Reply to Comment on ‘Casey of the White House’ by C.D. McCarthy, C.E.R. Boebert, and K.J. McKay

It was supposed to be easier for the six-term congressman, who has served in leadership over a decade. After the far-right House Freedom Caucus denied his ascension to the speakership in 2015, McCarthy spent years courting the conservative wing and worked overtime to stay in former President Donald Trump’s good graces. A group of conservatives distrustful of McCarthy were able to use their unexpected leverage to get what they wanted when a red wave never materialized.

In the wake of multiple of my constituents questioning the wisdom of proceeding forward with that leadership, there needs to be a “frank conversation” about who they choose for the top job.

The Freedom Caucus isn’t unified on whether or not to make that a hard line for Lauren Boebert of Colorado.

And during a recent meeting involving Republicans who all sit on the same committee, there was a “heated discussion” about offering a resolution to remove McCarthy holdouts from their panel assignments if they don’t back down, according to lawmakers familiar with the situation. At least for now, they agreed it wasn’t the best move.

The position of House GOP majority whip is still up for grabs even though the two top leaders seem to be in control of their leadership races.

CNN has not said which party will control the House of Representatives, though it seems like the Republican Party will have more seats than Democrats.

What have we learned about the GOP from the defeat of Sean McConnell in the House of Representatives? How many reps are needed to re-open the debate?

Norman said the group hopes to formalize a lengthier list of all the rules changes they are seeking. McCarthy is not expected to delay next week’s internal leadership elections.

The taxpayers that voted for McCarthy deserve the credit they were given, according to Norman.

McCarthy will have to lose four GOP votes in order to get the speakership, and he can’t afford that since the Gaetz bloc is still holding firm.

“With a slim majority, we shouldn’t be starting the C team,” Gaetz said. “We need to put our star players in a position to shine brightest so that we can attract more people to our policies and ideas.”

The GOP is grappling with what went wrong in the election and whether to keep its leaders after disappointing Election results last week.

A group of GOP senators wants to delay their leadership elections in order to have a discussion about why the GOP did poorly. McConnell is running for GOP leader, and at least one Republican has publicly vowed not to support him.

One thing the California Republican doesn’t have to contend with is the fact that there isn’t a strong alternative to his candidacy. GOP Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, the former head of the Freedom Caucus, has launched a long-shot bid.

Florida Sen. Rick Scott, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, is among those calling for a delay in the Senate leadership election scheduled for Wednesday, saying it “doesn’t make any sense” to have them this week.

What are we doing now? What do we stand for?” On Sunday, Scott said on Fox News. The leadership of the Senate says you cannot have a plan because they think the Democrats are bad. And actually they cave into the Democrats. They would like to do an election now. We don’t even have anything left to tell you about what happened in Georgia.

It’s a stunning reversal of fortunes – and potential moment of reckoning – for the once-bullish GOP, with party leaders now scrambling to quell the brewing rebellions in their ranks and explain why the election did not go their way. The disappointing results have caused other leadership races, such as that of the head of the House GOP’s campaign arm to be scrambled, if Republicans retain their majority.

“They’ve been measuring the draperies, they’ve been putting forth an agenda. Nancy Pelosi told CNN that they haven’t won it yet. “After the election is concluded, depending on who was in the majority, there’ll be judgments made within their own party, in our own parties, as to how we go forward.”

Behind the scenes, the finger pointing has already begun, and those conversations are likely to accelerate as the full House and Senate return to Washington this week for the first time since the midterm elections.

Trump and his allies have tried to make McConnell the fall guy for the GOP’s lackluster midterm performance, accusing McConnell of spending recklessly in states where Republicans faced significant headwinds at the expense of candidates in more competitive contests.

“There’s a very high correlation between MAGA candidates and big losses,” said retiring Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey. “I think my party needs to face the fact that if fealty to Donald Trump is the primary criteria for selecting candidates, we’re probably not going to do really well.”

McConnell and Scott have both spoken out against candidate quality in the past, with McConnell warning about candidate quality while Scott took a hands off approach in the primaries.

Even though he wouldn’t have a chance of succeeding, Scott was still open to contesting McConnell for the top spot.

McCarthy has been sounding out all corners of the conference privately this week in private, in order to find a solution that would satisfy his critics without alienating the rest of the conference.

The senior Republican told CNN that it was not possible to appease HFC and moderates at the same time. “If you straddle that fence, you better hope it’s not barbed wire.”

The Correspondence Between Kevin McCarthy and Henry Cuellar: Why the Democratic Party Shouldn’t Discretely Discuss Same-Sex Marriage

Kevin McCarthy is hoping to beat the test on Tuesday that will decide if he can become House speaker despite an lackluster performance in the election.

Idaho GOP Rep. Mike Simpson said he’ll support McCarthy for leader, noting the GOP gained House seats the last two elections. “He’s done a good job,” said Simpson.

“It’s not only delaying that,” McCarthy said of recruiting GOP candidates. “It’s being prepared to not only defend the majority, but grow the majority.”

A source in the room said that Bob Good, a McCarthy critic, complained that McCarthy didn’t call to congratulate him after he won his primary because McCarthy’s Super PAC opposed some pro-Trump candidates. McCarthy directed $2 million to Good for his race. Good had to be gaveled down in order to cut him off from speaking so they could move to the next question, the source said.

McCarthy has made a lot of public promises about how he would rule the House, such as threatening to institute an impeachment inquiry into Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and promising not to accept bills from any GOP senators who back the omnibus spending bill.

But McCarthy’s allies have recently attempted to convince moderate Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar to switch parties in hopes of padding their slim margins, according to two sources familiar with the conversation. Cuellar flatly rejected the idea. McCarthy’s spokesman said the GOP leader wasn’t involved if these conversations occurred and that this isn’t part of their strategy for the majority or for his speakership bid.

At the private forum, Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer, the National Republican Congressional Committee chair, was pressed on his vote in support of a bill to codify same-sex marriage earlier this year, according to a source in the room. His response: “These divisive social issues shouldn’t be brought to the House floor.”

The Republican Study Committee chair, Jim Banks of Indiana, as well as the chief deputy whip, Drew Ferguson, are competing with Emmer for the post.

Kevin McCarthy, his wife, Steve Scalise and the public opinion: a strategy for winning the speakership vote in 2024 but not as easily as expected

Kevin McCarthy promised not to drop out of the speakership race even if the fight goes to many ballots on the floor.

