The GOP-led House is in disarray and focused on all the wrong things. They couldn’t even get a bill to fund the Pentagon through a procedural vote because five of their far-right members revolted. And now Speaker McCarthy has pulled the continuing resolution to fund the government, one that was hammered out by the different factions this weekend, from any consideration because it also doesn’t have the votes.

Instead of doing their job and passing a budget—one they already agreed to earlier this year—they are preceding with an impeachment inquiry into President Biden because the Orange Guy insists he shouldn’t be the only impeached candidate up on stage. The hearing will now happen just two days before the government shuts down because they don’t have a budget in place.

This is the GOP in a nutshell, folks. Paralysis, political theatrics, and chaos.

@georgetakei

I have no love for the GOP my friend, but you are criticizing them for doing the one thing the democrats arent doing and should.... Vote their conscious rather than just agreeing with the group.

We **want** politicians who are there to vote whats right, not what their party tells them to vote.

@freemo

That depends on what they think is right. If someone is voting for terrible things, I'm not going to admire them for it because it's what their conscience tells them. I care somewhat more about what the politicians are voting for, than about whether they are showing an Independent Spirit by doing it. I'm fine with pols following the party line, if that line is actually good.

If a small group of Republicans is willing to harm the nation as a whole if they don't get to gut education, social services, food safety, etc, that is decidedly not what I "**want**" in any sense.

@georgetakei

@ceoln

> That depends on what they think is right. If someone is voting for terrible things, I'm not going to admire them for it because it's what their conscience tells them. I care somewhat more about what the politicians are voting for, than about whether they are showing an Independent Spirit by doing it. I'm fine with pols following the party line, if that line is actually good.

If you think independently and make good decisions, and that just happens to be in agreement with the party line, fine I have no problem with that.

But when its clear you are following the party line for sake of following the party line, espcially considering how poor a job the party is doing, then yea we have a problem. The problem is, I cant rely on you to make the right choice should the party become corrupted, so its not a good safeguard.

The democrats sadly have shown a pattern of voting the party line for the sake of voting the party line, group think has become very central to both parties, though moreso to the left it seems (based on george's post)

@georgetakei

@freemo

Thinking independently and making good decisions are not necessarily correlated! People can independently come to extremely bad conclusions.

I'm just saying that the quality of the decisions is far more important than whether they are arrived at independently.

Certainly if the group is going in a bad direction, then independence is good. But it's good because it increases the odds of getting to a good place, not because of some inherent virtue.

@georgetakei

@freemo

We have a very concrete example here, where a few "independent" Republicans are holding the government hostage because they want to gut important programs.

This may be "independent thinking" in some sense, but there's nothing good about it. They have diverged from the (bad) party line, in an EVEN WORSE direction.

@georgetakei

@ceoln

Actually its proof of the opposite.

So you are saying there is a good bill being proposed with good programs and the reason it was held up is because the republicans were split 44 (in favor) - 5 (against) and that is the fault of those 5 free thinkers. Meanwhile the democrats all 48 voted against the bill because they all stick together and tow the party line and see it as a GOP proposed bill.

So why are you blaming the 5 free thinkers in the GOP for stopping the bill rather than the 48 democrats who arent free thinkers?

Sorry the logic isnt following.

@georgetakei

@freemo

What? No. There are bipartisan spending bills that have passed the Senate with like 90+ votes. The GOP, which controls the House, has not introduced those bills, or anything else reasonable, despite there having been an agreement basically to do exactly that the other week. The only thing the extreme right has allowed to progress through committee has been junk including new abortion and trans care restrictions and like that.

The Democrats in the House can't just vote for a bill that hasn't even been introduced; that is not how it works At All.

I think your mental model of how the government actually works is a little oversimplified? We can both agree that it SHOULD be simpler and more sensible, but it's not.

Now if you're mostly just saying "would that we had people as willing to cause trouble for good as these extreme Republicans are to cause trouble for evil", I agree with the sentiment! :)

I just don't think willingness to cause trouble for what you believe is a virtue in itself; it depends what you believe in.

