#republican inaction

[misfitwashere]

The apocalypse we choose

Mike Johnson's record as Speaker of the House

Timothy Snyder

Mar 3, 2024

In four months as Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson has given Russia a chance to win its war in Ukraine, and thereby turn the world towards tyranny. 

Johnson's term of office consists of stratagems to avoid funding Ukraine.  He and a minority of Trumpist Republicans have left Ukrainians without the means to defend themselves, and enabled Russian aggressors to retake Ukrainian territory.  As a result, troops are killed and disabled every day. 

Around the world, Johnson's behavior is seen as betrayal and weakness.  We tend to focus on the details of Johnson's various excuses, rather than seeing the larger pattern.  Johnson's success in making the war a story about him exemplifies the American propensity to miss the big picture. 

Alive?  Thank a Ukrainian.  The great American capacity is to take others for granted, and our specific form of hubris blinds us to the great services others perform for us.  The resistance of the Ukrainian armed forces and Ukrainian civil society is holding back every form of modern catastrophe.  Ukrainians are preserving an order established after the Second World War, but also pointing the way towards a brighter future.  Their tremendous daily efforts have pushed the world toward a set of better alternatives we would all lack without them.  But they need us at their back. 

An elementary form of apocalypse is genocide.  Russia is making war on Ukraine with the genocidal goal of eliminating Ukrainian society as such.  It consciously fights its war with its own national minorities, and takes every opportunity to spread racist propaganda (including about African-Americans).  Russian occupiers deport Ukrainian children, rape Ukrainian women, castrate Ukrainian men, and murder Ukrainian cultural leaders with this purpose in mind.  They keep children out of school and force families into emigration, all with the goal of putting an end to a nation.  Ukrainian resistance, though, has put the backbone into "never again."  Where Ukraine holds territory, and that is most of the country, people are saved.  Ukrainians have shown that a genocide can be halted -- with the right kind of help. When we cut off that help, as we have done, we enable genocide to proceed.  This is not only a horror in itself, but a precedent.

A great fear of our age is nuclear war, and Russia has used nuclear blackmail against Ukraine.  Russians want Ukraine (and the rest of us) to give up because Russia has nuclear weapons.  Russian propaganda instructs that a nuclear power cannot lose a war.  This is of course untrue.  The U.S. lost in Vietnam, the USSR lost in Afghanistan.  Nuclear weapons did not hold the British and French empires together, or bring Israel victory in Lebanon.  Had Ukraine submitted to Putin's nuclear blackmail, this would have incentivized every country to build nuclear weapons: some to intimidate, some to prevent intimidation.  Ukrainian resistance has saved us from this scenario -- thus far.  Should America abandon Ukraine, we can expect nuclear proliferation and nuclear jeopardy.

Another traditional worry has been a Russian attack upon a European country that triggers the collective defense provision of the NATO alliance.  For now, Ukraine is making this all but impossible.  Ukraine has absorbed an attack by Russia.  At horrible cost, Ukraine is fulfilling the entire mission of NATO, thereby sparing all other NATO members any risk of loss of territory or of life.  The NATO economies are about two-hundred and fifty times as big as the Ukrainian economy.  If they exploit a tiny fraction of their economic power, they could easily sustain the Ukrainian armed forces.  Unfortunately the largest by far of these NATO members, the United States, is doing nothing.  Should this continue, and should Russia win its war in Ukraine, then further war in Europe becomes not only possible, but likely.

For the past two decades, the main concern in Washington, D.C. has been a war with China in the Pacific over Taiwan.  Never was this concern more pressing than in February 2022, when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.  Putin had just received China's blessing for his adventure.  Had Ukraine fallen, as so many expected, it would have been a signal that other such adventures were possible.  Ukraine's endurance has made clear that offensive operations are unpredictable and costly.  Ukrainians are achieving what we could not, as Americans, achieve ourselves: sending a counsel of caution to China without in any way antagonizing the Chinese.  Of course, should Ukraine be abandoned by its allies, and should Russia win, our earlier fears would return, and rightly so.

