IMO all this rules lawyering and quoting of snips of various documents is silly.
They will ad lib something that gets the job done and the rest of the country / world will go along under the rubric of “Eh, close enough good enough”.
Any complaints that it isn’t close enough will be too little too late, and/or rejected by the courts as an inherently political question.
It’s not like there is any serious controversy about who actually won both the popular vote and the EC vote. Plenty of serious regret, but no serious controversy.
Count me as a Dem who would love to watch a shitshow in Congress for the next 2 and ideally 4 years. The second two under a huge D majority. I also want a pony that shits gold bricks.
If, contrary to what I expect, the House can’t act, the Senate can, so expect a president Vance, or at least acting president. Not sure which is worse.
On the other hand, don’t expect the House to seriously function for the next two years.
There’s not much difference between a Reichstag that has literally burnt down and one that is such a dysfunctional figurative dumpster fire that it can’t get itself started to do any work.
21 GOP house members voted against the ACA repeal. About 13 GOP house members voted against tax cuts.
I’m sure the GOP will get their house in order, but I’m not sure if the republicans from purple districts will be willing to go along with republicans from deep red MAGA districts.
I hope the democrats leave them to flounder and suffer rather than rescuing the republicans.
I disagree. I see this as an opportunity to force congress to actually do things in the best interests of the American people rather than the best interests of the Republican party.
As far as I see it, the worst thing McTurtle did was declare that the #1 priority of the Republican party was to make Obama into a one term president. Not doing the best for the people but for the party. Nothing will pass this congress without Democratic help and I expect them to exact their price. And I expect (or at least hope) that price will benefit the people.
Fifty years ago, probably forty, you could count on Congressional Republicans to make deals with Democrats and follow through on them. We don’t live there anymore.
I hope the Democrats act like a political party in a mature democracy and give the GOP the choice of a power sharing unity coalition or leave them to their own devices.
Here’s my question, “What concessions will Mike Johnson make to win the speakership? Are the Kevin McCartney poison pills still in place?”
Generally speaking, putting Freedom caucus crazies and bomb throwers on the Rules Committee would probably be stabilizing: coopting the loons sometimes calms a few of them down. Allowing snap votes on the Speakership would be another matter. At the end of the day, right wingers need an outlet for performative destruction and adults need to govern.
After the Speaker is elected, the House majority must pass a rules package. Maybe that’s the key vote.
Politico on Rules Committee membership:
Yet the early demands are already piling up for Johnson: Rep. Chip Roy is angling to be chair of the Rules Committee, while the speaker’s allies urge him to remove the Texas Republican from the panel entirely. The other two conservative members of the panel aren’t clear on their futures either: Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), the lone Republican who has already said publicly he’ll vote against Johnson, has signaled he expects he’ll likely lose his seat, while Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) recently told POLITICO that he would like to stay on but he hasn’t gotten guidance from Johnson.
It would be nice if the democrats and ‘moderate’ republicans agreed to sideline the MAGA hardliners. But what’ll happen in practice is the GOP will make fake promises to get democratic votes, then betray the democrats after the votes are counted.
In the senate, when democrats under Obama controlled the senate and were appointing judges there was a rule (official or unofficial) that a senator from a state could block a judge from that state. So senators like Ted Cruz would block democratic judges from being appointed in Texas.
Once the GOP won the presidency and senate in 2017, they abolished that rule.