To paraphrase the eloquent Representative from Louisiana (where else?), Clay Higgins is 'like something stuck to the bottom of America's boot. Just scrape it off and move on with history.'
I know this is as tough as picking a favorite Beatles song, but no list of "worst GOP" Congressman is complete without the venerable Louis Gohmert. Take it with a grain of salt, but I'd give him Chip Roy's spot. (Sure, he's terrible, but strictly JV when compared to Gohmert.)
"Clay Higgins is an election-denying, conspiracy-peddling racial arsonist who is a disgrace to the People’s House. This is who they have become. Republicans are the party of Donald Trump, Mark Robinson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Clay Higgins and Project 2025. The extreme MAGA Republicans in the House are unfit to govern.”
All I would add is not only are they unfit to govern they are incapable of it.
As a person of Irish descent growing up in Boston, we learned very young about the virulent anti-Irish sentiment when the Irish began to arrive in large numbers, the "no-Irish-need-apply" signs on businesses, the cartoons depicting us as drunken, ignorant and lazy buffoons, the fear mongering and hostility. I say this to remind citizens in cities with new immigrants and across the country that this is the story of America - different groups come here to make a better life, often face prejudice and hatred and then eventually become assimilated into American life.
How about we skip over the prejudice and hatred chapter and get to the good part?
I am in pain about the polls. How can this be? How stupid is the electorate? Any rational decision from any perspective (Cuban suggests tariffs will affect businesses even more than taxes—so even billionaires have no rationale) must be for Harris. Do people really want Trump to trash the economy,keep women locked in their homes, take away their. Affordable Care Act not to mention Social Security and Medicare and get us into wars? Is this sane? What is the basis for their vote? Racism? Fear of the other? Stupidity? I don’t get it. Trump lost manufacturing jobs increased the national debt gave tax cuts to a tiny number of people who didn’t need them then the rest of us paid the difference, killed hundreds of thousands during COVID. Do these seem like things we want to repeat? Get a grip people. This is why cutbacks in education are not cost effective
Your last sentence says it all: "...cutbacks in education..."
I have seen too many interviews with focus groups where people said something like "they hadn't paid much attention but their grocery prices had gone up so they were going to vote for Trump.
Also, I know people (my family in particular) who only watch FOX, and when asked why on earth they are supporting Trump, they spout about "the border and all the hordes coming across." That's it, except an occasional "things were better when Trump was in office."
Talk about pining for better times. Sure the economy was good for 3 years, but even year 2.5 we hit a manufacturing recession (dear Democrats be more like Pete Buttigieg here ffs). The level of memory holing we’ve done as a population is astounding. I was far less engaged politically but holy shit Trump was EXHAUSTING. I’d rather not. For the love of my sleep cycle, America, let’s not do this again.
All the polls keep telling/ reminding us is that "a house divided against itself cannot stand." One day we can only hope that Trumpism will be viewed by historians as "that other peculiar institution."
The immediate threat to the US is that when Haley says that politics is not for thin-skinned people, the current R party is really standing for the proposition that politics is not for non-white skinned people. If you don't get that maybe you need to be skinned to be taught a lesson (other forms of lynching having gone a bit out of style. And "put the personal part of it aside?' As in "I hate you because you are not white, but it's nothing personal?" None of that nonsense from Haley and Pence ids helpful now as you continue to point out. It is all like "there, there, don't cry. I'm sure those fingers will grow back."
Caught my attention: "many of the top staff in the lieutenant governor’s office—including his chief of staff and general counsel, his policy director, his communications director, and his director of government affairs..." What does a Lt. Gov need with all these directors when he could just as well sit in on the Govs meetings with the same kind of departments? It isn't as if he has that divergent of ideas does it? Sounds like empire building for crony jobs for sure.
The lieutenant governor is elected separately from the governor in many states. No joint campaign is run. So I think lt governors set up offices as if they were governor themselves. Yeah it's also empire building. I see many of them run for governor after the current governor leaves office.
