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Ted Cruz

7 (6.5%)

Rick Santorum

16 (14.8%)

Michelle Bachmann

13 (12%)

Chris Christie

23 (21.3%)

Rand Paul

49 (45.4%)

Total Members Voted: 107

[MetalSlimeHunt]

GOP Civil War incoming.

[Max White]

Wasn't the entire point of your crappy two party system that you can't really fit all ideology into two categories, therefor it is pretty much a certainty that within any one group you will have conflicts for the throne? Heck I'm surprised both your parties aren't in a constant state of civil war.

[kaijyuu]

Oh they all have conflicts but they're usually hidden behind closed doors. They're in meeting rooms and such, not in the papers.

Now though, the speaker of the house is publicly blasting unnamed groups that usually support his party. That's less usual.

[FearfulJesuit]

GOP Civil War incoming.

No, don't you get it? We had our GOP Civil War when we almost defaulted twice. The Establishment won. The Tea Party's funding sources have cut them off. It's over.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

GOP Civil War incoming.

No, don't you get it? We had our GOP Civil War when we almost defaulted twice. The Establishment won. The Tea Party's funding sources have cut them off. It's over.

It's not over. They organized the far-right, they gave them elected positions. You can't just defund that away. The Tea Party is hated in general, but among their supporters the loyalty is absolute.

[Lord Shonus]

Wasn't the entire point of your crappy two party system that you can't really fit all ideology into two categories, therefor it is pretty much a certainty that within any one group you will have conflicts for the throne? Heck I'm surprised both your parties aren't in a constant state of civil war.

There IS no "point" to the two-party system. It was never established, and has no formal setup at all. It is nothing more than the way the power accumulated.

[FearfulJesuit]

GOP Civil War incoming.

No, don't you get it? We had our GOP Civil War when we almost defaulted twice. The Establishment won. The Tea Party's funding sources have cut them off. It's over.

It's not over. They organized the far-right, they gave them elected positions. You can't just defund that away. The Tea Party is hated in general, but among their supporters the loyalty is absolute.

Yes, but Boehner has successfully been able to get them to shut up. He got them to sign on to a non-default agreement, and now he's gotten them to pass a budget with nary a peep. Unless he's dethroned and a real weakling (or Tea Partier) gets the Speakership, that's it.

[Max White]

There IS no "point" to the two-party system. It was never established, and has no formal setup at all. It is nothing more than the way the power accumulated.

You can't mean to tell me they didn't see it coming. I mean seriously, FPTP + elective voting + presidential system was always bound to force such a system.

[kaijyuu]

IIRC a few of the founding fathers hated political parties and tried to ban them. Eventually they settled on not giving them any legal powers. So naturally parties formed and did whatever the the hell they wanted within the bounds of any other type of organization.

[Aqizzar]

There IS no "point" to the two-party system. It was never established, and has no formal setup at all. It is nothing more than the way the power accumulated.

You can't mean to tell me they didn't see it coming. I mean seriously, FPTP + elective voting + presidential system was always bound to force such a system.

They actually set it up that way, at the Federal level, because they wanted to avoid parties at all.  Their entire conception of electoral politics up to that point was European Parliaments, where the existence of party structures is basically enshrined in the voting system itself.  They hoped that by making one house of Congress locally elected only, another house appointed by the state governments, and the chief of the country elected by the whole country (through a single-purpose collective that could overrule the vote if it wanted to but never has), they hoped they'd be free of party alignments.  And since the national constitution and all the state constitutions were more or less based on each other, this same thinking was copied to every state's government.

That hope lasted exactly one Presidency, and it's been a fact of life since then.  Just never assume that it was intentional.

[Max White]

I'm guessing this is one of those things that goes unchallenged, because the founding fathers were pretty much the embodiment of Jesus, but better because they were American, so their word must be super-holy...

[Owlbread]

Ethiopia begged to differ.

[Urist Imiknorris]

Is that Bob Ross?

[Aqizzar]

I'm guessing this is one of those things that goes unchallenged, because the founding fathers were pretty much the embodiment of Jesus, but better because they were American, so their word must be super-holy...

It goes unchallenged because they didn't have any say in the matter, and it actually has been challenged many, many times.  We capped the number of Representatives instead of tying it to total population.  The Senate is now an elected body instead of an appointed one.  The variety of people who can actually vote has increased by orders of magnitude since then.  And the President is... well, technically still chosen by the Electoral College instead of an actual vote, but it's not only unthinkable for the College to not reflect the popular vote (in each state anyway) but impossible for them not to.  And it did take two hundred years, but there's a pretty strong momentum going to make it an actual direct election.

Y'know, within a generation or two.  For the same reason all the other stuff is still basically the same.  The elected representatives are the only people with the power to change any of these rules, and they usually directly benefit from the rules being kinda screwy.

[misko27]

I'm guessing this is one of those things that goes unchallenged, because the founding fathers were pretty much the embodiment of Jesus, but better because they were American, so their word must be super-holy...

I would disagree in that I can find things the Founders said that would make many Americans blanch.

A good thing to remember is that everything, from the Declaration onwards (Declaration included), was basically compromising on an imperfect solution that nonetheless remains the accepted standard simply because no one wants to compromise long enough to change it. Churchill had an excellent point when he said "Americans always do the right thing, after they've tried everything else". We tried a thing before the Constitution, didn't work at all, grit our teeth and made a better thing, and that thing has been the law of the land ever since. No one wants the endless fighting that another attempt at compromise would bring. That is how most things here work: We coast on former precedent, and it has somehow worked for 200 years.

Hell, the phrase "liberal" and "conservative" here refer to the degree to which you are expansive or strict in your interpretation of the liberties granted by the constitution, respectively. I mean, if we just changed things, all sorts of bad shit would happen. National Chaos. And as Aquizzar points out, we did do ok for 200 years of country based on the same framework. I mean we had a constitution before it was cool, but also before there was experience in making constitutions.

Wasn't the entire point of your crappy two party system that you can't really fit all ideology into two categories, therefor it is pretty much a certainty that within any one group you will have conflicts for the throne? Heck I'm surprised both your parties aren't in a constant state of civil war.

Neh. The closest to a point the parties have is that since they represent a wide expanse of ideological thought (if one wrapped up in a desire to win), compromise is achievable. When they fail at that, bad things happen. But few Americans actually support all of their parties positions (Hands up, who here supports everything that democrats in general support? Anyone?) but they compromise to work together and get some/most of their positions. It would be really awesome if they could somehow do that without fighting a different party at the same time (which enforces ideological rigidity), but such is life.