I don’t even know where to begin with this bullshit.

The weakest Speaker of the House in US history has been ousted and the Speaker’s position is vacant for the first time in the House of Representative’s 243 years of existence.

Good riddance.

Kevin McCarthy is nothing more than a sycophantic, lying, piece of garbage scraped off the bottom of my shoe. Partisan hack and chaos agent doesn’t begin to cover the contempt I have for this phony.

I haven’t even gotten into his smarmy, self-satisfied, failing up brand, and contemptuous face.

But you may say, tell me how you really feel.

And judging by his recent tantrum, Interim Speaker, Patrick McHenry isn’t much better.

Let me actually begin by answering the media’s pressing question: Why are Democrats to blame for this debacle?

Well…they’re not.

At all.

The Democrats have a speaker. The Minority Leader. His name is Hakeem Jeffries. They voted for him at the same time Republicans voted for Kevin McCarthy. For the Democrats, nothing has changed. They support their speaker 100%.

It is not their job to bail out his weak ass.

It is not their job to create a safe space for the Republicans to continue their attack on the American people by their reverse Robin Hood of taking from the least of us and giving to the wealthiest. This isn’t politics as usual.

Except that for the Republicans, it is.

I am currently reading Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre by historian, Heather Cox Richardson. It is more than the journey taken by the United States government that led directly to the Wounded Knee massacre, but it is the politics of the day that led to.

The greed.

The corruption.

Basically, the Republican way of life.

I don’t say this lightly.

Prior to this book, I finished reading Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: The Epic Story of the Transcontinental Railroads by Dee Brown about the building of the transcontinental railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and it is full of the double-dealing, cheating, corrupt railroad tycoons who did everything in their power to steal the land from the Native Americans while committing genocide along the way. (As an aside, Dee Brown also wrote the seminal work, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West – I highly recommend it.)

The railroad tycoons did not manage to do this alone. They had help, a lot of help from the US government and the military, all Republican run.

But I diverge from the focus of this writing which for our purposes only touches on the railroads and the Native Americans tangentially to the Republicans’ lying and cheating to win any election.

As I read Cox Richardson’s detailed descriptions of how things went down in the 1890s and beyond, the Republican representatives did everything in their power during the Harrison Administration to retain control of the Congress and the Presidency. They bought off election workers. They kept the Black vote suppressed. They refused to consider Native American citizenship because for some reason, having been born here wasn’t enough to be a voting citizen. Not to mention they weren’t land-owning, a prerequisite for the ability to vote.

They CREATED four new states, and only Montana surprised them by electing a Democratic governor, but other than that, they, as well as Wyoming, North and South Dakota were Republican in every other way. These four NEW REPUBLICAN states received at least four Congressmen and EIGHT senators. This heavily weighted the Electoral College to almost guarantee a Republican victory in 1892.

Which was exactly the point.

Our biggest mistake as a country is letting land vote.

And this was the least duplicitous thing they did to gain votes and money for their personal coffers.

They continually suggested that the land on the Great Plains was great for farming. It wasn’t. And it still isn’t without irrigation which hadn’t been discovered yet as a viable alternative to natural rain. They falsified weather reports, giving the opposite information than the Farmer’s Almanac predicted.

Reading this history, I was becoming incensed. I needed to stop often after I read a paragraph and then highlighted some other Republican misdeed. I was having flash-forwards to modern times and seeing this exact scenario playing out today.

Just look at the last few days of the Speaker vote. One Republican motioned for the speaker to vacate. Eight Republicans voted against Kevin McCarthy. REPUBLICANS. When the interim speaker took over, a small man who thinks smaller, slammed his temporary gavel so hard, he missed the block he’s supposed to hit. His first act as Interim Speaker wasn’t to speak to Democrats, to try to unite the parties or even to unite his own split, petty party, he used that first act to evict Speaker Emerita Pelosi and former Majority Leader Steny Hoyer out of their Capitol offices. Speaker Pelosi wasn’t even in Washington, D.C. She was attending her friend Dianne Feinstein’s funeral in California. Fortunately, her staff had help from Leader Jeffries’ staff to move her office. That’s all you need to know about the parties.

You may not agree with Democratic party policies, but most of the country does. And regardless of even that, when the Democrats are in power, they spend their time trying to make things better for ALL Americans. They’re not out there sabotaging each other and the rest of the country. They’re not holding the debt ceiling and the paychecks of the military hostage. They are working for the people. Always.

What have the Republicans gotten done for the American people?

Nothing.

They’re too busy whining, creating havoc, name-calling, lying, suppressing the vote and everything possible to stay in power.

But when they’re in power, what do they do?

Nothing.

Look back on the last few Republican Administrations. They screw us up so badly and put us deeper into debt, we elect a Democrat who fixes the mess, and then we get collective amnesia.

Remember this on Election Day.

Remember this on every Election Day.

Remember.