Russia is testing an international order.  The basic assumption, since the Second World War, is that states exist have borders that war cannot alter.  When Russia attacked Ukraine, it was attacking this principle.  Russia's rulers expected that a new age of chaos would begin, in which only lies and force would count.  The consensus in Washington, we should remember, was the same.  In the beginning, the American leadership expected the Ukrainian president to flee and for the country to fall in three days.  Every day since the fourth day is one in which Ukrainian blood has bought for us a future that we ourselves did not think we had.  After two years, too many of us take this for granted.  But if we decide not to help the Ukrainians, disorder will ensue, and prosperity will collapse.Albrecht Dürer, “Apocalypse,” (third panel), 1498

For the past half century, people have been rightly concerned about global warming.  Whether we get through the next half century will depend upon a balance of power between those who make money from fossil fuels and lie about their consequences and those who tell the truth about science and seek alternative sources of energy.  Vladimir Putin is the most important fossil fuel oligarch.  Both his wealth and his power arise from natural gas and oil reserves.  His war in Ukraine is a foretaste of the struggle for resources we will all face should Putin and other fossil fuel oligarchs get the upper hand.  Precisely because Ukraine resisted, important economies have accelerated their green transition.  Should Ukraine be abandoned and lose, it seems unlikely that there will be another chance to hold back fossil fuel oligarchy and save the climate.  More broadly, Putin's idiotic nation that there is no Ukraine is an example of the kind of oligarchical fantasy wastes time and destroys life as we try to confront the world's actual problems.

Global hunger is an important scenario for catastrophic global suffering in an age of drastic inequality and resource strife.  Here no country is more important than Ukraine.  For more than two thousand years, since the ancient Greeks, the fertile soil of Ukraine has fed neighboring lands and civilizations.  Ukraine today is capable of feeding something like half a billion people.  Russia's war against Ukraine has also been a hunger war.  Russia has mined farms, flooded others by destroying a critical dam, targeted grain-storage facilities, and blockaded the Black Sea to prevent exports.  In 2023, Ukraine was able to win an astonishing victory, clearing the western Black Sea of the Russian navy, and opening lanes for export of grain.  Because the Ukrainians did this on their own, it has hardly been covered in our press.  But it is a huge achievement.  People in the Near East and Africa are being fed who might otherwise starve.  If Ukraine is allowed to fall, all of this can be reversed, and suffering and war will spread to those vulnerable and critical areas.

From a different perspective, people fear that our world can end as a result of artificial intelligence, digital propaganda, and the collapse of the human contact needed for political decency.  For a decade now, Russia has been in the forefront of digital manipulation.  Its first invasion of Ukraine, in 2014, was successful chiefly as a hybrid war, in which it found vulnerable minds in the West and inserted useful memes -- ones which are still in use today.  And Russia does find backers today among the digital oligarchs, most notably Elon Musk, who has bent his personal account and indeed his entire platform to become an instrument of Russian propaganda.  That said, the Ukrainians have, this time, shown how this can be resisted.  Volodymyr Zelens'kyi and other Ukrainian leaders, by taking personal risks in time of danger, have reminded us that there is a real world.  And Ukrainian civil society has this time taken a playful approach to new media, deconstructing Russian propaganda and reminding us of the human side -- and the human stakes.

Perhaps the most insidious calamity we face is one of doubt: we cease to believe in ourselves, as human beings with values, who deserve to rule themselves in the system we call democracy.  For most of this century, democracy has been in decline, and this decline has been accompanied by a discourse of passivity and a lack of resolve.  Russia's attack on Ukraine -- the rare event of an armed autocracy seeking to destroy a peaceful democracy by military force -- was a turning point in this history.  Which way we will all turn remains to be seen.  By resisting on the battlefield, Ukraine has, for the time being anyway, preserved its own democracy, and given new hope to democracies in general.  There is nothing automatic about democracy.  People have to believe that they should rule.  And this will always involve some risk.  By taking great risks for the right values, Ukrainians can and do encourage others around the world.  If Ukrainians are killed, maimed, and forced to retreat as a result of U.S. policy, everyone is demoralized -- including us.

