Dem
51
GOP
49
Another day, another speaker. Late Thursday, after little more than a day as speaker-designate, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) concluded that he can't get the far-right supporters of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), which means the votes just weren't there for the Majority Leader to achieve the goal he's worked toward for at least 10 years. So, he withdrew from consideration as the replacement for deposed speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
Like McCarthy before him, Scalise fell on his sword for the Party, even if some members won't appreciate it. In the former case, the Californian sacrificed his speakership to keep the government open and to keep Republicans from getting the blame for a shutdown. In the latter case, the Louisianan did not insist upon a public vote on the floor of the House of Representatives before bowing out, since such a high-profile failure would be bad PR for the GOP.
That said, we're not so sure that holding votes or not holding votes makes all that much difference at this point. Either way, McCarthy was deposed 10 days ago, the House Republican Conference took a week to sort things out, and they don't appear to be close to actually seating a replacement. People will notice that, whether or not it's formally confirmed by a big song-and-dance broadcast on C-SPAN.
So, what is next? The only semi-concrete thing is that there is serious talk about giving Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry (R-NC) additional powers (or, alternately, him just asserting additional powers) so that the House can conduct some business while this whole drama plays out. As we have written from the beginning, when McHenry's special situation was first revealed, you shouldn't dismiss the possibility that the House limps forward with an "Acting Speaker" for weeks or months... or longer.
What about the possibility of Jordan as speaker? After all, he is the only current candidate still standing, which means the path could be clear for him, right? Wrong. Or, at least, we remain very, very skeptical. As we have written many times, he has enormous baggage between his overall extremism, his support for the 1/6 coup and for Donald Trump, his sham committee "investigations," and his pre-political-career scandal at Ohio State. We just don't see how he could get 217 votes.
And if Jordan did not have liabilities enough, there's also a new twist. Reportedly, the Ohioan thinks he's smarter than the average bear, and decided to try to play a little 3-D chess with Scalise. So, Jordan proposed that he would nominate and support Scalise in the first round of balloting for speaker, and if he was not elected, Scalise would drop out and nominate and support Jordan in the second round of balloting. Since there was no chance Scalise would be elected in the first round, it was a hollow and self-serving offer, and one that just served to antagonize Scalise loyalists. "He tried to extort Steve and Steve said 'no,'" said one Republican lawmaker, speaking off the record. "He's a fu**ing snake and disgraceful," said another. "There's zero chance Jim Jordan is speaker after the last 30 hours."
Ok, then what about the return of McCarthy? Throughout the week, it's been reported that he's acting very much like he never lost his job, and doing things that an actual speaker would do, like holding press conferences on the situation in Israel and remaining ensconced at his desk in the speaker's office. What he has not done during that time is lift a finger to help Scalise (or Jordan), or otherwise done anything to help the Republican Conference move forward. Certainly looks like someone who's hanging back, so that he can be called to ride to the rescue. That said, the folks who voted to remove him are still members of the House, and are not likely to have changed their minds about wanting to be rid of him. For McCarthy to be replaced by himself seems more likely to us than for him to be replaced by Jordan... but not much more likely.
The fundamental problem here is that the folks who are gumming up the works are not normal political actors. They see a non-functioning government as a good thing, and not a bad thing. Most of them would probably like to get some money for Israel and for the Department of Defense passed, but they may be able to do that without a speaker in place. And beyond those one or two things, the House can burn, for all they care. They don't care if the Republican Party suffers as a whole because they (other than Lauren Boebert, R-CO) represent safe, ruby-red districts.
There's also another, related dynamic. The foundational proposition of a democracy is that you put forward your best candidate, you take your best shot, and if you lose, you try again the next time. But thanks substantially to Donald Trump, the calculus has changed for many/most Republicans. They feel entitled to win EVERY TIME, and if they don't get the votes, they won't concede (graciously or otherwise) and they won't play nice. The reason that elections for speaker rarely go past the first ballot (as in, not once in a century prior to this year) is that the conference/caucus election is supposed to be THE election. Once a person has been nominated as speaker by their party, everyone in the party is supposed to fall in line, even if that person wasn't a member's preferred choice. But now, the House GOP sees the nomination as merely a suggestion, and the members feel they are free to continue acting as free agents. That attitude, plus the near-zero margin of error, makes it exceedingly difficult to elect a speaker. Fox's Bret Baier, who's pretty dialed in to Republican politics, reported yesterday that, according to what he's hearing, "Jesus of Nazareth could not get 217 votes right now." Probably right; Jesus was a Jew, so there go the votes of Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) right there.
It could be that a dark horse Republican (a dark elephant?) will emerge, and that candidate will be able to get 217 votes. But we struggle to think who that candidate might be, or even come up with a broad outline of their profile. How can you be far-right enough for the Freedom Caucusers but centrist enough to be acceptable to the rest of the Conference? How can you accommodate the needs and demands of 216 different free agents? And why would you even want to try? Any candidate who somehow lands the job will end up taking all kinds of abuse from both colleagues and the general public, will have to fly around the country raising money, and will have to do all of this knowing that they could be fired at any moment if they anger just a handful of their fellow Republican members.
There is one other option, of course, and that would be for the moderate elements of the Republican conference to join with the Democrats to resolve the situation. There are actually, broadly speaking, two ways this could go. The first is that the Democrats could work with the Republicans to change the rules, such that a speaker could be elected with a plurality rather than a majority. It's happened before; at the start of the 34th Congress, the members spent two fruitless months trying to pick a speaker before allowing Nathaniel P. Banks to be elected with a plurality on the 133rd ballot.
There are some problems with this scenario. The first is that the circumstances back then, in 1855-56, were different in terms of partisan politics. Because of the collapse of the Whig Party and the slow emergence of the Republicans, there were at least three distinct "parties" in the House, and maybe four or five. There was no majority. The (temporary) rules change was a response to that, effectively allowing the creation of a faux majority. Today, by contrast, there are just two distinct parties, and one of them is definitely a majority. The distinction between the Democrats (or, alternately, 217 Republicans) voting to change the rules so that, say, Kevin McCarthy can be reelected, as opposed to just voting directly to reelect McCarthy is a thin distinction, indeed.
This brings us to the second problem. Way back in 1855, the members who agreed that a plurality was enough knew that the two leading candidates were both close to the promised land. Banks ended up being elected with 103 votes, but right behind him was his main rival, William Aiken Jr., with 100. Put another way, there were at least 203 members (out of 214) who voted for the rule change knowing that it might just lead to their preferred candidate being elected. Right now, by contrast, the majority party would be playing with fire. If they agree that a plurality is enough, and then no Republican can get 210 votes, that would mean the election of Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) as speaker, since HIS caucus is actually unified in the way that a caucus is supposed to be.
To summarize, then, if a rule change will definitely allow a Republican to be elected speaker, we don't see why the Democrats would go for it. And if a rule change will not definitely allow a Republican to be elected speaker, we don't see why the Republicans could go for it.
That leads us to scenario two, which is that the Democrats and the more moderate Republicans work together to elect a unity candidate. This is what Jeffries pushed for in an op-ed he published the day after McCarthy's ouster, and it's what he was pushing for yesterday after Scalise threw in the towel.
What would a unity candidate look like? Who knows? It would probably depend on how many Democrats were part of the unity coalition and how many Republicans. We've toyed with various concepts in the last week, but let's do a rundown of some possibilities:
These really aren't meant to be predictions, per se. The purpose of the exercise is to illustrate that even if some/most Republicans and some/most Democrats decide to work together to try to get a unity speaker in place, it's going to require some creativity to make the deal acceptable to both sides. (Z)