The Congressional Record for today will reflect that the House of Representatives remained in session for all of two minutes. Isn’t that splendid? And since both siderism is the watchword of the day, let us note that not only is the House in complete paralysis due to Republican incompetence, but the Senate is still being sandbagged by Tommy Tuberville. War broke out in Israel over the weekend and we still don’t have an ambassador to either Israel or Egypt due to the machinations of that lunatic. Maybe falling down the steps of his plane yesterday jogged a few neural synapses into working but I wouldn’t count on it.
The Freedom Caucus is sandbagging the GOP conference the same way Tuberville is sandbagging the Senate. House Republicans can’t decide who is the less worse alternative, the Molester Protector or David Duke Without the Baggage. And if the thought has crossed your mind that they must have learned something from the McCarthy debacle, disabuse yourself of that notion forthwith. This crowd is unteachable.
They only know political theater and they’re going to amuse themselves to the death of their own careers and of their party. They’re banking, evidently, on the fact that the American public is so abysmally stupid as to not mind the wheels of government grinding to a halt, in wartime of our allies no less. We’ll see if that bet pans out. And I call your attention to the results of the last three elections for reference. Charlie Sykes, the Bulwark:
Here’s what we know: Scalise isn’t Kevin, but he faces the same dynamic and the same math. In yesterday’s GOP conference meeting, he beat out Jordan by a narrow margin of 113 to 99. In the Before Times, Republicans who understood how the system works, would then elect him speaker. But getting to 217 votes is no longer an easy matter in a party that apparently has no real interest in the business of actually governing.
Because three of his votes in yesterday’s Republican conference came from members of the House who cannot vote on the House floor (there are currently five such members in the GOP conference), Scalise’s vote total may be realistically more like 110, which means that he has to flip 107 votes to win the coveted Gavel of Doom.
Good luck with that. Here’s Punchbowl News this a.m.:
Welcome to Kevin McCarthy Part Deux. But worse. Maybe way worse.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s quest for the speakership — his seemingly impossible bid to turn 107 votes in his favor — has shades of the same Sisyphean task that McCarthy faced over the last nine months. Only the stakes this time are higher, the time frame is shorter, the opposition is larger and the House Republican Conference is angrier.
This is, of course, serious business, but (once again) we are dealing here with deeply unserious people. Like this guy, the freshly re-indicted George Santos, who clearly wanted a quid pro quo to protect him from being expelled:
Pause from Charlie Sykes for just a moment. This is the madcap comical subplot in all this madness. The biggest crook in the history of Congress, a freshman congressman who’s a pathological liar and who may end up in the House Of Many Doors before the GOP frontrunner makes it there, may be the swing vote that decides “leadership.” Hollywood would not buy a script this improbable, I’m telling you right now. Back to Charlie and the cold, hard figures.
Punchbowl estimates that the “real hard-core ‘Never Scalise’ vote is probably 20 to 30 members,” and Scalise can only afford to lose four (4) votes on the floor. Here is what Scalise, The-Man-Who-Would-Be Speaker, now faces:
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) went on Jake Tapper’s CNN show Wednesday to remind the public that Scalise once attended a white supremacist meeting when running for the legislature in Louisiana. Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) keeps saying he’ll only vote for Jordan on the floor.
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) has all but closed off the possibility of voting for Scalise, as have Reps. Carlos Gimènez (R-Fla.) and Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.). Rep. Barry Moore (R-Ala.) was for Jordan, then Scalise, and now says he wants Jordan. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said she’d rather Scalise focus on treating his multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer, than serve as speaker.
So where does that leave us? Charlie Sykes thinks that the idea of Hakeem Jeffries as speaker is political fanfiction but I’ll say this: after all we’ve seen and the way world events are going and driving the narrative, there is a possibility that a handful of Republicans, looking to save their own necks in 2024 in districts which voted for Biden and get government moving again, might go for something like that. I say rule nothing out at this point because this situation has already devolved into the unthinkable and then dropped several sub basements below that.