@georgetakei

@ceoln @georgetakei

> What? No. There are bipartisan spending bills that have passed the Senate with like 90+ votes.

We arent talking about bills, you are talking about this one which supposidly is a great bill and these 5 GOP people are ruining it

> The GOP, which controls the House, has not introduced those bills, or anything else reasonable, despite there having been an agreement basically to do exactly that the other week

Wait so now your saying the bill isnt reasonable? Soooooo... arent you saying that those 5 independent thinking GoP members stopped a **bad** bill from passing... ok so why are you saying independent thought is a bad thing, isnt this an example then of the independent thought of members of the GOP being a good thing since those 5 people just stopped this bad bill from going through?

It makes no sense, you are attacking them at being at a standstill for disagreeing, yet, dont actually want the bill to pass and literally all of the DNC agrees with these 5 GOP members and yet... somehow its a bad thing they dont all agree... man this is making me dizzy.

> The Democrats in the House can’t just vote for a bill that hasn’t even been introduced; that is not how it works At All

What, there was just a procedral vote, in the house, to introduce a bill. That vote was conducted by the house which consists of GOP and Dems.... of course the Dems get to vote when introducing bills... then they vote again when it gets to the sentate to pass it.

> I think your mental model of how the government actually works is a little oversimplified? We can both agree that it SHOULD be simpler and more sensible, but it’s not.

Pretty sure its not, I could tell you step by step the process to get a bill passed. This is the first one where it gets introduced int he house and involves votes from both sides to introduce it.

> Now if you’re mostly just saying “would that we had people as willing to cause trouble for good as these extreme Republicans are to cause trouble for evil”, I agree with the sentiment! :)

I mean that part is fairly valid, doing good and independent thought are obviously both criteria. With the democrats and the republicans doing evil not much else matters. But that doesnt make independent thought any less of a required virtue (along with goodness)

@freemo

"We arent talking about bills, you are talking about this one which supposidly is a great bill and these 5 GOP people are ruining it"

No, that's what YOU suggested, and I said "What? No.". I hope you're arguing in good faith here! There isn't just a single bill involved, and Congress doesn't actually work the way the little "how a bill becomes law" pamphlets say.

The 5 extreme Republicans are preventing the bipartisan bills that have passed the Senate, and could pass the House, from being introduced in the normal process. If the Democrats tried to introduce them on their own hook, every Republican would vote against them, because it would threaten their control to let them do that. And if Mitch forced them to a vote over the objections of the extremists, there would be a similar revolt.

If you don't understand how that works, I sympathize, but I assure you it's not "the House Democrats refuse to vote for the bipartisan bills that have passed the Senate just because they would have a Republican label on them". Some Democrats have been trying to persuade Mitch to introduce them and let them pass with broad D support, but so far he doesn't have the spine.

@georgetakei

@ceoln @georgetakei

> “No, that’s what YOU suggested

I never suggested it was a good bill at all. In fact I never said anything about if the bill was good or bad

The only thing i said is that the fact that the GOP doesnt engage in group think and people will disagree with their party and judge things independently is a good thing.

Regardless my stance works either way.

If it was a good bill then the 5 dissenting GoP voters int he house were not to blame, the 212 democrats who voted against it knowing it was a good bill but just to follow partiy lines are to blame. Ergo group think not independence is at fault.

If it was a bad bill, then that means those 5 dissenting GOP members out of the 435 members were the only ones engaging in independent thought and by breaking party lines were able to stop a bill that would have otherwise been bad and passed... again group think fails us and the independent thinkers save the day.

So literally what i said is accurate no matter how you dice it.

> I hope you’re arguing in good faith here

I very much am. I choose that argument because i mistakingly thought you thought the bill should be passed.. but as i point out above my argument works the other way just as well.

> There isn’t just a single bill involved

Yes this vote we are discussing is a single bill involved, it is called the Appropriations Bill. I dont even think you can have a single vote to pass multiple bills unless you collect those bills under a single bill. Which is exactly what we have here.

The name of that single bill is "Defense Fiscal Year 2024 Appropriations Bill"

This bill however itself contains many smaller bills collected into one.

