Even during that shitshow in January McCarthy never once received fewer than 200 votes over the 15 rounds of voting.
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Wouldn’t it be nice if the Tea Party extremists declared themselves a separate party and the Democratic Party could start making the US Congress actually work again?
Ah well, I can dream, can’t i?
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Could have been they needed to be elsewhere for the day, maybe other business to attend to. It is, after all, more ceremonial on their part, generally speaking.
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Looks like the party is over. Closed door meeting decided Jordan is done.
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It’s being part of the consensus process with the other party that is the hurdle. The thing that is supposed to make the house work has been declared impossible by the GOP. If the Democrats all picked a retired Republican, they would probably still not get any converts to vote with them (yet). The Democrats also shouldn’t do that.
I think they’ll get there eventually. Probably right before (or maybe right after) the government shutdown. The recent shutdown was almost caused by the requirement to pass the spending bills along party lines, with stuff in them they knew the other party would never agree too.
They eventually, at the very last minute, managed a consensus solution that was able to attract votes from both parties. They just needed to get to the point that not doing that was worse than not doing anything.
The two or five or whatever it is parts of the GOP could arrive at this internal to the GOP consensus first. That should be an easier goal to reach, since they’re all in theory closer to each other than to the Democrats. However, it appears they’re not really closer, or that at least one of those groups is unwilling to ever compromise with anyone and hence ruining it for everyone else.
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He upped his standards.
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… Google says Morgan Freeman
If we want somebody under 80, Michael J. Fox scores surprisingly high for someone who’s been out of the spotlight for so long
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Well, if the house GOP wants to try floating a new turd next week, I would suggest they prep their candidate with a diet high in fiber, broccoli and Mountain Dew. 
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I was delighted to read about congressmen declaring privately that they were strategically voting for Jordan in the early votes (once sure he would lose) so they could vote against in later ones, and put his tally on a visible downward trend.
I’ve read several times “the Democrats shouldn’t vote for a Republican”, i.e. shouldn’t accept (say) Liz Cheney as a compromise candidate. I agree it’s a weird precedent to set, but absent the ridiculous one-vote-to-vacate rule, what’s really so bad about this idea?
Because most of the ‘moderate’ Republicans like Liz Cheney are still awful. Maybe it could work if the speaker agreed to follow a variation of Denison’s Rule?
The principle is always to vote in favour of further debate, or, where it has been previously decided to have no further debate or in some specific instances, to vote in favour of the status quo.[2][3] Thus, the Speaker will vote:
- against the final reading of a bill (and against holding such readings immediately rather than in the future, to allow for time to consider the matter)
- in favour of earlier readings of bills (and in favour of holding such readings immediately rather than in the future, to allow for further debate)
- against amendments to bills
- against motions of no confidence
- in favour of disagreeing with amendments made by the House of Lords
The thinking behind the rule is that change should only occur if an actual majority vote is in favour of the change.
The GQP would object, of course.
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I agree, but, that’s not yet a good enough reason. In the current setup, the minority party has zero input into the choice of speaker. Why is “zero” better than “a tiny amount”?
Yes, it requires you to vote for an evil, in particular, for the lesser of several evils. That’s what I expect politicians to hold their nose and do.
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… Americans don’t usually have to deal with coalition politics in Congress, so we’re having trouble getting past the babytalk phase 
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When the language of genocide has become normalised by the Right, the lesser of evils has to cross back over a line before they can possibly be considered. If they are still murderous then there is no incentive to support them.
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So it’s better for 212 to vote for the lesser evil than for 5 to vote for the lesser evil?
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What scenarios are you comparing here?
All the Democrats can do is choose what to do with their vote. They can’t corral Gaetz et al. In particular they can’t choose how those other folk vote.
I’m not in favor of Democrats being responsible enabling Republicans to be irresponsible, e.g. Democrats paying down the deficit so that Republicans can spend it on hookers and blow upper-class tax cuts. Is that maybe the sort of thing you’re objecting to? I don’t want to put words in your mouth but I’m not getting enough of your drift, at the moment.
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Hmm. In Family Ties he played a Reagan-loving, greed-is-good young Republican with a Nixon lunchbox, and in The American President he played the environment-loving Assistant to a liberal President who was (justifiably, in my opinion) receiving a lot of criticism for dating a lobbyist whose was actively employed to lobby the president. So I think that folks on both sides of the political spectrum might find something unappealing about his past.
(Yeah, obviously actors are not the people that they play on screen, but the public is often confused on that point)
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