Dem
51
GOP
49
Just a few hours after this post goes live, the 118th Congress will commence. There will be many notable milestones; Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) will overtake Mike Mansfield as the longest-serving party leader in Senate history, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) is going to be elected the Senate's first female president pro tempore, and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) will be the first Black party leader in either chamber of Congress.
Of course, none of these is the main storyline today. No, all the attention is being directed at House Republicans. They've been doing previews of their parade of dysfunction for years, and now they're ready to open on Broadway. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has been bending over backwards to try to get the MAGA Maniacs on board and, by all indications, he has not succeeded. At the close of business on Monday, the far-right holdouts continued to insist that McCarthy would not get their votes.
That means that, barring a last-minute breakthrough of some sort, nobody will be elected speaker in the first round of voting for the first time since 1923. Still, that vote will be fairly consequential, as it will reveal how large the anti-McCarthy vote actually is. If only five Republicans vote against him, then McCarthy will be right on the precipice of the promised land, and he'll probably stay the course for a while as he tries to pry loose that last, crucial vote. On the other hand, if a dozen Republicans vote against him, McCarthy will be in serious trouble. That's particularly true if the opposition holds firm on the (hypothetical) second vote. A member might vote against him once to send a message, and then fall in line. But if they vote against him twice, they mean it. Note, incidentally, that until a Speaker has been seated, it's the clerk of the House who runs the show. So, McCarthy cannot postpone the vote to avoid the embarrassment of not winning.
In a development that should not come as a surprise to any reader of this site, Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), who just so happens to represent one of those crossover districts (NE-02) that went for Joe Biden in 2020, has started making noise about reaching across the aisle. He hinted at that possibility over the weekend, and yesterday he wrote an op-ed for The Daily Caller in which he says:
Much has been made of me saying I would work with moderate Democrats to elect a more moderate speaker. But my actual words were that if the five [MAGA holdouts] refused to coalesce around what the vast majority of the conference wants, I'm willing to work across the aisle to find an agreeable Republican.
We have read this at least a dozen times, and we're still not clear exactly what this clarifies. Unless you believe the Democrats are looking for someone ever further right than McCarthy that they can support, then "a more moderate speaker" and "an agreeable Republican" are the exact same thing. In any event, Bacon has not yet made the "modest" suggestion that he just might be the agreeable Republican that can get the necessary number of votes. But that could be next if a stalemate situation develops.
Even if McCarthy does pull it off, it's going to be a Pyrrhic victory. First of all, because everyone will know that even if he has the fancy office and the ceremonial gavel, it's the MAGA Militia that is really calling the shots. Second, because if McCarthy gets the job, it will require him to accept a rules package that will make governance all-but-impossible. Beyond the fact that the MAGA folks want to be able to fire him at any time, they want other rules changes, like reinstatement of the Holman rule. It's a little abstruse, but the Holman rule would basically allow any member of the House to submit an amendment to budget bills reducing federal workers' salaries, or eliminating federal workers' jobs, or eliminating entire departments. Under current procedure, such things have to be submitted to, and approved, by the Appropriations Committee. If the Holman rule is reinstated then, ipso facto, a small cadre of Republicans could, for example, hold the budget hostage unless 213 of their colleagues agreed to cut the number of FBI officers in half, or to roll back the stronger IRS enforcement adopted in 2022. The Democrats in the Senate won't go for such changes, even if House Republicans are browbeaten into voting for them. Hence, all-but-impossible governance.
In short, even if McCarthy wins, he loses. And you know who else is losing right now? Bigly? That's right, it's Donald Trump. He has already commanded his minions to support McCarthy's bid for the speakership. And his minions are, apparently, ignoring him. If the former president can't move the needle here, even a bit, it is just another reminder that his "power" is largely illusory.
Maybe, by the time we put Wednesday's posting up, this will all be resolved and McCarthy will be picking out fabric for the curtains in his new office. But, based on the scuttlebutt, we really don't think that will be the case. (Z)