THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES narrowly defeated a resolution aimed at blocking further attacks on Venezuela after House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., held the poll open for a lengthy period to secure a final vote against it.
The House voted 215–215 on the measure. Under House rules, a tied vote is a defeat.
Johnson’s decision to keep the vote open for more than 20 minutes drew jeers from Democrats and an angry response from Rep. Pat Ryan, D-N.Y., one of the measure’s supporters.
“Close the vote! Come on! Seriously!” Ryan said. “Come on! This is serious! This is serious shit! Close the vote!”
Ryan’s request was ignored and the vote was held open until Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Texas, who had been campaigning for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas, arrived in the chamber to cast the decisive vote against the measure.
The slow-moving vote in the House had threatened to spoil a signature achievement for Johnson, who minutes earlier had secured passage of an appropriations package that would prevent another government shutdown.
Johnson shuts the hall down early to avoid the Epstein vote, but keeps it open for this one. So sick of these double speaking bootlickers.
When you have power, you use it to your advantage.
That’s not how a functional democracy is supposed to work. That’s not debating for compromise. That’s the opposite of what our government was designed to prevent: rule of power over rule of the people.
Except now the people are too stupid to understand this, having grown up with Reality TV stars posing as politicians that only know how to use power to stay in office rather than policy.
Power works only when that fails. Using power to your advantage when you have it gets us our current gerontocracy. A bunch of skilless idiots in positions they don’t deserve, making decisions to collapse our country just before becoming too dead to experience it themselves.
Power is not supposed to be held be a single person. Hence the distribution of it in our previous system of checks and balances. Now that those are broken, so is our ability to govern by the people instead of whoever has the most money / power.
It’s how centralized power always works. Vanguard party or otherwise. Power becomes antidemocratic and serves itself.
It’s why power must be with the people directly. It’s not perfect, but it’s the least bad option.
Agreed.
Not when it’s well regulated. People become anti democratic. Not systems.
People with little experience, and skill, who are given enough money and a narcissistic upbringing, over time, always lead to centralized power. Literally every human culture and system of power w’ve created on the planet has fallen to this human design flaw. An easy life for the unskilled breeds insecurity through which nepo babies use their money to centralize power to feel skilled.
1700’s France Fall of Rome Qing Dynasty
Now 2026 USA.
Our only failure is in trusting that any part of a system of government can be self regulated. That any position of power shouldn’t be well distributed. Including the concentration of wealth.
Through the repeated attempts of humanity to organize over our entire existence with have literally brute forced our way into better and better systems. Now to the point where we understand the best solution for all of us, but lack the concentrated power and money enact it.
Once that changes, whatever system is developed next will likely be far superior to all of those before it.
Who does the regulation and runs the systems. When you answer that you will know why power always serves itself.
People. Which literally proves my point. Regulate people’s power, and they’ll never have enough to serve themselves.
Literally disproves. Even altruistic, benevolent people can’t avoid it. You regulate and operate by who and what you know. There will always be people/groups/things you don’t know. That no matter how hard you try you will run afoul of. And the larger the group you govern, the worse the disaster will be.
They’re extremely skilled, and doing what they’re paid to do.
Being skilled at lying does not make you skilled. It makes you lie about how skilled you are.
These people are paper plates in front of a stack of bills. They’d collapse to a few stern slaps to the face, as they have faced nothing but praises their entire life.
They are jumping through hoops to silence decent because they are too low thinking to engage in fair debate. They literally lack the communication skills to make their beliefs seem reasonable to anyone else. The skills to subtly do anything. The skills to think ahead. And certainly the skills to compromise.
These people are a volume knob turned to 11 on a rusty speaker that no one’s been allowed to touch for decades.
That’s not skilled. That’s stupid weakness propped up by money to seem smart and popular. Which, while effectively making US listeners stupider and weaker, doesn’t make them skilled let alone smart.
The thought they’re talented at anything other than being popular, is just a ruse they’ve made you believe because they’re popular. It’s literally their only skill. And 50% of it comes from social media manipulation. So it’s not even a skill they’ve well developed.
What do you think storytelling and playwriting is? I assert again they are extremely skilled. Using their skills to the detriment of society is simply that.
They are neither storytellers nor playwrights. (Except Shapiro kinda was a failed one.) Both of those skills require a tremendous amount of effort to refine until they are worth something of value to others.
Billionaires just have deep pockets for social media ads, PR, Bot farms, and narrative control and ownership of all US media. That’s not being good at storytelling. That’s using money to hack popularity by hitting caps lock and skipping spelling mistakes on millions of poor quality “stories” saying the same thing until it’s repeated enough our monkey brains adapt to it as normal. That doesn’t make the story good. It makes it common at best.
Billionaires just have greed. And the immorally deep pockets to prove it. If they had skills, you could point to something of quality that they have made with those skills, preferably something that actually has value or a benefit to others instead of themselves.
What of Facebook, X, Microsoft, Planatir, NVIDIA, Google, or Apple is of Quality?
What of all the companies they’ve merged with, then mismanaged, and completely destroying the value of? That is not a skilled use of those resources, let alone a good use of entire workforces.
They just want more. And don’t care what they break to get it. They do not have any skills to give.
They just take something of worth to many, and break it for the value they alone can most extract from it. That does not make them skilled. That just makes them someone who takes resources instead of learning a skill to earn them fairly. That used to be called a thief.
If they aren’t that, then show me the fruits of their skills. Show me valuable, quality results they can produce. I’ll tell you now it always involves hiring those who have the skills they lack.
Their one and only skill of any quality, imo, is their complete lack of hesitancy or empathy to exploit us at scale. At times it makes me question if their behaviour can even be considered human.
On brand for the guardians of pedophiles.
“Guardians” of pedophiles, are just pedophiles.
Jesus fucking Christ wtf do we have to do to get these useless pieces of shit out of our gov? Do they literally all have to age out? Fucking disgusting
Johnson’s day will come for his collaboration with Trump. It may take a few years to work its way through the courts after real leaders return to power, but he’ll eventually be wearing his favourite colour behind bars every day for the rest of his life: Trump’s Arsehole Orange.
