Can 2024 become any more absurd?
Maybe it can, but we probably do not want to find out. Things have already turned pretty crazy, especially in American politics. Any more of it, and we might lose sight of which side of the line between fiction and reality that we are standing on.
When I read a story about an apparently verified UFO sighting in Las Vegas, including 8-foot-tall beings rummaging through someone’s backyard, my first thought was that the only way 2024 can get any more absurd is if these space aliens make Capitol Hill their next stop.
Again, we are not there yet, and while we wait for the big landing, let us take inventory of how far 2024 has taken us already. For starters, this year is the first in U.S. history when a sitting president, running for re-election, has decided to throw a barrage of prosecutors at his opponent.
Back in the day, this was something we associated with Third World politics. African dictators had specialized in doing this, although not all of them limited their tactics to the courts. At least one of them, Jean-Bedel Boukassa of the Central African Empire, is said to have taken a more culinary approach to his opponents.
So far, the new ‘prosecute thy opponent’ standard in American politics has stopped short of Boukassa’s extravagance, but the new practice of weaponizing courts has certainly come to stay.
Let there be no doubt: the use of this tactic will not be the exclusive privilege of Democrats. If Donald Trump defies the court cases thrown at him and pulls off a victory in the November election, he will turn the tables on his predecessor. He is not going to want to be left behind when the people on the other side of the aisle invent new ways of waging a political war on their adversary.
Trump could, of course, wait until 2028 comes closer and see if Biden wants to run for a second term. However, given the incumbent president’s deteriorating mental capacity, he might not live much beyond leaving the presidency. By launching a ‘right back at ya’ series of charges against Biden, Trump can make sure that American politics is glued to the sleazy bottom of global standards where the Democrats have taken it.
But wait—isn’t it racist to suggest that Biden’s ‘prosecute thy opponent’ philosophy is an African idea? Perhaps it would be politically more correct to use Russia as the source of inspiration? After all, Russia plays such a big role in American politics as it is, including that of a fake ‘dossier’ that was supposed to show that Trump won in 2016 because he ‘colluded’ with Russia.
While Trump will probably be busy returning favors to his political enemies, Congress is getting ready to greet him, should he return to the White House. Their greeting, though, will probably not be of the kind he had hoped for. Instead of working with a Republican or Democrat majority, President Trump will probably be met by a shiny new Uniparty.
It all started when Marjorie Taylor-Greene, MTG, a Republican Congresswoman from Georgia, got tired of House Speaker Mike Johnson. While Johnson was busy running a legislative chamber with 435 members, MTG thought he was not paying enough attention to her. Convinced as she was that her ideas were more important than anything anyone else brought to the table, MTG really, really wanted to get her bills passed.
When Speaker Johnson did not give MTG the attention that MTG thought that MTG deserved, MTG decided to set in motion a process to have the House fire Speaker Johnson.
For those of us who do not live inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s head, it is difficult to see what she would have accomplished by getting a Republican Speaker of the House fired for the second time in less than a year. Given that a Congressional term is two years, it is absolutely essential for the party in the majority to project strong leadership and legislative efficiency. To fire your own party’s Speaker once is a bad idea; to do it twice in one Congressional period is a way to turn your own party into a political sitcom cast.
But none of that seems to bother MTG and her nearest Congressional friends. Where they come from, weaker leadership is stronger leadership.
Marjorie Taylor Greene did make history with her attempt to oust Speaker Johnson. But she also made history in a way that I highly doubt she still has realized. In order to fire Johnson, MTG would have needed every Democrat in the House to vote against him. They did that with his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, who was fired last year at the initiative of one of MTG’s close buddies. But this time around, the Democrats decided to save the Republican Speaker-in-Peril.
It was a smart move—from their perspective. The mainstreams of the two parties are not all that different at the end of the day. They see eye to eye on all the big issues of the day.
They both love big government spending, with the Republicans being slightly more in favor of expanding the military budget and the Democrats wanting to dole out more cash on entitlements.
They both love centralized education: the debate among Republicans of decentralizing education back to the states, which once roamed free in the party, is now confined to the outer rim where conservatives and libertarians dwell.
And most of all: the two parties love spending money on Ukraine. It does not matter if the money is actually going to Ukraine, or if it will be used by the Pentagon to procure the replenishment of depleted military stockpiles. So long as there is a ‘Ukraine’ label on the check they spend, mainstream Democrats and Conservatives are happy.
For these reasons, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s attempt to fire Speaker Johnson turned into a historic moment of political metamorphosis. On May 8th, Mike Johnson was saved as Speaker by 163 Democrats, who joined 196 Republicans and voted in favor of Johnson.
