"You control nothing": House Republicans brace for life in the minority - Polidicks

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/29/us/politics/house-republicans-minority.html About two-thirds of Republicans returning to the House for the 116th Congress this week have never experienced the exquisite pain of being on the outs in an institution where the party in charge is totally in charge. Majority control runs the gamut from determining the floor agenda to determining access to the prime meeting space. It will be a rude awakening for many who have known only their exalted majority status. “They say you will have a lot more time on your hands and will vote ‘no’ a lot more often,” said Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who was elected in the 2010 wave that handed control of the House to Republicans in President Barack Obama’s first midterm election. Mr. Kinzinger said the culture shift might be hardest on those colleagues who, unlike himself, believed the election was going to turn out quite differently. “We have come to grips with the shock of the election,” he said, “but the shock of governing will still be a wake-up call for some people.” “You control nothing,” said Representative Peter T. King, the New York Republican who will be experiencing his fourth transition in House power — 1995 to Republican control, 2007 to Democratic supremacy, back to Republicans in 2011 and now another reassertion of Democratic might. “ Coping with a change in House control is a relatively new phenomenon for Republicans. Before their stunning seizure of the House in 1994, Republicans had been in the wilderness for 40 years and were quite used to it.

Spineless, complicit, treasonous bastards. Get fucked.

Are we supposed to have sympathy?

No, schadenfreude.

"oh god we can't control anything" ya you guys were going to end up in the minority someday what did you think standing on the minor party's windpipe was going to achieve?

“Being in the minority is a chance to think big picture and be visionary and make sure we are drawing the contrast between us and the Democrats,” Ms. McMorris Rodgers said. “As Republicans, we really need to focus on what it is going to take to win back the voters we lost in 2018.” Sign Up for On Politics With Lisa Lerer A spotlight on the people reshaping our politics. A conversation with voters across the country. And a guiding hand through the endless news cycle, telling you what you really need to know. “We lost too many women, Republican women, in the suburbs and we lost men and women,” she said. “We must win hearts and minds, and we can do it.” By appointing more people like Kav, trying to outlaw abortion and running the Cheeto again 2020. I'm sure you guys will do fine.

Same thing was said in 2012 after Romney got fucked. After Trump gets tossed out, expect someone further to the right of Trump to be nominated next time.

Can't go much further right without being a nazi

Pretty much. The Trump faction is disgusting and fascist as fuck. I hope GOP either reforms and goes far more left or just dies, as long as the Trump wing doesn't completely control the US.

the only thing a nazi deserves is a knock upside the head, a sham trial, and a free jail cell tbh

Without the House the GOP can't -Do more tax cuts -Do sham investigations -Protect Trump -Pass legislation without having Democrats in the conversation -Write budgets The Senate would just block his appointments, and make removal from office a little easier with a few less GOP senators needed for conviction.

Well, Dick Cheney probably isn't interested in being the president again, but he is older, whiter, and much more to the right than Trump

I mean, prior to the Nazi's, we had never seen evil on such a massive scale. At this rate, I could totally see the Republicans going so far right that they make the Nazi's look like saints.

I hope you useless pieces of treasonous shit get to watch as everything you care about is taken away from you, piece by piece.

It's not necessarily that the Nazis were more evil than anything we've ever seen before (but they're waaay up there on the list), it's more that they industrialized it on a scale never before seen.

I mean sure there was lots of evil before, Colonialism and Religious/ethnic cleansing such as the Spanish Inquisition come to mind, but I can't think of many other scenarios in history that are more revolting than what went down in Nazi controlled lands, and concentration camps. Perhaps the Japanese during that same war were arguably worse(Nanjing comes to mind).

The House Republicans when Obama was in office made a rule that the House can basically take any official documents from the President for examination and transparency. As far as I know, they left this rule in effect which means the Democrats have open access to Trumps presidential documents. If they use them right, not only will they be able to openly obstruct his far-right policies, but be able to show the American people how crazy Trump is.

From what I've seen, a .30-06 does the job even better.

I mean they've actively working towards it. They're quite happy right now to simply let kids die in federal custody, and there is growing, open disdain for minorities throughout the party and the idiot in the oval office is the son of a Klan member and an unrepentant fascist.

If this were right after the election, I'd be right there with you. But then you get the atrocities in the immigrant detention camps and people's responses to them and I'm suddenly not super sure any more.

You guys really going to say those deaths were intentional?

Is complete apathy towards them really that much better?

