10-27-2023, 01:33 PM
Making Johnson Speaker just papers over the House Republicans' problems. The government is going to run out of money in late November. They have to pass legislation to keep things going. Now that the hard liners have won the Speaker battle with one of their own, how far are they going to refuse to compromise with Senate Democrats and Biden unless they get some things that even moderate House Republicans won't want to pass. What issues will they prioritize since the hard liners demands are all over the place and who knows what nonsense Trump will cook up to get them to pursue?
So they papered over the problem but I think the paper is going to get scorched looking pretty quickly. Unless... Johnson turns out to have a statesman hiding in there that tackles problems with practicality and compromise. Maybe he can leverage being one of the hardliners and the fact that they can hardly turn on him now to get them to compromise and not get too carried away. That would be nice.
Or maybe he is an ideologue determined to impose his tribes way on everybody else. Forget compromise. Threaten to stop the whole machine unless they get to take the steering wheel.
He's probably something in between a statesman and an uncompromising ideologue. I very much hope he leans more toward the former than the latter.
So they papered over the problem but I think the paper is going to get scorched looking pretty quickly. Unless... Johnson turns out to have a statesman hiding in there that tackles problems with practicality and compromise. Maybe he can leverage being one of the hardliners and the fact that they can hardly turn on him now to get them to compromise and not get too carried away. That would be nice.
Or maybe he is an ideologue determined to impose his tribes way on everybody else. Forget compromise. Threaten to stop the whole machine unless they get to take the steering wheel.
He's probably something in between a statesman and an uncompromising ideologue. I very much hope he leans more toward the former than the latter.