Jim Jordan has already lost five votes and the roll call is only through the Ds, so he's not going to be elected Speaker of the House today. Better luck tomorrow, Jim.
UPDATE: Jordan won only 199 votes today, less than the 200 he won yesterday. Things are not improving for Jim Jordan.
If the Republican caucus had even a few grownups in it, they would be willing to reach out to Democrats and ask what it would take to get a few votes from their side to elect a compromise candidate. But of course Republicans don't want compromise; they want everything their way or burn it all down.
The GOP has spent decades demonizing Democrats, successfully, because a large fraction of their voters believe the lies. As with every other voter group, Republicans can’t afford to lose the credulous, so they can’t be seen to cut any deals with the Evil Party.
At least 25% of the GOP base is animated solely on making the libs cry.
If they can stop immigration at the same time that's a bonus.
If you do something that you think is morally right but tanks your re-election chances, what happens? You don't get re-elected. So be it, you may say. But when this principle is applied repeatedly -- over multiple election cycles, at multiple levels of government, across all the districts in the country -- the result is natural selection, weeding out people in Congress who choose moral rectitude over re-election.
This is more or less inevitable in a democracy, so blaming the products of this process for behaving like products of this process is kinda pointless. The question is how to make it so that "doing the basic work of government" does not fall under "tanks your re-election chances."
IMO, this leads to fixing the Congressional primary process. My ideal would be ranked-choice voting, but since that will take a while to gain traction, I'd settle for simply making primary voting easier and more publicized, to bring in more voters and reduce the concentration of loonies.
The primary process is not fixable, because it requires politically savvy voters to work properly, and you don't have that in the US. Rank choice voting (wikipedia calls it "Rank Voting": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting) is the only plausible solution.
You've summed up my thinking pretty well. The only thing I would add is that it isn't time to do this yet. Jordan needs to throw in the towel or humiliate himself further.
McCarthy took 15 votes to become speaker. Jordan is going to get more than 2, assuming he wants them.
"But when this principle is applied repeatedly -- over multiple election cycles, at multiple levels of government, across all the districts in the country -- the result is natural selection, weeding out people in Congress who choose moral rectitude over re-election."
But this sort of "natural selection" process doesn't actually happen in real life American politics. Most seats are won by the same person over and over again until they die/retire/move onto another office, no matter what they do in office... or their district is redrawn in a way that bears little to no relationship to their prior district, which causes them to lose regardless of whether they exhibited morality or pursued self-interest. Many seats in Congress have had fewer than 10 people ever in them. So this whole "morality will be weeded out" theory is purely speculative. Evolution doesn't work well if there is little turnover, and doesn't work at all if everything is redrawn from scratch every decade.
“But this sort of "natural selection" process doesn't actually happen in real life American politics.”
In Trump’s second impeachment process, 10 Republican House members voted to impeach Donald Trump and only 2 are still in office. In the Senate, 7 Republicans voted for conviction. When Romney retires, there will only be 3 of them left. None of the Republicans lost to a Democrat in a general election. They either retired or lost in the primary. Those people put morality or the nation above partisanship, and Republican primary voters rejected that choice. So, the theory holds. Those willing to compromise or put national priorities over partisan gain are sent home and replaced by worse people.
“Many seats in Congress have had fewer than 10 people ever in them.” The only ones that I am aware that fit that criteria are Alaska’s at-large district with 5 and Hawaii’s 2nd with 8.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
The question in my mind is whether or not MAGA will be willing to take a huge risk for Gym and kill or threaten to kill a Republican congressman. Before ⅙ I think they might have been but now, with all the foot soldiers and lower management types being prosecuted and actually imprisoned for long periods of time, I think that MAGA lost its nerve when it lost its impunity.
I think Trump’s struggling with that problem himself. He can’t seem to get the reaction he obviously wants from the Republican base because I think they’re worried about the consequences. And Gym seriously removed from the pinnacle of MAGA world and nobody’s going to die or go to prison to make him speaker.
I am enjoying Gym's humiliation.
Could the MAGA GOP possibly find an even worse candidate for Speaker than Gym? Excluding the obvious, like MTG, Gaetz, Boebert, and of course Il Duce himself, is there anyone in that band of traitors and anarchists who is a bigger piece of shit than Jordan?
They're both so far out on the scale it's hard to say who could be worse, but how about James Comer?
A basic problem even for MAGA: to the extent that the goal isn't just pure chaos, whoever's in the chair has to maintain the brand, which takes at least a little bit of legislative competence. They have to push through those messaging bills that get nowhere, and some people on the appropriations committee seem to think there are a few priorities that simply have to be funded if only to keep MAGA happy. That takes some amount of logrolling and scheduling chops. Jordan has negative legislative competence.
MAGA needs a speaker who's competent and batshit crazy at the same time. McCarthy might have been their only horse at that rodeo, and that was just because he substituted unscrupulousness for insanity.
I'm enjoying the entire country seeing how utterly useless and incompetent this gang of thugs, nuts and losers is.
It is terrible for the nation, of course, but we apparently can't have anything better right now.
So every time another shitbag in a suit whines to Fox News about how the Dems did this, I smile a little wider.
A good speaker has to be an expert parliamentarian as well as having the personal skills to forge consensus. Jordan is neither of these, as even some Republicans realize. Jordan has never authored a bill in 16 years in the house and is more into personnal intimidation than process. A good share of his own caucus hates him. Smart people don't seek jobs that they are unqualified for by both temperament and job skill set.
In a sign that their caucus is splintering, House Republicans arrived at the Capitol today in three separate tiny cars, rather than the single small vehicle that they had been using.
Ha!