No one that the nutbag caucus puts up with get votes from other Republicans. No one that other Republicans put up with get nutbag votes.

If the moderate Republicans don't offer up someone that can draw at least a couple of Dem votes, this will never end.

Might be a good time to bump the predictions thread. They'll get a Speaker without any Democratic votes. As McP already pointed out, any Republican who only became Speaker due to Democratic votes would be DOA.

But, they are gambling that the country wont end up with a MEGArepublican (Biden's word, not mine) as speaker.


Edit: I think you could make the case there are in reality four parties (red-MAGA, red-Cuck, blue-Shit4brains, blue-Geriatric).

It's not that I disagree with that, but I don't know how this ends.

Spoiler: show

What's the next phase in my disillusionment? Feel like maybe Burt should write a pamphlet.

Lol. Yes, I am conditioned to think that the onus is the majority to select their own party leadership without votes from the other party.

This really gets at the heart of everything wrong with the House. Repeal the Sunshine Act!

You’ve got in McCarthy a politician who came into the national scene just as Tea Party conservatism was codifying in the capital. He’s spent the last 15 years walking a line between the far-right and mod right, certainly engaging in red meat rhetoric when it worked to his advantage, but also publicly blaming Trump for January 6. He demonstrated last week that he’s willing to trade horses across the party lines, to the chagrin of his far-right comrades, if he believes it’s for the good of the country. And the first thing the Dems want to do is vote him out? Fucking redacted.

Trag, I’d be curious to hear your “and then.”

“Democrats should have voted to keep McCarthy as Speaker, because then…”…what?

What happens after that?

As far as I can tell, you would have a Speaker of the House who cannot corral votes, full stop. Someone who cannot negotiate on behalf of his party, who would be mockingly called “the Democrat Speaker,” and who would be powerless to make promises or bargain as the shutdown approaches.

McCarthy could have bypassed the MAGA group at any time. He only ever needed to fashion a budget that could get seven Democrat votes. He was more amenable to negotiating unattainable budget cuts with his right flank than he was to attempting a compromise that could draw just 7 votes, because he knew that any bill that compromised with Democrats would be dead in the water on his side of the aisle.

Genuinely curious why you think these two go together.

Well he got 126 Republicans to support the stop gap, didn't he? It passed the 2/3 threshold, so I'm not sure I agree with your assessment there.

I also think that MAGA and Tea Party Republicans are often unfairly lumped in together. The former seems most interested in owning the libs, while the others are more interested in some narrow reading of the constitution that prohibits virtually any government spending on anything.

In any event, you very well may be right on the short-term calculus of it all; obviously House votes are incredibly sensitive to district constituents' given feelings on a matter, and those seem to shift in index to the media vacuums in which these districts tend to operate.

I'm more pissed about the spirit of it all than I am any sort of near-field vote roll calculus. Dems potentially had an opportunity to shift the atmosphere of the House towards something marginally more collaborative, and opted not to. Tit-for-tat wins again.

I can't think of any clearer proof that demonic possession is real than rando commoners having an opinion on the internal politics of who should be speaker of the house.

Maybe we’ve judged Gaetz to harshly in this specific situation

I want my MTV

Kurt Loder for Speaker of the House

Maybe it does it but party identity-centered voters incentivize them against it.

Is that fucker even still alive?

lol Scalise stepping aside. What a shitshow

Elise Stefanik ftw

Tabitha Sore-End