If Americans let Ukrainians down, it will be a blow, perhaps a fatal one, to the "spirit of freedom," as a Ukrainian veteran put it in a speech I heard at the Munich Security Council.  We need that spirit, in part to oppose those who lack it.  The people who block aid for Ukraine today wish our own democracy ill.  In the last few days and weeks we have witnessed, again and again, the overlap between Russian influence in American politics, opposition to aid to Ukraine, and hostility toward the American constitutional system.  Putin knows that his only route to Kyiv passes through Washington, D.C., and he has acted accordingly.

The people working to assure the destruction of democracy in Ukraine also oppose democracy in America.  We have just experienced a bogus impeachment proceeding against President Biden, where the chief accusation (long ago discredited by Ukrainian and other journalists, incidentally) arose from a Russian agent.  Mike Johnson is in a submission chain that passes through Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin.  Trump presents himself as an admirer of Putin and had been his client, in one form or another, for a decade.  He has succeeded in conditioning the media by teaching his followers to shout "Russia hoax" whenever the subject comes up: but, all the same, Russia has backed him in every campaign and is backing him in this one.  Johnson's 2018 congressional campaign, for that matter, took laundered funds from a Russian oligarch, and Johnson was one of the congressmen most deeply implicated in Trump's attempted coup in 2021. 

Ukraine should and can win this war.  To do so, it needs arms and funds.  The amount needed of both is tiny on an American scale, not anything we would even notice.  It is the choices of certain Americans that have brought the Ukrainians to this cruel pass, and brought the world to the edge of multiple catastrophe.  Should we fail to assist Ukraine, we will be inviting the worst of catastrophes.  We will put the security of the world at risk, and betray what is best about ourselves.  Americans can enable Ukrainian victory.  If we fail to do so, we will face an apocalypse Americans have chosen.  And, in particular, an apocalypse Mike Johnson has chosen.

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[winemom-culture]

Last insanepost then I’ll shut up about it but I do think back to office wonks should suffer. Not just the corporate ghouls pulling the strings but the low-level employees whose “I’m so lonely and isolated thanks to remote work ):” articles they rode on to make it happen. You’re too stupid to figure out how to take your laptop to a library or have a social life that doesn’t revolve around your job now every other normal person in the country who has kids and shit to balance has to answer for it

[cuckweeds]

if you think you are morally responsible for Trump's actions if you do not vote against him then why do you not think you are morally responsible for Bidens actions if you do actually vote for him?

[bouncinghedgehog]

[darksteel-relic]

The US's first past the post system sucks so much. If your third party movement gets big enough to have an impact on the national level it just splits the vote and the demonstrably worse party wins anyway.

You're right to be angry, you're right to want something better, but you will not convince me the two major parties are equally bad and that it doesn't matter which one holds power.

If you can work "within the system" to prevent the worst outcome it's still worth doing. State and Local level elections are where your vote has the most power. But you should also be engaged outside the ballot box working towards a future where we no longer have to choose the lesser of two evils.

[ratmanwalking]

I get so annoyed at people who decide to just not go out and vote because "well the leftist party also sucks". Yes, I agree, but do you know who sucks significantly worse? The right wingers, whose hands you are playing into by deciding to just sit out an election

[seraymerichateblog]

vote blue no matter who people are so intensely stupid they don’t even recognize that the people who are going to withhold their votes from biden over his complete impotence demonstrate the proper response to voting as a transaction

it should always be “we’re voting for you because you said you would represent our interests”

it should never be “you aren’t representing our interests but you said you Definitely will next quarter so we’ll still vote for you because you’re allegedly better than the other guy (whose wall you are still building)”

if the democrats want our vote, they need to earn it not just say “hey at least we’re not republicans”

theyve pulled off this excellent grift in getting every equality bumper sticker owning liberal to do their scolding for them: “if we don’t get control of the government because we barely fucking do anything when we do it’s actually your fault for not supporting us body and soul”

[govtshutdown]

Get your popcorn (or your tissues)

[inthemaelstrom]

Sample letter to send your fucking Senators. I just emailed this to Schumer and Gillebrand.

Last night, about a hundred protesters managed to prevent four of Elon Musk's minions from entering OMB and mucking around in our personal information and State Department secrets. They are kids from ages 19-24. One of them--the 19 year old, a former intern not even in college yet--calls himself Big Balls on LinkedIn. Nothing they are doing is legal. Their so-called security clearances are illegitimate, like Musk as the head of his so-called agency.

