Ronald Brownstein: The Threat to Democracy Is Coming From Inside the U.S. House

Representative Jim Jordan may or may not break down the last few Republican holdouts who blocked his election as House speaker yesterday. But the fact that about 90 percent of the House GOP conference voted to place him in the chamber’s top job marks an ominous milestone in the Republican Party’s reconfiguration since Donald Trump’s emergence as its central figure.

The preponderant majority of House Republicans backing Jordan is attempting to elevate someone who not only defended former President Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election but participated in them more extensively than any other member of Congress.

Jordan’s rise, like Trump’s own commanding lead in the 2024 GOP presidential race, provides more evidence that for the first time since the Civil War, the dominant faction in one of America’s two major parties is no longer committed to the principles of democracy as the U.S. has known them. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/10/us-house-democracy-threat-republican-speaker-race/675679/
 

Lorraine Ali: Elon Musk bought Twitter just to break it. With a new war, we’re paying the price

It’s been nearly a year since Elon Musk acquired Twitter, and more than the average landlord, he’s made some changes to the storefront: replacing the social media platform’s cheerful winged mascot with an ominous X, stripping all but paying subscribers of verified status, and turning it from a frenetic crossroads of breaking news and opinion to a playground for falsehoods and propaganda sowed by bad actors.

Now that the little blue bird is gone, the tenor of the place has changed — and things are much uglier. GLAAD called it the most dangerous platform for LGBTQ people. The ADL cited a 61.3% increase in antisemitic tweets two weeks after Musk bought the site compared to the two weeks before he took over. The Center for Countering Digital Hate reports a 202% increase in tweets using the N-word since Musk took the reins. Last month, Musk accused the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic and hinted that he might sue the anti-hate organization for defamation.

For Musk and those who’ve turned the place into a toxic dump of hate-fluencers and bad info, the goal is no longer sharing information. It’s about screaming into the void, no matter how ill-informed the message or baseless the accusation. It’s about eroding confidence in trustworthy sources, individual or institutional, and elevating nefarious users who must stoke fear, doubt and confusion in order to thrive. And as he nears his one-year anniversary, it’s never been clearer that Musk will go to great lengths to deliver. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-10-12/hard-line-republicans-wont-back-scalise-speaker
 

Shlomo Ben: How Netanyahu’s political calculations resulted in catastrophe

Sooner or later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s destructive political magic, which has kept him in power for 15 years, was bound to usher in a major tragedy. A year ago, he formed the most radical and incompetent government in Israel’s history. Don’t worry, he assured his critics, I have two hands firmly on the steering wheel.

But by ruling out any political process in Palestine and boldly asserting, in his government’s guidelines, that the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel, Netanyahu’s fanatical government made bloodshed inevitable.

Admittedly, blood flowed in Palestine even when peace-seekers such as Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak were in office. But Netanyahu recklessly invited violence by paying his coalition partners any price for their support. He let them grab Palestinian lands, expand illegal settlements, scorn Muslim sensibilities regarding the sacred mosque on the Temple Mount and promote suicidal delusions about the reconstruction of the biblical Temple in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, he also sidelined the more moderate Palestinian leadership of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, effectively beefing up the radical Hamas in Gaza.

According to Netanyahu’s twisted logic, strong Islamist rule in Gaza would be the ultimate argument against a political solution in Palestine. By rewarding the extremists and castigating the moderates, Netanyahu believed that he, unlike the soft leftists, had finally found the solution to the conflict. The Abraham Accords, which normalized Israel’s relations with four Arab states (and will probably soon include Saudi Arabia), blinded him to the Palestinian volcano beneath his feet. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-10-10/israel-hamas-war-netanyahu-mideast-policies
 

Dan Pfeiffer: An Unserious Party in a Deadly Serious Time

The Republicans’ 2024 strategy against Joe Biden has been crystal clear since the first day of his presidency — make the world seem as chaotic and dangerous as possible and then argue that the 80-year-old President is too old and infirm to protect Americans from that chaos and danger…

To date, that strategy has been working. Most people think the country is going in the wrong direction. More Americans are expressing concern about Biden’s age, and Trump has a slight edge in hypothetical general election polls.

The events of this past week, however, demonstrate a fatal flaw in that strategy. The more consequential the moment, the less likely voters are to hand over the wheel of the ship to a completely unserious party led by an erratic criminal without the slightest interest in or capacity to govern. https://www.messageboxnews.com/p/the-gop-an-unserious-party-in-a-deadly
 

Dan Merica and Amie Parnes: House Republicans’ Chaos Is Making Biden’s Split-Screen Strategy a Lot Easier

Joe Biden’s reelection strategy relies on painting Republicans as chaotic, disorganized, and unserious.

And the recent bedlam in the Republican-controlled House is making that job a lot easier.

