McCarthy’s Plane Is Sh*t Outta Runway. But What Next?

I am so glad that I made sure that I was up on time this morning, because this floor fight for Speaker is more fun than the original barrel tht all of those monkeys came in.

Despite all of his bluff, bluster, and bullshit, McCarthy went into this morning already knowing he was going to lose on the 1st ballot. For at least the last month now, there has been a Never Kevin core of at least 5 solid NO’s, and comin out of the weekend there were up to 14 more Likely or Possible NO votes.

In the 1st round of voting, everything broke McCarthy’s way. The wrong way. Elise Stefonik nominated McCarthy, and Gruppenfuhrer Gosar nominated Andy Biggs. The roll is called orally in alphabetical order. McCarthy could lose 5 votes, and before they even got through the “C’s”, McCarthy had already lost the first round. Biggs got 10 votes, Jordan got 6, and there were 3 other single votes. McCarthy lost all 19 prospective votes against him.

McCarthy had a plan for round 2. It sucked. McCarthy deluded himself into thinking that a large number of NO votes in the 1st round were lic king their nuts to keep promises they made. Now that they had kept their protest promise, they’d peel back off and vote for McCarthy on the 2nd round.

Fat  chance. Biggs wasn’t even nominated in the 2nd round, but Sugar Daddy Gaetz officially nominated Jordan. In that two man fight not only didn’t any protest votes peel away and go to McCarthy, Jordan actually coalesced all 19 protest votes. And for the 2nd time in two rounds, Democrat Hakeem Jeffries got more votes than McCarthy did, getting all 212 Democratic votes. Most analysts felt that the 3rd round would be pivotal, since that was where some of the protesters should get tired of sitting around voting, and start to come home to McCarthy.

Round Three was another two man vote on the GOP side, and again before they even the :C’s” were done, so was McCarthy. And worst of all, not only didn’t McCarthy peel away any Jordan votes, Jordan actually peeled away one McCarthy vote in the 1st two rounds.

Round Four was just aborted when a GOP member from OK proposed and passed a motion to adjourn until noon EST tomorrow. This is a surprise since the general line of thought was that McCarthy would keep holding votes as long as necessary, trying to tire out the resistance. Instead the GOP has a closed caucus meeting scheduled for 6:00 tonight. To me this appears to be either abject surrender, or utter futility, since they held a closed caucus meeting this morning, and almost got into fist fights with each other.

There are two likely ways this meeting can go. McCarthy can just come right out and say, OK, enough is enough. What will it take from me for your  to elect me Speaker? I have a feeling that McCarthy already tried this this morning, and it’s hard to deal with somebody who refuses to deal. Just as likely is that McCarthy does what he did in 2015, and scurry out with his tail between his legs. If he does that, former FL GOP rep David Jolly finds it highly likely that he will shortly resign from congress, since his leadership days are over.

But it won’t solve the problem. McCarthy has/had the support of 90% of the House GOP caucus, and his supporters are going to be pissed. Right now the last man standing would be Jim Jordan, with a whopping 20 votes. But not only doesn’t Jordan have a path to 218, he doesn’t even want the damn job, he wants the Chair o the Judiciary committee. The next most likely nominee would be Steve Scalise from South Carolina. He has widespread respect and support from both the McCarthy camp as well as the Freedom caucus. But he has two problems. The first is it would only take 5 NO votes from McCarthy loyalists to sink him every round.

The other one is worse. Here comes that damn moderate GOP caucus again. Scalese is far right, which is why he hasn’t been nominated. But while he may be able to cut a deal with the McCarthy Mob, it is highly unlikely he can swing the moderates. They want to govern, remember? And a Scalise Speakership gives them little or no chance of that. Besides, the more dominoes that fall, the greater their clout over the process grows.

I have never seen anything like this. I wrote weeks ago that the GOP had split into so many hardened factions that trying to pick a Speaker was going to be hard, and it wasn’t likely to be McCarthy. But these ass gaskets have screwed this up supremely that they may have made it literally impossible to come to an agreement on a Speaker.

Which brings us right back to the moderates, and a consensus compromise Speaker again. And as today ground on mercilessly for the GOP, and McCarthy’s position became less and less tenable, it wasn’t just me, more and more analysts and former GOP members started talking about it, to the point of throwing out possible names of well respected recent GOP House members. It appears as if this option isn’t just on the fantasy politics list anymore.

Let’s be clear. If it happens, this is not going to be a moderate GOP Speaker. Whomever it is is going to be a principled, respected conservative GOP member. So what’s in it for the Democrats? This. What the Democrats will negotiate is changes to the House rules that make it easier for the Democrats to get actual votes on the floor for bills, both bills they propose in the House, as well as bills the Senate sends down to them. Since the moderates want to legislate too, it’s in the reality zone. And don’t be surprised if one of those rules changes is that George Santos doesn’t get seated.

Y’all know me. I normally have an opinion, and frequently a projection or prediction for almost every situation. Not this time. This time, the entire situation is so far out there that there aren’t even any normal poliical solutions that I can find would apply here. Just strap in and watch, and we’ll all figure it out as it goes along.