House GOP Fixin' To Screw Up Speaker Vote, Imperil Trump's Inauguration, Cause Us To Die Laughing

Keep your popcorn buckets handy.

Could the January 6 counting of the electoral votes get delayed because the Republicans will still be fighting over which one of them gets the “honor” of leading the House of Representatives for the next two years?

Honestly, it seems unlikely. But what the hell, convicted felon/bronzed baby shoe Donald Trump is going to be President of the United States in three weeks and we need something to replenish our depleted schadenfreude reserve. The GOP starting off the next Congress with a long, drawn-out, dramatic leadership battle just might do it.

First, let us set the scene a bit. The next Congress convenes on Friday, January 3. The first order of business on the House side is to elect a new speaker. No business can be transacted before then. Everyone (“everyone”) would like to have the new speaker in place on January 6, when the electoral votes are supposed to get counted.

In normal times, there would not be any drama here. The majority party would have agreed on a speaker beforehand, and the vote would be perfunctory. In our insane times, quite a few House Republicans are making loud mouth noises about not supporting Johnson again. Since the voting margin in the House is 219 Republicans to 215 Democrats, and we can assume no one from the opposition party will vote for Johnson, that gives him a very, very narrow margin. He loses two Republican votes, and it’s a deadlock.

We all remember what happens when a candidate cannot get a majority of the chamber’s votes, right? If you have forgotten, may we refresh your memory with some looks back at that grand 2023 opera that first brought Johnson to power, The Humiliation of Kevin McCarthy.

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Poor Mike Johnson. He just wanted to bring his Redeemer back to Earth and then get himself Raptured to Heaven to sit at God’s right hand, leaving all of us nonbelieving heathens behind to swim in a lake of fire for the next thousand years. Instead he has to hang out in the Capitol building and beg Thomas Massie and Andy Harris to give him another chance, he promises he’ll be faithful to the GOP this time, you can trust him, baby.

The most immediate cause of the angst towards Johnson is the passage of a continuing resolution a few days before Christmas that kept the government from shutting down. Johnson had spent months shepherding that CR through bipartisan negotiations. Then at the last minute, Trump and Elon Musk turned against it, forcing the House to come up with a new plan that spent less money.

Even then, over three dozen hard-right wingnut Republicans voted against the new spending bill. Luckily there were enough Democrats to sigh heavily, be adults, and vote for the bill so that people wouldn’t lose their paychecks and Social Security five days before Christmas.

This wasn’t the first time Johnson had needed Democratic votes to pull his butt out of the fire. By most accounts, he’s actually been not awful about working across the aisle for the last year, and not awful is much, much better than we would have expected.

Democrats will not be pulling Mike Johnson’s heinie from the flames this time, largely because they are mad he yanked the spending deal they had spent months negotiating with him. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries even said as much this week.

This all brings us to the current drama, in which multiple Republicans have said they will oppose Johnson, Steve Bannon used an episode of his podcast to slam him, and Donald Trump was noncommittal, which could be the death blow.

The problem is that the Republicans don’t have anyone to replace Johnson with. There are very few, if any, GOP members who can be acceptable enough to both the MAGA nuts and the more moderate flank to earn enough votes to become speaker, let alone spend the next two years leading them. And whatever Republicans might fit the bill aren’t dumb enough to want the job.

Now, the law only says that Congress has to be in session on January 6 to count the electoral votes. It does not say they have to finish the job that day. If no one can garner enough votes for the speaker job, the House can go right on holding votes until someone does. No matter how long it takes.

Recall that in 2023, it took three weeks for the GOP to settle on Mike Johnson. Remember how we sat through hours and hours of failed roll call votes on CSPAN laughing at the Republicans? Oh, we had fun.

In 2025, the Republicans do not have three weeks. They must have a new speaker in place in time to count the electoral votes prior to noon on January 20, when Trump is inaugurated. And the few of them with a sense of shame would like to not repeat the spectacle of Johnson’s election 14 months ago.

What happens if the electoral votes are not counted in time, since the Constitution requires the new president take the oath of office at noon on January 20? No idea! It can’t be the president-elect or vice president-elect. And it can’t be the next in the line of succession, because that’s the speaker of the House and there won’t be a speaker of the House.

Presumably the office would temporarily go to the figure in line after the speaker. That would be the President pro tempore of the Senate, though this also assumes the Senate will have picked one by then. Maybe Kamala Harris gets to be president. That would be our choice.

Granted this is all probably far-fetched. The likes of Andy Harris are almost certainly posturing. But it is serious enough that the guest hosts of “Fox & Friends” on Friday morning were directly telling the viewers — particularly the main viewer, the guy who just a few days ago was lukewarm on Mike Johnson — that this is no time to fuck around. As they said in the below clip, the GOP has probably at best two years to push through Trump’s legislative agenda, they don’t want to waste a minute of it:

Listen, if the likes of Katie Pavlich are giving you smart advice, you know you’re on a very, very dumb path.

Yr Wonkette is rooting for chaos, so our hope is that more people on the GOP side listened to Bannon’s podcast than watched Pavlich on “Fox & Friends.” That might be bad for America, but it would be great for comedy.

It’s wild to think that at some point down the road, the fate of the planet could really hinge on what decision these fuckwits make here.

[MaddowBlog]

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