Floriduh Man- Matt Gaetz is the dog that caught the car...now what??
Now the accused pedophile is learning that acting on your personal vendetta may have lasting consequences
Silk is a fine, delicate, soft, illuminating, beautiful substance. But you can never rip it! If a man takes this tender silk and attempts to tear it, and cannot tear it, is he in his right mind to say "This silk is fake! I thought it was soft, I thought it was delicate, but look, I cannot even tear it" ? Surely, this man is not in his right mind! The silk is not fake! This silk is 100% real. It's the man who is stupid!
C. JoyBell C.
Follow your heart, but take your brain with you…take your meds.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA)
It may not always seem like it, but I do try to find good things about the people I write about. It’s just that there are so many Republicans in the House, especially in the Freedumb Caucus, who make it virtually impossible to find anything good. So it is with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who will go down as having engineered the first ouster of a sitting House Speaker in American history.
Rep. Gaetz is hardly an intellectual or legislative giant. His only known allegiance is to The Former Guy (TFG). If TFG ordered the Floriduh Congressman to kneel before and perform an act of “worship,” I suspect Gaetz would ask a staff member to find his kneepads.
Beyond that, Rep. Gaetz views politics as a zero-sum game- the equivalent of mortal combat in which the goal is to utterly crush Democrats under Republican bootheels.
To crush your enemies, to see them fall at your feet — to take their horses and goods and hear the lamentation of their women. That is best.
Genghis Khan
Now that Rep. Gaetz has used his personal vendetta to turn Kevin McCarthy into an ex-Speaker, the story may not be over. The consequences may only be beginning for Rep. Gaetz.
Karma can be a real bitch, and few have accumulated more karmic debts than Floriduh Man.
It may be that Rep. Gaetz won the battle to remove McCarthy as Speaker but isn’t nearly intelligent enough to win the war to save his own skin.
That should surprise no one who’s followed his tenure in the House. Floriduh Man has the morals of a snake, the intellect of a below-average ninth-grader, and the ethics of the late Dr. Josef Mengele.
His career is a karmic comeuppance looking for a place to happen.
Rep. Matt Gaetz stood in an unfamiliar spot Tuesday as he pressed his case to boot Rep. Kevin McCarthy from the role of House speaker — the Democratic side of the chamber.
By the time Gaetz (R-Fla.) finally made good on his long-standing threats to force a vote to topple McCarthy (R-Calif.), his Republican colleagues were so fed up with him that they wouldn’t let him debate from within their caucus, banishing him to the minority Democratic side of the room.
Gaetz’s successful fight to remove McCarthy from the speakership has cost him in his own conference, lawmakers say. The GOP on Tuesday was considering expelling Gaetz from its caucus. McCarthy, meanwhile, told Republicans he would not seek reelection as speaker after Gaetz pushed him out.
“I’d love to have him out of the conference,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) told reporters Tuesday. “ … He shouldn’t be in the Republican Party.”
Floriduh Man’s response to the potential threat to his position in the GOP sounded like Kevin McCarthy’s “Bring it on” comment before the House voted to force him out.
Unwarranted confidence? Or the forced arrogance of a dead man walking?
In a GOP conference that has in recent years devoured its own — ostracizing members who have spoken out against former president Donald Trump and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol — so far only Gaetz seems to be at risk of formal dismissal.
Asked whether he was afraid of being exiled, Gaetz responded with the same brashness he brought to the House floor during the debate over McCarthy.
“If they want to expel me, let me know when they have the votes,” he said.
The GOP disdain for Gaetz, aside from the handful of hard-right Republicans who joined his motion to vacate the speakership, was clear all day Tuesday.
“You all know Matt Gaetz,” McCarthy told reporters after he was ousted. “You know it was personal.”
Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.) assailed the Floridian on the House floor for soliciting campaign donations on the back of his motion to vacate the speakership.
“It’s what’s disgusting about Washington,” he said.
“That’s not governing,” McCarthy added. “That’s not becoming of a member of Congress. … It was all about his ethics. But that’s all right.”
Rep. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.) referred to Gaetz as a “Republican running with scissors.”
Republicans eating their young is neither new nor particularly newsworthy since TFG came on the scene. The House Republican Caucus has devolved into a Right-wing daycare center, so the “Republican running with scissors“ analogy hardly seems out of character.
The only power Rep. Gaetz has had to wield in this Congress is the House rule allowing any member to file a motion requiring a vote to remove the Speaker. It was a condition of Kevin McCarthy attaining the office after 15 humiliating ballots in January.
Over the past nine months, Rep. Gaetz has repeatedly threatened to invoke that rule, claiming that the Speaker had not held up his end of the bargain (he hadn’t). The nature of the agreement elevating McCarthy into the Speaker’s chair meant that his balls were in a vice, and the Freedumb Caucus controlled the lever.