Soon Mark Robinson will be alone in his office. The phones will be buzzing and the trash cans will be overflowing with Little Caesar’s boxes and tube socks.
He’ll be on Pornhub on the state WiFi, taking occasional breaks to peruse the Daily Stormer.
Knocks will go unanswered as the office develops a fug so thick you can see it and cut it into squares for viewing eclipses.
And he will still get 35% of the vote, because North Carolina.
I am honestly SO DISGUSTED this morning. I have high school students whose apathy levels and disrespect for their teachers are staggering; I have no idea how some of them are going to function in the adult world, because their learning skills and behavior sucks.
And then I read the tweet from higgins, whose a vile POS. But truly no worse than trump, vance, or any of the others. I mean, "disgrace and disrepute to the House of Representatives?" That's the whole damn caucus, including their smug, self-righteous hypocrite of a speaker.
And then these POLLS - they're SO CLOSE! trump is a maligant cancer on our country, the worst president in modern history (and likely to be at the very bottom of all time), and yet millions of people are going to vote for this vile, terrible person. People I love are going to vote for this despicable human!
If trump wins, then I will well and truly give up; the country won't be worth saving, because too many of its people will have given up their freedoms and their democracy for a lie.
Re. your students who won't be able to function in the adult world because their behavior sucks - last place I worked, if we got any of these put on us, a couple of the guys would take them out back and show them (not with violence) EXACTLY how the adult world woks. Worked a treat. Mostly. They certainly got to understand why "school days are the happiest days of your lives" - even if they'd hated school. . . .
Some of the students are honestly amazing. They are especially more open and tolerant of LGBTQ people and gender ambiguity, even though I teach in a rural school. Some of them are engaged and care about their communities and how they go through the world. But just so many of them seem not to give a hoot at all about their education, not even enough to try; as an educator, it's SO disheartening.
Most of the Trump supporters I talk to are voting for him because of the economy. They look back to 2020 and see cheap gas, rising paychecks and low interest rates. What they ignore are supply chain issues, a global pandemic and so many deaths because of decisions made by that administration.
When they look at their current lives, they see inflation but ignore the global impact and that the US has performed better than almost every other country post pandemic. They saw rising interest rates ( yes I built at 8%, but waiting to refinance), but retirement accounts are very robust with the current booming stock market. They look at egg prices but ignore the impact of the bird flu which has caused the euthanasia of millions of egg producing chickens (and yes, possible additive ingredients by feed producers possibly affecting egg production according to one of my sons) but ignore the fact that eggs are one of the least expensive proteins. They pay no attention to the fact that when salaries increase , the costs of paying those higher salaries increases the costs of production and therefor consumer goods. That gas was low in 2020 because of the pandemic- laws of supply and demand, no one was driving, and prices are not unreasonable now. They agree with ‘drill baby drill’ which is worthless unless more processing plants are built and that fuel is shipped overseas because it increases profits ( the reason diesel fuel prices exploded 20+ years ago). But let’s keep the price of gas low. I could continue, but you get the idea.
What they’re really ignoring is that much of the recent inflation can be traced back to Trump. Many of his signature policies, including massive deficit-financed tax cuts, tariffs, labor force reduction and artificially low interest rates are Econ 101 textbook blueprints for inflation (for the pedants out there, yes, I know that tariffs are not “inflationary” in the classical sense but they lead to the same place). Add to that the mishandling of Covid which deepened and extended the crisis, and it’s not really hard to see how the policies of the Trump years contributed to the inflation that occurred after his term ended. Someone should make that case, but time is running out.
Agreed. They're just remembering lower prices and think trump was responsible for it, even though he wasn't. But we're not going back to pre-covid and I wish people would realize that.
Trump, true to his entire life, set things up to look great for a year or two, but then it imploded and someone else is left footing the bill. Always. Classic con artist. I’ve known this since I was a kid in the late 90s and he was a total joke. We’re at a strange place. So many goods are taken for granted (teamsters - Biden literally saved your pension, but go ahead vote for Trump…I’m sure he won’t let the bosses bust your union).
