You gotta have the votes.
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Here in cartoon and lyrical form (the embed wouldn’t work) is the bottom line about how Congress works. It is perhaps the most real lesson from the musical Hamilton. (And it keeps running through my mind as I watch this).
The bottom line is that passage of legislation (or, in this case, electing a leader) requires building a coalition of votes. And it is requisite to being able to run a chamber of a legislature.
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For all the hate and venom that populists on the Right have directed at Nancy Pelosi, what we are seeing here is again a demonstration of her abilities as a leader and politician. It’s also a demonstration that those same skills are desperately lacking on their side of the aisle.
McCarthy spent the last decade questing for the Speakership and was woefully unprepared when the time came.
Hell, Murphy even makes John Boehner and Paul Rubin seem competent.
Rs in the House are closer to alignment on programs and policy than Dems, but Dems at least have an outcome they hope to achieve and that fosters compromise. For R’s it’s all personal aggrandizement.
It’s recent common practice never to call a vote you don’t know the outcome of. If elections could be settled in advance, they would be. Exceptions are made almost solely to expose the votes of one or more parties. Schummer did this a time or two in the last Congress.
Now, there has to be a vote for Speaker, but Kevin should have sewn it up between the election and the new year, or stepped aside for a compromise candidate.
Juries are the other common exception. That is, it’s common not to know how a jury will vote.
Rs in the House are closer to alignment on programs and policy than Dems
Except that Republicans don’t have any programs or policy. Mindlessly repeating “inflation and crime” is not a program. Hunter Biden’s Laptop + own the libs + a noun, a verb, and woke is not a policy.
In fact the only thing Republicans have to offer is conspiracy theories, blind opposition to whatever Democrats promote, book banning, sore loser election lies, fear, racism, smearing drag queens, tax cuts for billionaires, smearing gays as groomers while they protect the many pedophiles on their own side, climate change denial, and forced birth. That’s why they can’t unite. There’s no there there to unite behind. They haven’t had an official party platform for half a decade. Modern “conservatives” (pfft) are a bunch of childish, empty suits with no interest in solving programs or governing that’s why they can’t govern.
The question is why do a majority of white Americans keep voting this pathetic, incompetent, sorry-ass party of chaos agents into power? Educated whites finally woke up and smelled the coffee, what the hell is going on with the rest? Andrew Sullivan said IQ tests show white people are the most intelligent race. The demographic breakdown of election results in this country proves that IQ tests are garbage in / garbage out as far as Americans are concerned.
It’s also a demonstration that those same skills (Pelosi’s as Speaker) are desperately lacking on their side of the aisle.
Also a demonstration that the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party is nothing like a mirror image of the MAGA wing of the GOPs.
I’m starting to think we should be yanking the right to vote from people like Kari Lake. Or at least the right to stand for office.
There are too many people who seem to have mental illnesses out there. If you’re too narcissistic to admit that you lost the election fair and square, why should you be allowed to run for office?
@Kathy:
stepped aside for a compromise candidate.
I suspect that as DK noted, in much the same way as there are no policies and programs, there’s also no compromise candidate. One thing I learned growing up with the fundies is that if you’re not going to compromise on anything, you have no need to imagine what compromises you’d be willing to make. I find the concept passable for a religious belief (but probably not optimal because none of us are perfect enough in loving our neighbors as we love us to not need to compromise). I don’t think it works anywhere else.
@grumpy realist: If you eliminate narcissistic people, who’s going to run for office? You? Me? (I had to disqualify myself as I’m as narcissistic as I can imagine anyone to be.) Luddite? MR? Gustopher?
@DK: The question is why do a majority of white Americans keep voting this pathetic, incompetent, sorry-ass party of chaos agents into power?
Because white people are stupid? Oh… wait a minute, you already said that.
If Republicans can’t form a coalition within their own party, the Democrats are right there. This is basically a minority government coalition game that we see in various Parliaments which is generally hidden in the US by party labels.
The Problem-Solvers “Centrist Schmuck” Caucus has about 30 Republicans and 30 Democrats. This is a problem they could try to solve — the head Republican Schmuck (or head Democratic Schmuck) could put their name in the ballot and see what happens.
Or the hard-right establishment Republicans can give into the Q caucus.
But it doesn’t look like most of the Qs want to compromise.
@OzarkHillbilly: Well, the list isn’t exhaustive at all. You can be on it, too. I know this is late and doesn’t mean as much, but since I’m narcissistic, I don’t really care, I’m only pretending to.
ETA: Also, you really strike me as more the “I wouldn’t want to join a club that has the likes of me as members” type anyway. 😉
@Gustopher: I think the odds of the Centrist Schmuck Caucus doing something like this is low, but… if ever they were going to have their moment, this is what there moment would look like.
And they are presumably running already as an “independent Republican/Democrat that can cross the aisle where needed”, so they are likely in districts that favor that type of stuff so primary risks are less.
@Gustopher: You can only get minority government if a party can get the votes to elect leadership (it happened when an otherwise minority party can still get majority support to form the government, just in the absence of a formal coalition). It can’t happen otherwise.
There are no partners in the US with whom the Dems can work to form a minority leadership situation.
We have the worse of both worlds at the moment: enough fragmentation to make electing leadership very difficult, but locked into a rigid two-party situation.
The Problem-Solvers “Centrist Schmuck” Caucus has about 30 Republicans and 30 Democrats. This is a problem they could try to solve — the head Republican Schmuck (or head Democratic Schmuck) could put their name in the ballot and see what happens.
1. I am not sure that there are 30 such members of both parties.
2. 60 votes is not enough to do anything by themselves.
3. What would be needed would be for a bloc of one party or the other to break off and join the other. This won’t happen. For one thing, the primary voters and the general election voters voted R or D on the main assumption that the member elected would caucus with the party by their candidate’s name. It is no small thing to switch in this case and runs a huge re-nomination/re-election list.
The only kind of deal I can see, and it seems really unlikely, is that if the Dems en masse save McCarthy’s bacon so as to forestall a worse option and in exchange for a deal on the debt ceiling. But I would note that such a deal would totally damage McCarthy because the Ds would have given him what the Rs wouldn’t.
I can’t stress enough that in many ways one of the main reasons to be a D or an R is to caucus with others with the same letter by their name and therefore to be a vote for leadership. Breaking away and siding with the other party is tantamount to quitting your own party, so break-aways are really, really unlikely.
There are really 4 endpoints here:
1. The Qs quit – not bloody likely, since this would make their already-small caucus look that much smaller and weaker.
2. McCarthy quits – there is no current replacement. Remember when the Republicans had to beg Paul Ryan into this position last time, which is when they found out he was not fit for the job and all his “policy wonk” talk was just bullshit and their Congress failed to do anything and his political career immediately tanked? Yeah, nobody is volunteering for this but McCarthy, and maybe a very junior Q person (*cough cough* Donalds) who will find out very quickly why nobody wanted it in the first place.
3. McCarthy caves to the right – they want the speakership to be extremely weak, so caving to them would be ceding any authority he has.
4. McCarthy caves to the left – he would have to give them a lot, and publicly, which would make his speakership extremely weak, so caving to them would be ceding any authority he has.
So either McCarthy The Weak takes the gavel, or somebody incompetent or in way over their head takes it and flames their political career.