That morning, two parties walked into the House chamber; after the vote, one new party walked out.
For the first time in the history of American politics, the minority party actively saved a House Speaker belonging to the majority party. It was the founding moment of the American Uniparty, a riveting bromance across the political aisle.
With one ingenious vote, the House of Representatives killed the old two-party system. While the two will continue to exist, from now on they will slowly begin to merge at all the levels that matter. While voters can run around with red or blue hats and register as either a “Democrat” or a “Republican,” none of that will really be of any consequence from here on.
What really matters is that the Congressional insiders and their benefactors in the lobbying industry are now united. They no longer have to pretend. They can run around with their arms open and show each other the affection they have so long tried to keep hidden in the closet.
May 8th became a big political coming-out party for America’s political swamp creatures, and it is already having tangible consequences—especially with regard to the presidential campaign. With Biden doing to Donald Trump what Putin did to Navalny, the Republicans in Congress had originally developed a plan to stop one of the prosecutors in his tracks. They were going to remove the funding for Special Counsel Jack Smith and thereby kill his election interference charges against Trump.
With a House full of same-party unicorns, that plan has been scrapped. Explains the chief unicorn himself:
There is a necessity for a function like [Special Counsel], because sometimes the Department of Justice … can’t necessarily, without a conflict of interest, investigate or prosecute the president who’s their boss, or the president’s family.
None of this makes any sense, of course. The Department of Justice is more than happy to prosecute Trump, and to aid and abet anyone who does. Trump is not the incumbent president, namely, so there is no conflict of interest here, no matter how hard Speaker Johnson tries to find one.
The reality of the matter is, of course, that this is Mike Johnson’s quid-pro-quo for being allowed to stay on as House Speaker.
It remains to be seen if Trump gets convicted anywhere, on any of the charges that the Biden regime’s litigation machine has thrown at him. If he isn’t, we can all rest assured that the coming four years will be filled to the brim with vendetta-style ‘right back at ya’ prosecutorial persecution of Trump’s political opponents. The Democrats opened that can of worms, and Trump will be all too happy to return their favors.
Which brings us to the big point behind the new Uniparty. Its members, the unicorns at the epicenter of American politics, are now so powerful that they can neuter the presidency. Not only can they get all the legislation through that they want—the Senate is de facto already a Uniparty—but there are enough unicorns in both chambers to overcome a president’s veto.
Bluntly speaking, with the Uniparty running Congress, there is no room for a president to power play. He can do that when there are narrow majorities in the House and the Senate; regardless of which way the small majorities tilt, a president can always negotiate his will into the bills and the legislative process.
Now that the Democrats and Republicans have effectively ended the era of narrow majorities, the balance of power between the White House and Capitol Hill is going to shift decisively from the former to the latter.
Unless, of course, the president officially concedes and joins the Uniparty.
The consequences of this power shift are going to be significant. The Uniparty consists essentially of establishment neocons, politicians whose political convictions and interests align well with that of the decades-old neoconservative movement in American politics. We can trust that whatever political opposition there has been to the neoconservative agenda in American politics is now dead and gone.
Based on the votes to keep Speaker Johnson on his job, the neocon political agenda has the support of 82% of the House of Representatives. That is a ruling majority larger than we will find in almost any legislature in the free world.
Its first order of business—aside from getting neocon legislation passed with expediency—will be to build a bulwark in Congress against a presumptive second term with Trump in the White House. The problem with doing this has been that Congress for decades has been handing more and more power over to the presidency. In a trickling fashion, it has effectively delegated legislative authority to the executive branch.
While technically not unconstitutional (at least generally), this goes against the spirit of division of powers in America’s founding document. But Congress saw no problem in that; they could let the president bury politically controversial issues in the executive bureaucracy. Instead of Congress taking the blame for disruptive government intervention in the economy and in people’s lives, some regulatory agency somewhere could simply stipulate the same thing—and voters had nobody to blame.
So long as the president was a sound man—one who knew how the political swamp worked and helped perpetuate it—this slow transfer of power from the legislative to the executive branch was of no real consequence.
Until, that is, Trump won the 2016 election. Suddenly, the political swamp realized that neither party could control him. Although he lost in 2020, there is at least a fair chance that he will now make a comeback. The swamp needs to rewrite the rules so that Trump does not have anywhere near the power this time around that he had in his first term.
Behold the Uniparty. With four out of five members of the House being a unicorn, there is no way Trump will have any say on anything of any relevance.
The Uniparty has been long in the making, but it needed an opportunity to constitute itself openly. Thanks to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s obsession with trying to get Speaker Johnson fired, they got that opportunity.
Welcome to a new era in American politics. Welcome to tranquility and unity.
