Stoneage Ramblings

By John R. Stone

The long, ugly struggle for Republicans to first remove a Speaker of the House and then find a replacement shows how far our political system has deteriorated.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy was unceremoniously dumped by a conservative wing of the party, apparently over agreeing with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown after September, the time when the government needs to have a budget in place.

As the majority party it was the Republicans job to bring a budget bill to the full house, presumably after some negotiation with Democrats so it would known the bill would pass.

What apparently happened was that as the deadline neared McCarthy brought a bill to the Democrats that had not cleared his side of the House but which drew enough support from Democrats to pass at the last minute.

Shortly later, a relative handful of Republicans, some of whom openly preferred a government shutdown if their own wishes were not to be accommodated, moved to vacate the speaker’s chair. The Democratic caucus voted unanimously for McCarthy’s removal, joining some Republicans who made the motion.

I’m not sure the Democrats did the right thing, either, with the vote to vacate the chair. I can understand that they were allowed little or no input into McCarthy’s bill and were upset about that. What may have caused it was a Sunday morning newscast on which McCarthy blasted Democrats and gave them no credit for their action to avoid a government shutdown. Such credit would probably would have worsened McCarthy’s standing with Republicans, he may have blasted Democrats just to show his fellow Republicans he was a strong Republican himself.

If Democrats had just voted “present” they could have looked like the adults in the room and allowed McCarthy’s fate to be decided solely by Republicans. That could have been the first step in cooling this nonsense in Congress.

The problem we have as a country is that on some pretty significant issues it is seen as a weakness for either party to support something proposed by the other. Democrats probably could have supported a moderate Republican for speaker. But apparently they were united in not doing so. But then for a Republican to accept any Democratic support in the speaker race would be considered a violation of that person’s role as a Republican.

Actually some of the ultra conservatives had a couple of points with which I agree. For years Congress has failed to pass a real budget, the government has operated on continuing resolutions, merely extending the current year expenditures into the coming year. New money is added through other legislation.  Congress needs to approve a budget annually, it is its job. Secondly, I agree with the idea that Congress should not have taken its month-long August break without having approved a budget or a plan to have one agreed to by September 30. That was a Congressional leadership decision.

Republicans finally settled on Rep. Mike Johnson to be the new speaker. He comes from the most conservative side of the party. He’s relatively new as a Congressman and maybe that’s not a bad thing. One concern I have is that he was the architect of a plan to have the electoral college counts of four states not count in the 2020 election in order to flip the 2020 presidential election, a plan nixed by the Supreme Court. I have concerns about anybody of any party who seeks to invalidate legally cast votes without proof of fraud.

But maybe now that he is in a larger and more responsible role he will understand the importance of voters trusting the balloting system, a key factor in a democracy. So we’ll see how he does.

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Final count on the walnut harvest is 332.5 gallons of walnuts from our single tree.