Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Instagram: “Jan 3, 2023: What happens when you don’t elect a speaker?”
She's home with her pet dog Deco. She found it funny that someone called for evicting Kevin McCarthy from his office as a squatter. She noted that the US Senate has one of the longest continuous sessions in the world, because Senators' terms are staggered. But each House session ends every two years. She showed the number of her Congressional ID pin: 118. Then she noted that the House clerk must receive certificates of election.
From the election, it's two months to figure out who will be House Speaker, and KMC had all that time to get a majority of House votes. He got most of the R votes, but not all of them. One votes for someone or else one votes "Present", and one's vote will be counted.
This is the first time that a Speaker vote failed in a century. The last time it happened was in 1923, and before that in the 1850's, when the country was in turmoil over the issue of slavery, like the caning of Charles Sumner. In 1855: 133 round of voting. Without a Speaker, nobody gets sworn in, and it's the House Clerk who runs he House. No House business is possible. KMC might get elected if he gets some D votes. Then about Steve Scalise, 2nd in leadership, she notes rumors that he isn't interested.
She then stated that the D's were careful to fund the gov't until the end of this fiscal year, which is next September. That was
H.R.2617 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023 | Congress.gov | Library of Congress and she was the only D to vote against it, because of its military spending some $45 billion in excess of what President Biden requested. If the gov't had shut down, like when she entered Congress, it would have remained shut down as long as the House had no Speaker.
Do it again until enough people change their minds? Yes, until someone gets a majority.
As to her and Matt Gaetz, that was about some proposed deal where the D's would vote "Present" or not at all, so KMC could then get a majority of the votes. AOC told him that the D's will continue to vote for HJ.
She mentioned that party leaderships have a way of dealing with members who don't do what they want: to threaten to cut off campaign funding, not only directly, but also indirectly, by convincing big donors to not donate to them. But politicians who receive lots of small-dollar donations aren't subject to that kind of pressure, politicians like her.
As to what the anti-KMC R's want, some things are very bad, while some other things not so bad, like reducing the power of the Speakership. Over the last half-century, the Speaker has accumulated more and more power at the expense of rank-and-file members. KMC is willing to concede on right-wing sorts of issues, like reinstating the likes of MTG. AOC then stated that she often disagrees with the House D leadership. She also suspects that lobbyists gaining more power is associated with more centralized power in legislatures, from lobbyists having to influence fewer people to get what they want.
Who might AOC want as Speaker? She mentioned the possibility of a nonpartisan Speaker.
Will R's work with D's to support an alternative candidate? That's up to the R's.
Committees have numbers of members of each party in proportion to the overall numbers in the committee's chamber. All the committee chairpeople come from the majority party, and I note that the "ranking member" is the highest-ranking member from the other party.
Plurality vote? I note that the Congresspeople have to vote for election by plurality, whoever gets the most votes wins, rather than a majority, whoever gets more than half of the votes.
How can the House function when the R party doesn't want to actually govern? Then she criticized both-sides-ism. Wanting Medicare for All is not as extreme as willingness to do violence against politicians that one dislikes. She then noted that billionaires fund far-right activist movements. The Koch brothers, the Mercer family, ... right-wing podcasters often call themselves bootstrappy upstarts when they are often financed by oligarchs. The left, however, has grassroots funding, with lots of small-donor donations, without billionaires funding it. George Soros, for instance, seems to prefer funding more centrist Democrats.
She then mentions that the left has a policy agenda, and she described hers: universal healthcare, aggressive action to confront the climate crisis, taxing the rich, improving the path to citizenship, improving working power, like supporting labor unions and worker cooperatives. Then she says that the right wing had earlier been a little bit principled, like some decades ago, but nowadays, it's chasing clicks and views and the like, and that the R party might as well endorse Tucker Carlson for Speaker, since they all do what he says anyway. Or at least so she says.
Then saying that R's don't have a real plan for the border other than shutting it down. She also said that the US has a big labor shortage, and keeping immigrants out will only make it worse. Anti-immigrant ~ anti-healthy-economy. She said that we should look at countries with strong anti-immigrant policies.
She then said that there is a difference between on one side, many rank-and-file R's, many R voters, and on the other side, the elected R's -- and I'm sure, many R activists. She says that many R pols seem very obedient to Tucker Carlson, and that this is from Rupert Murdoch's money.
It doesn't happen only on the Right, and she mentioned Noam Chomsky's concept of "manufactured consent" in the mainstream news media. Like military-themed video games as recruitment tools. She also says that ad-sponsored media is incentivized media, that news-media companies may not want to displease their advertisers. She recommended that one have a varied media diet, and not just corporate-sponsored media: worker-owned media, publically-spondored media, grassroots media independent of ad placement.
