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McCarthey out as Speaker of the House - Bozo the clown on deck

Shadowy Man said:
It really is unfair, since we all know that the Republicans would definitely have saved Nancy Pelosi, had far left members of the House called to vacate her.
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Well … maybe if they thought AOC was going to get elected Speaker.
 
Elixir said:
Shadowy Man said:
It really is unfair, since we all know that the Republicans would definitely have saved Nancy Pelosi, had far left members of the House called to vacate her.
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Well … maybe if they thought AOC was going to get elected Speaker.
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I doubt it. The motion-to-vacate rule is the culprit here. Republicans voted it in with no Democratic support as a tool that could be used to force a speaker to do the bidding of the MAGA extremists. When it failed with McCarthy's stopgap funding bill, they pulled the plug on him. It is by no means certain that the Republicans have the votes to install anyone crazy enough to want the job. At this point we have a Catch 22 situation. Anyone who wants to be speaker is ipso facto unqualified to be speaker.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
Indeed, but if Trump was selected as House Speaker, he'd be second in line... hence Biden and Harris being no where near each other until Trump no longer is Speaker. Luckily Trump anointed Jim "Look the other way" Jordan... meaning Trump didn't want to be Speaker because he can't golf nearly as much. Pay would also be a cut from POTUS.
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Ouch!!! How many 1/6 types would try to assassinate them?
 
Democrats watched tape of McCarthy bashing them ahead of motion to vacate vote, Rep. Connolly says - YouTube

He also mentioned some other things that KMC did, like kiss up to Donald Trump not long after the January 6 insurrection, and try to obstruct the formation of the January 6 Committee.

Some Democratic Congresspeople were open to supporting KMC, but in the end, they all voted for his removal.

This was just before the vote to oust him: McCarthy says he won’t give Democrats anything in exchange for support as Speaker | The Hill
“They haven’t asked for anything. I’m not going to provide anything,” McCarthy said in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
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However, he seemed to think that the Democrats ought to be grateful to him for helping to avoid a shutdown.
“Let’s just be clear. When Nancy Pelosi was the minority leader, she would always come in, and she told Boehner and Paul [Ryan] that she didn’t believe in them utilizing [the motion to vacate to] remove Boehner, that she would always vote it down, not based upon saving an individual but based upon what’s good for government, what’s good for the institution as a whole,” McCarthy said.

“And that’s the question it has to be: Are we now in a situation in our government that we just provided keeping government open, that we’re going to play politics with how you become Speaker? If that’s the case, then I think we got real problems,” he continued.
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As to what the Democrats decided,
We are following our leader and we are not saving Kevin McCarthy,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told reporters.
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KMC again:
“And you know what? If some way I lose my job because I uphold the law, because I uphold the continuity of government, so be it. I’m just going to do what’s right for the American people and keep working towards that direction,” he continued.
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The bewilderment and schadenfreude the White House feels over McCarthy's ouster - POLITICO
The White House now has just 44 days to avert a November government shutdown and secure critical aid for Ukraine — and no earthly idea who will lead the House GOP. Last weekend, Biden and House Democratic leaders cited McCarthy’s support for Ukraine as a reason the funding would ultimately be approved quickly. With him gone, there were no immediate answers.

“For them to be engaged in this civil war, it’s nothing I’ve ever seen,” said Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), a close Biden ally. “This is uncharted waters.”
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Even while he was Speaker, he was troublesome.
People close to the president considered McCarthy a fickle and unpredictable partner. When McCarthy met with Biden in person, he typically presented himself as a sober negotiator, clear-eyed about the give-and-take of bipartisan governance. Then he would go out in public and brag about his refusal to bend on conservative demands.

On a particularly sensitive matter, McCarthy mocked Biden’s age and mental acuity in public, while privately telling allies that he found the president sharp and substantive in their conversations — a contradiction that left a deep impression on the White House.

McCarthy’s willingness to sign off on an impeachment inquiry without holding a vote was seen as a cynical ploy that sapped any goodwill among Biden’s closest advisers. The decision to renege on a debt ceiling deal he brokered directly with Biden, meanwhile, signaled his hold over those in his own party was waning.
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Bidenites thought that they could work with him in a backdoor sort of fashion as they endured his attacks on them.
The Biden campaign has since shifted into overdrive in its attempt to exploit the House GOP power vacuum, leaning heavily on Republicans’ own anguish over the intraparty war. Among the series of clips that campaign aides blasted out in Tuesday’s aftermath was GOP presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ declaration: “I see just a lack of leadership, I see a Republican majority that hasn’t delivered what it promised.”
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Some Republicans making bid to bring back McCarthy to move on aid to Israel - POLITICO - "Reinstalling the Californian, the thinking goes, is the only way to quickly deliver aid to Israel."

