Stop me if you have heard this one before, but Marjorie Taylor Greene is on another power trip.
In the span of just six months, I have gone from a cautiously optimistic supporter of the one vote rule for speaker removal to an ardent detractor. I now know just how massively damaging it is, not only to the country as a whole, but to the party as it is making the party look feckless and weak in an election year that could see record setting gains if the party could just achieve some things and get something positive to talk about and campaign on.
And remember, "we stood up to them" does not work in modern politics, at BEST you will be seen as the party of obstruction, and that is a modern political death sentence.
Many who support the Freedom Caucus' recent political machinations, some of whom are in my family, seem to conveniently forget that American elections are won in the middle, not on the fringe. You do not win the middle by diving hard left, or right, but by convincing those in the middle that you can directly impact their lives positively in the short term.
Ousting speaker after speaker after speaker and slowing the work of the house to a crawl will not do that.
If I am an independent, all I am seeing is a fractured party that is good for nothing, and who cannot be trusted to do anything for me because they are too busy trying to make the other guy look bad, and to make it worse, that other guy is wearing their same team jersey. You as a staunch conservative might not see it that way, but I promise you, the independents we desperately need to win over to take the electoral college in November do.
This is why Reagan talked so frequently about a "Big Tent." He wanted the Republican party to become that landing spot for the majority of Americans, and then to help them work through their conservatism over time, and let us be fair, there is more than one form of conservatism.
There is fiscal conservatism, social conservatism, moral conservatism, national or geopolitical conservatism, as well as economic conservatism (separate from fiscal conservatism). The Big Tent must be a place where all of these groups can come together and fight against leftism. When we are busy fighting against ourselves, how do we fight the other party?
This is because of the polarization which has forced those on the far right and left to say, "it is my way or nothing." This is exemplified by MTG's recent announcement that she intends to vote to vacate the speakership. I understood it with McCarthy, I do not understand it with Johnson.
You see, big tents are needed to win elections, but you do not get them if you are only going to cater to the purist, at least the purist as you see it. Speaker Johnson must balance, as all politicians do, the desires of his party against what is feasible given the makeup of the house and his ever shrinking majority.
What MTG does not get is that even if Speaker Johnson put up her bill, exactly as she wants it, it has beyond zero chance of being passed in the house, and yes, that means LESS than zero; let alone making it through the Senate where it would be laughed out in committee.
This further would add to the idea of fecklessness in the party and an inability to do anything positive to impact the lives of the people... upon whose votes these elections rest.
So go ahead, stomp, kick, bite, claw, fight, but understand, when the Democrats seize control because of it, I do not want to hear people kvetching about how they should not have. We HAD the opportunity to work to get things done, we did not, that is on us.
50% of what you wanted is better than 0% after a purist litmus test.
Do nothingism might fire up the base, but it loses elections.
Every time.
Left or right.
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