If McCarthy can’t win 218 votes, the hard-liners have suggested a new candidate would emerge but they have steadfastly refused to name the individual – something that is infuriating many McCarthy allies in the conference.

“Our initial plan is vote for Kevin and let him fight this out repeatedly. … But if they think they’re going to use this to infinity to drive him out, well, we’re not going to bend to their will,” said Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican.

The GOP member told CNN that if Kevin McCarthy does not become speaker, Steve Scalise has faint fingerprints on the dagger.

GOP sources tell me that the second-in-command of the House has made clear that he supports McCarthy, while taking steps to avoid being seen as scheming McCarthy’s demise.

“Obviously our focus is on getting it resolved by January 3,” he told CNN. “And there’s a lot of conversations that everybody has been having, Kevin, surely, with the members who have expressed concerns.”

Jim Jordan decided against jumping into the race for speaker even though Gaetz and other hardliners had urged him to.

After leaving a meeting with McCarthy, Norman said he was going to vote for Andy for speaker. He later added: “All this is positive. We’re having good change, regardless of what happens. You will see more of it.

Following that secret ballot vote, where McCarthy won 188-31, a bloc of five “hard no” votes strategically began to trickle out their public statements of opposition. After negotiations dragged on last month, another group wrote a letter to McCarthy, increasing pressure on the Republican leader to cut a deal.

So showing voters in 2024 that GOP governance addressed key problems like inflation and the economy will be important. But while he has announced he will form a select committee to examine China’s growing threat, which could unite both parties, most of McCarthy’s recent rhetoric has focused on a relentless set of investigations of the Biden administration and conservatives’ interest in impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Currently, the majority of the House GOP is required to call for the so-called motion to vacate the speaker’s chair. Conservative hardliners want to ensure that the speaker is held accountable with a single member being able to call for a vote.

McCarthy has been adamantly opposed to restoring the “motion to vacate the chair,” and a majority of the House GOP voted against the idea during a during a closed-door meeting last month. McCarthy laughed and refused to answer when CNN asked if he would visit the issue.

“I think that’s one of the reasons that we didn’t see a red wave … the idea that people are sick and tired of the noise, and they’re sick and tired of the fighting,” Rep. David Joyce, an Ohio Republican, said of the impact of a January 3 floor fight. I know that wherever I go in my district, people want to just get things done.

On Wednesday’s edition of “CNN This Morning,” Donalds said that his vote on Tuesday was to break the stalemate because they were not getting anywhere. “Right now, (McCarthy) doesn’t have a pathway to get there. If that reemerges, yeah, That is fine but Republicans have to come together and find a way toelect a speaker.

The Democratic Conference Organizing the Next Speaker: What will the next congressman do if Trump fails to get the votes or the votes?

The Democrats have said they will be interested in the idea and the moderate Texas Democrat told CNN that he has been approached by some of his GOP colleagues about it.

Joyce also said some members have reached out to him about potentially running, but he dismissed it. Kevin is the new speaker at the end of the day.

New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the next House Democratic leader, said, “there are no behind-the-scenes conversations” that he has had with Republicans to put up an alternative candidate. But he refused to rule out a scenario where his caucus would help elect the next speaker if McCarthy couldn’t get the votes.

“Democrats are in the process of organizing the Democratic Conference,” Jeffries told CNN on Thursday. The Republicans are organizing the conference. Let us see what happens on January 3.

The names of retiring congressmen who voted for the impeachment of Donald Trump are being thrown around as possible consensus picks.

But that would require agreement from every single Democrat and the help of five Republicans – no easy feat. Upton said he has no plans to be in Washington that day, telling CNN: “I’ll be skiing.”

Minority Democrats in the Arkansas legislature joined forces with a few Republicans to choose a GOP speaker of their choice, according to Republican Rep. Bruce Westerman. Westerman privately made this case to his colleagues at a closed-door meeting this week.

When Nancy Pelosi Becomes a Speaker of the House, Donald Trump Wins the House Speakership. But What Do We Need to Know Now?

“I’m concerned about January 3 getting here and us not being able to form a Congress and organize committees and getting delayed in pushing the policy objectives that we want to push,” Westerman said.

Westerman added that the discussion over changing House rules is good for the party. He did not like any type of destructive movement.

If Mr. McCarthy does have a plan, he has not shared it with members of his leadership team, whom he has cut out of his deliberations about the speakership race in what some regard as a display of paranoia. Instead, he has been spotted in recent days around the Capitol and the Republican National Committee headquarters nearby with Jeff Miller, a Republican lobbyist who is among his closest confidants.

It was not clear whether Mr. McCarthy enlisted Mr. Trump to help his campaign, or if Mr. Trump was simply working on his own. Eli Crane, an incoming Republican congressman from Arizona has been spoken to by the former president. A group of GOP lawmakers, including Mr. Crane and Mr. Norman, signed a letter demanding that their leader in the next Congress make it easier to remove the speaker.

When Nancy Pelosi in 2018 found herself about a dozen votes short of what she would need to secure the speaker’s gavel, she quietly picked off defectors, methodically cutting deals to capture exactly enough support to prevail. Ms. Pelosi, renowned for her ability to arm-twist and coax, won seven votes by agreeing to limit her tenure, picked up another eight by promising to implement rules aimed at fostering more bipartisan legislating, and won over her sole would-be challenger by creating a subcommittee chairmanship for her.

The California Republican has already made a series of pledges in an effort to appease the right flank of his party. He went to the southern border and called on Alejandro Mayorkas to resign or face possible impeachment. He promised Ms. Greene, who was stripped of her committee assignments for making a series of violent and conspiratorial social media posts before she was elected, a plum spot on the Oversight Committee.

He has threatened to investigate the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, promising to hold public hearings scrutinizing the security breakdowns that occurred. He has been quietly meeting with ultraconservative lawmakers in an effort to win them over. And on Monday night, he publicly encouraged his members to vote against the lame-duck spending bill to fund the government.

Reply to the CNN Correspondence on The Case for a New Republican Speaker in the House Minority Election” by R. J. McCarthy

The tiny GOP House majority that takes over in January, after a disappointing midterm performance, would mean a fragile governing mandate for any party at any point in American history. The ideological struggle being waged by pro- Donald Trump extremists inside the party would make even a more comfortable majority volatile.

The congressman wanted to be speaker for a long time. He seemed willing to do a lot of things to get the job, including burrowing into former President Trump’s good graces.