Kevin McCarthy considers resigning from Congress after being ousted as speaker - POLITICO - "The deposed former speaker has made clear he plans to stay at least through the speakership election before ending his House career, two people familiar with the matter tell POLITICO."

Empty speaker's office aggravates House-Senate beef - POLITICO - "It’s not just increased fears about a shutdown. Senators would consider themselves lucky to end the year without a catastrophe."

Kevin McCarthy’s Downfall Is the Culmination of the Tea Party - POLITICO - "Political scientist Theda Skocpol on how tea party politics laid the foundation for the GOP’s current troubles."

The Tea Party? Trump's MAGA is marching down a trail blazed by the Tea Party : NPR -- the teabaggers became Trumpies, it seems.
In the hours after the House of Representatives’ historic vote to oust Kevin McCarthy from the speakership, a photo began circulating online of the cover of Young Guns, the splashy policy treatise authored by then-Reps. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy in 2010. The irony of the photo was clear enough: The book, which featured a gleaming group portrait of the three self-declared standard-bearers of the Republican Party, was intended to introduce the rising stars of the GOP to the American people — but now, just 13 years after its publication, the book had become a visual obituary for the party’s past.
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Eric Cantor was House Minority Whip over 2009-2010, and he was House Majority Leader over 2011-2014. He was primaried by economics professor Dave Brat in 2014. But DB was a nobody and not some super policy wonk, and he was defeated in 2018.

Paul Ryan was a Representative from Wisconsin from 1999 to 2019. He became House Speaker in 2015, and he decided to quit politics outright in 2018.

Kevin McCarthy became a Rep from California in 2007, he was House Majority Whip in 2011 - 2014, and House Majority Leader in 2014 - 2019. He became the head of the House Republican Conference in 2019, and Speaker this year.

Professor Theda Skocpol:
“I’m sitting here looking at a picture on my iPad of the three ‘Young Guns’ from that iconic cover of their book,” she said. “All three of them were felled in succession by the popular anger of the tea party base.”

...
“It represents the culmination of [the tea party movement],” said Skocpol. “All the research that I and other political scientists have done on the movement shows that by the 2010s — just before Donald Trump emerges — the tea party had taken the shape of a just-say-no, blow-it-all-up, don’t-cooperate, do-politics-on-Twitter faction — and this is the perfect expression of it. This is where it leads.”
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Shortly into Barack Obama’s presidency, we saw this explosion of tea party demonstrations and a remarkable degree of grassroots organizing — a couple thousand local tea parties, according to our research. There was a lot of writing at the time claiming that this organization was motivated by the same thing that people now claim drives the Republican Party when they shut down the government — cutting the deficit. But it was never about cutting the deficit. The popular side of the tea party was about anger and fear of a changing country in which a guy with ‘Hussein’ as his middle name and black skin could be elected president. The tea party — especially at the grassroots — was trying to pressure the Republican Party and its elected leaders not to compromise with a changing country or with Democratic Party politicians in Washington.

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The tea party mobilization made a big difference electorally in 2010 in installing a Republican Congress, and probably even more importantly in installing Republican-dominated state legislatures. But it was especially potent after that in undoing any effort at compromise over immigration.
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Because immigrants are Not Real Americans.
We have to understand the radicalization of the Republican Party as a process that has been underway since 2000. Act 1 of that radicalization was the rise of the Koch network, which was itself motivated by displeasure with what the Republicans under Bush junior and senior had been doing — for example, passing Medicare expenditures.

...
So I think the Republican Party was first hollowed out at the top, and then the tea party crystallized when Barack Obama was elected president and then it ended up being given further expression during the immigration reform battles and the rise of Donald Trump.
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About Kevin McCarthy,
He’s a shapeshifter, and that’s given him staying power — up until the moment he had Democratic votes to keep the government open and then went on TV over the weekend and trashed the Democrats.
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When the ouster vote came, every Democrat in the House voted to oust him. KMC's two-faced act was his undoing, like presenting himself to the White House staff as someone willing to compromise while assuring his fellow Republicans that he will never compromise.
 