Welcome to America 2.0.
America’s Uniparty: The New Anti-Trump Frontline
Photo: Larisa from Pixabay
Can 2024 become any more absurd?
Maybe it can, but we probably do not want to find out. Things have already turned pretty crazy, especially in American politics. Any more of it, and we might lose sight of which side of the line between fiction and reality that we are standing on.
When I read a story about an apparently verified UFO sighting in Las Vegas, including 8-foot-tall beings rummaging through someone’s backyard, my first thought was that the only way 2024 can get any more absurd is if these space aliens make Capitol Hill their next stop.
Again, we are not there yet, and while we wait for the big landing, let us take inventory of how far 2024 has taken us already. For starters, this year is the first in U.S. history when a sitting president, running for re-election, has decided to throw a barrage of prosecutors at his opponent.
Back in the day, this was something we associated with Third World politics. African dictators had specialized in doing this, although not all of them limited their tactics to the courts. At least one of them, Jean-Bedel Boukassa of the Central African Empire, is said to have taken a more culinary approach to his opponents.
So far, the new ‘prosecute thy opponent’ standard in American politics has stopped short of Boukassa’s extravagance, but the new practice of weaponizing courts has certainly come to stay.
Let there be no doubt: the use of this tactic will not be the exclusive privilege of Democrats. If Donald Trump defies the court cases thrown at him and pulls off a victory in the November election, he will turn the tables on his predecessor. He is not going to want to be left behind when the people on the other side of the aisle invent new ways of waging a political war on their adversary.
Trump could, of course, wait until 2028 comes closer and see if Biden wants to run for a second term. However, given the incumbent president’s deteriorating mental capacity, he might not live much beyond leaving the presidency. By launching a ‘right back at ya’ series of charges against Biden, Trump can make sure that American politics is glued to the sleazy bottom of global standards where the Democrats have taken it.
But wait—isn’t it racist to suggest that Biden’s ‘prosecute thy opponent’ philosophy is an African idea? Perhaps it would be politically more correct to use Russia as the source of inspiration? After all, Russia plays such a big role in American politics as it is, including that of a fake ‘dossier’ that was supposed to show that Trump won in 2016 because he ‘colluded’ with Russia.
While Trump will probably be busy returning favors to his political enemies, Congress is getting ready to greet him, should he return to the White House. Their greeting, though, will probably not be of the kind he had hoped for. Instead of working with a Republican or Democrat majority, President Trump will probably be met by a shiny new Uniparty.
It all started when Marjorie Taylor-Greene, MTG, a Republican Congresswoman from Georgia, got tired of House Speaker Mike Johnson. While Johnson was busy running a legislative chamber with 435 members, MTG thought he was not paying enough attention to her. Convinced as she was that her ideas were more important than anything anyone else brought to the table, MTG really, really wanted to get her bills passed.
When Speaker Johnson did not give MTG the attention that MTG thought that MTG deserved, MTG decided to set in motion a process to have the House fire Speaker Johnson.
For those of us who do not live inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s head, it is difficult to see what she would have accomplished by getting a Republican Speaker of the House fired for the second time in less than a year. Given that a Congressional term is two years, it is absolutely essential for the party in the majority to project strong leadership and legislative efficiency. To fire your own party’s Speaker once is a bad idea; to do it twice in one Congressional period is a way to turn your own party into a political sitcom cast.
But none of that seems to bother MTG and her nearest Congressional friends. Where they come from, weaker leadership is stronger leadership.
Marjorie Taylor Greene did make history with her attempt to oust Speaker Johnson. But she also made history in a way that I highly doubt she still has realized. In order to fire Johnson, MTG would have needed every Democrat in the House to vote against him. They did that with his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, who was fired last year at the initiative of one of MTG’s close buddies. But this time around, the Democrats decided to save the Republican Speaker-in-Peril.
It was a smart move—from their perspective. The mainstreams of the two parties are not all that different at the end of the day. They see eye to eye on all the big issues of the day.
They both love big government spending, with the Republicans being slightly more in favor of expanding the military budget and the Democrats wanting to dole out more cash on entitlements.
They both love centralized education: the debate among Republicans of decentralizing education back to the states, which once roamed free in the party, is now confined to the outer rim where conservatives and libertarians dwell.
And most of all: the two parties love spending money on Ukraine. It does not matter if the money is actually going to Ukraine, or if it will be used by the Pentagon to procure the replenishment of depleted military stockpiles. So long as there is a ‘Ukraine’ label on the check they spend, mainstream Democrats and Conservatives are happy.