McCarthy has adopted some of the confrontational defiance of the “Make America Great Again” movement, toseek out soundbites and confrontation with the press as badges of honor.

But sources also admitted that the new proposals, even if accepted, would not win over all the holdouts McCarthy needs. And the continuing brouhaha raises a deeper question of why the GOP leader, who has had weeks to get his majority solidified, still cannot get it done. If the incoming speaker can’t get his coalition in line he will be removed from office.

This is one reason why the current year-end tussle over whether to fund the government for a full year – a bipartisan framework agreement for which was announced Tuesday night – or for just a few months is so critical since it could dump a fiscal crisis on the lap of a weak and easily manipulated new speaker next month.

McCarthy brushed off the CNN interview as being about her saying she was being facetious. His attitude was consistent with his attempts to rewrite the history of the worst attack on US democracy in modern times, which he briefly said Trump bore responsibility for.

McCarthy declined to criticize the former president for meeting with a white supremacist at a dinner even though he has made antisemitic comments in the past. During a meeting with Biden and other congressional leaders at the White House, the House Republican leader made a false claim about Trump having condemned Fuentes four times before.

CNN’s Raju and Melanie Zanona reported Tuesday that McCarthy had signaled at the White House meeting that he’d be open to a large bill. But while Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell worked on such a measure Tuesday and declared it “broadly appealing,” McCarthy told his members that he was a “Hell no” on the measure.

But Republicans in the House are livid for another reason. If Senate Republicans had refused to do a deal, Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, or whoever the future Speaker of the House will be, would have had more leverage in trying to force spending cuts on the Biden administration come next month.

As frustration inside the House GOP has grown over a small band of anti-Kevin McCarthy lawmakers, an idea to strike back at the rebellious group has been floated among some Republicans: kicking these members off their committees, according to multiple members involved in the conversations.

Moderates will probably be unwilling to follow through with the hardball tactics often deployed by the far right, even if it will backfire for McCarthy. Opposing the rules package, for example, could upend any careful negotiations between McCarthy and his detractors, so GOP sources don’t believe McCarthy’s supporters would ultimately take it down.

The rise of anti-establishment intransigence among a hard-right faction in the GOP can be traced with a straight line back to the Tea Party — and put on steroids by MAGA Trumpism.

“People need to recognize we don’t need to double down on failed policies and failed candidates,” said Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican. “There’s a reason the midterms were the way that they were: people who are left of center, right of center were the most successful.”

One of the Republicans who came out in opposition to McCarthy was Rep. Matt Gaetz, who admits the reality of a narrowly divided House.

“We are in a community of common fate,” he told CNN. “We have to acknowledge that the ship isn’t going anywhere if five people won’t row in that direction. And that’s true on impeachment, it’s true on the speakership vote, it’s true on the budget, it’s true on policy choices.”

“Some of the questions that remain unanswered is what other deals are going to be cut, you know, what guarantees, what concessions are going to be made?” Womack asked. We need to be careful not to give a lot of the leverage away.

Talks continued Tuesday evening, with McCarthy in his office making calls, sources said. He also has dispatched several emissaries – Brian Fitzpatrick, Garret Graves, French Hill, Patrick McHenry and Guy Reschenthaler – to help find a deal with his foes and present their demands to the rest of the House GOP conference.

At this point many members are still preaching unity, calling the private deal-making part of the process, and emphasizing that the conference will come together when the new Congress begins January 3. To that end, the Republican Governance Group recently sent a letter urging their colleagues to unite behind McCarthy.

“It shouldn’t be a surprise that Republicans are out there having conversations and talking about different points of view,” GOP Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida told CNN.

Even amid the high-stakes negotiations, members from competing factions have had time to have some fun with one another. The office of the congressman held a Christmas party this week, where all of Capitol Hill came together. There was a fountain filled with Mountain Dew, and a snack plate full of CheezWhiz and Ritz crackers.

The congressman who identifies himself as a member of the governing wing said that various groups actually agree on most things, and that there would be no tension next year.

“I’ve said this over and over again: there is not this, like, enormous amount of drama,” Moore told CNN. “I’ve met with House Freedom Caucus members to chat on what we agree on. It is an enormous amount.

McCarthy warns that the five GOP members may vote as a bloc on January 3, meaning that they will all vote.

McCarthy said that this is a presidential year and that you only have a few months to govern. And you want to hit the ground running. If you lose a quarter, you don’t start strong. You don’t get strong candidates. You don’t get more resources to be able to supply those candidates to get the message out.”

I know it would be difficult to take care of all the unfinished business this year and next, even though you have a narrow majority.

“We’re enduring the silly season of a campaign. After you are elected, it is over for most of us. He said that the silliness is still apparent because he is running for speaker of the House.

What the GOP should have done in passing the omnibus spending bill, or why it may have failed to resurrect the Child Tax Credit

Patrick T. Brown is one of the fellows at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, an advocacy group located in Washington, DC. He was a policy adviser to the Joint Economic Committee. Follow him on Twitter. The views expressed in this piece are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

The 4,155-page omnibus spending bill negotiated by the Senate Appropriations Committee was released Monday night, and Congress hopes to have it passed by Christmas.

Devotees of good government have plenty of reason to complain about the process. Forcing lawmakers to vote for bills that no one could have read in their entirety has become a crutch Congress relies on too often, even to just keep the lights on.

Republicans will not want to hear it but this product will help them out in the long run by removing a potential stumbling block.

Nonetheless, 13 House members, including rock-ribbed fiscal conservative Rep. Chip Roy of Texas and America First poster boy Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, released a letter excoriating Senate GOP leadership for supporting this “indefensible assault on the American people.” McCarthy endorsed the promise that they would oppose any legislative priority of those senators who vote for the bill.

But Republicans don’t have to embrace the lame-duck deal to appreciate the silver lining of something getting passed, as ugly as it may seem. Without an appropriations deal, the federal government would have been facing a temporary extension of funding that would expire early next year. That would have been a great chance for the GOP to start their time in the majority by causing a government shutdown.

In 1995- 1996, and 2013 Republican-led shutdowns resulted in poor poll numbers for GOP leaders, and did not achieve much meaningful policy change. There’s very little reason to believe this go-round would be any different, and some members may be secretly breathing a sigh of relief to have that taken off the table.

Republicans have plenty to complain about but there is something to be said for feeling a little frustrated that some negotiations that could have helped parents and families didn’t happen.

