On a key vote, five Republicans voted with Democrats against their own party’s policy preferences, leading to a high-profile, embarrassing defeat. The failure of the vote makes it even more likely that the GOP will stumble into a government shutdown at the end of the month because it can’t figure out how to make a deal with itself.
[...]
Republican House members have lost touch with mechanisms of democratic accountability.
Public Notice
They didn't lose touch, they took a hatchet to it.
The fact is that many GOP House members, and especially the far-right Freedom Caucus, have for some years taken any and every opportunity to buck leadership simply for the sake of bucking leadership. Conservatives forced their speaker, John Boehner, to resign prematurely in 2015. His successor, Paul Ryan, left Congress in 2018 after elaborately failing to unite his caucus. Kevin McCarthy then limped in as minority leader. When the GOP won a narrow majority in 2022, he was forced to endure 15 votes before his caucus reluctantly seated him as speaker.
The far-right representatives are fractious not because they have a consistent, principled agenda, but because they don’t.
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It’s notable that even the mainstream Republicans are grandstanding to pass a bill that tries to use military appropriations to push anti-abortion messaging — this despite the fact that abortion bans are extremely unpopular and get more unpopular when they are actually passed into law. The backlash to the Dobbs anti-abortion Supreme Court decision is widely credited with winning Democrats the 2022 midterms. McCarthy’s GOP is pushing a ruinous messaging bill, and then, even more ruinously, torpedoing that bill for unrelated and unclear reasons while the entire conference runs about like decapitated farm fowl.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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