Member Newsletter
We are down to the wire with the Jim Jordan maybe-Speakership. He’s down to a relatively small number of holdouts. But at least some of them seem pretty dug in. If I had to bet (which I never do) I’d say Jordan wears them down and becomes Speaker by the end of the week. But it’s less certain than it was yesterday. He seems to have lost some momentum last night. That may be more ping ponging of news narratives than anything that happened in the real world, the real vote counts. But news narratives and spin have a reality of their own in these cases because what Jordan’s allies were doing yesterday was creating that feeling of a stampede, a rush for the exits where no one wants to be the last out.
What stands out to me is that even the holdouts can’t quite articulate the real issue. Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, one of only a handful of genuine ‘moderates’ in the caucus, said this morning, “I can’t get past the fact that a small group in our conference violated the rules to get rid of Kevin [McCarthy], and then blocked Steve [Scalise].”
But it’s not that they “blocked” Scalise.
After McCarthy dropped out, the GOP caucus held a vote to decide who the caucus would back on the House floor. Scalise won that vote. But most of Jordan’s backers just said they wouldn’t abide by the results of the vote. Seeing no way to persuade them, Scalise dropped out of the race. That triggered another caucus election to decide who the caucus would back on the House floor. This time Jordan defeated a random back bencher who was likely there mainly as a placeholder for opposition to Jordan. But Jordan didn’t win by much more than Scalise won the first round. Jordan’s allies in turn went scorched earth against his opponents and got most of them to fold. This is ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ rules. The Jordan backers message is, ‘we’re the rule breakers and you’re the rule followers. So we get to break them and you have to follow them even when we break them. And that means that you have to back Jordan now both because those are the rules but also because there’s no choice since you know we won’t follow them if and when you win.’
It’s another version of debt ceiling hostage-taking. ‘You’re going to fold because deep down you know we’re willing to wreck the country to get what we want. We both know that. And we both know you’re not wiling to do that. So we’ve already won. All we’re talking about is when you realize it.’
This is obviously a fool’s game. Agreeing to play by those rules means you’ve already lost. I don’t particularly care about McCarthy or Scalise who thrived under this system before it consumed them. Who cares about them? But as we discussed a couple days ago, this is just a microcosm of the authoritarian pathogen looming over and threatening the whole American Republic. It’s the use of force over systems of rules. So in that sense it matters quite a lot.