[UPDATE: Jordan has said that he is ‘suspending’ his bid for the speakership (not withdrawing) and supports giving the interim speaker more powers until January 15 so that the house can conduct some business, not the least of which is the budget that is due on November 17. This means that he has figured out that he does not have the votes right now but is clearly hoping that by January, the anti-Jordan sentiment may have diminished enough for him to be elected.]

The second round of voting for the speaker of the House of Representatives that was called for by Jim Jordan saw him actually getting fewer votes than in the first round. The final tally was 212 for Democrat Hakeem Jeffries and 199 for Jordan with 22 Republicans voting for various people. Two people who voted against Jordan in the first round voted in favor of him this time but four switched the other way so that he lost ground.

I was actually surprised by this. The GOP is now a party whose dynamics are like those of a children’s playground, where one has the bullies and their allies and the bullied. In those situations, the bullied almost always cave to the pressure because they have nowhere to turn. Jordan clearly thought that having the support of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) would enable him to bully enough members to put him over the top. I too thought that these holdouts would fold but was wrong.

The Republican party has abandoned all semblance of having any principles and in discussing what is going on, we should ignore any talk of ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’.

You’ve likely seen a lot of the holdouts described as “moderates.” An overwhelming majority of them are nothing of the sort and their ideological views are almost identical. Where they differ is their temperament and tactics. The old way of business – which is still very much alive in the Democratic Caucus and across the Capitol in the Senate – is that you move up the ranks by making allies and getting stuff done. Consistency is key and it pays off through promotions, plum committee assignments, and hopefully, at the ballot box.

In his warparth to the speakership, Jordan has been destroying the traditional system (a common theme in today’s Republican party). Jordan has been in Congress since 2007. Not once during the past 16 years has any of the legislation he’s sponsored become law. Just three of his bills have passed the full House: this year’s establishment of a subcommittee on the “weaponization” of the federal government, a call for the attorney general to appoint a special counsel nine years ago during the Obama administration, and in his first term, an resolution expressing sympathy for Ohio flood victims (the resolution did not authorize any additional funds for the flood victims—it just expressed sympathy).

[Read more…]

[UPDATE: The first vote has just been completed on the house floor and Jim Jordan failed to get 217 of the 432 members present and so has not become speaker and there will have to be another vote. The final results were Democrat Hakeem Jeffries 212, Jordan 200, and others 20. All 212 Democrats voted for Jeffries while the ‘other’ votes were Republicans who voted for people other that Jordan and thus have been able so far to resist the thuggery of Jordan and his allies. Nancy Pelosi and Mary Peltola of Alaska were present this time and got big applause from Democrats when they voted for Jeffries. Pelosi was absent for the McCarthy vote because she was attending Diane Feinstein’s funeral while Peltola was absent because of the death of her husband. When the final results were announced with Jeffries the top vote-getter, Democrats broke out in loud applause, no doubt to rub it in to the Republicans, who looked glum and were silent.

Lauren Boebert was seated between serial liar George Santos and Matt Gaetz who initiated the McCarthy removal but she seemed to have refrained from any hanky-panky, unlike when she was attending Beetlejuice.]

I have written many times before about how the Republican party has given up on pretty much all of the norms of democratic governing. They have abandoned the idea of winning people over to their point of view and instead gone full tilt into political thuggery as a means of achieving power. This is best exemplified by their whole-hearted adoption of serial sex abuser Donald Trump’s (SSAT) Big Lie that he actually won the 2020 election, a denying of reality that is so outrageous that it boggles the mind that any sane person could believe it. Indeed, one has to assume that many of the advocates of the Big Lie among the party’s representatives in Congress and its supporters in the media don’t actually believe it but have decided that it is the only way to gain he support of MAGA fanatics and the political costs of opposing it in terms of retribution are too high to pay.

In short, we have reached the point where political thuggery is the main tactic being used.
[Read more…]

After majority leader Steve Scalise withdrew from the race of House speaker late Thursday evening following his failure to get enough support from his party members to ensure that he would get the necessary majority on the House floor, it seemed like Jim Jordan, the person whom he had defeated just a little earlier, had a clear shot at getting the nomination and the required House vote.

The rules require a speaker to get a majority of people present in the chamber and voting, which means that anyone who is present but just votes ‘present’ does not count towards any of the totals. That opens up various mathematical possibilities. One is that if the party persuades enough extremists to vote ‘present’ to enable a Republican to get 213 votes (out of their 221), that will be just enough to defeat the 212 Democratic votes that will go to their leader Hakeem Jeffries. In January, McCarthy became speaker on the 15th ballot, after six Republican holdouts finally agreed to vote ‘present’, leaving him needing just 216 to win which he was finally able to get.

But on Friday, things went awry again. Just minutes before the vote behind closed doors, Austin Scott, a congressperson from Georgia threw his hat into the ring and while Jordan got 124 votes, Scott got a surprising 81, even though he is hardly a household name. Then they took a second vote on the crucial question of whether the members would vote for Jordan on the floor of the House and he got only 155 votes in favor, with 55 against. This 155 is less than the 188 that McCarthy got in his first round of voting in January, which means that Jordan has to work even harder to get people to switch their minds.
[Read more…]

It appears that winning the majority of votes for speaker within the Republican conference by a margin of 113-99 and then being endorsed by his rival Jim Jordan was not enough for Steve Scalise to get 217 votes (from the total of 221 Republicans) to enable him to become speaker. There were enough hard ‘no’s to force him to withdraw his name from further consideration. The House adjourned last evening and it is not clear when it will meet again to try and get this essential piece of business done.

Here are some of the people who are opposed to Scalise.

CLINE is for JORDAN pic.twitter.com/mVW4dEDRYO

— Haley Talbot (@haleytalbotcnn) October 12, 2023

[Read more…]

Incredibly, there are reports that Kevin McCarthy may be interested in becoming speaker again. While he has not explicitly said so, some of his supporters are planning to nominate him at the closed door party meetings and he has not asked them to refrain.

A bloc of Kevin McCarthy’s most vocal GOP supporters, many of them centrists, are vowing to nominate the former speaker to return to the job and support him for as long as they can.

Three House Republicans involved in the effort to return the gavel to McCarthy — which is flaring up just a week after his historic ejection — say they expect dozens of colleagues to initially vote for the Californian during this week’s internal conference debate over speaker candidates.

Their plans depend on whether McCarthy is nominated, as expected, and may prevent either of the declared candidates to replace him — Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio — from garnering a majority on the first ballot.

After POLITICO’s initial report published, McCarthy publicly asked supporters not to nominate him. Several GOP members involved in the effort, however, have said they received no direction to stand down.

[Read more…]

Like pretty much everyone else, I was taken by surprise at the sudden assault launched from Gaza by Hamas forces into Israel. The sheer scale of the attacks, coming from land, sea, and air, was shocking given that Gaza has been described as ‘the world’s largest open-air prison’, with Israel controlling pretty much every aspect of life there, including entrance and exit from the territory. And yet, there it was, and Hamas even managed to capture Israeli soldiers and tanks and civilians to hold as hostages.

While before Hamas was able to periodically launch small-scale attacks, the idea that they could do this on such a large scale and take Israel completely by surprise has caused consternation within Israeli political and military circles as to how there could have been such a failure of intelligence, given that it was believed that the highly-thought-of Israeli intelligence services had deeply infiltrated Hamas and Gaza society and thus should have had at least some inkling of these plans, since there were thousands of Hamas fighters involved.
[Read more…]