Biden’s campaign has seized on the Republican infighting around the ouster of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Oct. 3  and the Republican conference’s inability to agree upon a successor. The fractious debate plays directly into Biden’s split-screen strategy, one that the president’s top aides and advisers believe will allow persuadable voters to see the Democratic leader in a position of power as the Republicans in the House and those vying for his job fight among themselves. https://themessenger.com/politics/biden-house-republican-chaos-contrast-strategy

Tom Nichols: The Source of America’s Political Chaos

As I continue to watch the GOP flail about—House Republicans have now chosen the execrable Representative Jim Jordan for speaker, replacing Steve Scalise, whose nomination lasted 48 hours—I have been thinking about an alternate history of a United States where Donald Trump lost the 2016 election. I am convinced that the chaos now overtaking much of the American political system was not inevitable: The source of our ongoing political disorder is because of a razor-thin victory in an election in 2016 decided by a relatively tiny number of voters.

Trump’s win set up a series of cascading failures. Winning in 2016 turbocharged Trump’s claims of leading a movement. His victory encouraged other Republicans to go into survival mode and adopt the protective coloration of Trumpism just to win their primaries, a process that led directly to the crapstorm deluging the House at this very moment. Most Republicans in Congress, as Mitt Romney has told us, hate Trump, and many of them probably wish that someone could jump into the Time Tunnel, go back to 2016, and persuade a few thousand voters in three or four states to come to their senses.

At the least, a Trump loss would have let other Republicans avoid sinking in the populist swamp. Elise Stefanik might be a relentless political opportunist, but without Trump, she and other GOP leaders could have pronounced Trumpian extremism a failure and stayed in something like a center-right lane. On the Earth Where Trump Lost, Fox-addicted voters might still have sent irresponsible performance artists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz to Congress, but the institutional Republicans would have had every incentive to marginalize them. (Remember, Jordan’s been in the House since 2007, but attaching himself to Trump has helped to put the speaker’s gavel within his reach. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/10/trump-2016-source-chaos/675643/
 

Molly Jong-Fast: House Republicans Have Opened the Gaetz of Hell

A Jim Jordan Speakership would be a nightmare for democracy, for political discourse, for many of the values that I hold dear. But Jordan winning 217 votes would make clear that there are zero moderates left in the Republican caucus, that literally every member of the house is a right-wing zealot.

Things are, in other words, looking pretty bleak. As the carnage in the Middle East dominates the news cycle—and the House’s fiscal responsibilities come into immense focus—it’s unclear how the party will escape from that sand trap, whether it’s by electing a hard-line MAGA replacement who endangers their control of the House or by reelecting McCarthy, who could very well be vacated once more. What is certain amid all the bickering, backstabbing, and nail-biting is that the only member of Congress who is presumably happy about this House of horrors is the Gaetz of Hell. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/10/house-republicans-have-opened-the-gaetz-of-hell

Jill Lawrence: Jim Jordan: An Absurd and Dangerous Choice for House Speaker

Here are nine of the countless reasons he can’t be trusted with U.S. democracy.

TWO YEARS AGO, I called for Congress to punish and even expel lawmakers who betrayed America by trying to overturn the 2020 election. Now a majority of House Republicans have chosen Jim Jordan, one of Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” ringleaders, as their preferred candidate for speaker of the House.

How dare they even think about it?

The speaker of the House is right behind the vice president in the presidential line of succession. A speaker might have to preside over a disputed presidential election. A speaker in theory could even manufacture disputes by leading his or her party to reject state electors, an amped-up version of what we saw congressional Republicans do on January 6, 2021.

The next speaker should not be someone we already know is willing to manufacture disputes and support groundless claims to overturn an election to install the president he wants.

Jordan is an absurd and dangerous choice for that reason and too many others to count. https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/jim-jordan-absurd-dangerous-choice-for-speaker

Eric Garcia: Jim Jordan’s failure shows the limits of ‘legislative terrorism’

Over the past day or so, it looked like Jim Jordan might actually clinch the speakership. He had won over some of his biggest skeptics in the House Republican conference. Even some Republicans from districts that voted for President Joe Biden like Rep Marc Molinaro (R-NY) and Juan Ciscomani (R-AZ) announced their support for the right-wing firebrand.

A Jordan victory would have symbolised the triumph of radical conservatives in the decade-long civil war they have waged against establishment Republicans – who, despite not necessarily being moderate, did understand the levers of governing – that began in 2010 during the Tea Party revolution. It would have been a sign that the institutionalists once again folded because they mistakenly believed if they incorporated the radicals into the fold, they would mature rather than see it as permission.

This is not to say that the radicals can’t stage a comeback. Indeed, they will likely remember this as a moment they got so close to a taste of power and rue against those who denied it to them. But they have shown that they do not have the capacity to actually implement plans to get the power to punish their enemies. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jim-jordan-house-speaker-legislative-terrorist-b2431372.html