For example, many progressives hoped to resurrect the Biden-era expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC), which was always a fool’s errand, as the lack of work requirements in the credit were a non-starter for Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, not to mention many Republicans. For most of the year, the White House’s position was that expansion had to be done without work requirements but at the last minute.

If a deal on the CTC were to have been struck, Democrats should have been having serious talks over the past year with Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah, Marco Rubio of Florida, Mike Lee of Utah or Josh Hawley of Missouri, all of whom have proposed variants of pro-family tax reform. Democrats may be able to explore areas of common ground during the upcoming divided governance era.

Another common-sense initiative that fell victim to partisan bickering was legislation that would have brought much-needed clarity to the legal landscape around accommodations for expectant mothers in the workplace. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which was endorsed by conservative pro-life groups and left-leaning women’s organizations, got caught up in questions about whether business could be forced to provide benefits to women who choose abortion.

The fact that the negotiations went down to the wire shows how many in Congress prefer culture war battles to compromise, even if Republican Senator Bill Cassidy helped lead the talks to resolve some of the concerns.

GOP candidates won’t take a hoot out of the $575 million in grants for family planning/reproductive health they will be given by the government in the name of biodiversity.

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing good in the omnibus. Aside from the big-ticket items that keep the government functioning, Congress included funding for a task force and hotline on maternal health, and ordered a study on the impact of tech use on teen mental health outcomes.

They increased funding for the child care block grant, extended funding for low income mothers for up to a year after birth under Medicaid and reauthorized the evidence-based maternal and early childhood home visiting program.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/21/opinions/republicans-omnibus-spending-deal-brown/index.html

The Devil Is in the Details: Bringing Order to the New House GOP Speaker’s Conjecture after Sunday’s Conference Call

For now, avoiding at least one self-inflicted wound may be the best parting gift Republicans could ask for from an era of unified Democratic control. And the fact that 21 GOP senators voted yes on a procedural motion to advance the deal suggests many in the upper chamber know that.

The speakership is McCarthy’s primary goal, and some of his fiercest critics, including Gaetz and Norman, told CNN they don’t think he’s done yet.

The moderate wing of the party have said they would be willing to agree on a threshold of 50 people, but it may be too low for them.

All of this will be a major topic of discussion during a crucial conference call on Friday afternoon that McCarthy scheduled with the various ideological caucuses in the House GOP, just four days ahead of the January 3 speaker’s vote.

McCarthy will get a fresh chance on Wednesday to show that he can bring his conference under control and finally bring some order to the new Republican majority – even if the path ahead remains impossible to identify. Perhaps a day of infighting will convince all Republicans they are at risk of squandering their majority.

“The ‘devil is in the details’ as far as threshold & other rule concessions,” Norman said. People will not move their votes until the details are clearly stated in writing and social media posts.

In a “Dear Colleague” letter from the California Republican, he made his case for the speakership and offered additional promises, including ensuring that the ideological groups are better represented on committees.

Not long after Sunday’s call, a group of nine hardliners – who had outlined their demands to McCarthy last month – put out a new letter saying some of the concessions he announced are insufficient and making clear they’re still not sold on him, though they did say progress is being made.

“Thus far, there continue to be missing specific commitments with respect to virtually every component of our entreaties, and thus, no means to measure whether promises are kept or broken,” the members wrote in the letter obtained by CNN.

The Rules Package for the House Speaker’s Representation in the 116th Session of the House Selective Causal Electoral Caucus

Some moderates who fear that the motion to vacillates will be used as cudgel over McCarthy’s head pushed back and expressed their frustration during the call, sources said.

Rep. Carlos Gimenez of Florida then repeated Diaz-Balart’s question, asking McCarthy to answer it. Sources say that McCarthy told them they needed to close the deal after a couple days.

Rep.-elect Mike Lawler of New York asked Gaetz if he would back McCarthy if he agreed to bring the motion to vacate threshold down to a single lawmaker, which is what it used to be before Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, changed the rules. Gaetz said that if McCarthy is making that offer now, than he wouldn’t think twice about it.

The package released late Sunday includes giving five Republicans the power to call for a vote on deposing the sitting speaker; restoring the ability to zero out a government official’s salary; giving lawmakers 72 hours to a read bill before it comes to the floor; and creating a new select commit to investigative the “weaponization” of the Justice Department and the FBI.

The process for discharge petitions, which allows lawmakers to circumvent leadership and force a bill to the floor, will not be changed by the rules package.

Other notable items that might be of interest: The rules package prohibits remote hearings and markups, does away with staffer unionization efforts and allows the House Ethics Committee to take ethic complaints from the public.

Four days before the vote for the House speaker, he tried to convince his critics of his candidacy, even though they had yet to decide whether or not to support him.

But now with just one day to go, a group of at least nine Republicans have made clear that they’re still not sold – despite McCarthy’s warning and even after he gave in to some of their most ardent demands, which he outlined during a Sunday evening conference call.

“To be honest, we are preparing for a fight. Not the way we want to start out in our new majority, but you can’t negotiate against the position that we will not guarantee anything in return. Rep. Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota, a member of the centrist-leaning Republican Governance Group, told CNN.

“I give Kevin a ton of credit. He brought everyone in, and worked hard to figure out a way forward. It is possible to make this place run better. But I get the feeling that not everyone is negotiating in good faith.”

During the week before the Christmas and New Year’s holiday, McCarthy worked the phones with critics and supporters to get consensus on rules changes that were intended to win over holdouts.

The battle for the next speaker: how a frustrated congressman can still get his act on the House committees without a rules package and how to avoid paying staff

At least five Republicans have promised to oppose him, while nearly a dozen other GOP lawmakers publicly say they are still not there yet.

It used to be possible for a single member to call for a vote of no confidence in the speaker, but that was before Speaker Nancy Pelosi changed the rules.

In another strategic move, McCarthy postponed races for any contested committee chairs until after the speaker vote. He said it was to let freshman members have a say in the process, but others think it was a way to protect himself if he ends up losing his race.

An aide to Republican Rep. Ralph Norman said the South Carolinian’s district offices have been inundated with calls from constituents who have received robocalls and “been read a script” by someone warning what could happen if McCarthy isn’t elected speaker because of conservatives like Norman. Norman’s aide told CNN that those campaigns didn’t influence the congressman’s position, but it did show the lengths McCarthy backers went to exert maximum pressure on detractors.

In phone calls and text messages during the holidays, McCarthy’s defenders vowed to him and each other they wouldn’t let a handful of members control their conference.

