Will McCarthy Get Enough Votes To Be House Speaker? Let's See!
Has he pandered enough?
Kevin McCarthy is trying to get the 218 votes he needs to become speaker of the House, but there's just one little problem: His party kind of hates him. Or at least not enough Republicans want him to actually lead them in the House, because REPUBLICANS IN DISARRAY. They'll vote at noon Eastern today, but even though McCarthy has traded all sorts of promises in an attempt to win votes — like promising Mad Duchess Marjorie Taylor Greene that she can have her committee assignments back — there's not a lot of confidence he'll get to 218 votes on the first ballot.
As Yr Wonkette noted yesterday, the five "Never Kevin" Republicans are just enough to keep him from getting there, and none of them have yet announced any willingness to budge, and all told there could be as many as a dozen Republicans who vote for someone else on the first ballot. The last time an election for Speaker went beyond a first ballot was 1923, with nine ballots. You'd have to go back to 1855-56 for the previous example. It only took 133 rounds of voting over two months that time. The winner, Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts, was a member of the antislavery* Free Soil and anti-immigrant Know-Nothing parties. He served a single term as speaker before pro-slavery Democrats won the majority in 1856 and then it was just about time to have a Civil War.
Politico reports today that McCarthy's supporters, of which he does have some, just not enough to win on a first ballot,
expect him to keep Republicans on the House floor, instead of trying to adjourn for off-the-floor strategy sessions between ballots, as he hopes to grind down his opponents. [...] Republicans are mentally preparing not just for multiple ballots, but also multiple days of voting.
Watch here! Should be wild.
*OK, the Free Soil Party was focused on preventing the expansion of slavery into western US territories, not officially committed to ending slavery altogether; it later merged into the Republican Party.
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without a speaker they can't start passing their fucked up version of policy etc, so let em fight.gif
Did you get your move completed? How did it go? I was hoping to go to Germany for vacation, but planes from Dover either took no pax, only a few, or were broken. I might try again in May.