| Party | Candidate | Votes | % |
|---|---|---|---|
| Democratic | Hakeem Jeffries (NY 8) | 212 | 49.1% |
| Republican | Jim Jordan (OH 4) | 200 | 46.3% |
| Republican | Steve Scalise (LA 1) | 7 | 1.6% |
| Republican | Kevin McCarthy (CA 20) | 6 | 1.4% |
| Republican | Lee Zeldin | 3 | 0.7% |
| Republican | Tom Cole (OK 4) | 1 | 0.2% |
| Republican | Tom Emmer (MN 6) | 1 | 0.2% |
| Republican | Mike Garcia (CA 27) | 1 | 0.2% |
| Republican | Thomas Massie (KY 4) | 1 | 0.2% |
Note: official party nominees in bold.
Democrats do not look better by letting the Republicans flail. If this is going to be a repeat of the last speakership election, Democrats should intervene.
There is no constitutional requirement that the speaker of the house be a member of Congress. Democrats should nominate a strong apolitical candidate (perhaps a Medal of Honor recipient), and dare the Republicans to give them anything less than their whole-hearted support.
Hell, they should publish a list of the next 10 such candidates they will be nominating, inviting the public and media to compare Jim Jordan to a whole list of laudable alternatives.
Waiting for the Republicans to negotiate toward a position that will appease Matt Gaetz and his chucklefucks serves neither the nation's interests nor Democratic interests.
Republicans do not look better by letting the Republicans flail. If this is going to be a repeat of the last speakership election, Republicans should vote for Jeffries.
There is no constitutional requirement that the speaker of the house be a member of the majority party in Congress. Republicans should vote for Jeffries since Jeffries has the most votes.
Hell, they could publish a list of alternatives to Jeffries in the Democratic party, inviting the public and media to compare candidates as they reach across the aisle.
Watching Republicans waste time until they negotiate toward a position that will appease Matt Gaetz and his chucklefucks shows just how much Republicans don't give a fuck about neither the nation's interests nor Democratic interests.
To a moderate Republican, the only thing worse than Gaetz is a Democratic political player. The only way a Republican can vote for the Democratic nominee is if that nominee is not a political operative.
A non-partisan speakership cuts the floor out from under Gaetz and his cronies, allowing the GOP to ignore its lunatic fringe and come back to the center.
When was the last time the Republicans let anything be non-political? Fucking surgical masks were political for crissakes! The moment a name comes out of the lips of a Democrat, Republicans will make it a partisan issue, no matter who is picked. Division isn't a bug to them, it's a feature.
And that's the problem, isn't it?
This is not how stuff works literally at all lmfao. There is no angle that what you're saying makes any amount of actual sense.
Bullshit. Why try to cover for their inability to govern? It's gonna suck, but if these people keep getting elected it will continue to suck for a long time. I'm all for a schism splitting off the radical right.
It's their house, and it's going to be a shitshow, but people voted for this. Maybe it'll make the party implode, or at least a few reconsider it next time out of embarrassment.
Bad take. We aren't covering for their inability to govern. We are exploiting their inability to govern by forcing them to accept a candidate they don't really want.
And if they aren't willing to accept that candidate, we keep comparing their horseshit speaker to the upstanding hero we could have had.
6 Republicans who don't want to reject a war hero either divide the party, or force it to back that reasonable candidate.
Instead, we're going to get someone an inch closer to Matt Gaetz. Fuck. That. Shit.
I get the impulse, but the difference between a democrat (Jeffries), and someone nominated by a democrat (MOH recipient/etc) to the GOP is minimal if not non-existent.
If you're talking about Republican politicians, I would agree. If you're talking about Republican voters, I strongly disagree. The reverence our current and former soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines have for MoH recipients is stronger than the distrust we have for the major parties. I don't see Republican politicians being able to spin war heroes into political hacks.
Fuck off with blaming the Dems because the Republicans can't get their shit together to nominate a compromise candidate instead of going further right with each nominee.
"further right with each nominee" IS the compromise. The only thing worse to a Republican than compromising with Gaetz is compromise with the Democrats.
We don't want compromise. We want to force the issue. We don't do that by sitting back and watching them flail around until they give Gaetz something he can call a victory. We do that by eliminating Gaetz from the equation. Relegate him to the back bench.
Let your fuckin voters do that lmfao. People been complaining that the democratic party is too passive and too quick to compromise, yet the moment they have a spine people say "oh no! that was the problem all along!"
People voted for Republicans, they got Republicans. This dysfunction is exactly what Republican politicians promised their voters.
