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You are here: Home / House of Representatives / The House Republicans’ Reckoning Was Long Overdue

The House Republicans’ Reckoning Was Long Overdue

October 25, 2023 at 11:00 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Tim Miller: “For about a decade and a half now the governing wing of the party has attempted every strategy imaginable to delay handing congressional leadership power to the group of lawmakers who better represent the desires of today’s GOP voters—the erstwhile renegades the late John McCain dubbed ‘wacko birds.’ That group has grown from only a handful of troublemakers to a significant bloc of Congress that’s bolstered by an additional group of “closet normals” who dress in wacko bird costumes for the retweets.”

“Throughout this period, Republican congressional leaders have taken whatever steps they thought necessary to accommodate and placate these members as long as they could retain what they saw as the real power—leadership posts, committee assignments, big-donor private jet rides—for themselves.”

“Among the many lowlights of this long-running spectacle of appeasement: engaging in wildly irresponsible brinkmanship, granting plum committee assignments to kooks, submitting to power-sharing arrangements and hosting struggle sessions with the House Freedom Caucus, launching sham impeachment inquiries, holding umpty-nine explicitly political hearings over a deadly embassy attack, flying down to an extremely dated South Florida resort to take degrading pictures with a wannabe authoritarian, defending a drag queen fabulist in their ranks, and, most egregiously, agreeing to be complicit in an attempt to overthrow our democracy to soothe the bruised ego of the man-baby-in-chief.”

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About Political Wire

Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.

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