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Notes -
Following up on my post from yesterday welcome to day 2 of the United States House of Representatives attempt to choose a Speaker. The current favorite is former House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) though he has been unable to gather the needed majority (or even plurality) of votes of members of the House needed to secure the Speakership. As of the third ballot yesterday there were some 20 Republican holdouts against McCarthy, of which he needs at least 13 in order to get more votes than Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) the Democratic Party nominee for speaker. The fourth ballot is currently underway and interestingly the Republican protestors seem to have changed their candidate from Jim Jordan (R-OH) to Byron Donalds (R-FL). Overnight it seems Trump has re-endorsed McCarthy for Speaker, we'll see if that moves the needle for the Republican holdouts. As of the time of this writing Donalds has acquired 7 votes, more than enough to keep McCarthy from acquiring the majority and likely guaranteeing a fifth ballot.
Assuming McCarthy eventually becomes Speaker (something I still think is the most likely outcome) how does he effectively run the House? The Republican majority is quite narrow (222-212) meaning the defection of only five Republicans can sink any legislation he wants to bring. Effectively this is a similar problem to the one Democrats faced in the Senate this last term, where the support of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were required for them to effectively utilize their 50+tiebreaker majority.
ETA:
At the end of the fourth ballot the results stand at:
Jeffries - 212
McCarthy - 201
Donalds - 20
Present - 1
So Trump's continued endorsement does not seem to have moved any of the holdouts to McCarthy. One member (I missed who) changing their vote from McCarthy to Present has to be concerning for McCarthy. Since election requires a majority of votes cast for a person (Present votes don't count) if more Members follow it decreases the total needed for election. If those Present votes are coming from McCarthy then that moves Jeffries closer to being elected Speaker, as the current plurality vote haver.
I wonder if this is the new strategy from moderate Republicans. Threaten to vote Present and lower the threshold and get the Democrat selected Speaker unless the holdouts get behind McCarthy. Presumably the holdouts would prefer even McCarthy to Jeffries. It would take 12 (I think) members voting Present to put Jeffries over the top, assuming he gets all 212 Democratic Party votes.
ETA2:
At the end of the fifth ballot the results stand at:
Jeffries - 212
McCarthy - 201
Donalds - 20
Present - 1
No movement from the prior vote. Trying to understand how one side or the other break the stalemate here. Doesn't seem like anyone has attempted to put forward a compromise candidate. Seems unlikely McCarthy supporters are persuaded to back the HFC candidate in the needed numbers, though they have peeled one off and another is voting Present. Seems unlikely the HFC members come back to McCarthy. In 1855 when the House had failed to choose a Speaker after two months and over 150 votes the majority agreed to elect whoever got a plurality as Speaker to finally end the voting. Maybe that's a possibility here but would be pretty risky since Jeffries has consistently been the plurality winner. All it would take is 6 HFC members staying strong and you'd have a Democrat Speaker of a majority Republican House (who could immediately remove him if they wanted).
ETA 3:
At the end of the sixth ballot the results stand at:
Jeffries - 212
McCarthy - 201
Donalds - 20
Present - 1
Still no movement. No idea how this stalemate gets broken.
ETA 4:
After returning at 8pm ET the House adjourns until noon tomorrow by a vote of 216 to 214.
I guess we could just not have a House of Representatives for a while. If it goes on long enough Democrats might break for McCarthy so that something can get passed.
The seemingly eternal dysfunction of the American government, as ordained by the founding fathers or so I've been told never ceases to amaze me.
Like Belgians, Americans would rather not have a government than let it run unpopular edicts.
The limits of this show in the politicization of escape valves like the courts, but in principle it's an admirable demonstration of the solidity of Liberal engineering of institutions.
That one could run the world hegemon like this and still trounce organized autocracies would be even more admirable, if Congress actually had anything to do with it.
This is something that seems like such a disconnect. People say “what, do you just want there to be no federal government?!?!”
…yes? What does the federal government DO most of the time other than take my money and spend it on shit that is meant to destroy my way of life and make it harder for me to raise my family?
This is a genuine question. What is the federal government doing for me that my state couldn’t do? I’ll give you the military, but what else?
The first and biggest boon the federal government brings us is uniform federal laws. In a republic with minimal federation interstate laws could become disparate enough to cause logistical and commercial problems. As a really nonsensical hypothetical, MN, IA, MO, AR, and LA could band together and say "it's illegal to ship goods through our state without paying an interstate transit fee", and theres no way around them on the ground without crossing into Canada. The federal government stops this nonsense from happening.
More realistically in a world without federal regulation state regs would be a giant mess and we would lose tons of efficiency to having a million little x state to y state compliance experts and all the insane bureaucracy that would come with it. It would be way less profitable to sell stuff to americans if shipping stuff had 50 different sets of rules.
I also think that having some uniformity in laws helps keep America from polarizing to an actual national divorce level. If california can make wholistic veganism mandatory and texas can outlaw saying the word vegetarian, we really might start living in our own corners and not seeing eachother as at all similar. National identity is essentially a federal IP.
Most of that nonsense happens anyway. Look into the significant complexity for direct-to-consumer interstate (ecommerce) alcohol sales. Combine the classic sales tax layered regime (which is already much more complicated post South Dakota v. Wayfair) down to municipal levels with fun state/county/municipal regulations like limiting how much of certain types of alcohol can be delivered to a given address in a calendar year (book keeping with indexing based on addresses rather than accounts and hope nothing is missed because of semantically equivalent but literally different street names). On the other end of the spectrum is the influence of things like CARB on the national vehicle market because of CAA waivers that in practice once granted by a friendly administration cannot be revoked by a later hostile one or at least have not been given the ability for lawsuits to hold up the revocation until the hostile one is replaced (8 years at the longest) by a friendly one. In practice California in particular has leveraged its population and economy to influence or de facto regulate national commerce and the 9th circuit has played along with SCOTUS typically denying cert. They did grant cert in National Pork Producers v. Ross so that may change. It is much less profitable on a per-unit basis scaling up to cross state lines or go national, but that very barrier to entry becomes a major competitive advantage for larger businesses that have already invested in compliance. There is also a small but thriving market in companies that sell compliance-as-a-service.
oh man, i am aware of and annoyed by how alcohol distribution is set up. Idunno if its national or just some states but where i'm at, a brewery HAS to sell to a licensed distributor and not directly to a customer, which prettymuch ruins any comparison to a free market. Anyway, i think the difficulties with alcohol shipping is a pretty good indicator that federal regulation can bring a uniformity that is preferable to each state having bespoke rules. Like, as bad as things are now, without federal regulation that small but thriving compliance sector would become a ubiquitous and heavy player in interstate commerce.
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