Yes, I fully agree. So would the Republican voters. The Republicans made a campaign promise of dysfunction, and the Republicans are successfully delivering on that promise. The MAGA crowd love that Gaetz and the chaos caucus are doing this. They are enthusiastic about the direction that American politics are moving.
What did the Democrats promise? I don't believe they promised to stand by and watch while the world burns under Republican dysfunction.
The wrong party is the one keeping its promises.
Decades of that sort of coddling is exactly how we ended up in this situation to begin with.
Yes they do, this is hilarious.
The R frontrunners are someone that covered up high school rape and "David Duke without the baggage."
University, wasn't it?
My bad, you're right.
Teenage rape.
Republicans failing because they’re bad at literally everything except fear mongering
“Boy this makes the Democrats look bad!”
Love seeing Democrats held responsible for Republican foolishness, as if the GOP are children fighting over what kind of cereal to get while the parents do nothing. At some point Republicans are going to have to be held accountable for their own fucking behavior, because although they’re a party full of immature, selfish, posturing, anti-democracy protofascists, they’re also grown adults. Let their failure be a demonstration to reasonable people everywhere of exactly how unfit they are to govern.
"The buck stops here.".
Democrats certainly aren't responsible for creating the problem, but they certainly can take credit for solving it.
The only people who benefit from the GOP sorting it out themselves are Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump.
You live in a unicorn world if you think that the GOP will give any credit to the Dems for allowing them to elect their speaker. They will somehow find a way to turn it against the Dems in the most inane way.
The point for Republicans is to flail around until the budget extension runs out. We're getting another 3 weeks of this.
At the end of that 3 weeks, we have a GOP speaker a little closer to Matt Gaetz, with the full support of the Republican party. And then he pulls this shit again, and the Republican party shifts a little further to the right. And again, and again, until that slimy weasel is in the white house.
Or, we divide the GOP right now, either giving them a respectable figurehead with just 6 GOP votes, or we spend the term asking their base why they preferred their loser speaker over honest-to-god heroes.
Best case, the new speaker is approved almost unanimously, and Gaetz looks like the fuckwit we all know him to be. worst case, the GOP looks even more incompetent than they actually are.
They would have an even worse chance of winning than Jeffries.
The Speakership is not an award or purely ceremonial position. The Speaker is a political operative. Their job is to unite a majority and keep it united during subsequent legislative votes. Winning the gavel is just the first test. If they can't consistently get a majority to vote for stuff, their gavel is useless.
That's why Democrats won't vote for a GOP Speaker unless they strike some sort of bipartisan deal about future legislation. In other words, Democrats will support whoever can offer something to Democrats in exchange.
An apolitical outsider offers nothing to anybody. They have no chance at becoming Speaker for that reason. And if they accidentally stumbled into the job, they would be unable to pass legislation - so why bother giving them the job?
You're describing the "majority leader" and the "majority whip". Not the speaker.
The speaker's role can and should be akin to that of a judge, with the majority and minority leaders as litigants.
That's not the actual role of the Speaker. They are, and always have been, responsible for wheeling, dealing, and cajoling other members in order to pass legislation. They are the carrot to the Whip's stick.
To take one example, Nancy Pelosi was a very effective Speaker but she was not a dispassionate "judge". She was in every way a power broker, like Tip O'Neill (another very effective Speaker).
If the Speakership worked as you suggest, with no real power to push an agenda, then few people would want the job. It would be like the President of the Senate (aka Vice-President), a job which is usually a consolation prize.
Nancy Pelosi didn't need to take a dispassionate role; she had the support of a partisan majority. Same thing with Tip O'Neill and the overwhelming majority of past speakers.
The last speaker only had a partisan majority because Matt Gaetz managed to drag the party to the right.
The next speaker will only enjoy a partisan majority if Matt Gaetz manages to drag the party even further to the right.
We disarm Matt Gaetz, and stop the rightward swing of the Republican Party by making the speakership an apolitical role.
Hakeem Jeffries should be the one announcing and supporting our "hero" candidate.
If Matt Gaetz could drag his party to the right, then Jim Jordan would already be Speaker. The reason Jim Jordan isn't Speaker tonight is that some members of the GOP are resisting further moves towards extremism.
If they can ultimately be won over to extremism, then Jordan won't need support from Democrats.
If they prefer bipartisanship to extremism, then they must find a Speaker who will actually work with Democrats.
But bipartisanship means supporting legislation that advances at least some Democratic priorities. "Stopping the rightward swing of the Republican Party" and "making Matt Gaetz less influential in the GOP" is not a Democratic priority. At all. Democrats don't care about internal GOP squabbles. If anything, painting the GOP as extremist would help Democrats in 2024.
