Don’t Republicans know how negotiations work?

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.
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Steve, we hardly knew ye

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.


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George Santos gets even more indictments

The Republican serial liar and fabulist congressperson has been hit with even more indictments that greatly expands the range of his alleged crimes to a total of 23. It seems like there was no crime too petty for him if the proceeds could be siphoned to his own bank accounts. His former campaign treasurer Nancy Marks has already pleaded guilty to fraud and is willing to testify agains Santos, which cannot be good news for him.
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McCarthy as speaker again?

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.

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How do you fix a broken political party?

There is widespread acceptance outside the MAGA cult that the Republican party has ceased to be a political party in any accepted sense. Even within the MAGA movement, there are those who have contempt for the Republican party, seeing it as part of the establishment that is not fully accepting of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT). The rot did not begin with SSAT’s takeover of the party, though. The rot started earlier, and John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin has his running mate in 2008, and the way she was embraced by so many, was the first serious sign that it had ceased to be a serious party. But the surest indication that a political party has gone seriously off the rails is when a demagogue with no serious policy agenda but instead spouts a series of grievances is seen as a savior and becomes its unquestioned leader, leaving it as just a hollow shell. The brutal ouster on Kevin McCarthy as speaker, someone who tried to have it both ways as a establishment figure as well as a MAGA cult member, was seen as the stripping away of final veneer of any political credibility.

Politico had an interesting roundup of opinions from academics and journalists about how it went so horribly wrong for the Republican party and what needs to be done to make it into a party again. I picked out just a few of the many contributions and the gist of the things they said.
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What next in Israel and Gaza?

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.
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Cartoons that explain McCarthy’s downfall

Choices have consequences.

Incidentally, it appears that it was McCarthy who ordered the immediate eviction of Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer from their courtesy offices on the very day of his ouster. This kind of pettiness is not going to help the GOP when the time comes from them to seek help from Democrats to get them out of messes of their own making, as McCarthy found out, when after repeatedly going along with the Trumpian demonization of Democrats, he expected them to throw him a life-preserver when his own job was on the line.

Did Trump want a jury or not?

This last week saw serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) spend three days in a Manhattan courthouse for the fraud trial brought against him by New York attorney general Letitia James. Since this is a civil case, his presence is not required so I was not sure why he attended instead of playing golf. It may be that since this case deals with his money and properties and where he risks losing much or all of it, the very things that are so dear to is heart, he felt obliged to pay close attention to what was said, though since he has the attention span of a goldfish, it is not clear how much of the proceedings he absorbed.

During the breaks in the court hearings, he would come out and rant to the media about the usual things, that he is being treated so unfairly. But he also complained that he would rather have been in Iowa campaigning and implied that he could not because he had to be in court. This is obviously not true and his lawyers must have told him that so he was clearly lying, though as with so many of his lies, it is hard to see what purpose the lies serve other than give him one more thing to complain about.
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The GOP internal fight is going to be nasty

We have seen how the GOP has taken revenge on Democrats by various petty acts because of their preposterous belief that the Democrats should have bailed McCarthy out as ‘gratitude’ for bringing the debt ceiling and continuing resolution (CR) to the floor for a vote, even though Kevin McCarthy bad-mouthed the Democrats even after they voted for the CR, and had refused to acknowledge their major role in passing it.

But the minority party in the House is already powerless and there is little other than petty things that can be done to them. But the more significant acts of revenge can be done on the eight Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy, such as congresswoman Nancy Mace.

Elsewhere in the GOP, revenge is on the menu. House Republicans are now weighing whether to expel Mace from at least two centrist-leaning groups she belonged to, as POLITICO first reported. Her staff was quickly removed from several internal GOP communications channels shortly after her vote Tuesday.
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After whipsawing between distance from and embrace of former President Donald Trump, for example, she recently opened the door to backing his primary campaign. Within the Capitol, she’s known as an outspoken critic of party leadership and a frequent guest on cable news shows.

“I’m not sure what the fallout will be. She has no coalition of support,” said one House GOP lawmaker, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal party dynamics.

“I can’t stop her from going on the Sunday shows,” this lawmaker added. “But inside the conference, she is a running joke.”

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McCarthy has only himself to blame for his woes

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Kevin McCarthy loyalists are seething with anger over his ouster from the position of speaker. It would be understandable that they would be angry with Matt Gaetz and the seven other Republican congresspeople who voted for him to go. But they seem to be even more angry with Democrats for not voting to keep him in his position, acting as if it were an unprecedented betrayal, even though it has always been the case that it was up to the majority party to vote in and keep the speaker and that the minority party always voted against.

At his press conference, McCarthy blamed the Democrats for what happened but Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was having none of it.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) railed against former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calf.) for blaming Democrats for being ousted from his leadership role in a historic vote. 

“Does anyone believe for one minute that McCarthy would help elect a Dem speaker ‘for the institution’?” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “McCarthy’s hubris is a theme. He loudly stated he wouldn’t negotiate [with] Dems, called virtually none, trashed those who helped w/ [a continuing resolution], and then expected Dem votes for free?”

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