House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) called for Republicans to “get their act together” and elect the next speaker while slamming the “extremists” within their party.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) called for Republicans to “get their act together” and elect the next speaker while slamming the “extremists” within their party.
Give the current state of the Republican electorate, it would be political suicide if any of them voted for a Democrat for Speaker. They may as well announce they are leaving the party at the same time.
OTOH, A handful of Democrats steering the post to a much more moderate Republican Speaker won’t see nearly the same amount of blowback from their electorate, and it may even help them get reelected, since Democrats value a functioning government.
There is no possible way this will ever happen. And if it does, the Ds who vote for it should be thrown out on their asses.
First, there’s no way they’d be able to get the entire Democrat party to go along with this, as those who are in far left districts would be thrown out on their ass just as quickly as a GOP representative voting for a Dem speaker.
Second, you’d have to find someone in the GOP that’s (a) willing to take the job, and (b) palatable to both Democrats and moderate Republicans. Who the hell would the GOP even put up that would be palatable? Their 3 biggest candidates are a slimeball, a pedo, and a racist. You think there’s a chance that a single Democrat would be able to vote for someone with the baggage of McCarthy, Jordan, or Scalise while still being able to keep their own seat?
Third, because of the rule that any single person can push a motion to vacate, there would be nothing stopping Gaetz or anyone else from just filing another motion to vacate, knowing there are probably enough on both the extreme left and right that would vote to remove him and put us right back in the position we’re in now.
And even if you could get past all of that, there would be absolutely nothing stopping whoever the new speaker is from reneging on whatever promises he made to win the speakership and telling Democrats to go pound sand, as Democrats wouldn’t have the votes necessary to do anything about it.
In more “normal” times, this may have been a possibility. But the political realities and climate in this country have made this nothing more than an absurd fantasy for at least the past couple of decades. Democrats need to stop saving Republicans from thesmelves, moderate Republicans need to stop acting like its the Democrats’ sworn duty to bail them out every time one of their crazy stunts backfire, and Republican leadership needs to start taking a hard line against the most extreme wing. I mean yeah, their voting base may be pissed off, but what are they going to do? Vote for a Democrat in retaliation?
.
Honestly, I don’t see a realistic path forward for anybody right now. Of course, at some point, somebody is going to have to fall on their sword, but there’s no real way of knowing who’s going to have to be the one to do that right now as everybody has their heels dug in. If you put a gun to my head and forced me to make a prediction, I’d say 5 Republicans voting for Jeffries is the “most likely” way to go, but when I say “most likely” in this case, I mean “has a slightly better chance of happening than me getting blown by every Dallas Cowboys cheerleader in alphabetical order”.
I’d love to see Vegas put odds on which side is going to cave first: Dems, GOP, or MAGA. I don’t even know what the result would be, outside of knowing that somebody would be making a fuckton of cash off it.
.
Nitpick. They decided it was better to allow these nutjobs to spew their bile because it made them a fuckton of cash. When even people at Fox News started saying “Hey, you think we may be going just a wee bit too far here?”, the response was to continue doing it because they were making a fuckton of cash and becoming more moderate would cede viewers to Newsmax and OANN. CNN held that Trump Town Hall specifically to cater to these people (Granted, that backfired on them spectacularly). Even CNN now has started catering to a limited degree to these people because there’s just too much money to be made placating idiots and their conspiracy theories.
They know it’s all bullshit. They even knew this would happen. They just didn’t care because they were swimming in cash.
.