I hope no one has been casting her votes during that time.
The Annoying Orange is demanding that Panama give the Canal Zone back to the US.
A man, no plan, a canal… COVFEFE!
He’s trying to show his independence from #PresidentMusk.
A man, concepts of a plan, a canal… Panama
A person, a woman, a man, concepts of a plan, a camera, a canal, a TV… Panama.
Dear lord…
‘Canal? What we need is a Panama Xunnel, flooded with heavy water. Not regular water the good stuff! And we’ll move cargo in xubmarines!’ ~ Overlord Musk
At first I was surprised he didn’t propose building a canal across the US. This is “Build the wall” + the hyperloop guy after all.
But then I remembered that this would count as infrastructure.
No proxy votes in the rules of this 118th Congress, and I looked at a bunch of roll votes in the House site over the past months and she has basically been listed as “No Vote” for half a year. She is not the only member who has had a prolonged absence for health reasons, or who has continued to hold the seat while suffering a disabling condition, but the norm is to at the least make some sort of statement to the effect.
As Gyrate put it
This left her constituents hanging for six months. Again, it is the usual thing for someone to finish out their term while suffering an incapacitating condition. Constituent services continue being delivered by staff while obviously legislative work as such does not happen, but still it’s not the same thing for an assistant legislative aide to call to follow up a case as when a Member of Congress calls.
In 1980 Gladys Spellman, congresswoman from Maryland, went into a coma days before the election and was reelected in that condition. The incoming House had to exercise its power to judge qualification of members and once it was clear that she could never be sworn in declare the seat vacant .
Hell, Mel Carnahan was dead when he got elected to the Senate.
Has he said what he plans to do if they don’t give it back? I’m reminded of an exchange from Yes, Minister:
[The President of Buranda plans a speech urging the Scots and Irish to fight against “British colonialism”.]
Hacker: Humphrey, do you think it is a good idea to issue a statement?
Sir Humphrey: Well, Minister, in practical terms we have the usual six options. One: do nothing. Two: issue a statement deploring the speech. Three: lodge an official protest. Four: cut off aid. Five: break off diplomatic relations. And six: declare war.
Hacker: Which should be it?
Sir Humphrey: Well, if we do nothing, that means we implicitly agree with the speech. If we issue a statement, we’ll just look foolish. If we lodge a protest, it’ll be ignored. We can’t cut off aid, because we don’t give them any. If we break off diplomatic relations, then we can’t negotiate the oil rig contracts. And if we declare war, it might just look as though we were over-reacting.
Imagine if Sir Humphrey were Trump’s Chief of Staff and couldn’t be fired.
Humphrey was amoral and a career civil servant, but he was competent and occasionally correct. He’d be a step up from anybody Trump will choose for the job.
Humphrey was the ultimate conservative in the classical sense. His primary goal was to prevent any action that would upset the status quo. Although this would mean he would stymie any attempts at progress or reform, he is a major improvement over the burn it all down attitude of the MAGA faction.
IIRC, doesn’t he have a monologue in one episode where he tells Bernard about how he’s had to hold wildly contradictory positions at different points in his career, like being pro-death penalty under one PM and being anti-DP under another? He’s sort of a combination of the ultimate small-c conservative and the ultimate gun-for-hire, who will fight for whatever his boss tells him to so long as it doesn’t upset the applecart, and a master at making his boss THINK he’s getting what he wants when in reality nothing of the sort has happened.
He and Trump would make almost as much of a comedically mismatched pair as he and Hacker did.
So, how many floors does the memory care facility have?
Not quite; it’s more a defense of why he has held no positions at all.
“Bernard, I have served eleven governments in the past thirty years. If I had believed in all their policies, I would have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to going into it. I would have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel. And of denationalising it and renationalising it. On capital punishment, I’d have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolishionist. I would’ve been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac; but above all, I would have been a stark, staring, raving schizophrenic.”
Wasn’t that the main plot point of a movie set in British India, where a young British functionary is beholden to his Indian assistant?
Clearly following his buddy Putin’s playbook of demanding Ukraine because that is going so well… oh, wait…