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Notes -
Third vote for Speaker of the United States House of Representatives set to start shortly.
What I'm hearing is the plan now is to do marathon votes, potentially through the weekend, as a strategy to wear down the holdouts and elect Jordan. I'm skeptical this will be successful. Allegedly some Republicans are saying they will go home for the weekend, Speaker vote or no. That is a bit of a sketchy place to be in because if enough go home (10) that means Hakeem Jeffries will be elected Speaker rather than Jordan. I imagine there would be some immediate votes to vacate the chair if that occurred but not sure how they would turn out. Also some Republicans have apparently been pressuring McHenry to bring legislation to the floor without a bill empowering him and he threatened to resign rather than do so.
ETA:
At the end of the third ballot results stand at:
210 - Jeffries
194 - Jordan
25 - Other
4 - NV
Jordan losing ground from the second vote as expected.
ETA2:
Reporting coming out of Republicans closed conference following the vote indicates the holdouts have no demands and want no concessions, they just don't want Jordan to be Speaker. If 8 people will never vote for McCarthy, 20 people will never vote for Scalise, and 25 will never vote for Jordan I'm not sure how this ends. One Rep was pictured carrying a resolution to oust McHenry as Speaker Pro Tempore. Maybe his replacement will be more amenable to doing legislative business without an empowering resolution? Apparently Jordan's latest vote total is the tied for the lowest in a vote for candidate for Speaker by a majority party since 1911 when the House was set at 435 members.
ETA3:
Jim Jordan has reportedly lost an internal ballot (88-112) and is out as Speaker Designate for the Republicans. As an amusing aside the 8 Republicans who ousted McCarthy have apparently circulated a letter claiming to be willing to accept some punishment like censure or expulsion from the Conference if it helped get Jordan elected. One problem? Rep Ken Buck has voted against Jordan all three times and apparently did not sign off on being included in the letter.
Apparently House is now going home for the weekend, lots more people expected to put their hats in the ring this next round.
Can anyone explain to me why this particular House speaker election is so contentious?
US political parties are really coalitions of factions and the Republican majority in the house is smaller than the smallest coalition. This makes each coalition is effectively the marginal vote required to elect a speaker and they're all trying to elect a speaker they perceive to be maximally friendly to their faction interests or extract maximum concessions from an unfriendly faction's choices.
Normally the way this is handled is back-room dealing where concessions are offered. Thing is, either the Freedom Coalition is intransigent, the mainstream isn't willing to offer them enough, or there's too much bad blood over the last time they got a deal which was then violated. Or all three.
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because a few conflicts are coming to a head right now
there is a very slim majority in the House due to laughably idiotic behavior by Party leadership and the NRCC and a small group of representatives see this as an opening to attack two fundamental pillars of Congressional business over the last few decades+
Dictator Speakership Era is in jeopardy - for the last few decades, the speaker of the house has had a shocking amount of power over the business of the house which almost entirely excludes the vast majority of the conference from decision-making and legislating.
Appropriations going through non-Normal process - Appropriations bills haven't gone through the legislatively designated normal process of how they are supposed to be drafted and modified and on what schedule for decades. Instead, they're clusterfucked through another process which is likely illegal but which no court is going to stop it which ends in giant omnibus bills and other sorts of christmas tree bills. Instead of just passing the appropriations bills required by law through the normal process also required by law, they appropriations are done by Continuing Resolutions and giant omnibus bills.
The small group of GOP representatives were able to get concessions which should end the Dictator Speaker Era as well as the Omnibus/Continuing Resolution Era from McCarthy in exchange for McCarthy getting the gavel. Appropriations must be passed through the normal process which means 12 appropriations bills produced by the 12 committees through the normal process and are brought to the floor before the statutory deadline which means no more omnibus bills and no more continuing resolutions. And there were many other smaller concessions. McCarthy broke his promises and used Democrats to do it. The small group revolted and that was the end of McCarthy's speakership.
This presents a big problem for many of the GOP blob who no one has ever heard of; McCarthy brought in A LOT of money and he used control of that money to fund many GOP people to win their seats which they otherwise never would have won. These people are duds, they can't fundraise, and their voters do not particularly like them. Without McCarthy protecting their seats and attacking their primary opponents, their seats are toast. This is A LOT of the caucus. These people are very upset that the smaller group of GOP rocked the boat because they have been living large with McCarthy doing all the work and getting the flack to deliver to donors who keep the gravy-train rolling. Many in the caucus feel ousting McCarthy was a stab in the back of leadership who had worked for decades raising billions and taking flak to do things the vast majority of them wanted anyway.