McCarthy’s opposition, however, has also been working in tandem – and they are far more practiced in playing hardball, though the Freedom Caucus has been openly divided over McCarthy.

The committee in charge of administrative matters sent a letter last week outlining the practical implications and pitfalls of a drawn-out speaker’s fight. Without an approved House Rules package, the memo outlined that committees won’t be able to pay staff.

The same memo, which was first reported by Politico and obtained by CNN, also warned that student loan payments for committee staff wouldn’t be disbursed if a rules package isn’t adopted by mid-January.

It is one of the many ways a battle over the next speaker could cripple the House and the Republican majority from operating efficiently in their opening days, with some of the harsher penalties falling on rank-and-file staffers.

CNN reported on boxes from McCarthy’s office being moved into the speaker’s suite last week, a sign that he is serious about running for the job.

The ongoing standoff between pro and anti-McCarthy groups has been described as a strange game of chicken where the steering wheel is removed from the dashboard and the sides pedal the metal.

The fight against McCarthy during the floor fight: a source familiar with the situation in the House of Representative Bacon and a friend of Scalise

The votes are needed to break the floor action into pieces on Tuesday because the House could go into recess. Or the House could continue to vote until someone gets to 218 – a scenario that hasn’t happened since 1923 when Frederick Gillet won the speakership on the ninth ballot. According to a source familiar with the matter, the chamber will keep voting until McCarthy gets 218 votes.

“Steve is trying to be very supportive,” said Rep. Don Bacon, a McCarthy supporter and Nebraska Republican. He has been speaking out about his support for McCarthy. Someday he wants to be a speaker. He has to be tactful.

In a private House GOP call on Sunday, Scalise embraced his role as the incoming majority leader by laying out the agenda and the bills that would come to the floor this week – and even referenced McCarthy as the future speaker, according to a source on the call.

But some of the hardliners are not satisfied, pushing to lower the threshold to just a single member who can call for such a vote – something that other House Republicans fear would be a recipe for chaos and have vowed they wouldn’t support.

If it becomes obvious that McCarthy won’t get the votes of the KMC, people will become more set against rule and operational changes.

Gaetz told CNN: “Of course.” He was asked if he would agree to the same concessions as McCarthy. The McCarthy concessions are a baseline for anyone.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/02/politics/mccarthy-floor-fight-steve-scalise/index.html

Rep. Tom Good and Rep. Dusty Johnson: What’s going on in the House of Representatives if Republicans don’t elect a Speaker

“We shouldn’t be in a hurry to make a bad decision,” Good said, promising a new candidate would emerge on Tuesday. He declined to specify the member and also declined to comment about Scalise.

Rep. Dusty Johnson, a South Dakota Republican, said that he found it “incredible” that the same members pushing for a more “open and transparent” GOP conference are getting behind a “shadow candidate” they plan to “ambush” Republicans with at the start of the new Congress.

Johnson told CNN that he thinks members are growing increasingly frustrated with the intransigence of some of the holdouts.

“Folks should not believe this is some noble cause,” said one GOP lawmaker. No one should think that this is anything other than self aggrandizement. They are trying to push procedures that no one cares about outside of Washington only to give themselves more power.”

Markwayne Mullin, who was an Oklahoma Republican and member of the House of Representatives, met with McCarthy. Mullin, who has been helping to lobby House members to back McCarthy, said he and others have been encouraging McCarthy with a simple message: “Stay put.”

No matter how they resolve Tuesday’s vote choosing the next speaker of the House, Republicans appear poised to double down on the hard-edged politics that most swing state voters rejected in last November’s midterm election.

Whoever Republicans ultimately select as speaker “will be subject to the whims and the never-ending leveraging of a small group of members who want to wield power,” said former GOP Rep. Charlie Dent, a CNN political commentator. “You’re going to have this group on the far right that is going to continue to push the leadership to go further right on issues.”

House precedent dictates that members continue to vote until someone secures the majority needed to prevail. But until Tuesday, the House had not failed to elect a speaker on the first roll-call vote since 1923, when the election stretched for nine ballots.

“I think he prevails because there is no other candidate with his experience and fundraising ability and at the end of the day the party base will close ranks because nothing happens until you have a Speaker: No investigations… nothing,” former GOP Rep. Tom Davis, who served as chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, wrote me in an email. “And the vast majority of the Conference is loyal to him.”

Whether McCarthy wins the speakership, or conservatives (in a less likely scenario) succeed in installing an alternative to his right, Democrats believe all these early markers guarantee that the House GOP’s most militant members will be front and center in defining the party over the next two years.

“In some ways, win or lose [for McCarthy] it doesn’t matter,” says Leslie Dach, a senior adviser to the Congressional Integrity Project, a Democratic-aligned group established to respond to the coming House investigations of the Biden administration. “I think the die on the next two years has been cast by giving these people the power and the podium.”

Dach and other Democrats believe that the majority in the House will reinforce the image of the GOP as a party of the right, by allowing hardline Trump allies to pursue conservative grievances like the FBI being weaponized against the right.

Dach says the show will be about the extreme type of people. “Every day that they are on a committee, every day they are on television, is a bad day for the entire Republican Party.”

The GOP has lost ground in several states since Trump became president, according to Michael Podhorzer.

When he made his inauguration speech, there was just one Democratic governor, four Democratic senators and no majority leader in the senate in the five states that he mentioned, says Podhorzer. In a month, four of the states will have Democratic governors, 9 of the 10 Senators are Democrats, and three of the state legislative chambers are led by Democrats. Since 2016, he adds, Democrats in those places “have done nothing but win because those states are not going to elect MAGA” Republicans.

It was two midterms at the same time if you were in a place where the new bubble of Democrats believed they had to come out and beat Trump again, said Podhorzer.

How Republicans have fought the war against the Taliban 20: The House Apportionment Committee voted unanimously to the Speaker of the House on Tuesday

That’s unlikely to create many problems for Republicans in the places where they are already strong. In the past couple of years, Republicans have consolidated their control over the country, holding governorships and state legislatures in many states that have become more conservative.

The new House Republican majority is locked in a once-in-a-century fight to elect the next speaker after GOP leader Kevin McCarthy failed to secure the support needed to win in three rounds of voting on Tuesday.

If anything, McCarthy got weaker with each roll call, even if one senior GOP source told CNN he would never back down and “we’re going to war.” Some GOP members are now referring to the rebels as “the chaos caucus” or “The Taliban 20,” CNN’s Manu Raju reported.

