Some good may yet come out of this, other than making Tennessee’s legislature look like morons.
One of his good friends got shot.
I believe that was the governor of Kentucky at the bank shooting a few days later.
Interesting. It seems to have been both of them.
Republicans: They don’t care until it happens to them.
See also: Nancy Reagan and Alzheimer’s research; Bush II and LGBT rights.
and sometimes not even then. See: Steve Scalise.
Except that what they really mean (whether entirely consciously or not) by “the republic” is “the Republican-dominated, default-white, traditional-privilege-and-power-perpetuating society that I and people like me equate with America”.
That’s why so many Republicans are so insistent about claiming that the US is a republic “rather than” a democracy. It’s not based on differing views about the structural details of governance systems, according to which the US is unambiguously both a republic and a democracy anyway. It’s based on their emotional associations of the term “republic” with “what Republicans want America to be” and “democracy” with “what Democrats want America to be”.
And by those definitions, as Chronos and others have suggested, Republicans are not at all wrong or delusional in their perception that their “republic” is being lost. White Americans are much less demographically, culturally and politically dominant than they used to be, and rigidly male-dominated cisheteronormativity is much less universal. These changes are real.
Where the Republicans are delusional is in imagining that they can do anything to effectively reverse such trends long-term. Even if they go full-on dictatorship and authoritarian suppression, they would not be able to hold themselves together in control of their “taken-back” right-wing Christian America for longer than a few short and very bloody years.
/hijack Did you change your pic? I know it was a cat before, but this looks like a different one
/hijack
No, I’ve had this one for quite a while. Maybe someday I’ll change it.
Oh no, don’t change, it is an excellent pic. I am sure I was thinking about some other almost as fabulous kitty pic!
What they are imagining and hoping for is a theocratic version of Nort Korea writ large, lasting for generations.
Tennessee GOP leader resigns.
Was there really this much blowback? I didn’t think that possible.
That’s not the reason.
Ok. An explanation that conforms to expectations, I guess.
Only after the press found out. Before that, everyone was happy to just keep the harassment information in his personnel file. (and pay off the victim)
The GOP leader who vote to expel all 3; resigned in disgrace for unrelated reason.
How to say “I’m not caught up on this thread” without saying “I’m not caught up on this thread”…
Pearson and Jones, who had already been reappointed to their seats on an interim basis, won the special elections to fully retake their seats in the Legislature.
From that Politico article:
The two raised more than $2 million combined through about 70,400 campaign donations from across the country. The amount is well beyond the norm for Tennessee’s Republican legislative leaders and virtually unheard of for two freshman Democrats in a superminority.
[obi-wan] If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.[/obi-wan]