Sure. They have open disdain for minorities and the entire reason for the current treatment of them by the federal government is to cause them harm. And on the smaller scale their active refusal to properly care for the people in their custody is because they don't want to provide then proper care.

I can't see that, but I can't say I believe myself either. Child detention camps are made out to be a necessary evil. How long until we see abuse justified as guards just doing their job, keeping the rowdy migrants in check? Observable reality doesn't matter anymore. These days a black man lying on the ground gets his jaw broken, and it's "a running stance" that the cop was justified in stopping with a kick to the face. I'd like to believe in basic human decency too, but team sport politics are often stronger, and dehumanization of illegals is already mainstream GOP rhetoric. An all-out death camp, no. But a detention facility, deregulated to the point where inhumane treatment is expected? Places where cultures of abuse form out of lacking oversight? Incidents that are suppressed and information that is manipulated? That is without mentioning the violent "tough guy" attitude encouraged by a president that supports torture. And, of course, racism. The road to genocide is already paved. I can hope the Democrat's wave will sustain, but I can't know if the GOP will truly be forced to reform in any significant way. It could be that the shifting of the overton window is enough to support them, alongside strong candidates like Nikki Haley, and Trump's SC appointments, signaling to base and establishment alike that he can protect conservatism. By then, years from now, how much abuse will have been justified? How many deaths will have gone brushed under the rug? I can't be sure that if worse comes to pass, death camps - or places functionally identical to death camps - won't be dismissed like things are today.

The infrastructure is there, the dehumanization and hatred is there; it's just a matter of time regardless of whether or not you want to shove your head in the sand. Children have already died in their custody, even if it was apparently from sicknesses they obtained on the way up to the States, and that's not even getting into the physical and emotional abuse they are going through.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D. And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now youlive in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way. This quote's feeling relevant again It bothers me how often I keep looping back to it

Trump's presidency isn't absolute nor will he stay in power until he dies of lead poisoning.

If anything fucked up happened in human history. It always has a chance to come back in some form or another. Cause this is Humanity we're talking about. Humanity has and will always have the potential to inflict terrible suffering and prejudice upon its own kind. For fuck sake, we're so good at it, at one point we industrialized the way of killing one another at maximum efficiency. I'm not saying this with a Misanthropic way. I'm saying this as a warning. I do believe humanity can steer itself away from the road of self-destruction and Chaos. Yet i also believe it can continue going down that path if it forgets it's past mistakes and/or is manipulated by others who benefit from this journey of Chaos. And nothing is Permanent. These forces of self-destruction will continue to plague humanity until it's end. It's a constant fight to stop ourselves from going down that path. There's no "We fixed it, everyone can go home now". We will always be fighting against this. Cause we are human. Self-destruction is a part of our nature.

Tinyhands is not the problem Stop doing this Stop blaming Tinyhands for this Tinyhands is doing a lot of damage and is a colossal shitheel, make no mistake, but never forget that the United States still has functional checks and balances to its power and the only reason he's able to cause as much damage as he does is because the people who are supposed to make sure those checks and balances work are a bunch of spineless, money grubbing shitheels They could reign him in at any time. The branches of the United States government wield an immense amount of political clout, but they're staffed heavily with Republicans. Republicans are holding a great deal of power right now, and I think their absolute refusal to use even a little bit of it and their refusal to even do so much as speak about the problems of this administration until they';re safely out of the line of fire and on the path to retire is a thunderous cacophony. It's the loudest silence and most conspicuous inaction in recent US history and I deeply implore anyone and everyone to not let them scuttle out from under the shadow of their responsibility Tinyhands is not the problem. He's a symptom. Tinyhands didn't just happen. The foundations for this administration have been years, even decades in the making, and make you no mistakes, it is very much deliberate. Tinyhands is everything the Republican political machine has been working for these last few decades. He's another Reagan. A brazenly corrupt, ego driven, loud mouthed, slack jawed, brainless idiot who plays so wonderfully to the cameras, polarizes the extremists, and draws the spotlight further and further away from the party itself

Which is why the worry is bigger if Trumpism lives on without Trump This is a big question, with lots of correct answers, but what lead to him? Why are we here in the first place? We don't know the extent of Russian influence, but we do know that Putin didn't make America racist. Trump, himself, does not matter as much as the conditions that got him the Presidency. He only tapped into what was already there. What is still here. And still will be, come 2020. With 90% Republican approval, can we say for sure this isn't the new normal for conservatism?