or even the strong desire to do more than get the money and perks that being in the Congress get them that THEY WOULD BE AS DESIROUS OF BEING RID OF TRUMP AS ANYONE. If only or those ignoble reasons.
But that's the nature of the kind of materialistic, lazy cowardice that is typical of America's conservatives, who are inevitably caught up either directly or by chosen association with our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy and the slaver culture that persists among our fascists. It's why conservative voters are perfectly OK with having do-nothing or little congresses, which has been the typical mode of Republican led congresses who are only enthusiastic in giving more money to the billionaires who bought them or destroying things and harming even their own consituents. That's certainly true of those in the House led by Johnson, McCarthy (one of the rotten Republican McCarthys), Ryan, Boehner and Hastert. You have to go back to the inept Tom Foley to find as ineffective a Democratic Speaker of the House. You could say the same thing about the Majority Leaders of the Senate, though, as Sheldon Whitehouse and Lawrence O'Donnell have pointed out recently, that's a far harder case to make because, other than Mitch McConnell and slime like Chuck Grassley packing the courts with corrupt, inept fascists where it's impossible to remove them, Senate Majority Leaders of either party haven't gotten much done.* The Senate, insulated as the corrupt founders and framers made it from the Voters and the house of larger egos is a harder body to discipline. By contrast as I have been pointing out for almost twenty years, Nancy Pelosi was probably the most masterful Speaker the house has ever had, something that Senator Whitehouse also pointed out on O'Donnell's show a while back. Not that many Democrats, especially those on the "left" noticed.
Anyway, I think one of the ironies of this period is that those handful of Republicans who pushed for a vote on releasing the Epstein files may have given their careers an enormous boost by doing what they knew would hurt Trump and some of the child-raping billionaires who have funded their corrupt party. They may lose their seats, in which case they can walk away from the disaster that the Republican fascists are setting up, I suspect a crash is coming on fast. There will be a reckoning and, perhaps, if they don't move on to something in the private sector, they an say I told you so and profit from that. I think that's the reason that so many of those in the House on the Republican-fascist side caved when they got the chance, they suspect that the garbage scow they've had as a mother ship for the past decade is about to go down and they don't want to be pulled under with it. I don't know exactly what Trump's motive in ordering them to do that was, whether some attempt at guile or senility but if I were among the Republicans in the Congress, I'd bet on hitching my wagon to Massie or someone like him, to mix metaphors. I would feel enormously relieved by the end of Trump, but, then, I'd want something more than to just keep the hand-job that being a Republican in Congress has been for the entire time.
I do wonder what will become of the "never Trumpers" who were Republicans who jumped even before 2016. I was talking with my sister about some of them the other day and she agreed with me that she has not heard a single one of them admit that there was something wrong with the Republican Party and the American conservative ideology that led to Trump and, before him, to Bush II and the Rehnquist-Roberts courts that guided America into Trumpian fascism. If they've learned the lesson that there was something wrong with their ideology as I've admitted there was something wrong with 1960s-70s secular liberalism, liberal democracy and huge swaths of liberal ideology I have yet to hear it. I would recommend that they do what I did and look at the consequences of their ideology in real life AND AS IT TRULY IMPINGED ON THE LIVES OF THE LEAST AMONG US AND THOSE NOT MUCH HIGHER THAN THEM ON THE ECONOMIC SCALE. The idiotic liberal-libertarianism that led even intelligent liberal lawyers to believe there was a "right to lie" especially in the mass media led as much to Trump as the collusion with fascism which has always been present within the Republican Party, certainly as Goldwater and Nixon implemented the "Southern Strategy" of welcoming our indigenous fascists, the white supremacists into it. And, I'll point out in fairness that there were plenty of those white supremacists in the North, too, especially those such as are concentrated in Maine's second district who have no connection to anything Southern.
I strongly suspect that there are few to none who will try to hitch their wagons to Vance, who is probably at least as detested as Ted Cruz and trusted even less. We will see the extent to which Vance is promoted to victory by that most corrupt force in the United States, the corporate media, the authors of the corruption of America in the wake of the Sullivan Decision that gave the media the permission to lie about politicians with impunity. As I pointed out they couldn't get Gerald Ford elected after he gave Nixon the pardon, though they certainly did what they could for him. If I were a Republican who wanted Vance to succeed or at least hold the office past '28 I'd caution him on pardoning any of the criminals in the Trump regime. If I were one of Trump's criminals who didn't have a pardon in my pocket already I wouldn't expect that they'd get one. Rudy Giuliani had to wait for his until just a while ago and he was totally exposed. I wonder if someone tests the pardons Trump handed out to those criminals who tried to help him steal an election how the rotten Roberts Court will deal with the fact that Trump's pardons were in aid of his own criminality WHILE HE WAS OUT OF OFFICE. I wouldn't bet on the Roberts Court Republican-fascists nullifying those corrupt pardons. We need a Constitutional Amendment to reign in the idiotically broad powers of pardon those founding fat-heads put in the hands of corrupt presidents. And that's along with the one nullifying the Roberts Court making a Republican-fascist president a dictator - which was their clear intent, knowing that the most stupid and corrupt and only convicted felon in presidential history was going to be the defining figure in their conception of a unitary executive. We probably need a vast restructuring of the Supreme and federal courts even more than we need to beat back the Roberts Court framing of presidential fascism.
* I remember being enormously frustrated with my Senator, George Mitchell in that regard as he and the Senate Democrats lost opportunity after opportunity to humiliate and force their Republican colleagues to take extremely unpopular votes that would have certainly lost them support even in Republican controlled states. I don't know how much of the case for Schumer doing a good job with the hand he was dealt is true and if his problems come from his lack of communications skills. I do think he could have made a lot stronger case for Democrats than he has, though if Democrats in the Senate would have gone along with that is far from a given. We do have a problem with Quislings in the party, some in the house where their effect is more diffused but far more in the Senate. I hate the Senate as a matter of experience and principle.
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