The GOP Should Just Elect Santos Speaker Since It's Already On His Résumé
Tuesday is the big day for Kevin McCarthy. His whole cringy life has been building towards this. And he’s pretty much told the fascist fringe in his conference that he’ll buckle on every one of their demands if they will; just agree to let him be speaker, even if just for one term. Cavin’ Kevin is doing exactly what almost everyone expected him to do all along. But for the hardcore fascists, it isn’t enough. It will never be enough. They want a true believer and ideological soul-mate, something he’ll never be no matter how much self-humiliation is willing to accept with a shit-eating grin.
The media keeps harping on 5 neo-Nazis… but there are plenty more. The #NeverKevin block is Matt Gaetz (FL), Andy Biggs (AZ), Matt Rosendale (MT), Bob Good (VA) and Ralph Norman (SC). McCarthy can only afford to lost 4 and they won’t be the only Republican votes against him on Tuesday. In fact, Friday congressional crackpot-elect Anna Paulina Lunatica (FL) was on Bannon’s podcast saying she’s a no vote as well. Gaetz happily tweeted it:
The fascist-five’s adjacent cronies have been upping the demands as McCarthy caves on one after the other. The latest, reported Politico, is a select committee that takes the investigations away from the relatively sane in-coming committee chairs who have been working on them and hands them over to the fascist fringe. Keep in mind these “investigations” are the entire GOP agenda. There’s nothing else they plan to accomplish. The new panel— the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government— would “direct probes against the entities they’ve castigated for years, including the FBI, the Justice Department, the IRS and Anthony Fauci.”
Mainstream conservatives are fighting back, weakly, by threatening to put retiring Michigan Rep. Fred Upton into the Speaker’s chair. (Remember, Upton voted to impeach Señor Trumpanzee.) Theoretically, they could do it— if they could persuade the Democrats to go along. Somehow, it would be hard to imagine, Cori Bush, AOC, Summer Lee, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar… voting for an anti-working class scion of a billionaire family. But it would just take a couple dozen Republicans if enough Democrats persuade themselves that Upton would be a better Speaker for them (and America) than McCarthy or Gym Jordan. The best part of that is that it might result in Gaetz committing ritual suicide on the House floor, which would be the best possible beginning of the 118th Congress— and the New Year.
This sounds pretty definitive, right? And Gaetz has said the same thing. Good and Rosendale have almost said it as well. Ralph Norman is the one everyone thinks wildcat andiron if McCarthy offers him a good enough goodie for himself.
On Friday, Lindsey McPerson wrote that the 5— or more— Neo-fascists in the #Never Kevin campaign and the 70-80 mainstream conservatives who say they will only vote for McCarthy have positions that “are seemingly irreconcilable, and members on both sides of the intra-party standoff predict the speaker’s election will require multiple ballots for the first time since 1923.
Luna[tica] said a rule change the Freedom Caucus has been pushing to restore the power of a single member to offer a privileged motion to vacate the chair— the procedural mechanism for ousting a speaker— is “incredibly important” in determining how she’ll vote in the speaker’s election.
“I’m not going to be voting for anyone that doesn’t embrace that change,” she said.
The motion to vacate is the tool Freedom Caucus members used in 2015 to help force out then-Speaker John Boehner. McCarthy ran for speaker then but dropped out just before the conference nomination vote amid opposition from the Freedom Caucus.
Democrats changed the motion to vacate rule in 2019 after taking back the majority. Now it can only be brought up for a vote over the objection of leadership if offered at the direction of a party caucus or conference, instead of just a single member. House Republicans adopted a conference rule change in November stating that only their conference could bring forward a motion to vacate in an effort to prevent Democrats from choosing the speaker.
How the motion to vacate will be structured in House rules has been up for debate. The key question is how many members it should take to sign onto a motion to vacate resolution to make it privileged, which means it can be brought up for a floor vote over the objection of leadership.
According to a member familiar with the negotiations, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, a former Freedom Caucus chair who is supporting McCarthy’s speaker bid after he unsuccessfully ran against him for minority leader in 2018, floated a compromise that would set the threshold at five members.
That number was chosen because with a 222-seat majority, five is the number of Republicans that could join forces with all Democrats and file a discharge petition to force legislation to the floor over leadership’s objection.
McCarthy is fine with the five-member motion to vacate compromise but many of his allies think it’s too low and some of his opponents say it’s too high, so a deal has not yet been reached, according to the member familiar with the negotiations who requested anonymity to speak candidly about private discussions.