> Congress doesn’t actually work the way the little “how a bill becomes law” pamphlets say.

When did I say that?

Ok... i mean no one here said it did...

> The 5 extreme Republicans are preventing the bipartisan bills that have passed the Senate, and could pass the House, from being introduced in the normal process

I mean that is mostly correct... but your language seems weird... You said earlier now it was a bad bill and should be stopped (earlier i thought you thought it was a good bill but whatever)... So if its a bad bill, then they arent extreme for stopping it... i mean unless you think all the democrats who voted against it are also extreme for the same reason.

> If the Democrats tried to introduce them on their own hook, every Republican would vote against them, because it would threaten their control to let them do that.

Ahh so the GOP would respond to the Dems introducing the bill the same way the Dems respond to the GOP introducing a bill... interesting, yea I can see how that is the GOPs fault lol

But yea its not right from either side... also not relevant to the context here.

> If you don’t understand how that works, I sympathize

Thankfully I do

> but I assure you it’s not “the House Democrats refuse to vote for the bipartisan bills that have passed the Senate just because they would have a Republican label on them”

Why are you using quotes around a thing I never said?

What I did say is that bills introduced by either side tend to be rejected by the other and we have very few if any bipartisan bills... but a bill is only bipartisan AFTER the vote so a statement like "refuse to vote for the bipartisan...." makes no sense.

> Some Democrats have been trying to persuade Mitch to introduce them and let them pass with broad D support, but so far he doesn’t have the spine.

Mitch will oppose bipartisanism at every turn, of course he wont let them.... just as the democrats do the same in return.

@freemo

There is no "it" which is a single bill that is either good or bad; that is an inaccurate oversimplification of what is going on here, and does not at all capture the situation. I've tried to explain that several times. The defense appropriations bill is just one version of one bill of a set of bills that need to be passed to keep the government open.

If you'd like to find out more about the actual situation that the OP was commenting on, the Axios article I linked to might be a helpful start.

@georgetakei

@ceoln

At this point i think you are not arguing in good-faith, but i also suspect it is not intentional and you think you are (so im not mad)..

There is an it, a very large it with many different sections... obviously you can agree with parts and disagree with others.. but there is one thing collectively to be voted. It is aggregately a good thing (the vote should be passed) or it is aggregately a bad thing (the vote should fail and it should go off for more revisions).

Just because a book has many chapers, and some may be good or some may be bad, it is erroneous to say there is no book and that it is not possible to say if the book, on aggregate, was good or bad.

> that is an inaccurate oversimplification of what is going on here, and does not at all capture the situation.

No it isnt, because it isnt an explanation of the entire situation, so it cant be an oversimplification of it. It is meant to describe on specific thing... either you think the vote should have passed, or you think it shouldnt... no matter how complex the system may be, this binary choice is still a binary choice (of course what you do after you dont pass it, wither improve it or drop it is another matter).

You keep trying to do mental gymnastics to some how make these 5 GOP people look bad for voting against party lines, yet somehow in the same breath agree that their vote is the one you agree should have been made... sorry you just cant do it and the more you try to pain that picture the weaker your argument will look.

> The defense appropriations bill is just one version of one bill of a set of bills that need to be passed to keep the government open.

If you saying there are other critical bills out thre other than this one... yea sure, of **course**... your point?

> If you’d like to find out more about the actual situation that the OP was commenting on, the Axios article I linked to might be a helpful start.

I've read (a lot of) the text of the bill, am intimately familiar with the procedures for passing new bills, am aware of the vote,am aware of the revision and anotation process, etc.

Can't imagine what about the situation that article is suppose to explain I havent already covered. So far you've said nothing I wasnt already aware of, and i have said nothing inaccurate about the process (at least not that you pointed out)... so what **exactly** do you think that article has in it that may be new to me? Obviously if there is something I'd be more than happy to read it, but my impression is it will just go over the stuff I am already aware of in far greater detail... maybe im wrong though. But yea, let me know why the article might be worth my time and ill happily give a read if it sounds like it will be.

@georgetakei