They Did Vote For This (GOP House Edition)

Fascists rely on blurring ignorance and malevolence.

Yesterday I wrote about the trend of reporting on GOP voters who say that they did not vote for one Trump policy or another. After I hit publish, I saw a bizarre variation on the theme. Rabid MAGA Georgia House member Marjorie Taylor Green took to twitter to admit that she had not realized that the giant MAGA budget bill that narrowly passed the house included provisions making it impossible for any government to regular AI for the next decade.

“Full transparency, I did not know about this section on pages 278-279 of the OBBB that strips states of the right to make laws or regulate AI for 10 years,” Greene wrote.

I am adamantly OPPOSED to this and it is a violation of state rights and I would have voted NO if I had known this was in there. We have no idea what AI will be capable of in 10 years and giving it free rein and tying states hands is potentially dangerous. This needs to be stripped out in the Senate.

House members generally do not boastfully admit that they didn’t know what was in the bill they voted on. But Greene isn’t alone. In a raucous and angry town hall, Nebraska representative Mike Flood was asked why he voted to strip federal courts of the power to enforce contempt orders against federal officials. Flood said he was opposed to the provision, and then added, “This provision was unknown to me when I voted for the bill. I am not gonna hide the truth.… We must allow our federal courts to operate and issue injunctions.”

In short, it’s not just random Republican voters who keep saying they didn’t vote for particular Trump policies. It’s actual Republican legislators, who are in theory voting, not just for Trump, but for particular policies.

Which raises the fairly obvious question—what the fuck?

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What the fuck?

Flood’s constituents were incredulous when he said he hadn’t read the bill. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Democratic colleagues also responded with (appropriate!) scorn and derision. “You have one job. To. Read. The. Fucking. Bill,” Rep. Eric Swalwell told Greene on twitter. “Read the f**king bill instead of clapping for it like a performing monkey,” Rep. Marc Pocan added. Rep. Ted Lieu pointed out that he had read the bill and voted against it in part because of the AI provisions.

It is certainly reasonable to ask representatives to read the bills they vote on—or at least to have someone on staff provide them with a competent summary of the major provisions. Greene and Flood are admitting to having failed to perform anything like due diligence. Their negligence put their constituents, and the republic in danger by their own estimation.

The moral calculus here is a lot more straightforward than when you’re talking about non politician MAGA voters. Voters, as I discussed yesterday, are often ill-informed, and in any case tend to vote for a person or a party rather than a policy. I think there’s reason to believe that voting for a fascist party is still an immoral act, but it’s a somewhat complicated and nuanced argument. Much more so, anyway, than a literal political representative casting a vote to end democracy and then saying he should get a mulligan because he couldn’t be bothered to figure out what he was voting for.

At the same time, Flood and Greene’s failures aren’t just individual. They failed in their duty as representatives. But that failure was enabled by a broader failure of the Republican party.

Generally, House leadership is supposed to protect its own voters from casting ballots for hair-brained schemes or wildly unpopular legislation which could put a wrecking ball through the majority. Back-benchers may not necessarily be going line by line through legislation, but they should have some idea what they’re voting on. At the very least they should be able to trust their leaders not to put them in front of town halls with their pants down and explosives shoved where you don’t want explosives shoved.

As political scientist Jonathan Bernstein writes, “It’s one thing for the rank-and-file to not know what the bill will actually do; it’s something else if all sorts of things show up later that either no one intended or that someone included when no one was looking.”

Johnson has largely managed to pass bills with a very narrow margin and a divided caucus by pretty deliberately lying to his caucus, obfuscating what they’re actually voting on, and shucking and jiving to get each bill over the finish line without any longterm planning or any concern at all for retaining the majority in 2026. He’s setting up his own members for ridicule and failure.

Which you’d think would lead them to rebel, or at least to openly try to shift the blame to him when they’re ambushed in town halls or mugged on social media.

They aren’t really doing that, though. Which again raises the question, what the fuck?

What the fuck?

You’d think a House Majority leader who treated his members as stooges and cannon fodder would not be a majority leader for long. But Johnson has engendered little backlash—especially compared to predecessors like Kevin McCarthy, John Boehner, or Paul Ryan.

There are various reasons for that. One is that Johnson has figured out that he can hold onto his leadership position by always fucking over the moderates, who always cave, while always himself caving to the wackiest reactionaries (among whom we would have to include one Mike Johnson.)

Another dynamic, I think, is that the GOP is increasingly, escalatingly, a fascist party—and fascism has a particularly contemptuous relationship to truth. You see this especially in fascism’s obsession with conspiracy theories. These theories are easily debunked, and fascism’s adherents often more or less recognize that they are easily debunked. They embrace them to own the libs with their dull establishment commitment to “facts” and “truth”—as per Sartre:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

Conspiracies are, again, one way in which fascists demonstrate their utter freedom from the constraints of honesty. But I think you can see a similar cavalier attitude in governing, where the GOP often deliberately refuses to know what it’s doing. Party leaders, rank and file reps, and to some extent even voters themselves just refuse to pay attention to expertise, to evidence, or even to basic logic in their decision making. Garish expressions of hate and subservient expressions of loyalty overwhelm all other considerations. Representatives no longer try to help constituents. In many cases, they don’t even try to protect themselves. The only imperative is to die, die for Darkseid, and/or kill for him, to the extent those things can be separated.

Fascists deliberately obscure, or violently repudiate, their own responsibility for the things they say or do. To be right has no relationship to one’s actual acts, because it is entirely dependent on being part of the right (white, male, cishet) identity group. In that context, “I didn’t vote for this” could mean a repudiation of the fascist program—a realization that one has been led astray and wants to change course. But it could also be a statement of distinctly fascist blamelessness—an assertion that you should not be judged by the votes you actually cast, but by the (supposedly validating white supremacist) coalition which you are upholding.

Again, representatives obviously are significantly more culpable than your average low info voter. But I think fascism is also deliberately designed to blur those lines—to create a situation in which representatives behave like low info voters, and everyone in the GOP gets to simmer in pleasurable hate while disavowing any of the disastrous results of that hate. The ultimate goal of fascism is a massive, terrifying pile of dead bodies for which no one is responsible—a boot with no foot in it, stomping on a hated face forever.