Dem
51
GOP
49
Here's a sentence we never expected to write: Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) is the Speaker-Designate of the House. Following the withdrawal of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), after Scalise realized he couldn't get to 217 votes, the House Republican Conference met to pick a new nominee and gave Jordan their "support." We put "support" in quotation marks because, as Scalise just showed us, and as Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) demonstrated back in January, being the speaker nominee of the Republicans, even with them in the majority, does not mean a glide path to becoming speaker, the way it has on both sides of the aisle for more than a century.
Prior to Friday's voting, Rep. Austin Scott (R-GA) announced that he was throwing his hat into the ring for the speakership contest. You know who Scott is, of course. He is... well, he was... er, he is known for... wait. Actually, you probably don't know who he is. He's a backbencher who isn't even well known in his home state of Georgia, and who has no real claim on the speakership since he has no experience in any leadership positions. He's never even chaired a top-line committee (only the House Agriculture Committee's Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities, Risk Management, and Credit). However, he's a staunch conservative and an ally of McCarthy. Scott put his name into consideration primarily so there was an alternative to Jordan for the Conference to support. Presumably, the opportunity to get some national attention was a welcome bonus.
Up against Scalise, a legitimate candidate for speaker, Jordan lost the Conference vote 113-99. Up against Scott, a virtual unknown, the Ohioan won 124-81. That's not a big improvement. Well aware of the purpose behind Scott's "candidacy," Jordan then asked the Conference for a straight up and down vote as to whether they would support him on the floor of the House. He got 152 votes, which is 65 votes short of the promised land. Put another way, it looks like the House Republican Conference has about 100 members who prefer Jordan, 25 who like him well enough if there's not a better option, 25 who will support anyone in the name of unity, and 65 who are Never Jordan. The Speaker-Designate adjourned the House for the weekend, and said he will spend his time today and tomorrow whipping votes. For our part, we are extremely skeptical that he can win over 61 of those 65 (in other words, about 94%).
There are, just to lay it out again, two fundamental problems with Jordan's candidacy. The first is that a lot of his colleagues hate him, either because of all his "show horse" nonsense, or because he's a backstabbing louse who threw both McCarthy and Scalise under the bus. Those men did not become speaker/a viable speaker candidate without having a fairly broad base of support in their conference, and some of those allies are going to remain loyal.
The second problem is that Jordan as speaker is all-but-certain to do things that thrill the hardliners/Trumpers, but that just about everyone else finds appalling. It is entirely plausible, for example, that he will pull a Tuberville and say "Until I get a bill cutting funding by 8%, I won't bring any spending bills to the floor, and if the government shuts down for a year, then so be it." Liz Cheney, who may just know a thing or two about electoral politics, agrees with us that Jordan would be disastrous for the Party, tweeting: "If Rs nominate Jordan to be Speaker, they will be abandoning the Constitution. They'll lose the House majority and they'll deserve to." And note that she thinks the mere nomination of Jordan (which is now a done deal) is enough to cross the Rubicon. Imagine the harm done by his actual elevation to the speakership.
It is unclear whether there will be a vote on the floor of the House on Monday, or anytime this week. Obviously, if Jordan thinks he has the votes there will be, but he is not likely to have the votes. So, "show horse" that he is, will he insist on a vote nonetheless, in hopes of creating some momentum and/or some pressure on the holdouts? He could. On the other hand, while he probably doesn't care about embarrassing the Party on national TV, he probably doesn't want to embarrass himself by losing big. In short, we could see him playing it either way.
McCarthy, for his part, offered up a reminder on Friday of the kind of "leader" he is, launching into a rant about this is all the Democrats' fault. Perhaps he never heard about how the buck stops here. In any case, he's the one who got the speakership by giving away the rules change that ultimately cost him the speakership. And it's his conference who initiated the motion to vacate. Ironically, the Democrats actually did what a House caucus is supposed to do, which is make a collective decision on the leadership and then have all members vote accordingly. It is the Republicans' near-total lack of party discipline that got us here.
And indeed, it is the Democrats who appear to be doing the legwork needed to move the ship of state forward. Assuming that the Republicans cannot elect a speaker with Republican votes, then there are really only two ways forward. The first is to have Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry (R-NC) assume some/most/all of the duties of the speakership for some indeterminate amount of time. Yesterday, four moderate Democrats—Ed Case (HI), Jared Golden (ME), Josh Gottheimer (NJ) and Susie Lee (NV)—sent McHenry a letter committing their support to an arrangement of that sort, particular as regards funding for Ukraine/Israel and funding for, well, the federal government.
There are plenty of news items out there asserting that McHenry's only power, as Speaker Pro Tempore of the House, is to initiate and oversee elections for a new speaker. These news items are somewhere between "incomplete" and "flat-out wrong." To explain, we will point to something that is small, and yet very meaningful. Upon assuming his new, temporary job, McHenry's first order of business was... to kick Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) out of her Capitol office. Reassigning office space has nothing to do with speakership elections, and is the prerogative of the person serving as speaker.
In other words, McHenry has already presumed to exercise powers beyond holding speakership elections (there are a couple of other examples, but the Pelosi office is the clearest and simplest). And it could well be that he was acting out of turn, but that doesn't matter unless someone objects (and that objection is sustained by a majority). Members on both sides are leery of letting McHenry do too much right now, because they don't want to establish precedent for the office of pseudo-speaker, whose powers are ill-defined, and whose existence could be used to do a future end-run around normal order (think: acting cabinet secretary). That said, if push comes to shove, the members absolutely will amend the House rules to allow McHenry to do what needs to be done or, instead of changing the rules, they will just look the other way and not object when he presumes to, for example, bring a Ukraine funding bill to the floor.
The other way forward, of course, is to elect a unity speaker. This, as we have noted, is the option that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) prefers. Yesterday, Rep. Ro. Khanna (D-CA) gave an interview in which he hinted what that might look like:
I have said they should lock us in the Capitol until we can solve this issue and have a new speaker. What I would like to float is a suggestion to get someone who is a consensus person, someone like Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK). And many people on my side respect someone like him even though we have strong ideological disagreements. He doesn't have any ambition to have further political office and he could come as a consensus person, with two conditions:
One is that we honor the funding agreement with President Biden so that there's no government shutdown until the 2024 election season is over. And two is that he stops the impeachment inquiry.
Khanna is one of the leftier Democrats, so his views are not necessarily the views of his caucus. That said, he's pretty dialed in, and this is exactly the kind of deal we'd expect the Democrats to want in exchange for their support. Though we don't think Cole can or will be the guy, since he was among the members who voted against certifying the 2020 election results. Maybe Khanna forgot that, or maybe he doesn't think it's a big deal, but we think that would be a deal-breaker for many of Khanna's Democratic colleagues.
There's one other concession that would go a long way to getting the Democrats on board, and that would also make life easier for the would-be unity speaker. And that concession would be to lower the number of signatures needed for a discharge petition to, say, 200 (or 205 or 210). That way, if the Democrats really wanted a bill to come up for a vote, they could make that happen solely with Democratic signatures. This would make it much harder for a group of Freedom Caucusers to completely gum up the works.
Overall, because of the Republicans' shooting themselves in the collective foot over and over, the Democrats are currently in a position where anything that happens is a win for them. To wit:
Our guess, then, is that the House Democratic Caucus is going through a lot of popcorn at the moment. This whole drama is not only fascinating for them, they also know it has a happy ending. They just don't know which happy ending.
So, that is where it stands at the moment. Presumably the next big news will break Monday, and so will appear in Tuesday's posting. We should know, by then, if Jordan managed to whip the votes or if he's just another dead man walking. (Z)