Ken Buck has been making noises as the voice of reason. Maybe he’ll step up to the plate. Maybe Marge Greene will decide that leading the House is a better idea than being Trump’s VP although I doubt that. Nancy Mace has replaced Lauren Boebert as the lightning rod of crazy, maybe she’ll jump in. Another idea is that Patrick McHenry retains the post. He’s only dropped the gavel once, and the one act he took as Interim Speaker (throwing Pelosi and Hoyer out of their offices) was against the rules, but hey, nobody’s perfect, right? And then there’s Don Bacon, crying out in the wilderness. He said the extremists are “destroying our conference and apparently want to be in the minority”?
I don’t think the extremists want to be in the minority, I think they want to destroy the party. I think that this era of history will be categorized as Matt Gaetz fiddled while the GOP burned and Donald Trump did Catskills comedy, while having a nervous breakdown. And I repeat my prediction that Trump will one day urinate on stage, sooner rather than later. This is how thoroughly out of control things have gotten.
The reality may be that no R can get 217. https://t.co/IUaLSo6B3e
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) October 12, 2023
Again I say, don’t rule out Hakeem. Crazy times call for crazy solutions and I personally rule out nothing at this point. Not after all that we have already seen.
First let’s talk Santos. Any Speaker candidate should imitate little Georgia and LIE. Tell him in exchange for his vote they’ll promise not to allow an expulsion vote. Then turn right around and break the promise if that’s what the rest of the conference wants to do.
As for the larger crazy I don’t know who but GOPers need someone other than Jordan or Scalise. I think much as they hate to admit it neither will get the needed 217 votes, at least without however grudgingly cutting a deal with Democrats on at least a CR to keep the govt. funded until Jan. 2025 and a few other things including Ukraine funding. Dems can swallow more wasted money on border fencing or some such nonsense. All Democrats and most GOPers can readily agree on a rule change to prevent a single asshat from calling a vote to vacate the Speaker. Frankly, some kind of deal would have to be made (probably) even if a new candidate were to emerge be it a “caretaker” Speaker like McHenry who would be out come Jan. 2025 one way or the other, or some other semi-sane person with enough gravitas to get us all through the next sixteen months. And retire because their career would be OVER which is why no one has stepped up so far.
When it comes to the Senate, Tuberville’s ass hit every step on the way down from that plane. If his brains aren’t in his ass in the first place, despite what your eyes tell you his head is way the hell up that orifice which means some serious TBI when he was done with his not so little fall. Not even the coaching part of his brain is working at the moment, much less the parts that have to try to learn enough to function as a Senator. Although faint, I have hopes that if in the meantime his GOPer colleagues can’t make headway with him then the crisis in Israel will, once the House gets its shit together and there’s a new Speaker go ahead and allow cloture on all the nominations and hold a “package vote” on them all. Same for the asshats holding out on us having Ambassadors in some pretty goddamned important places including Israel. The effing gamesmaship has gone on for too long and any tears from GOPers over lost lives are crocodile tears if they don’t overrule these Senators with delusions of grandeur.
People Are Dying. By the thousands and there’s no end in sight. “Journalists” need to bluntly say that to EVERY fooking Republican in EVERY interview with them!
Strange times call for strange solutions. With such a divided ‘majority’, the ‘minority’ has all the power.
“… there are currently five such [nonvoting] members in the GOP conference … ”
I’m confused. The table shows SIX nonvoting members, only THREE of which are in the GOP conference.
The problem lies in the original source (Charlie Sykes and his “Bulwark” story). Under the old rules of journalism, it should be incumbent on a reporter to double-check any quoted source or source material but, when even the BIG NAMES in journalism can make mistakes by repeating incorrect material, I’m not going to hold Ursula to a higher standard than you’d expect from CBS News or a conservative political commentator (albeit anti-Trumpy) like Sykes.
For the first time in history, I’ve misspelled my own moniker. But that raises the following question: why does the program ask me each time to “Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment,” and then, when I check that box, never saves them? It used to occasionally do so for short periods, now it doesn’t seem to be doing it at all.
I use Firefox and it, very conveniently, ‘remembers’ the log-in details all by its little self