Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Good post! Nothing like a bit of factual concertinaed history. Yessiree. Today Gingrich plays the statesman by having a go at Gaetz. Uh uh.

"Instead, Mr. Gingrich’s triumph in 1994 in wresting the House from a Democratic majority for the first time since 1952 was the starting point for the zero-sum brand of politics that mutated into the Tea Party movement, the grievance-based populism of the Trump era, and what was garishly displayed on the House floor in a raucous four-day speaker battle that ended in the small hours of Saturday.
[...]
“They’re employing the old Gingrich argument that you don’t get any benefit from cooperation or compromise, only from confrontation,” said Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, until recently the Democrats’ House majority leader. Mr. Hoyer, who was sworn into office in 1981, two years after Mr. Gingrich, recalled the Georgia congressman “playing to the anger and disaffection of people who Nixon called ‘the silent majority’ a few years earlier.”

“Those feelings predated Gingrich,” Mr. Hoyer said. “But he took extraordinary advantage of them, just as Trump did later and just as this crowd’s doing now.”

It was Mr. Gingrich, after all, who as a congressional candidate in 1978 told an audience, “One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.” A decade later, Mr. Gingrich coached his colleagues to cast the opposition as “the loony left,” saying, “When in doubt, Democrats lie.”"

Note the Gaetz six justify their obstructionist bullshit by saying McCarthy cooperated too much with the Democrats. Much similar to the rationalizations of those who booted Gingrich

"Though Mr. Gingrich and his two lieutenants, Dick Armey, the House majority leader, and Tom DeLay, the majority whip, preached ruthless partisanship, in the end, Mr. Gingrich was forced out of power by his fellow Republicans in 1998 after agreeing to a budget deal with Mr. Clinton. The party lost the House majority in 2006, “though frankly, even before then, the Gingrich faction did not feel that they had won when George W. Bush won, because they weren’t interested in his ‘compassionate conservatism,’” Mr. Hoyer recalled."

And never forget from where the Tea Party raised it's ugly ultra-partisan confrontational head, the Caucus Room restaurant meeting:

"The election of Barack Obama in 2008 thrust Mr. Gingrich back into relevancy. On the night of Mr. Obama’s inauguration, the former speaker gathered at a Washington steakhouse with a small group of desultory Republicans that also included a second-term congressman from California, Kevin McCarthy. It was Mr. McCarthy who, consulting his inner Gingrich, urged a hyperaggressive approach to Democratic control in Washington.

“We’ve got to challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign,” he told the steakhouse group that night.

Mr. Gingrich left the dinner feeling much encouraged. “You will remember this day,” he said to the others.

The seeds of the Tea Party movement were sown by discontents among a threatened white majority, or what Mr. Trump later called “the forgotten men and women of this country.” Initially framed as a nonpartisan call for fiscal discipline, the Tea Party avatars returned the Republicans to power in the House after the 2010 midterm election and quickly reverted to Gingrichian partisanship.

“The Tea Party movement was more about fighting the Obama administration, Pelosi and Reid,” said a member of that class, Representative Jeff Duncan, Republican of South Carolina."

Your - "From Gingrich to McCarthy, the Roots of Governance by Chaos"
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/07/us/politics/speaker-mccarthy-gingrich-trump.html

See also:

First Republicans said, 'Screw democracy we'll reject every bill Obama put up', GOP's Anti-Obama Campaign Started Night Of Inauguration
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77743975
He wasn't at the meeting of 15, but
Mitch McConnell Vows to Block Biden’s Entire Agenda Just to Be a Dick
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=166130221
Then some of the stinking icing on that anti-democratic cake ot the Republicans
and against all rules of traditional decency McConnell denied Obama a SCOTUS spot
The End of Genuine Law and Order in the United States?
[...]
...What Happened to America’s Political Center of Gravity?
[...]
Consider McConnell's lost desk under the number of bills he is holding up.
Extreme obstructionism, possibly the worst in America's history, promotes anarchy.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=156506853
P - Today's Republican Party is acting in a way that defies all historic norms
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168105929