Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC), chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, reportedly told House Republicans behind closed doors Tuesday to stop holding in-person town halls as viral clips of clashes with angry protesters have caught fire online.
The protesters, making appearances in many deep-red districts, have objected to the purge of federal workers and slashing of federal funding by President Donald Trump and his billionaire appendage, Elon Musk.
While the outward reaction from Republican leaders has been dismissiveness — both Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) hand-waved away the demonstrations as the work of paid protesters and Democratic activists — the new guidance is revealing. After reveling in the muted response to Trump’s second election, Republicans are eager to turn off the spigot of any emerging resistance.
Dismissing these kinds of protests as astroturfed insincerity is a well-worn gambit that both parties have employed — Democrats during the Tea Party uprising accompanying the crafting of the Affordable Care Act, Republicans during Trump’s failed effort to repeal it. Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) actually flourished a piece of turf as a visual aid during a press briefing in 2009.
To the extent that Democrats in 2009 and Republicans in 2017 actually believed that these protests were artificial pop-ups funded by their political opponents, they were quickly proven wrong.
The 2010 midterms were catastrophic for Democrats, as Republicans flipped the House, making gains not seen in 60 years, picked up seven seats in the Senate and, perhaps most importantly, dominated at the state level, flipping control of 20 state legislative chambers and thus winning the power to heavily gerrymander districts in their favor for the next decade.
In 2018, Democrats ended Trump’s trifecta by flipping the House in a blue wave election that saw record-breaking turnout and included notable wins on liberal ballot initiatives and by candidates representing historic “firsts.”
In both of these cases, the protests were a harbinger of elections to come, an early data point about burgeoning voter backlash to the party in power. Republicans can mute the audio here, deprive demoralized Democrats of the pleasure of circulating these clips — but they’ll have to hope that history isn’t repeating itself, that the protests aren’t merely a symptom of an underlying anger that will express itself at the ballot box sooner rather than later.
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The way things are looking, democracy is toast.
He should have never been allowed to run again.
Kafka wants out.
Edit: The graphics card on the wall is an AMD Radeon HD 7970. I used it for gaming, and to mine Bitcoin in the 2010s. The guilt of wasting CPU cycles on Bitcoin got to me. I liquidated all of my Bitcoin when 1 BTC was $100. I don’t really feel bad for missing out on the wealth that was completely undeserved, I feel angry at all those who are making money on the backs of the environment and fools.
History does repeat itself.
When it’s too absurd for Kafka…
Someone’s going to get hurt soon.