Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Thursday, October 12, 2023

There Won't Be A Speaker Anytime Soon

 The news that Steve Scalise won the internal ballot within the GOP caucus has made him a sort of front runner to be the next Speaker. The margin over Jim Jordan was pretty small and there's no margin for error. Scalise did not try for a vote yesterday because he knows he does not have the votes.

There are clearly a number of irreconcilables on both sides. Since the next Speaker can only afford to lose 3-4 votes, there's simply no way to elect a Speaker between Scalise and Jordan. My money remains on Elise Stefanik being a compromise candidate after a days of fruitless and failed efforts for one of these two awful people to become the leader of the larger group of awful people.

Meanwhile, Democrats can rail against the fact that we can't appropriate aid to Israel and Ukraine while the GOP cannibalizes itself. 

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