The U.S. Congress is navigating yet another government funding deadline — the eighth in less than six months — and are at an impasse over sending aid to key allies in Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel. Divisions among Republicans in the House and Senate killed a major bipartisan border policy bill. Reforms to bedrock programs like Medicare and Social Security are desperately needed but no closer to getting passed. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives spent close to a month without a speaker last year due to infighting between moderate and hard right factions of the Republican party.

When U.S. Representative Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, begged his colleagues in November to “give me one thing I can campaign on and say we did,” he was articulating what many lawmakers and observers were feeling: Congress isn’t working.

The simplest expression of this is the number of bills passed by Congress. Just twenty-seven bills were passed last year — a record low — but even before that, the number of bills signed into law by the president has been falling.

  • Rickety Thudds@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    Read the CIA simple sabotage field manual and try to tell me that isn’t exactly the republican playbook. They’re not interested in governing. What’s weird is how few of them seem to be even doing it deliberately.

      • Rickety Thudds@lemmy.ca
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        8 months ago

        Ignorance can surely explain why a pack of republican lawmakers spent the 4th of July at the Kremlin.

      • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        At this point, it’s a distinction without a difference. Whether they are failing because of a plan, or because they are actual idiots is irrelevant.

      • something_random_tho@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        To quote Aristophanes, “Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.”

      • Rickety Thudds@lemmy.ca
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        8 months ago

        You’re right, but as it’s a distinction without a great difference I thought it best to connect that dot implicitly.