The House is set to convene at noon ET on Wednesday after holding three rounds of votes to elect a speaker on Tuesday. McCarthy failed to reach the majority threshold necessary to secure the speakership. The House adjourned in the early evening after the vote series stretched on for hours with no resolution in sight.

The tally for the second ballot was 203 votes for McCarthy with 19 votes for GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. McCarthy was nominated by Jordan to show that he was not in the running for the job. Critics of McCarthy went ahead and voted for Jordan despite the move.

A small band of conservatives were given free rein to make demands by the razor-thin majority that gave Republicans in the November elections.

What has unfolded over the last two months is an all-out scramble for the speakership, which has taken the form of strategy sessions with close allies on and off Capitol Hill, intense negotiations over rules changes and non-stop phone calls with members.

McCarthy had no strategy other than a beat the head against a brick wall approach, which ended the debacle with the House in a limbo. Smartly dressed family members who traveled to Washington to see their new lawmakers proudly sworn in were bored and disappointed. The House adjourned and will resume on Wednesday at noon, even though there’s little sign the deadlock will break.

“People are committed to this and they’re sick and tired of the tail trying to wag the dog, which is what these 19 think they’re going to do,” Rep. David Joyce of Ohio, who backs McCarthy, told CNN’s Jake Tapper after the second vote.

On Wednesday, Mr. McCarthy lost for the fourth time in a row, this time with 20 defectors throwing their votes behind RepresentativeDonalds of Florida, the first Black man to be nominated by Republicans for the job. Representative Victoria Spartz of Indiana, a supporter of Mr. McCarthy before she voted for another lawmaker, votedpresent, which deprived him of a badly needed vote, but hindered him less than she had voted for another lawmaker.

By backing Jordan, Donalds joined the original 19, including people like Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas and Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, who are equally committed.

That the original 19 – far more than the four colleagues McCarthy could afford to lose – have stayed strong against him has dragged out a process that is normally a formality into a series of plodding votes the likes of which has not been seen for 100 years.

The Role of Jim Jordan in the Bipartisanship Battle between the 1850s and the Future: Sen. McConnell to the House Speaker Post

“The irony of what we’re witnessing here today is the fact that Jim Jordan was always the ringleader of these types of rebellions and he’s trained these guys well,” said the CNN analyst, moderate Republican and former Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania.

“Now he ostensibly is trying to get these guys to back off and they won’t. The most weird thing I have witnessed on the House floor in all my years is the fact that he was a rebel and he couldn’t control them.

The House may face the same set of calculations today. A large majority of Republicans want McCarthy, who has been a staunch ally of former President Donald Trump, but if the prolonged battles of the 1850s are any guide, they would do better to select someone who is acceptable to the entirety of their caucus. Otherwise, they risk prolonging the balloting for days, weeks or even months.

Gaetz, in nominating Jordan before the second round of voting, stood right in front of McCarthy and accused him of having “sold himself” in the quest for the speaker post.

This drama is so sideshow that it presages a very difficult year for the ultimate speaker in that the debt ceiling must be raised to avert an economic crisis.

“The Republicans have to at some point figure out what are we going to do here,” said the CNN anchor John King. It’s not possible for the House of Representatives to come to a consensus on who should lead them. So never mind about immigration, what we’re going to do about inflation, what we’re going to do about the border, America’s place in the world.”

They are holding that on hold while they find a leader. There will be a highly scripted photo opportunity in Kentucky on Wednesday about bipartisanship, as House Republicans try to convince their members that they don’t want to work in the system.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who just became the longest-serving Senate party leader in history, will appear with his state’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, and the country’s Democratic president, Joe Biden, to announce new funding to upgrade the Brent Spence Bridge, which connects Kentucky to Ohio. Gov. Mike DeWine is an Ohio Republican and Sen. Brown is an Ohio Democrat.

On Tuesday Beshear spoke to Kate about how the bridge project would help the region’s economy as well as update a key piece of infrastructure as a result of the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

“I think it is also a great statement that there is nothing partisan about a bridge,” Beshear said. He later added the bipartisan quintet would “announce that we’ve done the right thing for our people. It is pretty refreshing.”

He will have to find a way to get along with whoever the Republicans pick as their speaker and also try to stop the government from grinding to a halt.

Two years after the master of political mayhem, ex-President Donald Trump, stormed out of Washington in disgrace, Republicans have finally won back some power.

On a surreal day, the 118th Congress opened with Republicans fighting Republicans, while Democrats – who should have been mourning their lost majority – were joyous at the GOP circus they beheld.

The Republicans and the Benghazi Special Committee: What are we supposed to do about it, or why should we let him go? A former president of the U.S. Embassy in Libya

McCarthy told reporters late Tuesday that he didn’t think they would get any more productive by continuing on. He insisted he wouldn’t be giving up the race.

He said that he thinks he can win with 11 more votes because he thinks he can get a number of members to vote present.

On the floor of the house, Gaetz jabbed at McCarthy by saying that he may not be the right person for the speaker of the house.

Beutler went on to lose the general election to a Democrat after losing a primary to an ex-president who supported him.

Two GOP sources familiar with the matter said McCarthy’s allies were panicking on Tuesday after the former president gave a tepid response to NBC News when asked about his support for McCarthy. The former president also declined to issue a statement Monday reiterating his endorsement of McCarthy despite a behind-the-scenes effort from several McCarthy allies to get Trump to do so, two sources said.

Democrats want political capital out of it because they claim Republicans should be kicked out of office at the first opportunity in the next election for not being fit for power. “I just watched House Republicans plunge into utter chaos on the House floor,” Jeffries told Democratic donors in a fundraising email. “This changes everything for Democrats. Now is the time to show what we can do.

The Utah Republican said on Tuesday that the conference could either be the one to implement the agenda or it could be a minority that kept it from happening.

None of it has been enough. The voting went beyond one round for the first time in a century after three ballots of voting, and Congress adjourned without McCarthy as speaker.

Republicans rode the Tea Party wave to win control of the House, but the cost was steep. Five years of an inability to get much done even with each other, and fights over raising the debt ceiling, were frustrating John Boehner as speaker.

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” McCarthy said on Fox News. “But we put together a Benghazi Special Committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”

The purpose of the investigation was to find out what happened in the attack on the American embassy in Libya which left four people dead, not to hurt Clinton. But Clinton, who was secretary of state in the Obama administration, was the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

Why didn’t McCarthy think he was going to play tough guy in the early House? An example of how Democratic leaders might not adjourn the House

That’s why McCarthy didn’t believe he could stick to his criticism of Trump after Jan. 6, heading down to Trump’s Florida home just weeks after the insurrection and posed for a photo with him.

