So How Is This Whole Speakership Mess Going to Play Out?

What’s going on in Washington? I heard they fired the president of Congress?

Uh, sure. A handful of far-right Republicans in the so-called Freedom Caucus, by filing a so-called “motion to vacate the chair,” moved to depose Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy—a fellow Republican who they felt had compromised too easily in allowing the passage of a bill last weekend that funded the continuing operations of the federal government for 45 days. The speakership is determined by a vote of the entire House, not just the majority party, and Democrats declined to help keep McCarthy in his position. So he lost the vote and is no longer speaker.

Wouldn’t voting to let McCarthy keep his job have been the responsible thing for Democrats do, given that he’d just helped keep the government running?

The only reason there was a question of whether the government would be funded in the first place is that McCarthy, in response to pressure from the Freedom Caucus, had reneged on a May agreement to maintain a certain level of spending going forward. He’d also denounced the work of the committee that investigated Jan. 6 and supported an inquiry into impeaching President Joe Biden. (Even some of the conservative witnesses who were called to testify by Republicans testified that they did not think impeachment is currently justified.) And he didn’t ask Democrats for their support, possibly because doing so would have created another, larger right-flank effort to oust him, which would have put more pressure on him to shut down the government when the current short-term funding bill runs out on Nov. 17.

In short, it’s far from clear that voting to keep McCarthy in the speakership would have advanced even the most high-minded interest in the functioning of the United States’ civic institutions, much less any partisan interest of the Democratic Party.

Or, put another way:

Fine. What does the House of Representatives do now?

It’s being led on an interim basis by North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry.

Patrick McHenry? Give me McLiberty or give me McDeath!

Ok.

Right.

McHenry’s only job is to help elect a new, permanent speaker. He has set that vote for next Wednesday.

And whomst, thusly, will be competing for the honour of the speakership?

Not McCarthy, who announced Tuesday that he is done with this crapola and is evidently feeling great about that decision. The declared candidates are Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, who is the current majority leader, and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, who is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

Both men, given their support of Trump’s stolen-election theories, are arguably members themselves of the party’s conspiratorial right wing. To get elected, they’ll have to figure out some way to win the support of swing-district moderates like, for example, South Florida Rep. Carlos Giménez, without being seen as sellouts by hard-liners like, for example, west Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna. Giménez tweeted Wednesday that he’ll only support someone who agrees to change House rules to prevent small handfuls of right-wing members from being able to submit a motion to vacate the chair; Luna tweeted Tuesday that she won’t support anyone who doesn’t commit to “defunding” the Department of Justice’s prosecutions of Donald Trump.

Sounds like a fine line to walk!

In a convenient metaphor, the actual literal middle ground between the population base of Giménez’s district in Dade County and Luna’s district in the Clearwater area is occupied by the Everglades, i.e., an uninhabitable swamp filled with alligators and escaped pythons. (Other sets of Republican members making mutually incompatible demands are not hard to come by, either.)

And if and when Republicans agree on a speaker, they’ll face the problem of agreeing about how to fund the government, which is the same problem that just led to the deposing of the previous speaker, without any indication that anyone involved has changed their position in any way.

Yep. Hope they’ve got a plan for the pythons!