Three weeks after Matt Gaetz of Florida pushed a one-person motion to vacate the chair and dump Kevin McCarthy out of the big chair at the top of the rostrum in the House of Representatives…the Republicans have managed to find a new fanny to sit in the seat second in line from the Presidency.
I’m sure the most relieved person in the room has to be Patrick McHenry of North Carolina who no longer has to be the ringmaster of the circus of clowns that is the Republican caucus! He’s been the caretaker Speaker Pro Tempore for the past 22 days warming the seat but having zero power to move any legislation.
We thought the new boy beholden to the extremists was going to be Jim Jordan of Ohio, election denier extraordinaire and abrasive personality completely uninterested in legislating or doing anything other than conducting farcical enquiries rather than attending to the critical business of the people.
He got three votes on the floor of the House where his support declined each time before he was effectively ordered to stand down behind closed doors when more than half the caucus was willing to vote against him privately but weren’t willing to put their names in public opposition for fear of offending his patron saint of the orange persuasion.
The caucus then chose Tom Emmer of Minnesota to be their candidate for Speaker.
That candidacy lasted all of four hours because he committed the cardinal sins of voting to avoid the US defaulting on its debt for the first time in history, voting to codify the right to same-sex marriage, and worst of all to the MAGA extremist crowd…he voted to certify the election of 2020 which the extremists still delude themselves into thinking was stolen even though over sixty legal challenges and many recounts have proven conclusively it was one of the most fraud-free elections ever.
Everyone with aspirations to be Speaker came out of the woodwork after Emmer’s candidacy went down without a vote but the clear consensus candidate was Mike Johnson of Louisiana.
He seems much more affable than the rest of the candidates on offer. In fact, he’s been described as “Jim Jordan with a sport jacket and a smile”.
Ouch!
He certainly does come across as polite and desiring a more collegial atmosphere which isn’t surprising considering he’s only been there since 2017.
But it beggars belief that someone who was vehemently against certifying the peaceful transfer of power after the election of 2020 and whose votes consistently are in favour of the most extreme right-wing policies and unwavering fealty to former President Trump could be a candidate for leading the House in any capacity, to say nothing of being Speaker.
And yet there is Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries handing Johnson the Speaker’s gavel after his successful election vote (which was foreshadowed on C-SPAN when they showed a trolley with McCarthy’s furniture and personal effects sitting outside the Speaker’s office which the Republicans would not have ordered had they any doubts that Johnson would be elected Speaker).
Unless he gets rid of the one-vote threshold for the motion to vacate the chair, he’s going to be as beholden to the extremists as McCarthy was. He’s already promised that he’ll push another continuing resolution to fund the government which will almost certainly infuriate the hardliners in the caucus.
So after three weeks of Congress being out of action whilst Israel and Gaza are at war and the Ukraine is wondering if the US will flake out on helping them defend themselves against Russia…we’re effectively no more closer to a functioning House of Representatives than we were before only now there’s a far more extremist partisan in the top job.
To be fair, some of the complaints Matt Gaetz had about the procedures of the House that supposedly led to his motion to vacate the chair seem reasonable: appropriating in regular order in the customary appropriations bills rather than the continual succession of continuing resolutions and omnibus spending bills and allowing representatives time to read the legislation before they’re expected to vote upon it.
But it was his way of making his grudge against former Speaker McCarthy a personal crusade to oust him that dramatically overshadowed the message he was trying to communicate as to why he felt the need to make the motion. Perhaps newly elected Speaker Johnson might well make those reforms a priority but I’m thinking he’s going to have his hands full just trying to be the ringmaster of a very chaotic circus!
It seems par for the course on a day that North Carolina, one of the most “purple” of toss-up states, has now had new district maps imposed upon us that entrench a Republican super-majority in the General Assembly upon us for years to come and will likely result in a 10-4 Republican congressional delegation with even more egregious hyper-partisan gerrymandering than the maps that has seen us end up in the Supreme Court through most of this century.
Of the 14 seats in the maps that are now law, only one is considered at all competitive.
That rather begs the question: why are Republicans so deathly afraid of pitching their policies and trying to convince a majority of an electorate who can choose their representatives in competitive districts drawn without party considerations that their policies are the correct ones rather than rigging the elections by allowing the politicians to choose the voters they want?
Could it be that a clear majority of North Carolinians are very much opposed to the more extremist Republican proposals that seem to want to establish a theocracy in our state which has been shown consistently by reputable polling over several years and the only way to force policies upon the people that they clearly don’t want is to rig the maps in their favour?
I can accept policies I might not agree with much easier if I’m in a district that was drawn and contested fairly. I might not *LIKE* the policies in question and would move heaven and earth to either get them reversed or try to get a more favourable candidate elected but I could at least accept the legitimacy of the democratic process no matter how ugly it is in practice.
But when I’m gerrymandered into a district that clearly is meant to silence opposition to the establishment of a theocracy that wishes to dictate policy to a subjugated people rather than represent and pursue policies that have been ratified by a population of a fairly drawn district with real choices on the ballot paper…that I’ll always find to be intolerably unacceptable.
Want another depressing thought about how bad democracy is faring here in the Tar Heel State?
According to the latest voter data available from the Kaiser Family Foundation, North Carolina has the lowest percentage of registered voters of those eligible to vote at 60.8%.
Dead. F**king. Last.
That’s a damned disgrace but it’s not surprising given that the Democrats and Republicans have been heavily gerrymandering our voting maps for many decades and most of the maps they’ve produced have resulted in very few competitive races and after seeing a few lawsuits end up in the Supreme Court only for them to wring their hands and admit that they find the maps gerrymandered but they can’t do anything about it.
Is it any wonder why so many North Carolinians don’t bother with voting anymore when it’s clear that the politicians are selecting their voters and ignoring them when they’re no longer of use which is often right after the elections are closed and tabulated?
The new maps enacted today? Of the 120 seats up for grabs in the NC House, only *THREE* are considered at all competitive. And the maps pretty much guarantee a veto-proof Republican supermajority which is the very definition of anti-democratic.
We are in desperate need of maps drawn by an independent commission who will draw the maps without consideration of party political advantage and in compliance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The General Assembly cannot be allowed even one iota of influence over the process regardless of what party rules it because the history of gerrymandering in this state shows they cannot be trusted at all with that responsibility.
Anywho, I don’t envy the new Speaker who is about to find that having is a much less pleasant thing than wanting and that any ideas he might have that he has political power are going to meet the harsh reality that at best he has influence and that no matter what extremist policies he might try to pass through the House, the Senate will pretty much guarantee that none of the MAGA wish list becomes law during this Congress.
That’s likely to be a huge millstone round the necks of the candidates for the US House of Representatives in 2024 and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Hakeem Jeffries is handed the Speaker’s gavel in January of 2025 with the swearing in of a new Congress.