By Lisa Mascaro | Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas was not, in fact, impeached by the House.
A border security package instantly collapsed in the Senate. And foreign aid for Ukraine as its fights Russia is stubbornly stalled.
The broken US. Congress failed in stunning fashion this week as Republicans in both the House and the Senate revolted in new and unimaginable ways against their own agenda. Lawmakers will try to do it all over again — as soon as next week.
“This is the mob rule right now in Congress — and I’m ready for mob rule. … But it’s not a way to govern,” said Republican Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana.
Just 48 hours put on display a spectacular level of dysfunction even for a Congress that has already set new standards for infighting, disruption and chaos after last year’s historic election, then ouster, of the Republican House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy.
It shows how deeply the Republican Party, under Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, is by choice or by force, turning away from its traditional role as a working partner in the U.S.’s two-party system to a new one that is rooted in Donald Trump’s vision of the GOP.
In dramatic back-to-back scenes this week — a closed-door shouting match of Senate Republicans testing McConnell’s slipping hold on power late Monday and Speaker Johnson presiding glumly over failures in the chamber he could not control Tuesday — provided new entries for the history books.
“Politics used to be the art of the possible. Now it’s the art of the impossible,” said Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee.
“Let’s put forward proposals that can’t possibly pass — so we can say to our respective bases, Look how I’m fighting for you,” said Romney, explaining the current mindset. “We’ve gone from the sublime to the ridiculous.”
The next steps are highly uncertain as an emboldened…
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