Turnabout is fair play

“You had me several years ago when I was still quite naïve
Well you said that we made such a pretty pair and that you would never leave
But you gave away the things you loved.” — Carly Simon

There’s a predictable arc to these stories these days. Someone on the right says something outrageous and dangerous that would normally cause them to have to resign or slink underneath the nearest rock. Republican leadership will say something that seems like a rebuke, but nothing seems to be done about it. Everyone returns to the spot to play another day.

In the case of Majorie Taylor Greene, the playbook has been completed. There were a number of options to deal with her and her outrageous and dangerous rhetoric. Kevin McCarthy even has done it before when he stripped Steve King of his committee assignments before King was voted out of Congress. Given the opportunity here, he has done nothing and he’s all out of ideas.

The Democrats have a multiple choice of options at this point. The GOP choice would be for them to do nothing but decry her behavior. At this point, that is untenable. The second choice would be censure. We will cover that one in more detail shortly. The third option is to strip her of her committee assignments. Finally, they could expel her.

Those options are mentioned in order of severity. Censure is the government equivalent of scolding a member. It has no real force of law other than being an official condemnation from the body. It takes a simple majority, so they could do it now without a problem, but scolding Greene at this point is akin to lecturing your teen after they went out on an all-night drinking bender and then committed vehicular manslaughter.

It sounds like they have decided to try to strip her of her committee assignments. That’s a prudent middle option. It would take a two-thirds vote to expel her and that isn’t very likely because a GOP member could kill someone on the House floor and their membership wouldn’t vote to expel them. Maybe they could be reasoned with. They would call an attempt to expel such a member as a sign of disunity. They either refuse to get it or they just don’t get it.

It seems like hyperbole, but I’m not so sure. Pelosi blasted McCarthy by labeling him as Kevin McCarthy (Q-CA). For those that don’t read political news regularly, the normal course is to report the member’s party affiliation and state after his or her name. So, Pelosi is putting him in the Q party. Simply hilarious. It was clear that it wasn’t a typo since she also said in her statement that McCarthy had ceded power in the GOP to Greene.

Predictably, the outrage machine kicked in full force. How could she treat the minority leader with such disrespect? We need to be moving forward in unity and bipartisanship. Such an insult is beneath the dignity of her office. I’m sure a cursory Google search would find commentary saying all of these things in some combination.

Let’s remember one key thing. In addition to Jewish space lasers, denying school shootings, and vast Q conspiracies, GREENE ACTUALLY THREATENED PELOSI’S LIFE! I don’t normally scream like that, but I feel like somebody needs to do it. If your response to that is to have a private sit down meeting with her and then to do nothing then you have either been neutered as a leader or you tacitly approve of her statements. The time for being nice and polite ended a long time ago.

For me, just stripping her of her committee assignments is over the top in terms of generosity. If I were speaker she would be thrown out of the House and her ass would be in jail. Vote or no vote I’d have her arrested on the House floor in front of the cameras for all the world to see. I would make it be known that any member not voting for her removal is a traitor against the United States. It is long past time to give these stupid sons a bitches any due or deference.

The time for playing nice is over. That time passed when the former president launched an insurrection on the Capitol and your caucus excused it. Not only did they excuse it but they are threatening the few GOP members that saw it for what it was. They are eating their own. So if your little feeling are hurt over the minority leader being called A Q I honestly don’t give a shit. Put on your big boy and girl pants and deal with it. You either follow the ex-president and Q or you defend the United States. Get up off your ass and pick a side.