For these reasons, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s attempt to fire Speaker Johnson turned into a historic moment of political metamorphosis. On May 8th, Mike Johnson was saved as Speaker by 163 Democrats, who joined 196 Republicans and voted in favor of Johnson.
That morning, two parties walked into the House chamber; after the vote, one new party walked out.
For the first time in the history of American politics, the minority party actively saved a House Speaker belonging to the majority party. It was the founding moment of the American Uniparty, a riveting bromance across the political aisle.
With one ingenious vote, the House of Representatives killed the old two-party system. While the two will continue to exist, from now on they will slowly begin to merge at all the levels that matter. While voters can run around with red or blue hats and register as either a “Democrat” or a “Republican,” none of that will really be of any consequence from here on.
What really matters is that the Congressional insiders and their benefactors in the lobbying industry are now united. They no longer have to pretend. They can run around with their arms open and show each other the affection they have so long tried to keep hidden in the closet.
May 8th became a big political coming-out party for America’s political swamp creatures, and it is already having tangible consequences—especially with regard to the presidential campaign. With Biden doing to Donald Trump what Putin did to Navalny, the Republicans in Congress had originally developed a plan to stop one of the prosecutors in his tracks. They were going to remove the funding for Special Counsel Jack Smith and thereby kill his election interference charges against Trump.
With a House full of same-party unicorns, that plan has been scrapped. Explains the chief unicorn himself:
None of this makes any sense, of course. The Department of Justice is more than happy to prosecute Trump, and to aid and abet anyone who does. Trump is not the incumbent president, namely, so there is no conflict of interest here, no matter how hard Speaker Johnson tries to find one.
The reality of the matter is, of course, that this is Mike Johnson’s quid-pro-quo for being allowed to stay on as House Speaker.
It remains to be seen if Trump gets convicted anywhere, on any of the charges that the Biden regime’s litigation machine has thrown at him. If he isn’t, we can all rest assured that the coming four years will be filled to the brim with vendetta-style ‘right back at ya’ prosecutorial persecution of Trump’s political opponents. The Democrats opened that can of worms, and Trump will be all too happy to return their favors.
Which brings us to the big point behind the new Uniparty. Its members, the unicorns at the epicenter of American politics, are now so powerful that they can neuter the presidency. Not only can they get all the legislation through that they want—the Senate is de facto already a Uniparty—but there are enough unicorns in both chambers to overcome a president’s veto.
Bluntly speaking, with the Uniparty running Congress, there is no room for a president to power play. He can do that when there are narrow majorities in the House and the Senate; regardless of which way the small majorities tilt, a president can always negotiate his will into the bills and the legislative process.
Now that the Democrats and Republicans have effectively ended the era of narrow majorities, the balance of power between the White House and Capitol Hill is going to shift decisively from the former to the latter.
Unless, of course, the president officially concedes and joins the Uniparty.
The consequences of this power shift are going to be significant. The Uniparty consists essentially of establishment neocons, politicians whose political convictions and interests align well with that of the decades-old neoconservative movement in American politics. We can trust that whatever political opposition there has been to the neoconservative agenda in American politics is now dead and gone.
Based on the votes to keep Speaker Johnson on his job, the neocon political agenda has the support of 82% of the House of Representatives. That is a ruling majority larger than we will find in almost any legislature in the free world.
Its first order of business—aside from getting neocon legislation passed with expediency—will be to build a bulwark in Congress against a presumptive second term with Trump in the White House. The problem with doing this has been that Congress for decades has been handing more and more power over to the presidency. In a trickling fashion, it has effectively delegated legislative authority to the executive branch.
While technically not unconstitutional (at least generally), this goes against the spirit of division of powers in America’s founding document. But Congress saw no problem in that; they could let the president bury politically controversial issues in the executive bureaucracy. Instead of Congress taking the blame for disruptive government intervention in the economy and in people’s lives, some regulatory agency somewhere could simply stipulate the same thing—and voters had nobody to blame.
So long as the president was a sound man—one who knew how the political swamp worked and helped perpetuate it—this slow transfer of power from the legislative to the executive branch was of no real consequence.
Until, that is, Trump won the 2016 election. Suddenly, the political swamp realized that neither party could control him. Although he lost in 2020, there is at least a fair chance that he will now make a comeback. The swamp needs to rewrite the rules so that Trump does not have anywhere near the power this time around that he had in his first term.
Behold the Uniparty. With four out of five members of the House being a unicorn, there is no way Trump will have any say on anything of any relevance.
The Uniparty has been long in the making, but it needed an opportunity to constitute itself openly. Thanks to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s obsession with trying to get Speaker Johnson fired, they got that opportunity.
Welcome to a new era in American politics. Welcome to tranquility and unity.
Welcome to America 2.0.
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