The cynic in me almost wants us to hit rock bottom so I can say “told ya so”, but that means committing so many innocent people (children, those voting against MAGA, etc.) to a lot of harm.
Almost all of my anger is reserved for two groups:
1) Those who know better like Haley and Pence
2) Those who have fallen into a “lol nothing matters” nihilism despite having great lives (many other men I know)
Me, too, Roseanne, especially the people in my family who are voting for him. I know they're actually NOT bad people; and yet they're voting for one of the most awful people I have ever seen. It's so damn sad.
I mean, just watch the movie "Don't look up" and that's what America feels like.
All these people who are like "Yeah, he attempted a coup and says he wants to be a dictator, but Republicans all say he has the best policies and they would never lie so I'm voting for him".
My sibling - "yeah, I know trump says some crazy, off the wall sh!t. But I just want to keep my money from being funneled into things that don't help me, so I'll vote for him".
I'm still not clear on how spending our tax money at his golf motels and on golf carts for SS agents to follow his wide load around helped this sibling.
To paraphrase the eloquent Representative from Louisiana (where else?), Clay Higgins is 'like something stuck to the bottom of America's boot. Just scrape it off and move on with history.'
I hope her bet is a good one. It looks to me like MAGA (ie. Nuts) will be here for a good long time. Good luck, Nikki.
Clay Higgins definitely has done enough to make my top 10 of worst house members:
1. Jim Jordan
2. Chip Roy
3. Paul Gosar
4. Marjorie Taylor Greene
5. Clay Higgins
6. James Comer
7. Matt Gaetz
8. Andy Biggs
9. Anna Paulina Luna
10. Lauren Boebert
I know this is as tough as picking a favorite Beatles song, but no list of "worst GOP" Congressman is complete without the venerable Louis Gohmert. Take it with a grain of salt, but I'd give him Chip Roy's spot. (Sure, he's terrible, but strictly JV when compared to Gohmert.)
You need a better hobby.
I never watched much reality TV but the Republican Party makes the Jersey Shore look like Downton Abbey
This from Hakeem Jeffries best summed it up.
"Clay Higgins is an election-denying, conspiracy-peddling racial arsonist who is a disgrace to the People’s House. This is who they have become. Republicans are the party of Donald Trump, Mark Robinson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Clay Higgins and Project 2025. The extreme MAGA Republicans in the House are unfit to govern.”
All I would add is not only are they unfit to govern they are incapable of it.
As a person of Irish descent growing up in Boston, we learned very young about the virulent anti-Irish sentiment when the Irish began to arrive in large numbers, the "no-Irish-need-apply" signs on businesses, the cartoons depicting us as drunken, ignorant and lazy buffoons, the fear mongering and hostility. I say this to remind citizens in cities with new immigrants and across the country that this is the story of America - different groups come here to make a better life, often face prejudice and hatred and then eventually become assimilated into American life.
How about we skip over the prejudice and hatred chapter and get to the good part?
https://www.history.com/news/when-america-despised-the-irish-the-19th-centurys-refugee-crisis
"The key lies" and then apparently Pence goes on to tell them.
Re the Clay Higgins "repentance" - what kind of God do you pray to, after a tweet like that?
I am in pain about the polls. How can this be? How stupid is the electorate? Any rational decision from any perspective (Cuban suggests tariffs will affect businesses even more than taxes—so even billionaires have no rationale) must be for Harris. Do people really want Trump to trash the economy,keep women locked in their homes, take away their. Affordable Care Act not to mention Social Security and Medicare and get us into wars? Is this sane? What is the basis for their vote? Racism? Fear of the other? Stupidity? I don’t get it. Trump lost manufacturing jobs increased the national debt gave tax cuts to a tiny number of people who didn’t need them then the rest of us paid the difference, killed hundreds of thousands during COVID. Do these seem like things we want to repeat? Get a grip people. This is why cutbacks in education are not cost effective
Your last sentence says it all: "...cutbacks in education..."