Trump maintained his power with the base and endorsed scores of candidates in the 2022 midterms. They did well in the primaries, but not as well in swing districts.

At the 11th hour, he tried to play tough guy, threatening the defectors with stripping them of committee assignments. That appeared to have the reverse effect of what he and his allies were intending.

The question now is – not just for McCarthy but for anyone with ambition and has to make choices between what they believe and what they’re willing to compromise – was it worth it?

At the end of the day, the job of speaker isn’t supposed to be about one person’s ambition but what they can get done to fix problems in the country, and this is taking place at a time when people are already cynical about the intentions of politicians in Washington and what they are trying to accomplish.

This is yet another example of the chaos surrounding House Republicans despite all the talk in Washington. With just a four-seat majority, how can they govern if they’re going through all this just to pick a leader?

Multiple sources are saying that McCarthy and his allies might not be able to adjourn the House by Thursday because they wouldn’t have the votes.

The reason: Voting to adjourn would require 218 votes, and Democratic sources say they would actively whip against a motion to adjourn. Some Republicans would vote against it as well.

McCarthy and the Republicans: When Will Donald Trump Become a Speaker of the House Intelligence Committee in 2020? A Reply to Gaetz

The member said that the statement made by Donald Trump on Wednesday morning that he was in support of McCarthy and urged Republicans to back him was meaningless since he had blasted McCarthy in the past.

It was warned that it was not possible for McCarthy to turn the tide at this point because the opposition to McCarthy was personal.

Shortly after Trump defended McCarthy in a Truth Social post, Gaetz issued a statement saying that his view of McCarthy and his vote did not change.

Long a staunch Trump ally, Gaetz’s refusal to bow to Trump’s desire for a McCarthy speakership raises new questions about the former president’s dwindling influence over Republicans in the midst of his third presidential campaign.

Early on Wednesday, Trump delivered the kind of full-throated endorsement of McCarthy that the Californian must believe he was owed after his obsequious support of the ex-president following the January 6, 2021, insurrection.

A person briefed on the call said that a lawmaker who spoke with Trump suggested the former president run for speaker himself. Trump kept pushing this person to support McCarthy, because he claimed he would be a solid supporter of America First.

A Strange History of Speaker Elections: Nathaniel P. Banks, the First Republican Speaker of the House, 1855-1860

Thomas Balcerski is the Ray Allen Billington Visiting Professor of U.S. History at the college and a long-term Fellow at the Huntington Library. He is the author of “Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King” (Oxford University Press). He tweets about presidential history @tbalcerski. His own opinions are expressed in this commentary. View more opinion on CNN.

The history tells us that the battle to choose a speaker of the House in 2023 will be long and bitter. In today’s politics, Americans have sadly come to expect nothing less.

In either instance, a compromise of some sort – whether by choosing a new candidate for speaker or by placating the splinter faction in some significant way – has usually been the result. If history is any guide, we may once again be living a version of one of these two scenarios.

What does this long, strange history of contested speaker elections tell us about today’s divides? In the speaker contests of the 1850s, the extension of slavery in the territories was a main cause of division in the two major parties. While Republicans did not get their first choice for speaker, they nevertheless selected a member of their own party and lived to fight another day against the Slave Power.

In 1855, the race for speaker faced its most serious challenge yet. Without sufficient Democrats or former Whigs to reach a majority, the compromise candidate was found in Nathaniel P Banks, a nativist American Party member. Banks, who became speaker after 133 ballots held over two months, defeated Democratic challenger, William Aiken, Jr., of South Carolina, whose backers hoped that a plurality resolution would once again capture the votes of competing factions. Instead, Banks ultimately defeated Aiken on February 2, 1856.

The tolerance for the progressive Republicans was short-lived. Longworth stripped several progressive Republicans of their seniority after they refused to support Calvin Coolidge’s reelection bid. For all intents and purposes, the Republican Party had been purged of its liberal faction.

After deadlocking for eight ballots, an emergency meeting was held between the Republican majority leader Nicholas Longworth of Ohio, and the radical faction, represented by Rep. John M. Nelson of Wisconsin, Rep. Fiorello LaGuardia of New York and Rep. Roy O. Woodruff of Michigan. As a result, the House agreed to a number of procedural reforms and Gillett became speaker.

Although the politics have changed, similar dynamics are also at work in 2023 as they were in 1923. Today, a vocal conservative minority is trying to assert its power within the Republican majority and possibly emerge stronger for it. The fringe group may be unhappy with McCarthy but they need to consider whether they would prefer to achieve their goals under Republican leadership over being unwilling to participate in governing.

It’s a very small minority of a slim majority that’s kept the House from moving forward and is on the cusp of derailing Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become speaker.

The majority of Republicans don’t have anything to do with them. The 20 anti-McCarthy Republicans who so far derailed his bid to become House speaker represent less than 10% of the House GOP.

They’re sort of gaining support. Although she voted “present” rather than voting for anyone, Indiana’s Victoria Spartz was the 21st Republican member-elect that didn’t support McCarthy.

“I think you need to break the 20 down,” the conservative Republican Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado said on CNN on Wednesday. Buck was seen as a potential defector before this week, and he made clear that the patience with these votes is starting to wear off.

He suggested McCarthy’s deputy, Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, as a possible consensus speaker who could speak to three varieties of the 20 anti-McCarthy Republicans.

They want specific changes. “There are some of the others … who want changes in the rules and there are some others who care about policy,” Buck said. “So I think if Steve (Scalise) meets those three needs, he will be able to move forward and take the speakership.”

Do we really need a Republican president? Rep. Tim Bishop tells CNN: ‘We need to stop the train of the swamp’

Lawmakers want to make painful cuts to stop the deficit spending. Most economists think a US debt default would cause the economy to go into a tailspin. The government shutdown has been unpopular in recent years, but it would be less severe.

“We are showing the American people that this process works,” said the Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Scott Perry in rising to nominate Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida as an alternative to McCarthy. It was 100 years ago that there was a floor fight. We said we wouldn’t need any more of Washington being broken.

“I really think this is democracy in action,” North Carolina Republican Rep. Dan Bishop told CNN’s Jake Tapper. You can only be satisfied with the same thing if you aren’t happy with Washington.