Some other conflicts which exacerbate the issue is the large and growing divide between the GOP and their voters as well as MAGA vs Establishment GOP; the harder and harder to hide secret of the caucus is that a large portion, maybe even a majority, and definitely party leadership actually really dislike their own voters and MAGA is making it increasingly difficult to maintain the scam of lying to their voters while delivering to their donors which keeps the moneytrain, status, etc., rolling in.
tl;dr: a small group of reps attempting to use their negotiating power given a slim minority to bring down two fundamental pillars for how the House works and has for decades which slammed directly into a large group of their own caucus who rely on the scheming and fundraising to maintain their seats and owe those seats to leadership they feel was backstabbed
It's important to note that this small group was intentionally making it impossible for McCarthy to keep his promise. He was going forward with regular order, the Appropriations committee and relevant subcommittees had reported their bills already by mid-July, but Freedom Caucus holdouts spiked rules votes to begin floor debate on those bills time and time again.
The whole situation was engineered by a group that got to get their names in the headlines off of it. They wanted him to break his promises because then they got to fundraise off of being the scrappy freedom fighters against the duplicitous Establishment. But, by forcing a delay, they put McCarthy in a situation where he had to choose between a shutdown and a CR.
Just like the Left, the Recalcitrants in Congress depend on people being underinformed about how a complex process works so they gin up a self serving narrative.
All twelve bills could have been passed by early August and a unified Republican Conference could have fought a very public and very righteous fiscally conservative battle against Democrats in the Senate and White House through the end of September, boosting their credibility as a serious party of responsible government without risking a shutdown. Instead, they're embarrassing the party and all but guaranteeing the Democrats regain the House next year, all so Matt Gaetz can send out fundraising emails while he votes to kick his own party out of power.
It seems like you’re underrating the possibility that they wanted a shutdown.
Well, what I'm really doing is underrating the diversity of opinion among the Recalcitrants. Chip Roy, although not one of the defenestrators, has consistently been among the recalcitrants on advancing budget bills, but I trust him to be doing what he does for the reasons he says and he would probably have been fine with a shutdown if the budget didn't come out the way he wanted. Gaetz was doing it for attention and fundraising, he thinks he's going to become the next Governor of Florida off of this. Some of the others wanted a shutdown because they seem to think hardball negotiating will get them what they want ( I think Andy Biggs is in this category).
Others may have their own reasons.
Chip Roy is rooting for a shutdown because he wants Greg Abbott to be in charge of US border policy, and right now the most plausible route to that scenario is for the federal government to stop paying the border patrol(with most plausible route #2 being that the Biden admin gives in to all of his demands as a condition of keeping the government open). I think Andy Biggs is in agreement with that policy even if he has a few other demands. Matt Gaetz might be attention whoring, but he might also just be the face of a Biggs/Roy axis who can take a fall if it all blows up.
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Has it been decades? I seem to remember the process being roughly the normal appropriations process up until 2011 or 2012 (can't quite remember which), when they got rid of earmarks.
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As of now, Polymarket implicitly thinks either the deadlock will go on longer than 8 months, or that we'll have a candidate coming completely out of left field (i.e. one that's not currently listed). The total potential profit from buying a no share for all options, assuming none come true, is just 38 cents. Granted, Polymarket is a fairly thinly traded platform, but it's still real money people are betting with so that gives it a good deal of legitimacy in my eyes.
Current frontrunners are, as of 10/20/23:
So there's around a 60% probability that the eventual winner isn't in that list, or that the deadlock lasts longer than the market resolution date of June 30, 2024.
Modern US federal politics is notorious for its gridlock, but this is taking it to a new level.
I must confess that I'm kind of enjoying it.
You shouldn't. Stasis is ignorable for now, but it has huge costs across society that we'll have to pay one way or the other, either through direct payments for debt or future wars, or indirectly from stifled development.
The first thing mentioned in that article is that housing isn't being built because the government is actively getting in its way. Sure, a government deadlock will, sadly, not stop the regulators, but it'll (at least temporarily) stop lawmakers from tossing even more monkey wrenches into an already-completely-dysfunctional system. Also, "new rail systems won't get built" just sounds like the status quo to me...
I mean, I still vividly recall that during the long Obama government shutdown the only way they could actually get us hoi polloi to feel any pain was to actively shut down public parks (requiring more effort than doing nothing). When you're doing a performance review, and the answer to "so what do you do, exactly?" is "as long as you pay me I won't set fire to the building", it's time for that employee to go.
Correct, and when governments are broken the old regulations stay in place. YIMBYs are constantly stymied by all the veto points present in American politics.
Surely you must think at least some regulations are good, like "don't put poisonous substances in the drinking water". Other regulations can obviously be abused by rent-seekers, while others still can be bad if they were just poorly thought out. The solution to the latter two is to... just make better regulations. This is hard and it won't always go in the right direction, but it's pretty dang important for a functional society.
The "regulations are always net-negative" idea is a goofy right-libertarian version of Whig history that will have us drinking the equivalent of cyanide-laced water for some future problem. Sure, it might look like there's nothing critically important to regulate right now, but society and technology move on, and it's not very helpful if the machinery of state is completely paralyzed by people endlessly throwing sand in the gears because they thought regulations were impossible to ever do correctly.
