Matt Gates is the petulant, 42-year-old adolescent congressman from Pensacola, Florida.

He's a vandal, a neilist, and an enormous disgrace.

He's also the person that Republicans are blaming for blowing up the House of Representatives.

Now, there's a lot of things to criticize Matt Gates for, but that's not one of them.

The reason the House of Representatives is ungovernable is very simple. And it's not Matt Gates's

fault. It's Donald Trump's. It is the price of the cowardice

of an entire political party that succumb to an authoritarian demagogue. On the evening of January 6th,

after Donald Trump lied for months about the outcome of an election,

an election for President of the United States, a decision, a choice, a right in America

that is elemental, foundational to the functioning of American society. It is the core building block of the American

civilization. After lying about the stolen election and after helping incite an insurrection

that saw the Confederate flag carried across the Capitol Rotunda, that saw insurrectionists

defecating and urinating on the chamber floors of the House and the Senate, 140 Republicans

voted to strip away after the fact the vote of millions of Americans. Most of those people,

the people the Republicans wanted to take the vote from, well, they shared something in common.

You guessed it. They were black and they were brown and they lived in

America's inner cities. Right away Donald Trump came out on election night and started lying.

He talked about the votes that arrived out of nowhere. None of it was true. All of it was a fantasy. And the cost of it has been a

loss of faith and belief in democracy itself. Enormous percentages of the country believe

the last presidential election was illegitimate when it was anything but.

And now they believe the system is illegitimate. All the while, the incitements to violence,

to chaos, to mayhem, to madness and insanity, never abate. The reason the House doesn't have a speaker is because of

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