House of Representatives 5: The Clown Caucus is Throwing Their Toys Out of The Playpen

[GreyhoundFan]

Reaon #9,362,444,951,802 why Gym should not be permitted to even see the speaker's gavel: "Jim Jordan’s new shutdown threat highlights an unnerving right-wing trend"

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Republicans spend more time talking about the practical problems posed by the U.S.-Mexico border than any other issue — even as much of what they propose to address them is utter fantasy.

Case in point: Rep. Jim Jordan, who wants to be the next House speaker, is threatening to derail the next round of talks about keeping the government open — unless Democrats agree to restrictions on asylum-seeking that are not just wildly extreme, but would be entirely unworkable even if Democrats were inclined to accept them.

With the government set to run out of funding in mid-November, the Ohio Republican told Punchbowl News that he will inject a new demand into the next round of fiscal talks.

“No money can be used to process or release into the country any new migrants,” Jordan said, referencing the large number of new arrivals that have bedeviled the Biden administration, adding that funding must get a “time out.” This demand will be “non-negotiable,” reports Punchbowl, because Jordan “has no flexibility” with other Republicans on this matter — presumably because to get elected speaker, he has to vow to threaten a shutdown to win concessions from Democrats.

But if the administration were barred from using funds for “processing” any migrants, it would seemingly mean officials could not process any migrants’ requests for asylum. The administration must process these requests, because the law requires it: Migrants who ask for asylum after being apprehended on U.S. soil, even ones who entered illegally between ports of entry, must get an official interview.

That generally means migrants are, at minimum, screened by officials to determine if they have a “credible” or “reasonable” fear of facing persecution if returned to home countries. (If they pass, they enter a longer legal process.) It’s unclear how officials could comply with that law if all processing was defunded.

“That would be both illegal and a practical impossibility,” Tom Jawetz, a former senior Department of Homeland Security lawyer, told me, adding that administration officials “are legally obligated to process people for asylum on request. It’s not a choice.”

Jordan’s demand for a total defunding of all releases is similarly absurd. Like all past administrations, the Biden administration does release many migrants who are awaiting asylum hearings, especially families. A legal settlement precludes the protracted detention of migrant kids, so detaining families long-term would require separating them — which even President Donald Trump dropped as untenable.

Detaining all migrants awaiting hearings would in fact require an enormous and unprecedented scaling up of detention facilities. “It would mean billions of additional dollars,” says Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.

Meissner notes an irony: Hard-right lawmakers ousted McCarthy for failing to secure deep spending cuts in the last fiscal talks, but now are injecting a demand for mass detentions that “would be entirely at odds with the goal of cutting spending.”

It might be tempting to dismiss Jordan’s clownish demands as posturing. But the House GOP recently passed a wildly extreme bill that would functionally eliminate asylum-seeking. That bill, a nonstarter for President Biden and Senate Democrats, won’t ever become law. But rather than accept this, Jordan is telegraphing plans to wield the threat of another government shutdown to try to compel them to swallow a demand that’s even more extreme.

This demand for concessions to the right of the GOP’s border bill is part of a broader trend: On rhetoric and policy, far-right Republicans are slowly, inexorably shifting the outer boundaries of GOP discourse on immigration into darkly fanciful and even sadistic territory.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for instance, loves saying that migrants bearing drugs across the border should be shot “stone cold dead.” Only 10 years ago, GOP leaders rebuked then-Rep. Steve King of Iowa for denigrating migrant drug runners in far tamer terms. DeSantis’s rendition has earned GOP cheers.

Similarly, businessman and GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has vowed to end birthright citizenship for all U.S. children of undocumented immigrants and to deport them. Relative to Republicans who in 2015 proposed ending birthright citizenship without that retroactive element, that’s another rightward lurch.

And Trump recently opined that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Not long ago, right-wing personalities and Republicans who trafficked in “great replacement theory” were careful to describe migrations as merely shifting the political or cultural makeup of the country. Trump has made the ethno-nationalist and potentially white-supremacist implications about blood dilution explicit.

It bears repeating that the border is badly overwhelmed, and that a series of reasonable compromises exists that would help fix the problems there. Instead, as Jordan’s latest threat demonstrates, when it comes to policy, Republicans often treat the border as a kind of fantasy zone — and there is no discernible limit on their prescriptions, no matter how hallucinatory or barbaric.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Good gravy:

 

[fraurosena]

",... instead they've booted their speaker and are warring over the next one. They are rewriting the rules for the election the day of the election after criticizing states for doing that in 2020. They are taking the cell phones of elected officials when they go into meetings -- these are adults with staffs who are not able to bring their electronics into party meetings. This speaker election could go a while. Two weeks now on an internal party matter with govt funding expiring in a month and change."

