Go get 'em, Matt:
.@SpeakerMcCarthy is going to get his wish. I’m going to file a motion to vacate against him this week.
If at this time next week Kevin McCarthy is still Speaker of the House, it will be because the Democrats bailed him out. He can be their Speaker, not mine. pic.twitter.com/ITlcwynY39
— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) October 1, 2023
My prediction is that Gaetz will be successful at ousting McCarthy. Republicans will then spend two or three weeks flailing around, obviously unable to agree on a replacement. Then they'll vote McCarthy back into office.
Then we'll get back to the critical business of obstructing budget bills for FY24.
Gaetz's picture is next to the word pettyfogger in the dictionary. McCarthy is doing his bosses' bidding just not the way Matt wants. What I don't get is why he's lighting fireworks, dressing in florescent clothing, shining a floodlight in himself, and drawing as much attention as possible to himself. As you say, it'll backfire and there might be an inquiry into Gaetz.
Dems should make a deal with the Dopey Devil. Go with the budget crap they passed earlier in the year, no new cuts, give him some border garbage, get more even committee’s and see if he can govern in a bipartisan manner. Or not and watch the shit show ensure. Haha
He's a psychotic narcissist who's coked out of his gourd, he'll say or do anything to get attention.
Trump showed all these minor league-rs how it's done.
McCarthy is safe
Once Gaetz has tossed the last toy out of the pram, then what? Go to Disneyland?
Eh, petifogger is a fancy, pretentious word; what's needed is a short rude Anglo-Saxonism or better, Yiddish. Gaetz is is a putz who aspires to be a schmuck...along with the rest of his circus. Cue the music for the stupidest show on Earth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9NKHwmFTV0
I've always thought a putz was a higher degree of more garden-variety schmuck. Gotta check the dictionaries again, I guess.
The Max Headroom-meets-Bozo look must be netting him huge bucks as well as right-wing media hits so he probably doesn't mind the ridicule he earns.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if he finds some excuse to back out of actually making the motion now. Depends just how dedicated he is to the cause of real-world chaos, as opposed to getting attention. If he does go through with it now I think Kevin's on the right track, but there might not even be that much brouhaha. There'll be a ton more publicity to be gained if he waits about 40 days and keeps threatening . . .
Schmendrick is a better choice, I think (not least because it hasn't been appropriated by the goyim yet and is more novel). And goniff might be appropriate as well, but I think Unser Drumpfenfuhrer now has (or should have) permanent and sole possession of that one.
Schmendrick, yes-- captures the feckless unseriousness. I don't know of a single term that distills the orange menace. But putz is a decent start, and goniff belongs there too. Maybe paskudnyak, though that might be more apt for junior.
He aspires to being a schlimazel with money so he can sue.
That putz will need 218 votes to do it and he won't even get close. There are simply too many MAGA/GOP members who will be running for reelection in districts Biden won in 2020 and they don't want to be associated with Gaetz and Marjorie Green.
He starts with 212 democrat votes. And with two vacancies, he only needs 217 votes.
Public office seems to attract both the best and the worst kinds of people.
Instead of a citizenship test for holding office, there should be a "self-centered asshole" test for (not) holding office.
A very large percentage of American voters are morons.
That's the problem; the morons want to be represented so they elect Goetz, and Greene, and Boebert, and the rest of the clown show.
Yeah, we'll see what most House GOP members want more going into election season: to get rid of McCarthy and have the media cover the multi-week shitshow as they fail again and again to agree on a new speaker, or to just keep McCarthy and spend as much time as they can back in their home districts raising money and taking credit for stuff Democrats pass.
Kevin would know the answer to this question better than anyone since he lives in California: would the voters in Bakersfield (McCarthy's district) recoil at what essentially would be a coalition government in the House?
This is important because remember, California doesn't have party primaries anymore. Not only could McCarthy win support from Democrats in the House but in his district as well.
I mean, since the GOP first won control of the House after 40 years back in 1995, every Speaker has run into the same dilemma i.e. their caucus is filled with utopians, crazies, performance artists, anarchists, people who refuse to deal with the realities of life. And when that caucus threatens to rebel those Speakers whether they are Gingrich, Boehner or Ryan (Denny Haster, aside from being a child molester, was basically the puppet of Tom DeLay) resign, because they can't deal with it anymore.
So you have to give McCarthy some credit at least for sticking it out or perhaps he's figured out that the Freedom Caucus types talk a big game but in the end they're just bullshit artists. They have no plan and ultimately no candidate to implement it. They're sound and fury signifying nothing.
Yes the Dems should extract a pound of flesh for their support of McCarthy if it comes to that on committees, House rules, patronage, all that fun stuff.
But the point of the coalition should be to break the logjam and get stuff like immigration reform(which Boenher wouldn't do for fear of endangering his Speakership and then he ended up resigning anyways). It should not be for power's sake. The coalition would have a remarkable opportunity to pass bi-partisan legislation to tackle's the nation's problem but should only be done for that reason.
