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Fleischmann left 'shocked' by would-be House Speaker McCarthy dropping out McCarthy abruptly withdraws candidacy for House speaker John Boehner, behind the tears
It has been increasingly evident that the Republican Party is falling apart, a victim of its rabid right minority, despite majorities in both chambers of Congress.
It has never been more evident than this week when that squawking minority hard-right group of 30 or 40 House of Representatives members proved they could topple two House leaders in a matter of days. CNN has aptly dubbed the fiasco "the House of Cards."
Even Democrats are holding their heads in their hands at the sight of more congressional idiocy at a time when Americans already think Congress is broken.
This Congress is broken, but the model our forefathers gave us is not. We just have to get the faulty 40 - otherwise known as the Freedom Caucus - voted out at every next opportunity. In Tennessee, that apparently includes Republican Scott DesJarlais, according to a map created by The New York Times.
Former Democratic Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts succinctly summed up the turmoil caused by the group that drove House Speaker John Boehner to step down and then forced Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., to pull his name out of contention after it became known that the Freedom Caucus would block his election. The caucus pledged support to Daniel Webster, a man who House moderates will not support.
"The House of Representatives, for all that they talk about the Constitution, they don't understand it," Frank said Thursday. "Compromise is not a personal choice. It's a necessity to govern."
That's exactly right, and exactly the reason Republican voters who are disgusted with Congress need to turn out this frat boy group whose sole agenda appears to be an anti-government goal of grinding our governing system to a halt.
And why? Can anybody tell us why? To defund first one or another program? Last year, it was Obamacare - which was originally the idea of the very conservative Heritage Foundation and tried out first, successfully, by Republican Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts. This year, it's Planned Parenthood, a program that helps millions of poor women obtain health care and birth control and, yes, abortions. And no, the abortions are not funded by government. And no, the group does not sell baby parts.
The real "why" is far more sinister. Calling these folks anti-government is just a nice way of saying they are anarchists. Traitors.
What these folks are doing to our Congress - and to the Republican Party - should be viewed as treason.
And the result for the whole of the country is likely to be a long cold winter.
This will likely make a government shutdown more probable than possible. And that harbors no good tidings for the economy.
These frat boys would like to blame everything on President Obama, as they've always made a habit of doing. Remember the days of the last shutdown when pundits - especially Republican-leaning ones - were saying maybe if Obama was nicer to these guys we could get things done?
Well, here we are looking at the Republican Party unable to pick a House speaker because of a replay from this hard-right faction. But this time, with the extortion going on within their own party ranks, they lay that earlier fallacy totally bare. It has never been anyone - not Obama, not Harry Reid, not Nancy Pelosi, no one - who has driven these malcontents and socially backward frat boys into their selfish corners. They started there, and they have dug in. They are nothing more than extreme ideologues.
Now the clock is ticking for exactly what the anti-government hard right wants - disruption. The Treasury Department has said it will exhaust its authority to borrow money to fund the government on Nov. 5. If Congress does not raise or suspend the government's statutory borrowing limit, the government would default on its debt days later, risking economic chaos, soaring interest rates and plunging stock prices. A month later on Dec. 11, a stop-gap spending bill expires. Without congressional action, much of the government will shut down.
To borrow an Oct. 2 line from New York Times' conservative columnist David Brooks: "Opposing the political class is not an agenda." Nor is opposing government simply for the sake of mutiny.
If the frat boys won't grow up, the normally quiet, reasonable American people who expect government to function must roar en mass at them to become part of the solution, not the catalysts of chaos.