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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25086 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

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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.

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...

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.

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.

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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