people are picked to actually form the next jury, and there are several rounds of this until the final jury elects the Doge himself.
It's not immune to negotiation and horse-trading, but it makes it harder; probabilistic systems aren't vulnerable to Arrow's theorem, so tactical voting is much rarer. In practice it diffused power from any individual or jury, and acted to preserve a stable oligopoly; it ensured there were enough noble families to fill out a jury, but not much more than that (and getting functioning government from them absolutely relied on politeness and good faith and all that). Whether that's better or worse than a two-party system is open to debate.
Yes, the point is not to advocate for Venetian rules themselves, but rather to demonstrate a set of rules that seem to have been at least somewhat designed for the properly adversarial context that is politics.
My snarky take is that the whole thing is a farce and the House hasn't been more than theater (in an Article I of the Constitution sense) in quite a while.
There hasn't been any proper budgeting since Bush43. Among the unmet demands leading to McCarthy's ouster was lack of regular budgeting order.
The House has had copious resources to do investigations out the wazoo, but it's actual, Constitutional job? No' so much.
MODEST PROPOSAL: if a Congress fails to do its basic job, then none of the jackwagons sworn into that Congress (either chamber) get to run for their existing seat when next up for election. Do you Monkey Fighting job, or get some people who will.
The judicial branch seems like a good candidate for this job by virtue of being a system designed to test the relationship between facts and laws. I imagine the relevant laws would have to be specified via constitutional amendment.
The fundamental asymmetry in power is that the far-right group does not care if the government is functional, they're there to destroy government as much as they can, so they have leverage over anybody that does care.
I don’t know how anyone can lead a house GOP with a faction that opposes any compromise, demands the ability to remove the speaker at a whim, and seems to have little interest in governance generally.
Seems like an impossible position.
The obvious path of forming a coalition with the other party seems like the only functional way forward.
I sure hope so. I absolutely loathe the phrase 'two party system'; it's not a system or an institution, it's just an emergent outcome of our voting mechanisms that has become a self-fulfilling prophecy while having absolutely no basis in law, statutory or precedential.
Unfortunately it's become embedded in American life as to become a thought-terminating cliche (though not as used here!): mentioning it typically produced a murmur of recognitional agreement, which then serves to drain the energy out of discussing problematic or perverse electoral and legislative outcomes. This has been exploited by politicians of all stripes to evade any sort of electoral accountability and shut down any new entrants into political markets.
Saying it’s not an institution ignores all the gating rules which make it harder for any but the two parties (and sometimes one party) to offer candidates; or for candidates other than those supported by an often remote party core vs more locally favored candidates.
I guess it is institutionalized, but I mean it's not formally enshrined anywhere as a policy or intended outcome, eg at the FEC. Like if you arrived on earth in a UFO or as an LLM and read all the official election documents, you might be able to infer that two parties were the most likely outcome but it's never explicitly stated.
My take is that the Republican Party is in such a great position of power now that splits are inevitable. To date, the famous Republican lock-step unity has been in everyone’s interest because otherwise they lose to Democrats. But if you have an insuperable advantage in most areas of government, maybe it’s time to actually argue about what you’re for.
Whether they’ve chosen their moment to have this split correctly, however, is up for debate.
Having no speaker is also a successful situation if you don't want the government to do anything, which seems to be the preference of some Republicans.
75 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36668491 (July 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29466650 (Dec 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29282769 (Nov 2021)
We want curious conversation here, not denunciatory rhetoric, fulmination, putdowns etc. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it.
p.s. No, this is not a function of which political side you're on. I don't know (I don't scan the comments for that) and it's the same either way.
Interesting and probably accurate. But I think it underlines a more important point. The freedom caucus is basically an enemy faction to the mainline GOP. At some point they’re going to need to be disowned if they don’t fall in line. Probably quite soon if the orange loses the presidential run.
They're still being elected by their voters. In many cases, with high approval ratings. You aren't going to mute them without addressing their districts' problems.
They are not really the problem. The problem is that your institutions offer no mechanism for a majority that agrees on a particular course of action to actually make it happen. Silly partisanship trumps running the country.
