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Happy first Tuesday in 2023. The fun never stops. We thought we’d be able to announce the new Speaker of the House tonight. We thought we knew who it was going to be, but no, the race for speaker is still ongoing. Voting has been suspended for the day. It’s going to resume again tomorrow.
Now, the fact that this race has not been settled by now is being described, especially online by many, as embarrassing – and it is embarrassing if you prefer the Soviet-style consensus of the Democratic Party’s internal elections, where votes are merely a formality and all the really big decisions, the meaningful ones, are made years in advance by donors. Oh, of course, everyone’s on board. That’s what they do.
But if you prefer democracy to oligarchy, if you prefer real debates about issues that actually matter, it’s pretty refreshing to see it. Yes, it’s a little chaotic, but this is what it’s supposed to be. Now, we’re going to give you a lot more to tell them what’s happening in just a minute and throughout the week, but first, a quick overview to frame the big points.
Kevin McCarthy of California was going to be speaker. He badly wants to be speaker. In fact, he wants that job more than anything else in his life and he was going to get it. But then a group of 20 Republican members stopped him. Now they stopped him because they decided that Kevin McCarthy is not conservative enough to represent a party that’s just taking back the House from Nancy Pelosi. and they are definitely right about that.
JIM JORDAN HOUSE SPEAKER PUSH IS HOLDING UP GOP AGENDA: REPUBLICAN REP-ELECT
McCarthy is not especially conservative. He is, in fact, ideologically agnostic. He’s flexible. His real constituency is the lobbying community in Washington. So, if you’ve got sincere political beliefs, that is infuriating to watch. On the other hand, to be fair, this is politics and McCarthy does have strengths. It’s not easy being speaker when the
