It was the end of the Earth year 2260, and the war had paused, suddenly and unexpectedly. All around us, it was as if the universe were holding its breath…waiting. All of life can be broken down into moments of transition, or moments…of revelation. This had the feeling of both. […] G’Quan wrote, “There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities, it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope. The death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender.” The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born…in pain.
Johnson is marginally better than Jordan but has the huge benefit of being relatively unknown to the vast majority of Americans. That makes him less of a liability to swing district Republicans.
Of course, there’s the more fundamental issue of all the even moderately well known Republicans being unacceptable to one part of the caucus or another, but for them, that’s a problem for not-today rather than something to actually address
Rep. Nancy Mace, who voted to ejected McCarthy from the Speakership because she felt the party didn’t have a compassionate argument for women on abortion, says she will vote for Johnson. Johnson is one of the most staunchly anti-choice members of the House, with an A+ rating from Susan B. Anthony Pro Life America.
Next up, patting your head while rubbing your belly. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Doesn’t apply here.
If Johnson wins, there may be a lot of “Dems should have helped McCarthy…” stuff afterwards, with the presumption that Johnson is worse than McCarthy. But 1. McCarthy was terrible; I seriously doubt Johnson can be any worse; and 2. if Dems had helped McCarthy stay on, Dems would own the results of McCarthy as Speaker. Meaning the next set of lies and bullshit McCarthy pulled would be partially the Dems fault.
The Dems will have no ownership of Johnson’s speakership tenure (should he win).
Looks like the deed may be done today. After all, he has the glowing endorsement of a guy with dozens of felony indictments, what more does anyone need? The only question in my mind is how are they going to humiliate McCarthy today.
He wants to play shadow Speaker behind a pliable puppet, so probably not precisely what he wanted. He’s mostly aligned with Johnson anyway, so probably good enough for most things.
But if the ethics investigations against Gaetz continue forwards, most definitely not. We’ll have to see how that plays out, so TBD
It could also just be a few of them that are late. There have been Representatives that missed a quorum vote but voted in the subsequent Speaker’s vote.
This is my expectation if he is to make it today. Also, to those talking about how “the moderates will cave”… did you look at Jordan’s votes? The “mainstream” already “caved”, it was not a matter of righteousness, but of finding who in the FC had not pissed people off too much personally.