Perhaps you need to consider secret ballots in your legislature. That would eliminate partisanship in a trice.
Yes, it does.
What it also does, sometimes, is create incentives for that consensus on some important issues not to form for electoral tactical reasons that go beyond thr immediate issue, even where there would otherwise be consensus on the immediate issue. (Conversely, it sometimes creates a tactical incentive for majority consensus despite disagreement on the merits of the immediate issue.)
> Perhaps you need to consider secret ballots in your legislature. That would eliminate partisanship in a trice.
It wouldn't eliminate partisanship, but it would eliminate individual accountability of legislators to the electorate, making the system less democratic but equally problematically partisan.
They can't be disowned, practically, unless the rump GOP has a strategy for securing a majority without them (not just without those members, but also the people in the electorate and activist base thar share their views and are a significant share of the support for other GOP members.)
It's a no brainer, they'd have him McCarty the balls, Matt Gaetz looks like a jackass, and they can use the leverage they have to keep the house doing its job.
Instead, we have pandemonium, no speaker, no plan to ensure the government doesn't shut down in a month, and Gaetz has something to crow about. Do the republicans look like a clown show? Sure. Is that a better overall outcome for the country than having a (barely, semi) functioning House? No (even if you're a democrat).
The whole goddamn lot of the house ought to be ineligible for reelection for failing to govern.
>"In the end, they all voted to remove McCarthy. Many people wondered afterwards why McCarthy did not offer the Democrats a bargain in order to sustain him. The answer is that the logic of the procedural coalition wouldn’t allow it. As with the Speakership vote in January, McCarthy didn’t need one vote, one time. He needed an ongoing procedural coalition. Unless the Democrats were going to form a permanent alliance with him, saving him on the vacate vote wouldn’t have done any good. In fact, it would have simply turned more Republicans against him, as whatever concessions he gave the Democrats would have certainly moved policy to the left."
So it either had to be a fully negotiated, lasting alliance for the rest of this Congress, or nothing. McCarthy did not make any moves towards such a thing, completely contrary to your assertion that they'd "have him by the balls". On the contrary right after the vote for the CR he immediately went on TV Sunday to try to backstab Democrats and (preposterously) say they were at fault.
This presupposes that the Democrats prefer "a better overall outcome for the country" over "the Republicans look like a clown show". It seems like the predominating political theory of the day is that any bad thing is actually good, as long as you can convincingly blame the other party for it.
Besides the factional issues described in the article, they also have several loose cannons in their ranks; George Santos, credibly charged with numerous frauds; Matt Gaetz, who has had his own brushes with the law and is a gleeful consensus-wrecker; and multiple hardline ideologues like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, and Andy Biggs, who are out at the ideological wings of the party but also have an apparently bottomless appetite for publicity, because their antics generate a reliable flow of donations which makes them less dependent on leadership for campaign funding.
In the game between Democrats and Republican leadership, McCarthy promised to work with the Democrats on several issues and then back tracked multiple times. McCarthy then assumed that the Democrats would simply support him since the alternative was the chaos we have now. Democrats intentionally adopted tit-for-tat, and 'went low', which is why McCarthy is now no longer speaker.
By playing hardball, the Democrats have increased the chances that the next speaker will be a moderate willing to have some semblance of bipartisanship.
This is a longer video but here AOC gets into the politics a bit more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahEgoH8UfLU
The reality of it is that parties are not in the United States Constitution, and our enshrinement of them is becoming an increasing problem.
So let’s set the record straight, it was not Republicans that provided 95% of the votes to punish McCarthy. It was democrats. And when they’re looking at President Trump‘s second term in January 2025, this will be on them. There was a moment to showcase good government and defy extremists, and they chose what was electorally better for them but worse for the country. like they did the same when they started giving money to the most insane MAGA clowns, because they would be easier to beat in a general election. When the government is shut down because moderates were purged by the companies and parties reveal their moral and ideological corruption like this it plays into populist hands.
The parties are cancer on America. They will kill the democracy.
What is your proposed alternative?
