Is it time to play Speaker Roulette again? Reigning House lunatic Marjorie Taylor Greene is mad that Mike Johnson passed a budget package with the help of Democratic votes:
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, on Friday took the first step toward ousting House Speaker Mike Johnson, filing a resolution calling for his removal after he pushed through a $1.2 trillion bipartisan spending bill that enraged the hard right.
“Today I filed a motion to vacate after Speaker Johnson has betrayed our conference and broken our rules,” Ms. Greene said shortly after passage of the package... “It’s more of a warning than a pink slip,” Ms. Greene told reporters on the steps of the Capitol. “We need a new speaker.”
As it happens, this was not a vote where a few extreme Republicans dissented but most of them voted in favor. Republicans as a whole voted against the budget 112-101.
But did a majority of the Republican caucus truly hate the bill? Or was it more that a lot of them knew it would pass with Democratic votes, so they had the freedom to dissent without any consequences? I suspect the latter.
And what if MTG pulls the trigger on a motion to oust Johnson? He could easily keep his position with the help of a few Democrats, but he'd have to ask for it. Democrats probably wouldn't ask for anything in return, but they'd insist that Johnson has to at least want their support. Kevin McCarthy didn't, which sealed his fate.
These are all thoughts for another day. The debt ceiling is done, the budget is done, and there's nothing else coming up in the near future aside from Ukraine aid. So I imagine that Johnson is safe until Election Day, at least.
"Democrats probably wouldn't ask for anything in return"
I dunno. If republicans screw themselves into having another internal, extremely high profile and embarrassing fight over a new speaker it might not serve dems interests to help resolve it. Particularly if we can draw trump into the fracas and further highlight the incompetence of MAGA politicians and their inability to perform the very basics of governenance. It might also drive some more GOP house members to resign.
Ahem.
My thoughts as well. Ukraine aid failure has already cause lots of damage (UKR itself, US reputation). Why the continued delay? And I don't want to hear any BS about Mike Johnson being a Christian. He's not. He's Christian Veneer.
Isn't Christian Veneer a French fashion house?
Sorry, couldn't resist. Actually a good characterization of him.
Yeah, that's the ask/commitment, for sure, and I don't know why it's not even a throwaway aside here.
Though I'm not sure about this, the mechanics might not require affirmative votes but simply abstentions or absences of enough Ds that Johnson gets by on the votes he has in his own caucus. But no D leader could be naive enough to do that for free.
Republicans should put MTG into the seat, don't you think?
She'd shut down government at the start of FY2025, just before the election. Her argument will be that her actions show that she is serious about...stuff...and that it wasn't her who shut down the gov't, but Ds who voted against the GOP's one-sided budget.
Sadly, that gambit would probably work for millions of low-info Americans on both sides of the political spectrum. Far, far too many Americans have no idea how government or elections work, and just assume that "well we just had an election so everything that happens now must be the winner's fault."
"Democrats probably wouldn't ask for anything in return..."
This is both almost definitely true, and really stupid of Democrats.
Hakeem Jeffries should take this opportunity to undermine the shortsighted convention that the minority ALWAYS votes against The Rule on pending legislation. This gives extremists in the majority a chokehold on legislation.
It seems like a good way to enforce party discipline, and there may be instances where it is essential to block unwise or punitive legislation. But most of the time it just means that the "ultras" in the majority get to block GOOD legislation that the minority supports.
The total value of Trump Media after the merger, were it not for the memestock status, would be the value of Truth Social plus the cash brought in by DWAC, which according to my math is $0 + $300 million (according to WaPo) = $300 million. So Trump's 90% stake should be worth $270 million...until that cash is spent down.
But it looks like, after the merger, Trump’s stake is only ~40%, ~$120 million. Of course, he can’t sell any sizable fraction of that without crashing the share price.
Nor, at least in theory, can he do that for another 6 months, if I'm understanding this correctly, and who knows what the share price will be then. OTOH the market price is what a willing buyer and a willing seller agree on, and it's just possible that trump could be persuaded to take a higher price than is publicly quoted . . .
BTW, Johnson and McCarthy have to be in completely different categories as far as Ds are concerned. McCarthy made himself widely detested by not only lying wildly about them to the media but also betraying agreements he'd made with them. He had a real history of earned enmity.
Johnson's a smarmy creep-- what Harold Lloyd would look like if he bathed in castor oil, maybe-- and he's done some really hinky stuff around the spending bills, but I don't know of any instances where he's deliberately betrayed Ds, and he has gone to them (explicitly or implicitly) several times now for suspension. So they might be inclined to prop him up in return for Ukraine/Taiwan/Israel aid. And then let nature take its course in the R bear pit.
"Democrats probably wouldn't ask for anything in return"
I've often though that Democrats can be pretty dumb (or at least naive), but I don't think they are quite as dumb as Kevin here. A WaPo report has multiple Democrats indicating that they would be willing to save MAGAt Mike ... if he allows the Ukraine aid bill to come to the floor. And that's the least he could do.
I hope they also hold out for humanitarian aid for Gaza. And limiting aid to Israel to border- and missile-defense only; no offensive weapons whatever.