It won’t happen. I predict McCarthy’s ouster will be resolved within 3 weeks of today, probably with Steve Scalise as GOP House Speaker. Gaetz has endorsed him.
Still in a unity coalition, who would be the House Republican acceptable to a majority of Dems? Who would be the House Democrat acceptable to majority of Republicans (Manchin is in the Senate)? Other than AOC, whom conservatives clearly have a fixation on.
What sort of concessions would the Dems demand? I’m guessing the Biden impeachment inquiry would be squelched. Joint chairmanships of the Judiciary and Ways and Means Committees might be a demand.
However, a sufficiently funded 3rd party that followed the following strategy:
Identify counties with only extremist and excessively partisan candidates that are liable to win.
Head-hunt plain spoken, non-ideal driven moderates who don’t want to run for office and pay them to run as a “sane and reasonable” alternative for everyone else.
Promise to not advance any policy, just to listen to the arguments by the two sides and vote appropriately, while in office. Say that you can’t have everyone acting to push policy and not have anyone willing to listen to the arguments. It’s like having a professional prosecutor and a professional defender and expecting them to agree on something. You need a jury.
Advertise to the locals in the middle and on the opposite side, as the only winning alternative to the crazy vote. They need to abandon their party agenda.
Promise to never campaign for more than 15% of all open offices.
At the very least, you would need a rule change that says any bill that passes the Senate MUST be brought to the floor of the House for a vote. The only way you get everybody to agree on a Speaker is to take away their discretion over what the body gets to vote on.
Actually, the one idea that would work in the short term would be to move to a secret ballot system.
It makes coalition building difficult - people will promise to vote one way, renege, and then you (the Speaker) don’t have any way to know what changes need to happen to the legislation to fix it. But it would allow people to cross the aisle and, these days, despite the problem of the secret ballot, it would still probably make it easier to build coalitions than is currently possible.
I see how that might work within the chamber, but wouldn’t it completely undermine the accountability reps are supposed to have to their constituents? If my district’s voters want X, I’m supposed to vote yea on X, and if I vote nay they deserve to know it.
That’s a modern invention. Voice vote was the norm for nearly all legislation until the 1970s. Since then, we’ve basically been on a downhill slope.
Accountability was a proposal made to push back on corruption. In theory, opening up all of the secrets of what lobbyists a person is talking, to donations they’re receiving, and how they’re voting all provides the data that a rational and skeptical public to monitor and remove corrupt political types.
Safe to say, that solution is still waiting on a rational and skeptical public to appear. There are better methods. Public accountability just provides the information to enact voter fraud - ensuring that politicians vote the way that they were paid or voted in to do.
Well Scalise dropped his bid yesterday, and Jordan doesn’t have the votes. The Freedom Caucus won’t abide by the wishes of an overwhelming majority of Republican House members, and that same overwhelming majority has decided to return the favor: when Jordan called for a vote essentially saying, “Will you support me on the House floor, please?”, he got only 152 yes votes out of a needed 207.
Last week House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had a WAPO Op-ed piece making an entirely reasonable proposal for coalition power-sharing as the price for Democratic support for a Republican House speaker. Specifically:
The details would be subject to negotiation, though the principles are no secret: The House should be restructured to promote governance by consensus and facilitate up-or-down votes on bills that have strong bipartisan support. Under the current procedural landscape, a small handful of extreme members on the Rules Committee or in the House Republican conference can prevent common-sense legislation from ever seeing the light of day. That must change…
Emphasis added. This proposal falls far short of what was contemplated in the OP. Today Josh Marshall of TPM characterized such a deal as, “… some form of enhanced or supersized discharge petition.” After some discussion, Marshall concludes:
Even describing this I find myself saying to myself there’s just no way that’s ever going to happen. And probably not. But that’s why there’s been no Speaker for going on two weeks.
I am reminded of Stein’s Law: “That which cannot go on forever will stop.”
This is typical MAGAt reign of terror BS. These chuckleheads should keep in mind it won’t take many of those GOP congresscritters in swing/Biden districts to defect and vote for Jeffries.
I’m not counting on that happening but who knows how this could play out. I’ve given up on understanding the current GOP so anything is possible at this point.
Several of Mr. Jordan’s supporters have posted the phone numbers of mainstream G.O.P. lawmakers they count as holdouts, encouraging followers to flood the Capitol switchboard with calls demanding they back Mr. Jordan — or face the wrath of conservative voters as they gear up for primary season.
Brad DeLong offers demands that he think the Dems should make:
I doubt whether the Dems will demand or receive this much. More likely the masochistic GOP caucus would accept the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose deal offered by the Freedom Caucus, though probably not with Jim Jordan as leader.