Sorry, it sounds like you want some easy slam-dunk argument against some sort of cartoonish capital-L Libertarian, but that's not who you're speaking to. :) I don't want NO government and NO regulations - of course some regulations are good. But that says nothing about whether we have TOO MUCH government and TOO MUCH regulation right now. Most of the important obviously good stuff has been in the system for decades (if not centuries), because it's, well, important. And even if we kicked legislators out for 51 weeks out of every 52, the important stuff would still pass because it's, well, important. I happen to believe that most of what our modern legislators do IS net-negative, and I'm afraid you can't just hand-wave that away with a strawman argument.
As for YIMBYs, bless your heart Charlie Brown, you keep trying to kick that football. Surely one day they'll win! You yourself linked an article about the dire straits we're in. "Don't try to stop or slow down the government, we need it to fix all the problems caused by the last 50 years of government!"
If you think all regulations can be monolithically grouped into a giant "is bad" category then there's probably no convincing you no matter what I say. If the difference between "bad regulations" and "good regulations" don't matter since you think legislators will almost always do the wrong thing, then yeah, no point in trying I guess.
Comments like these are pretentious and unnecessary.
I have no idea how you're extracting these arguments from what I said. (shrug)
For the record, I wasn't trying to be mean-spirited (just "funny"), but I see it could come off that way.
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That's because there are a bunch of practices in place to minimize the impact of government shutdowns as long as they don't run too long. They could've ended the practice of requiring critical Federal employees to work without pay, leading to shutting down airports, not sending SSI checks, a ton of law enforcement activity being suspended (send CBP home), etc... If you're middle class and/or old you're insulated from most of the negative short term impacts by design.
Cool, cool. So, the obvious follow-up question is, can we just keep those critical federal employees, and drop everyone else? We might even survive firing the seven critical workers who were kept off furlough to keep people away from the Washington Monument.
I'm being a little facetious. You have a point, of course - lots of government services seem extraneous right up until the point where you (or someone else in a worse situation) desperately need them. It would be great if there was an option somewhere between 0% and 100% of our current government, where the first 10% to go isn't the part calculated to maximize spite.
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A government shutdown that lasts more than a month or so would result in the border patrol being offered employment by the Texas state government en masse, albeit probably with very different policies.
I mean, honestly, being a young enough person to not expect social security anyways who lives in a region that would almost inevitably be the imperial core for at least some portion of the continental US if the federal government collapses under its own incompetence and infighting, just shutting it down and not worrying if it reopens seems fine I guess.
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The government not doing things is not the same as nothing getting done.
There's some parts of the US that are doing well, like computers and renewables, but a lot of other places have devolved to an ossified gerontocracy. And a broken government, really, really doesn't help.
Disagree on that one. That the Academic/Managerial class has devolved into an ossified gerontocracy, is exactly why a broken government is a good thing.
The less opportunity or ability they have to interfere with the people actually producing things the better.
Don't underestimate the ability of a broken government to get in the way though. The government offices being empty doesn't mean buildings get built without approval, it merely means that nothing can be approved at all, so nothing will be built. The enforcement wing is sadly usually the last to break, so it can continue preventing action long after it has lost the capability to allow it.
We're talking about the feds here. The vast majority of things don't need federal approval. The state governments can approve things.
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Honestly, to some extent it feels like it matches the overall sentiment of the electorate with respect to where they want the country to go: a minority of really strong opinions, but definitely no consensus and a whole lot of normies quite content to grill and shrug.
And despite the US method of forming coalitions differing from a parliamentary system, this isn't unheard of in Europe either: Belgium was without a coalition government for the better part of two years during the Obama administration.
Belgium doesn’t have government shutdowns, though, does it?
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This is so weird. If someone sincerely thinks Jordan shouldn't be the Speaker, why would it matter how many times they vote? What's the incentive to just sit there, roll your eyes, and vote for not-Jordan?
There are 10 Democratic member of the house who are over 80, if you run votes for 18 hours you stand a reasonable chance of pushing the session long enough that some of them decide bed sounds better than voting when they know they have essentially no chance of their guy winning.
'Fillibuster to the death' emerges as a viable strategy at some point...
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I mean, not for nothing, but as I understand it these are mostly quite old office-dwelling people who have to be physically present and sitting upright and not asleep when each of these votes happen.
The strategy may be to literally wear them out, physically, mentally, and emotionally, until their strength fails or their will breaks and they either give in or go home.
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The strategy is opaque to me as well. I'm under the impression attrition is how McCarthy got the last few holdouts to vote "Present" rather than for someone else, which secured him the Speakership. However there was a lot of discussion and compromise to actually get the votes over Jeffries. My impression is Jordan hasn't been doing this part (maybe he can't?) which means getting people to vote "Present" by attrition is not going to work.
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More bad press for them, the base is riled up and wants them out, elections are coming up, etc.
It remains wild to me how few Representatives cleave to the perspective that they should simply vote in the fashion that they think is correct and then win or lose elections on the merit of that. I suppose I understand that the selection filter for who winds up there doesn't favor such a personality, but you'd still think there would be a few.
Or more likely it's just a convenient stance to take when there are big donors like the MIC putting bags of money on the scales behind the scenes.
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