“The fact is that you never see a specific agenda that you know Kevin McCarthy’s going to go to the mat for, as opposed to sort of pablum or poll-tested language, indicates the problem,” Bishop said. “And it’s been that way for all 14 years he’s been in leadership, with all due respect to him.”

Boebert said on the House floor on Wednesday that he did not think it was appropriate to use campaign tactics to get people to turn against them. “I think it actually needs to be reversed. Kevin McCarthy should be told by the president that it is time to withdraw.

If you watch enough Tucker Carlson on Fox or listen to Steve Bannon’s podcast, you’ll hear the argument that Republicans and Democrats aren’t that different. Carlson often uses the term “uni-party” to blast the funding bills that are signed into law. McCarthy has been part of the GOP leadership for years and there are some things in opposition to him.

I want to hold the line right now because I think this place needs to operate differently and that is not a partisan statement. In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday, Representative Chip Roy from Texas said it was just something he believed.

Roy claims to be one of the fiscal conservatives trying to stop the train of the swamp, which he says is made up of Republicans and Democrats. He believes that the special interests push for government funding bills to fund it for most of the next several years.

Roy and Donalds are both trying to get a single member to force a vote to remove a sitting speaker.

We can’t do anything about the overspending we have, as appropriations doesn’t allow for open amendments. She said that that needs to stop.

The Farcical First Day of the 2019 GOP-Leading Session: A Reply to Mr. McCarthy’s Call to the Speaker

McCarthy did offer numerous concessions to the hardliners like Roy, including a pledge – which seems impossible given the slapdash way legislation comes together – to give lawmakers 72 hours to read a bill before it goes to the floor for a vote.

He also agreed to allow just five Republicans to force a vote to remove the speaker instead of the current requirement that a majority of Republicans join the call.

One complication with finding a McCarthy replacement is that someone like Scalise might realize how much more difficult McCarthy’s concessions will make the job.

Donalds did not want the job after being asked by CNN if he wanted it.

There are often multiple funding bills on everything from farming to defense and transportation in massive end-of-year omnibus bills. Republican members made reasoned arguments about the need to mend a broken institution, to open the House’s business to the public, and to conduct a proper appropriations process through committees with time for full debates and amendments on CNN on Wednesday.

The fourth-ballot vote signaled the Republicans were not in a position to break the stalemate, even after a direct appeal from Donald J. Trump who had endorsed Mr. McCarthy.

The endorsement failed to move a single defector in Mr. McCarthy’s direction. With a fifth vote underway, the Republican leader and his allies still were working behind closed doors trying to secure the votes.

On Tuesday, right-wing Republicans coalesced behind Jim Jordan, a founding member of the ultra conservative House Freedom Caucus, as an alternative to Mr. McCarthy.

The California Republican unveiled major concessions on Wednesday evening after he was stung by right-wing radicals who blocked his bid for power in six humiliating votes – a farcical debut for the new GOP-led House.

The proposals emerged after the new House majority finally agreed to something Wednesday and voted to adjourn their futile search for a speaker until Thursday.

The cheers that came from Republican benches as the vote was done reflected the risible situation of the House’s new GOP management, which is unable to perform the only task that it currently has – choosing a leader.

The idea that a fresh new majority is riding into town to do the American peoples’ business is in tatters. On Tuesday and Wednesday, there were squabbles in the new House and it appeared that every tough vote in the new House could be in danger if small groups of members were allowed to shut the chamber down.

“The country or Kevin McCarthy. Adam Kinzinger, a retired GOP congressman, thinks that one should have more weight.

‘Groundsy Day in the House, and tomorrow will be different,’ says Chip Roy, a conservative left-right senator

Right-wingers hold the party, the House and the country hostage, with no clear objective other than to destroy governance itself. Chaos is where they like to see the point.

But as humiliation piled on humiliation for the California lawmaker, there was the merest hint of a lifeline as a divide inside the anti-McCarthy block began to open.

Lawmakers who want changes to the House’s way of working reported progress in talks with McCarthy. One of their number, Texas Rep. Chip Roy, predicted he could bring over 10 votes if the talks pan out.

The question is whether another day of pointless voting on Thursday will prompt members to begin to consider whether he should step aside for a more universally trusted colleague – perhaps Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, for instance. Many Republicans say that their hope of quickly wielding power and disrupting the Biden administration has been dashed.

While a new speaker wasn’t born on another ‘Groundsy Day in the House,’ it did offer hints about how the speaker’s came to be. It provided an overview of the balance of power in Washington and the ways Congress will work in the future.

“If it’s the latter, it’s not as constructive because it shouldn’t be about the personality, it should be about the process, but I don’t know. I have no sense of how many are in either camp,” he told CNN.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/05/politics/mccarthy-desperation-speaker-analysis/index.html

Jeremy McCarthy’s desperation speaker after the first two terms of office: Why the House is having a tough time, and why the majority of its constituents are unhappy with the government

In impassioned floor speeches and interviews, Roy has argued that the House is finally having consequential debates. Under recent Democratic and Republican speakers, normal order and the sequencing of new laws through the committee process and debates on the House floor have been curtailed as severe partisanship and gridlock causes leaders to enforce ruthless party-line discipline.

Some Republicans say that their colleagues use the spotlight to drum up appearances on conservative media, in order to raise campaign cash. It is the latest expression of an anti-Establishment wing of the GOP that wants to take away the government’s powers.

This politics of destruction was sent into overdrive by ex-President Donald Trump, with his vows to drain the Washington “swamp.” And it was expressed most eloquently by Steve Bannon at the start of the Trump administration as “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” The problem for McCarthy – who has cozied up to Trump and often appeased the zealots – is how to negotiate with someone whose main aspiration is chaos.

It was the kind of social media blast that once would have had Republican members leaping into line. But is no longer. It didn’t seem to change the vote at all.

She rebuked her colleague because she believed that Trump’s juice wasn’t what it was used to be among Republicans in the House. This kind of insubordination is not likely to have gone down well with the Republican base in Mar-a-Lago.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/05/politics/mccarthy-desperation-speaker-analysis/index.html

Equilibrium lawmakers in Kentucky are embarrassed by the events of Kentucky on Wednesday night: A case study of the Biden-McConell infrastructure package

The chaos and recrimination that occurs in parliaments in Europe and Israel, where it can take weeks or months for a leader or governing majority, is more similar to what happened in the House on Wednesday.

The chaos surrounding the events in Kentucky was embarrassing for the country, as Biden and McConnell highlighted bipartisan political leadership over his massive infrastructure package.