“Our willingness to self-mutilate on these things really impairs our ability to get the job done. Let’s do the math here, Charlie. We have a four vote majority, right? Now we’ve kicked out George Santos, we have a three vote majority.
“Congressman Bill Johnson of Ohio has taken a college university presidency. That knocks us down to two and I don’t think Kevin McCarthy is gonna stick around long. Every image of his office shows that he’s packing things up in boxes.
“So we could be down to a one-seat majority! We got a bunch of these octogenarians in our conference and God forbid any of them were to cross the rainbow bridge.
The GOP tried to establish their dictatorship and failed. The normal progression after you get your strongman into power is to start a series of internal pogroms based on the daily purity test. Essentially, the people who are the most strident and extreme without your power bloc begin tearing down anyone and anything that stops them from continuing to consolidate power into an ever smaller group. Since this is supposed to begin after you gain the authoritarian rule, you can basically do it with impunity since there’s no minority party internal or external to your group to stop you and wrest power back.
Because their coup failed, they’re now going through a round of purity tests without having removed the minority party so it’s just a self destruction of their party. The risk is that they continue to winnow down their numbers internally, but the voters of the nation just don’t care that the GOP is a party of insurrectionist traitors and actually votes them more seats. If that happens, or if they just decide to do it without the majority of seats anyway, they get to try coup #2.
In either case, we’re dealing with an ongoing coup attempt in the US by one of the major parties.