28
votes
Steve Scalise drops out of US Speaker of the House race
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- Title
- US House speaker nominee Scalise drops out of race, deepening crisis
- Authors
- David Morgan, Moira Warburton
- Published
- Oct 13 2023
- Word count
- 622 words
I remember bursting out laughing when I saw this headline yesterday, not even 24 hours after they announced that he got the vote. Maybe it was a laugh of relief that the speaker wouldn't be "David Duke without the Baggage" as he calls himself, which is quite frankly insane to me.
Welp I spoke way too soon, they picked the molester guy next: https://apnews.com/article/house-republicans-scalise-jordan-mccarthy-trump-ced017e71de967a7e327cba7e502926a
The current rumor is that he doesn't have the votes to get to speaker (which I hope to god is true), because a significant number of republicans don't want to reward the ultra-right minority for all this infighting, stonewalling, and ultimatems with the speaker role
Exactly lmao. I was just thinking, "Hmm... I wonder how long this buffoon will last" then boom he's gone before I know it lmfao
The title says it all, at this rate we might not have a Speaker of the House by the Nov 17 Shutdown Deadline. I feel like the Republicans are doing everything they can to weaken their position coming into the 2024 election.
The runner up candidate to Scalise, Jim Jordan most likely won't unite the factions either:
I wonder who will end up being the "compromise candidate" that gets the house reopened again.
Honestly if anyone in the Republican caucus had the fortitude to present themselves as a unity candidate who would reach out to Democrats to get support from across the aisle this would be a total non-issue. It wouldn't be too hard to get 10 or so Dems to prop you up. But any deal a Republican makes to appeal to the 10 most conservative Democrats will instantly get them blackballed by 99% of the Republican caucus.
Who thinks it's sustainable to run a country this way?
Let's go the other way - I believe it would just take just a handful of republicans to side with the democrats, and elect someone like Hakeem Jefferies, leaving the Democratic minority leader as the speaker of the house.
That would be nice, but I'm premised on the argument that elections have consequences and the Republicans won so the speaker should be a GOPer. (Yes, I agree that Republicans don't win based on an even playing field and their "wins" don't necessarily accurately reflect the will of the people but I'm setting that aside.)
That's not really how a constituency-based democracy works, though. The election was to choose a representative for each constituency, and put those representatives into the House. But those representatives now need to make their own decisions.
Remember that the House of Representatives is not a proportional system (nor is it designed to be, for better and for worse), so I don't think it's helpful to adopt a winner-takes-all approach to its leadership. Plus, even in proportional parliaments, it's not unusual for minority parties to form coalitions to meet the 50% threshold and get enough consensus to rule.
Coming from outside the US that attitude doesn't really resonate with me.
Basically everywhere else there are more than two "real" parties and they just have to deal with minority governments and having to work with other others.
Elections need to have consequences; I just see those consequences in a different way I guess.
I'm not sure if this is actually true, even though it might be the sense in Washington. McCarthy should have been open to negotiating with Democrats, and if the concessions were too extreme by his taste then he could have complained publicly about whether it's "right" given the election results.
I feel like this misunderstands (the Trumpist segment of) the Republican base. They don't really care about governance or getting things done. Their entire political ethos is based on resentment. They're fundamentally destructive. They want to see their enemies (whomever that happens to be at the moment) frustrated, humiliated, obliterated.
I feel like Democrats keep making this mistake of thinking that we're living in like 1990, where voters actually wanted to see policies and a functioning government, and actually cared about scandals. And they keep underestimating Republicans because they're like "Well surely people don't want to vote for the party that can't get anything done!" But that's not necessarily true anymore.
From what I had read before, there's an interim speaker that oversees these upcoming speaker votes and supposedly it is untested and unknown what power the interim speaker can exercise. It feels ripe for abuse, I wonder if Republicans will simply try to push forward with an interim speaker acting as the elected speaker.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/04/us/politics/patrick-mchenry-interim-speaker.html
Looks like they're thinking about it, so buckle up. We may have an unelected Speaker pushing laws through.
https://apnews.com/article/house-speaker-powers-mchenry-875bebd218096a5252840cd8f52cc137
Yep, that's about what I expected, especially from Republicans. It's constantly testing the limits of the system when there's no explicit rules to tell them they can't do something. That's not to say Dems don't do it as well, but I think it's clearly different in how Dems might do it compared to how Republicans have been.
I'm not familiar with the details of House rules, but my understanding is that McCarthy had come to an agreement with some of the outliers of his party where they could bring a vote against his role as Speaker without the usual rules that it might require to do that action. I would imagine that does not apply to the interim speaker. So the interim speaker might not be able to be as easily influenced by those 8 or so outliers that McCarthy was beholden to.
I also suspect McCarthy may have known that on some level if he chose to make such an agreement with those extreme reps that they would likely end up using it against him and his list of replacements would probably come into play.
The betting market on this has been wild, here’s metaculus. People have really been taken off guard by the GOP’s inability to get this done. I’m starting to think changing the speaker out of nowhere is a near impossible task. It’s giving someone a huge amount of power (which they might keep for decades), yet they have limited ability to “grease the wheels” so to speak. When you normally pick a speaker, you probably based that on months —> years of horse trading.