Was KMC's ouster a rejection of the Tea Party legacy? TS: "No — it represents the culmination of it." Then,
I think most people in the in the media thought the tea party was about cutting the federal budget deficit because that’s what a few elite spokesmen on TV said it was about. But our research always showed that at the grassroots, it was about popular anger over a changing country and fury at a Republican Party that was not responding to that desire.
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Her interviewer then asked why the likes of Matt Gaetz make a big fuss about the deficit. She responded "You’re not going to like the answer I’m going to give you." and then
It sells with the Washington press corps. Why anybody believes this is beyond me. Did you see what Donald Trump did when he was office? Did you see what Republicans did when they controlled the entire Congress? They don’t cut anything, except taxes. And that keeps a certain number of billionaires — and even Charles Koch himself — happy.
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Yes, Republicans have been running up big deficits for all of Gilded Age II, ever since Ronald Reagan and his big deficits. George Bushes I and II both did it, and Donald Trump did it, but when a Democrat gets elected President, they all say what a horrible thing deficit spending is, how it's stealing from our children, and other such things.

She then describes two strands in the Republican Party of recent years. One of them, which she calls McConnellism, is to game the system to get Republicans elected and their judges appointed. The other is Trumpism, "which at this point has gone from bullying and threatening to actual calls for violence."
 
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Theda Skocpol then gets to what might happen to these hard-line right-wingers. "Well, I think Matt Gaetz himself wants to get on TV, raise a lot of money and run for another office." Like governor of Florida, succeeding Ron DeSantis.

She concludes with "We are in uncharted territory."
 
How in the heck is that even a thing? He didn't reach out to the Dems before hand or after Jeffries raised the issue. He can only get in with Democrat votes, most likely, unless he keeps the 1 vote poison pill, which umm...
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
How in the heck is that even a thing? He didn't reach out to the Dems before hand or after Jeffries raised the issue. He can only get in with Democrat votes, most likely, unless he keeps the 1 vote poison pill, which umm...
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I suspect he calculates that the Republicans will fail to elect an alternative and may turn to him rather than risk moderates striking a deal with Jeffries. At least, that is how I would pitch it to the MAGA crowd, if I were him. He would be a relatively safe choice for them, in exchange for a promise to help him shut down the government if their blackmail demands aren't met. And, of course, he could agree to that and then back out of the commitment again, so that won't make it an easy choice for them. I suspect they'll need to go through several rounds of votes before seriously thinking about taking him back. And, of course, there's the Israeli crisis now. So there's added pressure to elect a new speaker soon.
 
Scalise wins GOP nomination but which guarantees nothing for the House vote.

thehill.com

Scalise secures GOP Speaker nomination

House Republicans on Wednesday nominated Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) to be the next Speaker, sending his candidacy to the House floor following Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) stunning o…
thehill.com thehill.com
 
Based on the comments on Washington Post, it doesn't look good for a speaker to be selected without Democrat support. The GOP is really proving they suck at leading. Scalise is a staunch conservative in the room (who also voted to fuck the 2020 election), and seems like the best option we can expect the GOP to come up with.
 
Does a non-Member Speaker get a vote, and if so why doesn't a party with a very narrow majority ALWAYS choose a non-Member for Speaker? If there's any ambiguity in the Constitution, we can assume that, were the extra vote to become crucial, a GOP-majority House would amend the rules to make that voting power explicit.

Recall that Scotus voted 5-4 in Bush v. Gore (531 U.S. 98) for the Republican Party over fair play. Clarence Thomas is the only GOP holdover from then on today's court; the 5 new GOP Justices are even more whorish than their predecessors.

Toni said:
It is currently Patty Murray because the seat of Speaker of the House is vacant.

Succession goes VP, Speaker of the House, President pro tem of the Senate, Secretary of State.
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If, heaven forbid, Biden and Harris were both taken out by MAGAt assassins, the House would quickly elect a Speaker, presumably -- if only because the Gaetz-Boebert faction would insist -- Donald J. Trump. It wouldn't matter if they had to violate a rule to do so; Clarence Thomas and The Other Five Whores would rule as their pimps instructed.
 
Well... then there is this.
article said:
Within the Republican conference, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) received 113 votes for the speaker nomination, while Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) got 99. Eight GOP lawmakers voted for someone other than Scalise or Jordan, and three members voted present.
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But American politics is so about the last five minutes because....
article said:
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) will back Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) for House speaker and has offered to give a nominating speech on Scalise’s behalf, according to a spokesperson for Jordan.
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This was after Jordan being all mopey about a divided carcass.

House supposed to go into business at 3 PM. Might recess immediately. Who knows.
 
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