Will they be locked in with each other until a speaker is elected? If so, they might end up being locked in until the end of time... 😇

[fraurosena]

The candidate is going to be Steve Scalise...

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Scalise is no great shakes. Of course, choosing between him and Gym is like choosing between being shot or stabbed. 

[GreyhoundFan]

The chaos continues. The entire House was called back at 3PM, but recessed without a vote. It's uncertain when they'll be back.

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House Republican leaders are choosing to recess the chamber because of a critical problem: Too many Republicans are set to vote for former speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). While Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) was nominated by a majority of Republicans behind closed doors in their conference earlier Wednesday, Republicans knew it was unlikely he could clinch the necessary 217 Republican votes needed to wield the speaker’s gavel.

 

[kittykay]

Republican party is FUBAR when the choice is Scalise over Jordan.

[GreyhoundFan]

More from the circus:

 

[front hugs > duggs]

2 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

More from the circus:

 

And Jim Jordan helped cover up sexual assault….what’s his point?

[GreyhoundFan]

I love Jake’s reaction:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Narrator: they won’t do better. 

[fraurosena]

Of course it's the Democrats who step up to the plate with a solution.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[Loveday]

On 10/11/2023 at 9:01 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

I love Jake’s reaction:

 

My crush on Jake Tapper has grown by leaps and bounds with this.💖

[GreyhoundFan]

According to the Washington Post, Scalise has dropped out of the speaker’s race.

[fraurosena]

 

[WatchingTheTireFireBurn]

Who in the world will they actually agree to? We (USA) look like childish morons.

[Ozlsn]

Kind of hoping the moderates give up and agree to Jeffries.

[Becky]

8 hours ago, WatchingTheTireFireBurn said:

Who in the world will they actually agree to? We (USA) look like childish morons.

...and the world is watching, allies AND enemies.  

[GreyhoundFan]

From the live updates section of the Washington Post:

[AnywhereButHere]

https://apple.news/A5wqyZr7SSPqx7k-2PnnU2Q

Damn. He’s starting to look as desperate as McCarthy did in his bid for the job. Groundhog Day, indeed…

 

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WASHINGTON — House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan said on Friday that he is re-entering the race for speaker, just a day after the GOP’s nominee, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, dropped his bid for the top job after failing to lock up enough support.

Jordan, a Donald Trump loyalist who has burnished a reputation on the Hill as a conservative bomb-thrower, could still meet the same fate as Scalise. Because of the party's razor-thin majority, just five GOP detractors can block Jordan in a House floor vote, and a handful of moderate Republicans have already said they won't vote for Jordan.

They include Reps. Ann Wagner of Missouri, Austin Scott of Georgia, and Don Bacon of Nebraska.
 

Many Republicans are now looking to Jordan, of Ohio, because he was the only challenger to Scalise, of Louisiana, losing just two days ago in a narrow, internal 113-99 vote. Supporters point to his conservative credentials — he chaired both the Republican Study Committee and far-right House Freedom Caucus — and also that he has aligned himself with the GOP leadership team more in recent years.

Following Scalise's decision to drop out, House Republicans regrouped and huddled behind closed doors Friday, facing deep intraparty divisions and no apparent path to 217 votes, the magic number needed on the House floor to elect a new speaker.

The chain of events began with Rep. Kevin McCarthy's ouster as speaker last week and led to Scalise's exit Thursday, all intensifying the bad blood within the party, which could make Republicans' task even harder. Some GOP lawmakers, including Rep. Carlos Gimenez of Florida, have pledged to vote only for McCarthy on the House floor.

“We had a process and we had a nominee and people stabbed him in the back,” said Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas. “So that’s not something to be proud of.”

 

[kittykay]

Republicans still SUSFU.

[GreyhoundFan]

Apparently Gym has now become the nominee because he has the most R votes, but he's way below what would be needed to win the vote in the whole house. He only has 152 votes, but 217 are needed.

 

 

The Rs are going to try and whip the votes over the weekend.

[GreyhoundFan]

No, Qevin, it's not the Dems' fault.