Which is why it never happens. I don't think there are enough sane Reps. left in the House. Decades of aggressive gerrymandering has led to the foreseeable conclusion - a bunch of certifiable crazies.
I don't see why Democrats would vote in favor of a motion to vacate. A motion to vacate is not a vote for Speaker. It is simply a motion to drop everything and hold Speaker elections again. It would further logjam the House.
I think if you ask the question of whether, as a Democrat, passing a motion to vacate is better or worse for Democrats and for the country, the answer is that it's worse. It's not at all the same as voting for McCarthy as Speaker.
Now, this might play badly for McCarthy in 2024. But that's a McCarthy problem, not a Democrat problem.
Whether or not the Democrats support a motion to vacate would, I expect, depend on what they would do next. As I've said before, one potential option for the Democrats would be to replace McCarthy with a "moderate" Republican heavily tied to Democratic puppet strings. It would only take five Republicans to support such a maneuver, and they could pretend not to see the strings.
Dems should make a deal with the Dopey Devil. Go with the budget crap they passed earlier in the year, no new cuts, give him some border garbage, get more even committee’s and see if he can govern in a bipartisan manner. Or not and watch the shit show ensure. Haha
Democrats should use their leverage not to end the impeachment farce but to put a time limit on it. Give Comer, Jordan, and the other crack investigators until date XX to produce actual evidence and then shut it down
Have you considered the problem of having a House without a Speaker as the window of that 45-day CR nears?
I am 10,000% certain that Gaetz and the MAGA far-right plan on blocking any effort at a budget compromise so that they can force a government shutdown.
IDK what's going to happen, but there could be a coming-to-Jesus moment where half the GOP wakes up and decides to stop playing around with fire.
Given that approximately half of them voted for the CR, I'd say that moment has come.
A speakerless House is an unorganized body presided over by the clerk. Its sole order of business is to elect a speaker and it's powerless to do anything else. So yes, you're right that the threat of a motion to vacate is more potent in 40 or so days, and I think there really is a handful of bomb-throwers who are thinking seriously about doing that. Whether Gaetz is one of them I'm not sure-- he may just want the attention more than anything else.
Relatively normie House Rs have known about these crazies the whole term but haven't had any idea what to do. Both times it began to look serious they've been rescued by McCarthy betraying the nuts after self-shamingly kowtowing to them, suddenly reversing course without telling anybody. So absolutely nobody can trust him now. But the normies have nowhere else to turn as long as the House is organized by the majority party, so they have to trust that McCarthy will continue to betray the crazies. Which sounds almost USSR-style paradoxical.
I think bbleh is right that no interest _in the House_ is served by getting rid of McCarthy. But you can't leave trump out of this. He's the one who benefits from real chaos and he's the actual party leader. How many real acolytes does he have in the House who are truly willing to tip us all over into anarchy? And what will the normie Rs do if that moment arrives? That's where it all hangs.
The first and only commandment is Thou Shalt Be Re-Elected. So I think it matters less what TFG himself thinks than what the members believe their voters -- especially primary voters -- will think, which of course is influenced by the Oracle's proclamations. And therein lies the quandary. Some of their voters are burn-it-down neo-anarchists (but don't touch mah Social Security, or agricultural subsidies, or The Troops, or or or) but they're a distinct minority. And a complete shutdown does NOT visibly Own The Libz. So unless TFG targets a member specifically, which he doesn't have the time (or likely the information -- or brains ahem) to do, the individual members are left to balance what's gonna happen in their voters' lives with what they're gonna hear generally from the Oracle. And if I had to guess, most of them -- with a few exceptions -- will go with stability over vague pronouncements about Making America Great Again Whatever Exactly That Means.
Now if TFG decides to go after Qevin hammer-and-tongs, then it's something else. But I don't think he'll do that, first because he doesn't really have the time, and second because it's not clear that it would do him good (despite the chaos) and it might actually do him harm.
(But on the third hand, I'm being rational here, and we're talking about Republicans, so maybe I'm way off base.)
I don't think it's in the interests of either most of the Republicans OR the Democrats to oust McQarthy, and frankly I don't even know that it's in the interests of Gaetz et al. actually to succeed.
Republicans don't want the chaos: they look bad enough as it is, and they're not advancing their agenda. I think Dems are perfectly happy with a hobbled McQarthy as Speaker, because they have significant leverage over him given the hostility of the Crazies, and because a truly dysfunctional House could hurt Biden. And I don't think the Crazies want to succeed -- only to be seen trying -- because they have inordinate power with McQarthy in the chair, while someone else might stuff them back into their hole.
So no, it's just Kabuki.
You're on! I don't think they'll oust him at all. I think part of the deal is that the Democrats will allow a handful of their caucus to vote against his removal.
I was right about the shutdown, predicting that there would be a bipartisan CR at the last minute.