I have seen too many interviews with focus groups where people said something like "they hadn't paid much attention but their grocery prices had gone up so they were going to vote for Trump.
Also, I know people (my family in particular) who only watch FOX, and when asked why on earth they are supporting Trump, they spout about "the border and all the hordes coming across." That's it, except an occasional "things were better when Trump was in office."
As Bill the Cat from Bloom County would say: “Ack!” Then he would probably spit up a fur ball.
Talk about pining for better times. Sure the economy was good for 3 years, but even year 2.5 we hit a manufacturing recession (dear Democrats be more like Pete Buttigieg here ffs). The level of memory holing we’ve done as a population is astounding. I was far less engaged politically but holy shit Trump was EXHAUSTING. I’d rather not. For the love of my sleep cycle, America, let’s not do this again.
The people pushing Trump and much more old Vance are nasty. It will be very, very bad. You won’t be exhausted, you will be looking for the exit.
What do you expect from Higgins and company? MAGA!
All the polls keep telling/ reminding us is that "a house divided against itself cannot stand." One day we can only hope that Trumpism will be viewed by historians as "that other peculiar institution."
The immediate threat to the US is that when Haley says that politics is not for thin-skinned people, the current R party is really standing for the proposition that politics is not for non-white skinned people. If you don't get that maybe you need to be skinned to be taught a lesson (other forms of lynching having gone a bit out of style. And "put the personal part of it aside?' As in "I hate you because you are not white, but it's nothing personal?" None of that nonsense from Haley and Pence ids helpful now as you continue to point out. It is all like "there, there, don't cry. I'm sure those fingers will grow back."
Al Franken, where are you these days. Please come back, we need you.
Caught my attention: "many of the top staff in the lieutenant governor’s office—including his chief of staff and general counsel, his policy director, his communications director, and his director of government affairs..." What does a Lt. Gov need with all these directors when he could just as well sit in on the Govs meetings with the same kind of departments? It isn't as if he has that divergent of ideas does it? Sounds like empire building for crony jobs for sure.
The lieutenant governor is elected separately from the governor in many states. No joint campaign is run. So I think lt governors set up offices as if they were governor themselves. Yeah it's also empire building. I see many of them run for governor after the current governor leaves office.
"Trump is an industrial plant pumping sewage into a river; Mike Johnson is downstream with a kitchen strainer."
Half right, Andrew.
Actually, Mike Johnson is downstream baptizing Republicans who aren't already Christian Nationalists.
Soon Mark Robinson will be alone in his office. The phones will be buzzing and the trash cans will be overflowing with Little Caesar’s boxes and tube socks.
He’ll be on Pornhub on the state WiFi, taking occasional breaks to peruse the Daily Stormer.
Knocks will go unanswered as the office develops a fug so thick you can see it and cut it into squares for viewing eclipses.
And he will still get 35% of the vote, because North Carolina.
Watch out for my coffee spray! (Hilarious!)
I am honestly SO DISGUSTED this morning. I have high school students whose apathy levels and disrespect for their teachers are staggering; I have no idea how some of them are going to function in the adult world, because their learning skills and behavior sucks.
And then I read the tweet from higgins, whose a vile POS. But truly no worse than trump, vance, or any of the others. I mean, "disgrace and disrepute to the House of Representatives?" That's the whole damn caucus, including their smug, self-righteous hypocrite of a speaker.
And then these POLLS - they're SO CLOSE! trump is a maligant cancer on our country, the worst president in modern history (and likely to be at the very bottom of all time), and yet millions of people are going to vote for this vile, terrible person. People I love are going to vote for this despicable human!
If trump wins, then I will well and truly give up; the country won't be worth saving, because too many of its people will have given up their freedoms and their democracy for a lie.