It was discussed Friday afternoon on a conference call McCarthy held with GOP leaders of the various ideological caucuses, known as the “five families,” a reference derived from the five family-led New York organized criminal gangs that formed the Italian American Mafia in 1931.
The five families of the Republican conference are the Freedom Caucus, the Republican Study Committee, the Republican Main Street Caucus, the Republican Governance Group and the Problem Solvers Caucus.
Members of the latter three groups are the ones who’ve led the “only Kevin” movement and have said they won’t vote for anyone but McCarthy so long as he remains interested in being speaker.
A group of 15 Republicans from battleground districts, led by Rep.-elect Michael Lawler of New York, went as far as to send a "Dear Colleague” letter Thursday saying they “are not open to any so-called shadow ‘consensus candidate’— regardless of how many votes it takes to elect Speaker-designate McCarthy.”
Biggs, who has offered to be an alternative candidate for those who don’t want to vote for McCarthy on the first ballot, has said some House Republicans who are not in the Freedom Caucus have “quietly” approached him to express interest in serving as speaker once it becomes clear McCarthy doesn’t have enough votes.
But McCarthy has vowed not to drop out of contention and is intent on securing the gavel, regardless of how many ballots it takes.
“Kevin McCarthy is best prepared to lead the 118th Congress, and we are prepared to vote for him for as long as it takes,” Republican Main Street Caucus Chair Dusty Johnson of South Dakota and Vice Chair Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma said in a letter Friday addressed to “Speaker-Designate McCarthy and Major Caucus Leaders.”
They said the group of more than 70 members met Thursday to discuss the speaker’s race and the rules package and that many have “strong reservations regarding lowering the threshold on the motion to vacate,” as well as demands from some McCarthy opponents to change the structure of the Republican Steering Committee that doles out committee assignments. Republicans already compromised and expanded the Steering Committee when they adopted their conference rules in November, but the expansion did not go as far as Freedom Caucus members wanted to ensure their voices were represented.
Johnson and Bice said Main Street Caucus members wouldn’t back concessions on the rules unless McCarthy’s detractors drop their opposition.
“Any RMSC support for rule changes will be taken off the table if Kevin McCarthy is not expediently elected as Speaker of the House on January 3,” they wrote.
The motion to vacate is far from the only House rule that McCarthy opponents want changed, and they are still seeking other concessions. For example, they’re concerned about how McCarthy will handle government spending negotiations and want guardrails in House rules to ensure he won’t agree to a massive omnibus appropriations package like the one Congress just passed for fiscal 2023, according to the member familiar with the negotiations.
McCarthy’s message to his opponents on Friday’s conference call was that they’ve been working on the rules package for two months and it’s time for them effectively to put up or shut up, according to the member, who said the detractors are still not being transparent about what they want in order to actually vote for McCarthy.
The motion to vacate is far from the only House rule that McCarthy opponents want changed, and they are still seeking other concessions. For example, they’re concerned about how McCarthy will handle government spending negotiations and want guardrails in House rules to ensure he won’t agree to a massive omnibus appropriations package like the one Congress just passed for fiscal 2023, according to the member familiar with the negotiations.
McCarthy’s message to his opponents on Friday’s conference call was that they’ve been working on the rules package for two months and it’s time for them effectively to put up or shut up, according to the member, who said the detractors are still not being transparent about what they want in order to actually vote for McCarthy.
The member acknowledged that some of the opponents may never come around given their inherent distrust for McCarthy. That’s why members of the Republican Main Street Caucus, the Republican Governance Group and the Problem Solvers Caucus who have vowed only to vote for McCarthy have discussed a backup plan that wouldn’t violate their pledge not to support another sitting House Republican for speaker.
The plan, which would only be deployed if the speaker’s election went to multiple ballots with no one budging, would be for a significant bloc of Republicans to work with Democrats to nominate retiring Michigan GOP Rep. Fred Upton for speaker. The position does not need to be held by a lawmaker, but no Congress has ever elected a speaker that wasn’t also serving as a member.
The member said the long-shot effort to elect Upton would involve giving Democrats concessions on House rules, like subpoena powers for committees, and other assurances Republicans probably ideally don’t want to grant.
Stock up on popcorn for Tuesday-- and beyond. This is going to be fabulous. Keep in mind that there is no outcome that will be actually "good," but the more harm the Republicans do to themselves with a spectacle, the better for America in the long run.