The GOP's Fetish for Political Violence Is Reaching Dangerous New Heights
As Jim Jordan and his allies attempted to whip speaker votes last week, they kept running into a familiar refrain from their skeptics: The brass-knuckle tactics they were deploying were causing Jordan’s critics and their families to receive a slew of vicious messages—including death threats.
The Pynchonesque-ly named Iowa Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks reported that she had received “credible death threats and a barrage of threatening calls” after switching her vote to oppose Jordan on a second speaker ballot. Georgia’s Drew Ferguson changed his vote after Jordan wouldn’t “calm down the hysteria” surrounding his nomination. Nebraska’s Don Bacon revealed his wife had grown so fearful after a barrage of intimidating calls that she had started sleeping with a loaded gun. On Friday, CNN aired a voicemail that the wife of one unnamed congressman received from a caller that threatened she would be “fucking molested” if she didn’t convince her husband to back Jordan.
Jordan may have publicly decried these threats, but his association with an effort to use threats and intimidation as an explicit political tactic—and as a means of cajoling fellow Republicans to get in line behind him—is the clearest sign yet of just how central such tactics have become for mainstream Republicans. Indeed, while they failed to have their intended effect, it’s abundantly clear that the Republican Party remains as comfortable with radical elements promising violent retribution as Donald Trump was during his effort to overturn a legitimate election.
Given the size of the anti-Jordan contingent—about two dozen members—and the slim majority required to win the gavel (he could lose five Republican votes, give or take), one could reasonably expect Jordan to try to turn the temperature down in an attempt to woo his detractors to his side and end the stalemate that has gripped the House GOP ever since a group of hard-liners deposed former Speaker Kevin McCarthy earlier this month.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/gop-fetish-political-violence-reaching-100000550.html