Re. your students who won't be able to function in the adult world because their behavior sucks - last place I worked, if we got any of these put on us, a couple of the guys would take them out back and show them (not with violence) EXACTLY how the adult world woks. Worked a treat. Mostly. They certainly got to understand why "school days are the happiest days of your lives" - even if they'd hated school. . . .
Some of the students are honestly amazing. They are especially more open and tolerant of LGBTQ people and gender ambiguity, even though I teach in a rural school. Some of them are engaged and care about their communities and how they go through the world. But just so many of them seem not to give a hoot at all about their education, not even enough to try; as an educator, it's SO disheartening.
Most of the Trump supporters I talk to are voting for him because of the economy. They look back to 2020 and see cheap gas, rising paychecks and low interest rates. What they ignore are supply chain issues, a global pandemic and so many deaths because of decisions made by that administration.
When they look at their current lives, they see inflation but ignore the global impact and that the US has performed better than almost every other country post pandemic. They saw rising interest rates ( yes I built at 8%, but waiting to refinance), but retirement accounts are very robust with the current booming stock market. They look at egg prices but ignore the impact of the bird flu which has caused the euthanasia of millions of egg producing chickens (and yes, possible additive ingredients by feed producers possibly affecting egg production according to one of my sons) but ignore the fact that eggs are one of the least expensive proteins. They pay no attention to the fact that when salaries increase , the costs of paying those higher salaries increases the costs of production and therefor consumer goods. That gas was low in 2020 because of the pandemic- laws of supply and demand, no one was driving, and prices are not unreasonable now. They agree with ‘drill baby drill’ which is worthless unless more processing plants are built and that fuel is shipped overseas because it increases profits ( the reason diesel fuel prices exploded 20+ years ago). But let’s keep the price of gas low. I could continue, but you get the idea.
What they’re really ignoring is that much of the recent inflation can be traced back to Trump. Many of his signature policies, including massive deficit-financed tax cuts, tariffs, labor force reduction and artificially low interest rates are Econ 101 textbook blueprints for inflation (for the pedants out there, yes, I know that tariffs are not “inflationary” in the classical sense but they lead to the same place). Add to that the mishandling of Covid which deepened and extended the crisis, and it’s not really hard to see how the policies of the Trump years contributed to the inflation that occurred after his term ended. Someone should make that case, but time is running out.
Agreed. They're just remembering lower prices and think trump was responsible for it, even though he wasn't. But we're not going back to pre-covid and I wish people would realize that.
Trump, true to his entire life, set things up to look great for a year or two, but then it imploded and someone else is left footing the bill. Always. Classic con artist. I’ve known this since I was a kid in the late 90s and he was a total joke. We’re at a strange place. So many goods are taken for granted (teamsters - Biden literally saved your pension, but go ahead vote for Trump…I’m sure he won’t let the bosses bust your union).
The cynic in me almost wants us to hit rock bottom so I can say “told ya so”, but that means committing so many innocent people (children, those voting against MAGA, etc.) to a lot of harm.
Almost all of my anger is reserved for two groups:
1) Those who know better like Haley and Pence
2) Those who have fallen into a “lol nothing matters” nihilism despite having great lives (many other men I know)
Makes me 😢
Me, too, Roseanne, especially the people in my family who are voting for him. I know they're actually NOT bad people; and yet they're voting for one of the most awful people I have ever seen. It's so damn sad.
It's frustrating for sure.
I mean, just watch the movie "Don't look up" and that's what America feels like.
All these people who are like "Yeah, he attempted a coup and says he wants to be a dictator, but Republicans all say he has the best policies and they would never lie so I'm voting for him".
Why are so many people's brains broken?
Truly. How did so many people become so brain-addled?
Propaganda is a hell of a drug.
My sibling - "yeah, I know trump says some crazy, off the wall sh!t. But I just want to keep my money from being funneled into things that don't help me, so I'll vote for him".
I'm still not clear on how spending our tax money at his golf motels and on golf carts for SS agents to follow his wide load around helped this sibling.
Fairly close to saying "my money going to help the wrong people".