The GOP Is A Rudderless Ship. And If The Democrats Are Smart, They Can Play It

I always kind of expected it from a feckless, tongue-tied jerk like Kreepy Kevin McCarthy, But what I didn’t expect was that all of the wheels would come off of the GOP jalopy at the same time.

Let’s start simple, with The Man(ge) Who Would Be Speaker, McCarthy. The election was held on November 3rd. Today is December 14th, and McCarthy is no closer to the Speakership than he was on November 9th. In fact, if anything, he’s even further in the hole. McCarthy has thrown so many promises and bribes around that even if he manages the miracle, he’ll end up looking like a Philosophy PhD trying to pay off his student loan debts while working at DoorDash.

In desperation, McCarthy has called in the Big Guns to solve his problems, kind of like a wimpy 8 year old siccing his high school football player big brother on the class bully. McCarthy prostrated himself once again, probably having to tongue wash Trump’s Mar-A-Lago golf cart, in order to get Traitor Tot to hit the phones and work whe whip count for him.

Which brings us to the 2nd broken leg of the GOP 3-legged coffee table. Apparently the Never Kevin caucus seems to have grown more of a spine than either McCarthy or McConnell, and they’re hanging tough, telling His Lowness to go and fuck himself. They’ll deal with the little weasel themselves. And yes, this is Glorious Bleater they’re talking to. Apparently the 2022 midterms taught them a lesson about Trumpenstein’s reach.

And it’s not just the Never Kevin caucus. Trump is going down like a porn star. A new poll released shows that a majority 61% of GOP voters want the Trump agenda to be the platform in 2024, but without the Klown Kar train wreck that The Trumpster Fire brings with him everywhere he goes. And new polling shows that FL GOP Governor Ron Pissantis is clobbering Trump in head-to-head matchups. Personally, I’ll keep my powder dry on that issue until The Trumposaurus gets his teeth into that little weasel.

2 legs down, and 1 to go. Mitch McConnell. And Moscow Mitch would love to come out of this debacle appearing to be the adult in the room, and the sage elder leader of the party. But that ain’t gonna happen either, Dooley. Rick Scott challenged McConnell for the Senate Minority Leader sopt, the first direct challenge of McConnell’s career.

And news today is that while McConnell has reached a bipartisan, long term spending bill to prevent the McCarthy MAGAt’s from shutting the government down before January 15th, there are rumblings that GOP renegades like Hawley and Scott may use their singe votes to stretch the whole thing out, and make it more difficult. The Grim Reaper of the Senate isn’t used to being defied like this, but hey!, sucks to be him, doesn’t it?

The Ultimate Arbiter, the kindergarten teacher that’s supposed to come back in the room and send the little scamps to their nap mats is of course Ronna Romney McDaniel, the RNC Chair. But you can’t even get her to go on the record saying that it was Trump who led to the shitty midterms if you held a gun to her head. I know, I saw a Sunday morning talking head try it last weekend.

This is incredible. There is literally no coherent, authoritative leadership to be found in the GOP. The RNC is going broke paying Trump’s burgeoning legal bills, The GOP House doesn’t even have a frontrunner for the Speakership going into the holiday break, and McConnell’s autocratic hold on his Senate caucus is broken. If he wants to get something done, then he’s going to start doing something he hates, making deals in his own caucus. And there are a couple of vulnerable GOP Senators in 2024 who would rather get things done for their constituents, as well as that moderate GOP caucus in the House that is already committed to results vs politics.

Which is a golden opportunity for the Democrats in both chambers. In the Senate, Schumer has a clean advantage, and he knows how to use it. And facing a tough reelection in 2024, and having spent the last 2 years watching a kayak navy paddle out to his boat mansion to kick his ass, Manchin may be a bit more amenable to playing ball on targeted exceptions to the filibuster to get things done. Which would leave Sinema all alone on a very lonely island, trying to light an SOS signal fire for rescue.

Since Schumer became the Senate Majority Leader, he has danced rings around McConnell. And with the insurgent rebellion from his right, it makes it easier for Schumer and moderates like Klobuchar and Baldwin to peel off moderate GOP Senators who are sick of the bullshit.

The same goes for the House. Let’s just say McCarthy manages to crawl and snivel his way into the Speakership. There is no coherent governing plan for the GOP, it’s all going to be one endless mosh pit of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and Impeach President Biden. And whether it’s a bill generated in the House that would be popular at home for that pesky 20-25 member moderate GOP caucus, or whether it’s a bill forwarded from the Democratic Senate that would play home, a unified Democratic caucus can always go looking for the 5-6 moderate GOP votes to threaten McCarthy with a dispatch petition on the floor of the House to force a vote.

But here’s the cherry on top. It doesn’t really matter for the Democrats. Because even if they never snag a GOP Senate vote to pass a bill, and even if they never get enough moderate GOP House votes to pull off a discharge petition, the Democrats still win!  Because they can spend the next 2 years showing themselves as trying to do the people’s business, and highlighting how the GOP House’s conduct mirrors nothing of what they ran on in 2022. Meanwhile, the GOP caucuses in both chambers will be doing their best impersonations of a WWE Mass Elimination Cage Match. And if the results of 2018, 2020, and 2022 showed one thing, it’s that the majority of voters are sick of partisan gridlock, and want results. And that includes an increasing large bloc of young voters looking for positive change. And when you throw in a potential Trump-DeSantis death match, the GOP’ is going to look ridiculous.