(also: I think the analogy is flawed. The cancer on America would be the media and other moneyed influence. The democracy has been brain-dead for two decades already, and the parties are the only thing keeping it on artificial life support. Pulling the plug will not magically make the patient better)
This is a failure of government and unity within the Republican party. If there is some moderate that could form a coalition between the parties, great. Wonderful. Let them be speaker. But no Republican has tried (or at least, no one has gotten even a single vote across party lines).
This clown show does not enhance the image of the Republican party, instead lessening it. It only heightens the image of the ultra-conservative because their base is not rational and doesn't recognize that any result will be touted as a win.
That's not wisdom, that's cynicism and selfishness.
Not really. The Democrats take deliberate action to cultivate and perpetuate that dysfunction for partisan advantage. They scream about the danger of "Ultra MAGA" Republicans while supporting those very same people in primaries, and they refuse to take very easy actions to stabilize the system (e.g. not siding with Matt Gaetz's antics). That shows they're not interested in "replac[ing] dysfunction with function" but rather with acquiring power.
And the idea that the Democrats are the only party "capable of governing," is just propaganda or marketing. If you think about it carefully, "governing" is subtly redefined as being in relative harmony with Democratic party priorities.
We're going in circles here. "[The Democrats] acquiring power" in this case, IMO, is replacing function with dysfunction. And the Democrats were trying to stabilize the system. After Gaetz made the motion to vacate, there were active discussions happening between moderates from both sides to pass rule changes to go along with saving McCarthy's skin. McCarthy decided to blow that up by not waiting for that to play out before holding the vote. One of the very few things that I'm in wholehearted agreement with Matt Gaetz is that a clear majority of the House did not trust McCarthy's word, and rightfully so. The Democrats have no obligation to save someone that they don't trust on the assumption that the Republicans would be unable to agree amongst themselves on a replacement.
> And the idea that the Democrats are the only party "capable of governing," is just propaganda or marketing. If you think about it carefully, "governing" is subtly redefined as being in relative harmony with Democratic party priorities.
Thank you for reminding me to think about it carefully. Ok, I've thought about it carefully. When I speak of the capability of governing, I'm speaking pretty close to literally. When the Democrats are in power there is no risk of the government shutting down and there is no risk that making our debt payments will be used as a hostage to achieve policy goals.
> Thank you for reminding me to think about it carefully. Ok, I've thought about it carefully. When I speak of the capability of governing, I'm speaking pretty close to literally. When the Democrats are in power there is no risk of the government shutting down and there is no risk that making our debt payments will be used as a hostage to achieve policy goals.
You're not thinking that carefully. There's no risk of those things happening when Republicans are in power either. Shutdowns happen when the government is split and Republicans and Democrats refuse to compromise.
And your comment is a good example of the kind of propaganda rhetoric I was talking about: two sides won't come to an agreement, but half that equation is forgotten to take shots at the enemy. It's pure myside bias.
Well sure, if you don’t have a particularly good understanding of how the House works, then one might be tempted to lazily both-sides these fiascos. In reality, the House is a body dominated by the party in the majority. They have absolute control over the agenda. In the latest near shutdown drama, the Republicans were only trying to solve the issue themselves. There was no compromise for the Democrats to agree to. Once it was clear that he couldn’t avert the shutdown this way, McCarthy sought a compromise solution to get Democrats on board, and they quickly agreed. So stop with the gaslighting. As for the debt ceiling nonsense that only happens when Republicans control the House and there’s not a Republican President, no, you don’t reward hostage-taking.
And here's the real test if Democrats are serious about being the responsible party: help deal with pricks like Gaetz instead of complaining while simultaneously chanting "not my responsibility."
Selecting a speaker is the job of the whole house, and there's nothing stopping Democrats from voting for a moderate Republican (and maybe they should stop trying to get those guys primaryed).
If they're not willing to do that, they should drop all the rhetoric about responsibility and dysfunction and say what they really want: a government that's as dysfunctional as possible whenever they're not in control.
It might seem unfair of me to say that Republicans would just be complete hypocrites like this, but consider the phenomenon of politicians taking credit for public works projects or similar even when they voted against the law that appropriated the funding for them.