By your inaction, you are handing the keys to the government to six clowns and their South African oligarch ringmaster. Heather Cox Richardson, citing Wired, called this the largest data breach in history. As a start, can you just send members of Congress to observe, to see with their own eyes what they are contributing to? This requires more than just lawsuits. People in the streets are throwing their bodies between these marauding kids and our data and secrets. Will it take a literal uprising of voters to get you to act? What are you doing?

Here's a suggestion for action from the 20K people at Indivisible who met last night on Zoom (30K more signed up):

-Deny a Quorum: If Republicans don’t have 51 votes in the chamber, Democrats can walk out and shut down Senate business entirely.

-Block Unanimous Consent: Object to every procedural shortcut, forcing Republicans to take the longest possible route for every step of the confirmation process.

-Max Out Debate Time: Use all 30 hours of debate on Vought to expose Project 2025, Musk’s Treasury takeover, and the funding freeze.

-Delay and Disrupt: Force roll-call votes, quorum calls, and procedural delays to slow everything down.

-Blanket Opposition: Democrats cannot continue to vote for Trump’s other nominees, helping to install more MAGA loyalists into powerful positions in the federal government while this power grab continues.

-No Business as Usual: This is a constitutional crisis. Democrats must abandon the old rules and fight with everything they have.

Do something. We're demanding it.

[aw-dag]

Section 1557 is the law that guarantees trans protections in the us. Saying she supports that law is not “not giving a shit about trans rights lol” just because you don’t know to what law she is referring.

Lovely how libs has spent a year going "yeah well Harris is gonna back and fund a genocide but at least she will stand by trans people in the US" just for her to come out as not giving a shit about trans rights lol

[lesbianwyllravengard]

Every single day I live in constant fear that trump will become president again because you stupid cunts on tumblr with no ounce of intelligence think that not voting for Biden will do any good. I'm sick to my stomach seeing this shit. You think that not voting absolves you from the consequences you think that not voting will make things better you do not understand that republicans will vote for trump no matter what and your inaction will lead to him winning. He cannot win. He cannot fucking win.

Vote for Biden and shut the fuck up

Edit: Anyone who comments asking if I'll block them and call them a bot for disagreeing, I absolutely will. Manipulation tactics will not sway me to ignore substantial ignorance and neoliberal bullshittery. If you're not a bot you're a fed so I think I'm being kind in calling you the former, actually

[liberalsarecool]

Two things:

1. Trump policies and willful Covid inaction destroyed the economy. Crushed jobs.

2. Biden inherited Trump's horrendous clusterfcuk of an economy, passed Democratic policies, and was massively successful at creating jobs.

Democrats are better at government for The People. Republicans create/increase trauma.

#VoteBlue

[rederiswrites]

North Carolina voters check you registrations and tell your friends and relatives to. From Heather Cox Richardson's daily writeup:

North Carolina’s State Board of Elections announced in a press release that over the past 20 months they have removed 747,000 voters from the state’s list of registered voters. Officials said these voters either had moved or were inactive because they had not voted in the past two federal elections. The state has 7.7 million registered voters. Trump must win North Carolina to have a plausible chance at victory in 2024, but the Robinson scandal will hurt Republican turnout. In 2020, Trump won the state by about 75,000 votes.

[indelicateink]

"[Senator John Fredrickson's] speech unfolded amidst a heated debate surrounding a proposed bill known as the Sports and Spaces Act, aimed at restricting trans students' access to facilities and sports teams aligned with their gender identity.

"This legislation would threaten to further marginalize trans youth by denying them access to basic amenities like bathrooms and locker rooms, as well as excluding them from sports competitions.

"The Sports and Spaces Act ultimately met its demise by a narrow margin, with Republican Senators Tom Brand and Merv Riepe—who initially co-sponsored it with their colleague Kathleen Kauth—abstaining from voting, effectively rendering it inactive for the remainder of the legislative session.

"The measure could not overcome a filibuster after a vote of 31-15 failed to cross the 33-vote threshold.

"In light of that, many praised Frederickson for speaking out so eloquently."

