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Notes -
Here we are two weeks after Kevin McCarthy was first removed as Speaker for the United States House of Representatives. About to have our first vote on the House floor to try and select the next Speaker.
It's been a bit of a tumultuous two weeks. At the beginning of last week Steve Scalise (R-LA), Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Kevin Hern (R-OK) announced their candidacy for Speaker. Hern subsequently dropped out before any internal polls of the conference had been done. Scalise won the initial round of internal Conference votes over Jordan on Wednesday 113-99. Over the course of Wednesday and Thursday around 20 Republicans came out as hard no's on Scalise, more than enough to deny him the Speakership. Scalise subsequently dropped out leaving Jordan as the presumptive candidate. On Friday, shortly before the internal Conference vote, Austin Scott (R-GA) declared his candidacy for Speakership though went on to lose the internal vote 124-81 to Jordan. While there have been subsequent developments indicating many of Jordan's critics have come around the margin in the House is so close there may still be enough to deny the Jordan the Speakership.
This is a presently ongoing event and I'll update as the situation develops and I am able.
ETA:
As of the time of this writing the first ballot is still being counted but
fivenine Republicans have voted for someone other than Jordan, meaning he will not be Speaker on the first ballot.ETA2:
At the end of the first ballot the votes stand at:
212 - Jeffries
200 - Jordan
20 - Other
2 - NV
With 2 NV that means the total to win is only 216. House now in recess rather than another vote. This vote total is within a couple of votes of where McCarthy was for the first three days and eleven ballots in his Speaker campaign. Hopefully this one doesn't take so long.
ET3:
No more votes today, House has gone home.
I've been considering a longer effort-post on the topic to tie it in with other conversations about "credible accusations", but since we're doing this today, I just want to mention my favorite Jim Jordan subplot is his putative involvement in the Ohio State wrestling sex abuse scandal:
So, the scandal is that some wrestlers got groped by a physician 30 years ago and the claim is that Jim Jordan "knew about it" and failed to put a stop to it. Of course, none of them bothered to mention that Jordan knew about it until a few decades later when he became a rising figure in the Republican Party. What's the available evidence on the matter?
So, basically, "come on, he had to have known". With the standard of "credible accusations" applied to Kavanaugh and Jordan, I find it hard to believe that anyone could be truly innocent. The necessary ingredient for a scandal appears to be finding someone willing to say that a few decades ago he must have known that something bad for going on. Seriously, how the hell is anyone supposed to defend against that allegation? What can you even say other than, "uhhh, no I didn't"?
For what it's worth I feel the same about Trump's rape civil lawsuit. "Did you violently rape this woman in a store changing room almost 30 years ago?" What possible defense could you have other than saying you didn't do it.
Thanks for clarifying that, civil court judge. This literal he-said she-said based on 27+ year old memories has convinced us all that Trump's violently raped a woman in a clothes store. He unambiguously says he didn't do it and obviously no evidence exists 3 decades later, but that doesn't count.
I think this is missing some relevant context for those quotes. They were made as a reply to Trump's lawyers arguing that his conviction for sexual assault was not relevant to his parallel defamation case since he was only convicted of sexual assault, not rape. So the question of what, exactly, was encompassed by the term "rape" was relevant in the defamation case. Carroll argued it was used colloquially, Trump argued it was only the specific crime.
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