Finally, nothing in the House is apolitical. So supporting an "apolitical" candidate doesn't help Democratic priorities either, since an outsider "hero" is powerless to push through any legislation, much less push through something that will help Democrats.
It absolutely should be. We should be sabotaging right-wing extremists any chance we can get.
Democrats sabotage right-wing Republican extremists by trying to get people to vote for Democrats.
Not by trying to get people to vote for different Republicans. Or otherwise help Republicans make themselves more appealing.
You've got it backwards. Gaetz is the one making the Republican party more appealing to Republicans. Undercutting Gaetz makes the Republican party less appealing, not more.
Democrats don't care whether the Republican party is appealing to Republicans.
Democrats only care whether the Republican party is appealing to voters in general. And they believe, for good reason, that people like Gaetz make the Republican party less appealing to voters in general.
If that is true, it is an incredibly shortsighted and foolish belief.
The objective should be to achieve the policy positions of the Democratic party, regardless of which party is currently in power.
The way to do that is to promote our policies when we are in power, and to push the Republicans toward our policies (and away from their lunatic fringe) when they are in power.
Allowing the Republicans to constantly run further and further away from our positions makes things worse, not better. I am honestly horrified that Democrats could possibly consider this a good thing.
I think and I hope your vile argument misrepresents the Democratic party position.
Yes, the objective of Democrats is to achieve Democratic policy goals. That's why Democrats have, in fact, already indicated that they are willing to support a bipartisan GOP Speaker who will make a deal with Democrats to help achieve some of those goals.
What they are not willing to do is support a GOP politician who offers nothing to Democrats in order to defeat a different GOP politician who also offers nothing to Democrats. It's a distinction without a difference, because either way Democratic policies will not be achieved.
In other words, there is no reason to support GOP politicians who are not willing to help Democrats. There is no reason to support someone like McCarthy in order to defeat someone like Gaetz. Because neither one wants to help Democrats achieve Democratic goals. Their superficial difference - i.e. steadfast opposition to Democrats based on expediency (McCarthy) vs extremism (Gaetz) - is irrelevant.
Irrelevant to the issue at hand: I never suggested supporting a GOP politician.
I suggested an apolitical outsider: someone other than a congressman. A person untainted by political aspirations. I suggested a Medal of Honor recipient, but we could go with an astronaut, or the head of a major charitable organization, or someone else with an awe-inspiring origin story who hasn't yet managed to piss off half the country.
They've asked the GOP to nominate someone the Democrats can support. That's the wrong approach. Anybody the GOP nominates will automatically be considered a partisan hack by many of the Democrats. Any division in the Democratic ranks would be very damaging. Democratic leaders would have an extremely difficult time trying to wrangle all Democrats to support any candidate the GOP puts forward.
We want the opposite. We want 212 Democrats voting for this person. That means we have to nominate this person.
This person's unassailable record needs to scare the GOP leadership into believing 6 or more of their own members may defect. An MoH recipient can do that.
As soon as they believe that, GOP leadership has to jump on the bandwagon and back this person as well.
It would be incredibly damaging to the GOP for all of their members to shun an MoH recipient. Current and former military would crucify them.
The Speaker is a highly political job. They decide which bills will get a floor vote and which bills will not get a floor vote. One of their first decisions will be whether to bring a budget bill with Ukraine funding to the floor, or a budget bill without Ukraine funding. They will need to decide one or the other before anyone votes for them as Speaker.
If an "apolitical" outsider plans to include Ukraine funding, they would put many Republicans in a tough spot. So why exactly should they have support from those Republicans? If they plan not to fund Ukraine, why exactly should they have Democratic support?
Likewise, will the "apolitical" Speaker bring pro-choice bills or anti-choice bills to the floor? Pro-LGBTQ or anti-LGBTQ? Pro-union or anti-union? Pro-environment or anti-environment? And so on. Whichever they choose, it will cost them support.
Legislators favor certain bills, and they won't vote for a Speaker who won't bring those bills to the floor. Even if they have a Medal of Honor.
Several decorated war heroes have gone into politics, including GHWB, McCain, and Inouye (who actually had a MoH himself). They didn't automatically get bipartisan support based on their military record. If 212 Democrats somehow nominated and voted for someone with a Medal of Honor, that person would immediately be labeled a Democratic war hero, like Inouye. And they would get as many Republican votes for Speaker as Inouye would have: zero.
It's cute that you think this would matter at all. The Republicans won't vote for anyone who isn't a hardcore republican. Their base wouldn't give a single fuck about them not voting for someone great the Democrats all voted for.