Jared Moskowitz Delivers Best Synopsis Of Speaker Crisis In :52

Nancy Pelosi said that the problem in the House this week was simple arithmetic. And she’s right, from a pragmatic standpoint. Out of every single individual in the House Of Representatives, Pelosi knows the nuts and bolts of getting things done, particularly when you govern by a sliver. She had an amazing track record of getting bills passed and she never brought one to the floor unless she had the votes. She made it look easy, as professionals in all walks of life do.

That was in the before times. Now, this iteration of the GOP majority can’t only not get bills passed, they can’t even get any introduced to the floor — because they can’t even do the rudimentary basic of agreeing who will be the person to do that task. Kevin McCarthy loved the idea of the power and pomp and circumstance. He lasted a mere nine months and did very little. Then came the attempted reign of Jim Jordan and that’s where Jared Moskowitz makes the definitive point of what this week’s debacle all boiled down to.

JFC this is absolute PERFECTION

— File411 (@File411) October 21, 2023

If there’s one note of this that’s out of place, it escaped me.

Here are excerpts from Politico Playbook Deep Dive which give you the flavor of the dysfunctional GOP family now ruling the House, like some deranged sequel to Dune.

“When Matt Gaetz stepped to the microphones during Thursday’s three-hour private House GOP meeting on the speakership, the speaker he ousted promptly yelled at him to ‘sit down.’ KEVIN McCARTHY was not the only Republican to vent fury with Gaetz, the Florida conservative who successfully ousted the House’s leader. The room met Gaetz with booing, profanities and calls to back off, according to multiple lawmakers in the room. When Gaetz refused, Rep. MIKE BOST (R-Ill.) stood up and hollered a command at him that one Republican recalled as: ‘If you don’t sit down, I’ll put you down.’”

After that family meeting, Lawler huddled privately with Jordan and the other holdouts. Lawler said he did not believe Jordan persuaded any of them to change their minds. In between those meetings, his office was barraged with thousands of threatening calls demanding that Lawler reverse course and back the Ohio Republican for speaker.

In the evening, Lawler sat down with Ryan in his office in Longworth to review what exactly happened yesterday. Midway through the conversation, he learned that Jordan would force another vote at 10 a.m. today. (Jordan also announced he will hold a press conference at 8 a.m. this morning.)

Lawler was unmoved. He said he will vote no again and predicted that Jordan’s opposition will grow.

“I think he’s probably going to lose a handful more votes,” Lawler told Playbook.

You can listen to the full interview with Lawler on this week’s episode of Deep Dive. What follows are some key excerpts:

— On how yesterday went down: “It was, uh, what the French call ‘a clusterfuck.’”

— On the mood inside the Republican Conference: “[The] conference over the last few weeks has been like Festivus: the airing of the grievances. But we’re past the airing of the grievances. Obviously, there’s a lot of anger and frustration about why we’re even here.”

— On what he said to Jordan yesterday: “Frankly, it doesn’t matter who the speaker is, because if we can’t govern as a group, as a conference, it doesn’t matter.”

— On Gaetz and McCarthy’s ouster: “Matt Gaetz is, you know, the dog that caught the car. He didn’t have a plan. He didn’t have a plan for what would come next. I think he just assumed the conference would just, you know, fall in line and it’d be fine. And ‘yay, I removed Kevin McCarthy.’ … It is a constitutional crisis that has been created.”

— On expelling Gaetz from the Republican Conference: “I think there needs to be accountability. … [I]f that were to come up … that’s something that I would support.”

— On the bigger issue at stake in the speakership drama: “If we don’t deal with the fundamental issue here — the ability of the conference, the eight that vacated the chair, the 21 that voted against the conservative C.R., the 20-plus that voted against Kevin McCarthy in January, those that voted down the rules, if they can’t coexist with the swing district members — those of us in Biden districts — if we can’t find compromise within it, doesn’t matter who the chair of the speaker is, you’re irrelevant.”

— Who will be the next speaker of the House? “If I knew, I’d go over to the MGM right now and place a bet.”

And there you have it. 435 House members, most of them at each other’s throats, and nobody knows nuthin. I can’t help but wonder how many of them will still be around in 2025?