Being a small minority of the GOP’s majority, the Freedumb Caucus demanded an outsized influence on policy, something McCarthy was neither prepared nor able to deliver. Rep. Gaetz demanded absolute fealty to the Freedumb Caucus’ agenda, which would’ve been a disaster for the country.
Not that Floriduh Man cared or understood that.
Gaetz was McCarthy’s main obstacle to the speakership in January, leading a band of rebels who refused to vote for the longtime GOP minority leader for the first 13 rounds of roll calls. In the 14th round, Gaetz softened his stance, but only slightly. He voted “present,” not a vote against McCarthy but also not in favor — and not enough to hand him the speaker’s gavel.
McCarthy approached Gaetz on the floor, then walked away, appearing dejected. Meanwhile, Rep. Mike D. Rogers (R-Ala.) stormed over and lunged at Gaetz before being restrained by Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.). The Floridian sat unperturbed.
McCarthy was elected speaker after midnight in the 15th round of voting when Gaetz and other right-wing hard-liners voted “present,” lowering the threshold McCarthy needed to win office.
But by then, McCarthy had struck deals with those hard-liners that hemmed him in. The most noteworthy concession: A single member could bring a “motion to vacate the chair,” or call for a vote to remove the speaker.
Gaetz threatened to wield that power for months, then made clear on Sept. 12 that he would seek to depose McCarthy, when he said the speaker was “out of compliance” with the deal he struck in January.
Gaetz demanded McCarthy rectify those supposed breaches by instituting steep budget cuts during the September fight to fund the government and abandoning a spending deal McCarthy had made with President Biden in June. The president and speaker agreed to suspend the debt limit in exchange for limiting growth in federal discretionary spending. Conservatives quickly soured on that arrangement, which drew large numbers of Democratic votes on its passage.
Gaetz threatened to invoke the motion to vacate if McCarthy did not back away from that deal and instead pass 12 appropriations bills with draconian spending cuts. And if McCarthy made an end run around Gaetz and relied on Democratic votes to keep the government open, Gaetz would invoke the motion, too.
Rep. Gaetz’s approach was a “my way or the highway” approach. The Speaker could accept Floriduh Man’s legislative hostage-taking or face a vote to take away his gavel.
Worse, if he had the temerity to try to achieve anything resembling bipartisan consensus, Rep. Gaetz would scuttle the ship and send it to the bottom. The government would shut down, and he’d force a vote to remove McCarthy from the Speakership.
Rep. Gaetz’s attitude has become all too representative of the ugly partisanship infecting the GOP on Capitol Hill today. Take what we’re offering without change or hope of bipartisan consensus…or we’ll burn the whole goddamn thing down and blame you for it.
That position was too extreme even for many highly partisan Republicans, who knew there would be Hell to pay if the government shut down and they returned home to face their constituents. They’d have to explain how one intransigent Congressman who didn’t give a damn about anyone or anything except his narrow agenda managed to shut down the government in a fit of anger.
So, when the Speaker pushed through an agreement to continue funding the government for 45 days…and it passed, Floriduh Man lost his…um, equilibrium. He filed a motion demanding a vote to vacate the Speaker’s chair.
In an historic 216-210 vote, Democrats- with eight Republican defectors- excommunicated Kevin McCarthy. The House of Representatives, arguably rudderless under the best of circumstances, could now be compared to an oil tanker floundering with neither a rudder nor a captain.
Rep. Gaetz said that the House must now go through a “grieving process,” but the reality appears to be that the GOP must now decide what to do about Floriduh Man. As a party that’s always valued and enforced lockstep discipline, the GOP has a loose cannon on its hands. What to do with Floriduh Man will be a delicate yet crucial question that will impact how Republicans handle business in the future.
Unsurprisingly, Floriduh Man’s already complaining about the House’s Speaker pro tempore, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC).
“I do have to offer some pretty sharp criticism of the new pro tem of the House, Patrick McHenry,” Gaetz told host Eric Bolling. “We met tonight and he sent us home until Tuesday of next week, Eric. We should be here tomorrow working to elect a new speaker, getting onto our appropriations bills, and engaging in a negotiation with the Senate to get the government funded.
“But instead, whoa, these people have got to go home and cry for a week? They’ve got to go do a week of hand-wringing and bed-wetting over the fact that Kevin McCarthy isn’t speaker anymore? This institution is about more than one man. It’s about the job. How about we pass a budget?”
Wow…how about enjoying your victory and trying to work to make things better? Unless your goal really is to burn things down?
Will they be able to control their shrinking majority? Or will they see it turn into even more of a three-ring circus, with clowns like Matt Gaetz driving the bus?
Stay tuned, y’all. If you enjoy the spectacle of Republicans eating their young, this could be EPIC.
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OK, I was going to ask if that Ghengis Khan quote wasn't from Conan, but you answered that on your own. I would be truly astonished if the Republicans did anything about about Yotz. They hold such a vanishingly small hold on the House as it is that they require every mindless cuttlefish they can find.