In contrast, here's how the old Venetians elected the Doge, in a process so complex that it was presumably impossible to game to anyone's advantage:
"First, thirty members of the Great Council were chosen at random. Then nine of those thirty were chosen, again randomly. Those nine members picked the next set: forty people from the Great Council. And those forty? Twelve, randomly picked from their number, moved on to the next step. Those twelve chose twenty-five; those twenty-five were randomly pared down to just nine. Having fun yet? This set of nine members chose forty-five more; eleven were picked – again at random – from those forty-five. The eleven chose forty-one members. Those forty-one (finally!) voted for the doge. There were some additional checks against skulduggery. Each noble family couldn’t have more than one member in each group, and members couldn’t vote for their own relatives. Every time a set of members voted for the next group, more than a simple majority was required: around three quarters of the voting group had to agree. (For the final election, just 25 of the 41 had to agree.)"
https://generalist.academy/2020/11/06/the-election-of-the-do...
Americans have a deep reverence for their personal brand, but it's worth considering they don't install their government model on countries they conquer. Japan, Iraq, Germany, etc are all Parliamentary.
We can’t fix ours in-place—technically, yes, but practically, no, largely for game-theoretical reasons—so we’re stuck with, effectively, an obsolete constitution. Fortunately, those who’ve set up new states in our name haven’t been forced to install that same known-bad model, so they’ve done better.
It's also a different context. The problem with presidential systems is they become despots. That historically hasn't been a problem in America, because it's a big country with multiple power centers.
Not relevant. The House behaves like a parliament. It's currently hung.
True. Would not help us before November 17th, though.
Also, parliamentary democracies do fall into the trap of back-to-back snap elections. Given the current situation is likely to change within thirteen months, I'm not seeing a fundamental advantage to a parliamentary system with respect to this dynamic.
This is more a post-War (or post-New Deal) problem. If the federal government shuts down, towns and states still function.
The problem is so much more, today, is interstate and global. As a result, the tendency towards gridlock absent consensus, previously more a feature than a nuisance, is now careening towards something existential.
It's not particularly complex. The numbers may seem arbitrary (there's actually a deep logic to them, although they may have been found by trial and error) but you don't need to understand the numbers to understand the process: each jury elects a set of people for its successor, and then a random subset of the elected people are picked to actually form the next jury, and there are several rounds of this until the final jury elects the Doge himself.
It's not immune to negotiation and horse-trading, but it makes it harder; probabilistic systems aren't vulnerable to Arrow's theorem, so tactical voting is much rarer. In practice it diffused power from any individual or jury, and acted to preserve a stable oligopoly; it ensured there were enough noble families to fill out a jury, but not much more than that (and getting functioning government from them absolutely relied on politeness and good faith and all that). Whether that's better or worse than a two-party system is open to debate.
There hasn't been any proper budgeting since Bush43. Among the unmet demands leading to McCarthy's ouster was lack of regular budgeting order.
The House has had copious resources to do investigations out the wazoo, but it's actual, Constitutional job? No' so much.
MODEST PROPOSAL: if a Congress fails to do its basic job, then none of the jackwagons sworn into that Congress (either chamber) get to run for their existing seat when next up for election. Do you Monkey Fighting job, or get some people who will.
I don’t know how anyone can lead a house GOP with a faction that opposes any compromise, demands the ability to remove the speaker at a whim, and seems to have little interest in governance generally.
Seems like an impossible position.
The obvious path of forming a coalition with the other party seems like the only functional way forward.
By leading the House, not the House GOP. Perhaps we're seeing seismic activity in our two-party system's alignment.
Unfortunately it's become embedded in American life as to become a thought-terminating cliche (though not as used here!): mentioning it typically produced a murmur of recognitional agreement, which then serves to drain the energy out of discussing problematic or perverse electoral and legislative outcomes. This has been exploited by politicians of all stripes to evade any sort of electoral accountability and shut down any new entrants into political markets.
Although that will break the illusion of team red vs. team blue that has maintained power for 30+ years.
Whether they’ve chosen their moment to have this split correctly, however, is up for debate.