David Kurtz acknowledges he doesn't entirely know what's going on in the House of Representatives,
I’m not going to sit here and pretend I have a grasp on what is happening in the House. I don’t think anyone really does.
which may make him effectively the most reliable guide, and one of the things he does think he understands is that it's much less important who succeeds to the speakership than whether they manage to scrap the Gaetz-devised rule allowing any member to force a vote on whether the Speaker should stay in office:
if the hair-trigger motion to vacate under the current rules is kept in place, then no speaker will have the authority to lead. It would be a phantom majority. Kevin McCarthy stumbled through nine months of that before it all collapsed.
No one wants the job under those circumstances, nor should they.
The rule delivers absolute power in the House to Gaetz, or some replacement for Gaetz as madman-in-chief (not Jordan, I don't suppose, or Taylor Greene, both of whom parked their loyalty with Kevin McCarthy even while maintaining close ties to Trump, and seem to have developed aspirations to "legitimacy", but more of a pure nihilist like Biggs or Rosendale), and it they can't get rid of it, the next Speaker will be just as impotent as McCarthy was.
Then there's the question of whether they'll be able to elect a Speaker at all. Both of the two announced candidates have difficulties with one set or the other of irreconcilables; Scalise is ideologically far right enough for the craziest ("David Duke without the baggage", as he notoriously said himself), but institutionally too comfortable as a member of the elite to please them; Jordan, Trump favorite and class clown of the hearing room, is widely hated, I believe, by colleagues who regard him as one of the agents of the January 6 chaos, though they won't say so publicly. Nor does Jordan have guaranteed support from the maniacs, in spite of the Trump endorsement: Stephen Bannon (of whom more in a subsequent post) has been pretty down on him lately, and making what sounds like a demand for Gym to come over and kiss his ring:
"Jim Jordan was @ one time a champion, but over the past few years has acted almost like 'controlled opposition'... impeachment and weaponization have been non events —@ best. With thorough vetting in all areas and a deep understanding of the specifics of what a Jordan Speakership would actually entail, he may eventually be the right pick," Bannon wrote on Thursday on the social media website GETTR.
"Eventually" could mean past the mid-November government shutdown, and months of anarchy inside the Capitol and out around the country, as vital government functions disappear.
The obvious solution is the filmscript Aaron Sorkin might write, of course, in which a bunch of brave Republican representatives from swing districts make a deal to support Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries for the speakership, in return for some committee spots and possible chairmanships, or even talk Democrats into backing one of their own "Problem Solvers" (my pick would by South Dakota's Dusty Johnson, a glib equivocator loved by NPR who refers to McCarthy's ousting as a "giant waste of time" and insists he can work with Democrats but advocates impeaching Biden without evidence), but I don't think that's going to happen (and certainly hope it doesn't, with Johnson or one of his ilk, who's at bottom no more trustworthy than Jordan himself).
One last variable is the extremely thin Republican majority, which is likely to be shrinking by at least one—George Santos, whose former campaign treasurer Nancy Marks just pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy charges that could earn her a five-year sentence, and is certainly providing evidence against the congressman and his scheme
to mislead the public about the state of Santos' finances by "falsely inflating the campaign's reported receipts with non-existent contributions and loans."
According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Marks and "the candidate" reported fictional or inflated contributions to Santos' campaign by family members.
They also allegedly lied about a $500,000 loan that Santos claimed he made to his own political operation.
(still can't wait to learn where that half million dollars actually came from). And maybe Gaetz himself, now the target of what looks like a personal campaign from Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), who seems to have really had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane:
Sen. Markwayne Mullin on Matt Gaetz: “We had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor … of the girls that he had slept with. He’d brag about how he would crush ED medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.”
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) October 5, 2023
Gaetz responds: “This is a lie” pic.twitter.com/h55hj0ag29
Wonkette is your best source for that, as well as a lot of other stuff.
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