[milf--adjacent]

serious voting question: I'm an ml and generally I don't vote. can I ask what your reasoning is for voting third party? I'm curious to round out my opinion a little better

Seeing just how many people voted socialist back in the 19-teens was an inspiration to me as a baby leftist growing up in a deep red state. Even if they didn't win, I saw that I wasn't alone like I felt I was, that even the 'stupid' people of the past had some sense in their heads and supported policy and politics we still need even today. So no. 1 it's for the baby leftists to come who will feel trapped and alone and need a tangible connection to their beliefs: The number of people who simply didn't vote doesn't show up in textbooks, but minor party votes do.

Second: the democratic campaigning apparatus only serves to seperate those willing to organize from meaningful organization. By convincing people to put that same energy into the third party of their choice, we have countered at least a little of the Democrat's anti-revolutionary strategy. If you can convince a progressive to actually act and vote like a progressive, that's someone who might actually help when you need to set up a soup kitchen or protest in the future.

Thirdly: Many of these "I'm gonna vote anyway so I might as well vote blue" folks have never engaged in organizing. Getting involved with 3rd parties puts them in touch with others who are of a similar political slant, the first (and often most difficult) step in organizing. At least with the Greens in most places, they actively ask for help of all sorts, giving people experience in organizing they can build on as they become more politically involved. More people who know how to organize is never a bad thing.

Fourthly: If a third party can get just 5% of the national vote in an election, they are entitled to national campaign funding and a space in the official debates in the coming election. This would be a much needed shift in American politics. Democrats sound much more like republicans than leftists, and that's part of why they never get involved in the free and equal debates: the democrats are to the right of the fucking libertarians on a number of policies.

Finally: if a 3rd party candidate did win the presidency, a lot of the good things the democrats have held over our heads like bait for decades would get done, and people would have more time and energy to commit to political actions. I support 3rd party politics because at the very least it shakes things up a little. The status quo is what's killing us and any effort to change that disorganizes and spreads our true enemies thinner. Center-left socialism will not save us, but it will at least address the social ills of our society in a helpful way and attempt to tackle crisies like climate change, policing, and ending foreign policy fiascos via slashing the bloated military budget (even the fucking libertarians are running on that).

The general population of the US will refuse to even consider actual leftist politics without some sort of shift in our electoral politics. Instead of apathy and middle-finger-hoisting inaction, I chose an action with lasting strategic value. If we want a real "the revolution will not be televised" moment, we have to slap the soma of blue-tie lies out of enough hands to get people to pay attention. 3rd party electoralism is a step in the correct direction for them and a path I have started many people down already. I plan to continue until there is no need for it.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Nick Visser at HuffPost:

Former President Donald Trump participated in a town-hall-style event with undecided Latino voters on Wednesday night, facing a series of tough questions as Americans have begun casting early ballots across the nation. Ramiro González, a Florida Republican, gave Trump a chance to “win back” his vote after he said he was disturbed by the former president’s actions on and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“I am a Republican,” González, a construction worker, told Trump during the Univision event. “I want to give you the opportunity to try and win back my vote. Your action, and maybe inaction, during your presidency and the last few years sort of … was a little disturbing to me. What happened during Jan. 6 and the fact that you waited so long to take action while your supporters were attacking the Capitol.” He went on to voice concerns that some in Trump’s orbit, namely his former vice president, Mike Pence, no longer supported him. Trump rejected that any notable portion of his supporters had broken with him and then launched into a series of falsehoods surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection while claiming there was “nothing done wrong at all” and “nobody was killed.” “You had hundreds of thousands of people come to Washington. They didn’t come because of me, they came because of the election,” Trump said, discounting his efforts to inflame his supporters after his loss to Joe Biden. “Some of those people went down to the Capitol — I said, ‘peacefully and patriotically.’ Nothing done wrong. At all. Nothing done wrong.”

Ramiro González, a Florida Republican, asked Donald Trump on how to win his vote back at last night’s Univision town hall. González explained why Trump’s despicable actions on January 6th, 2021 and afterwards was disturbing.

Trump responded to Ramiro’s question with delusional nonsense praising the domestic terrorist actions he helped incite on that date with his “stolen” election lies.

See Also:

BBC News: Trump calls 6 January 'day of love' when asked about Capitol riot