After three weeks of chaos and uncertainty, the Republican House of Representatives finally settled on a speaker, right-wing Louisiana representative Mike Johnson. All they wanted was a warm body; what they got was a loose cannon.
Sanity Is Back
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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“third in line to presidency”
technically, given the current POTUS, Johnson is “2½th in line to presidency”.
Enjoy your brief respite of sanity.
Johnson as Speaker equals Joe Biden’s presidency coming to a grinding halt. The upcoming election cycle was already going to be humiliating for him and his party. But with Johnson deliberately sabotaging as much as he can by using the loopholes in the rules? Right now, the only path forward is to jettison Kamala Harris and replace her with a better-polling option (e.g., an inanimate carbon rod) so that the democrat voters, come Election Day, realize that they aren’t voting for Biden, they’re voting for the ICR, who will replace him about a week after the Inauguration.
Yup, that sure was a smart play on the democrats’ part, letting McCarthy get voted out of office. More 11-dimension chess from the people’s party. I wonder what the first thing Trump will do when he gets back into office will be.
A few of Trump’s challengers for the 2024 Republican nomination are reasonable (by traditional Republican standards) but there have not been reasonable challengers (by Democrat standards) to Biden for the 2024 Democrat nomination… except maybe this new guy Dean Phillips. What’s the low down on this guy?
The tea leaves are murky, but I’m going to stick to the current expectation of Donald Trump winning the party nomination. He has completely taken over the Republican Party. Barring his heart stopping (or being stopped), the party nomination is already Trump’s. If, by a miracle, the courts get him hauled off to jail, I suspect most of the “contenders” will simply give up completely at that moment because he will become unstoppable. He may spontaneously start ranting in German.
We’ve had Trumps in the past: the politicians who knew how to activate the baser sides of their voters. But this time, we’ve also got end-stage neoliberalism, the economic realities of a globally aging population, climate change, whatever the next Covid is going to be (will it conveniently come along just in time to shut everything down again so Joe Biden can duck another grueling campaign season), etc. …
Trump’s the only Republcan who can win the primary, so all the Republicans will, at the end of the day, support him in the general. Nov. 5, 2024, is just a year away. We’ll all be stunned and sickened with how fast that year will melt away.