Thursday's Titanic Absurdities: The GOP Clown Show Just Keeps Marching Along
Ben Shapiro captured the nature of the ongoing impasse among the House GOP Conference over the election of a new Speaker in a Twitter thread this morning:
There is a major divide among the 20 or so holdouts against McCarthy. Some, like Chip Roy (R-TX), have an actual strategy to exact concessions, many of which are good and proper. Others refuse to vote McCarthy no matter what. They have no plan whatsoever.
The former group's strategy can be worthwhile: use your outsized leverage to exact commitments to vote on funding bills by department, for example, rather than in an omnibus. The latter group -- never McCarthy, under any circumstances -- will likely force a wild counterplay.
That counterplay could take the form of Republicans and Democrats voting to appoint the Speaker by plurality rather than majority. If that happens, this puts the Never McCarthy group in the position of either voting for McCarthy, or letting Hakeem Jeffries become speaker.
The bottom line here is that the “Never McCarthy” group, nominally led by Florida Cong. Matt Gaetz, can’t win and frankly never had any intention of winning. While it’s hard to blame them for wanting to see a change from the party’s traditional go-along-to-get-along leadership, acting out in anger, as so many of them have done the past two days, is a lousy way to achieve that.