Frantic self-abasement by GOP leader may all be in vain
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Having not done the math, I hadn’t realized that Kevin McCarthy’s House speakership bid can be blocked by just four Republican no votes. Despite McCarthy’s willingness to do practically anything to secure the necessary support, things are not going too well at the moment:
Kevin McCarthy has made perhaps his biggest concession so far to the band of conservatives standing in the way of his path to speaker. Yet it’s not clear if it will be enough to clinch his gavel.
In a lengthy conference call on Sunday, McCarthy and his team informed members that he would lower the barriers for rank-and-file members to attempt to depose a sitting speaker, a change that some GOP lawmakers have warned could weaken their leadership team. If adopted, the new rule would allow five members of the House majority to force a vote of no-confidence in their leader — a long-time demand of the party’s right flank. . .
It wasn’t the only ominous sign for McCarthy on Sunday: A group of nine conservatives who haven’t said how they plan to vote on Jan. 3 released a missive stating they remained unsatisfied by McCarthy’s answers to their demands from last month.
“Despite some progress achieved, Mr. McCarthy’s statement comes almost impossibly late to address continued deficiencies ahead of the opening of the 118th Congress on January 3rd,” the group, led by Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), wrote.
The group added that McCarthy’s response, which was delivered to them on Saturday, was “missing specific commitments with respect to virtually every component of our entreaties,” though they said some of the progress has been “helpful.”
Those noncommittal members, many of whom belong to the House Freedom Caucus, are in addition to several other prominent McCarthy skeptics in the GOP — underscoring the shakiness of the California Republican’s path to speaker on Tuesday.
The most likely outcome here would seem to be that McCarthy will manage to scrape together a bare majority by a vote or three, but that his speakership will collapse in short order, because the new rules he’s acceding to that could depose him will be deployed as soon as five GOP members of Congress get upset about trans communist drag queens programming Hunter’s laptop to turn them all gay, which I expect will happen sometime towards the middle of next week.