For all the drama, House Republicans have passed only 22 bills into law this session. One established a commemorative coin, and two renamed medical centers.
For all the drama, House Republicans have passed only 22 bills into law this session. One established a commemorative coin, and two renamed medical centers.
If you for even a moment pretend there’s any doubt about it, you’re an idiot, a cowardly journalist or both.
One was for competently chairing a committee, another for speaking truth to power about Palestinians not being disposable sub-humans and the third for pulling a childish prank that was still more professional than 99% of what any of the Republicans have done this year.
The guy who pulled the alarm deserved a censure. You don’t fuck with fire alarms. I’ll agree, Republicans do some stupid, unprofessional shit, and more than a few deserve a censure, but let’s not defend the guy who made the building less safe because he was late to a vote.
it was one of those door alarms which is the most commone to accidentally activate. im unsure on if it was purposeful.
It was a regular fire alarm. He approached the fire door, accidentally knocked a sign down, and pulled the alarm. I buy his story that he thought it would open the doors. I just think that’s still an exceptionally stupid thing to do.
ok I thought it was a bar type alarm.
Understandable, because you see him push on the bar, but you can’t see the alarm switch on the wall from that camera angle.
The guy who pulled the alarm was a hero who took one for the team. Let’s not pile on the guy who interrupted a legislative stunt to push voting on a bill without reading it, with a schoolkid prank
I disagree. Since they can’t fine each other, censure is the strongest condemnation short of being stripped of committee assignments. While what he did wasn’t great, it was nowhere near serious enough to warrant censure.
Yeah you do. Schoolkids do it all the time.
I’m not saying it wasn’t a bad thing to do but he didn’t make the building less safe. That’s a ridiculous hypothetical based on assuming likelihood of an extremely unlikely confluence of events.
You need to relax with the learned alarmism, pun intended.
He did plead guilty and paid a fine, because pulling the alarm is a crime. I’m not being alarmist, activating the fire alarm costs real money, draws the attention of fire fighters, wastes the time of everyone in the building that must evacuate, and reduces the likelihood that anyone will take the next alarm seriously. It’s not a felony, but it’s not harmless.
It’s a crime when kids do it, too, but usually they don’t prosecute it. However, this is a Congressional Representative. Whether we do or not, we should expect more from our elected officials than we expect of school children.
I also think you’re putting too much weight into a censure. It has all the teeth of a strongly worded email sent to an unmonitored inbox. You’re correct that it is the strongest form of condemnation, and I do think the GOP is abusing the censure, but I don’t have a problem with Congress formally disapproving of an adult member of Congress pulling the fire alarm. It wasn’t an aide or a teenager on a school trip or a confused septuagenarian Senator.
The other censures are pure theater, and the more censures they hand out, the less anyone will care.
Journalists don’t seem to know how to report on politics when people are not acting in good faith. Why assume that Republicans stated motivations are genuine at this point? Republicans know that they will always be given the benefit of the doubt by the media and that their radical messages will be transmitted directly to their supporters and then sanitized and normalized when repeated by other media outlets.
This is exactly it. They either don’t know how to react to it or they simply refuse to acknowledge it out of fear of jeopardizing their disingenuous absolute neutrality facade.
Literally no good reason.
Yup!
Sartre described their bad faith perfectly when he talked about antisemites: