Since October 3rd, the house has been without a speaker. As of today, there are 9 speakers currently running for speaker of the house: Jack Berman, Bryon Donalds, Tom Emmer, Kevin Kern, Mike Johnson, Dan Meusar, Gary Palmer, Austin Scott, and Pete Sessions. Without a speaker, ‘the house will be unable to undertake any legislative activity whatsoever’.
Tomorrow morning, house republicans will meet to have the runners present their visions. After this is done, on Tuesday, an internal election will be held. This means, the house members present will be the ones electing the speaker. This might be lengthy because all house members need to be present meaning the nominee should have at least 217 votes. If someone is elected, republicans can go to the house floor for an election that day. The type of voting they use to elect the speaker of house in the internal election would be majority: the runner who receives the lowest votes will be kicked off and then there would be a SECOND ballot with the nominees still running. This process would go on until there are 2 nominees left so this process could end up taking a longer time which means that the house would be left without a speaker for a longer than just Tuesday which could present an issue due to the deadline of November 17th handed by the Biden admin.
To tie this into pressing events, the fact that the speaker of the house is up in the air means that aid to Israel cannot be received. The biden administration is sending aid to Israel but this legislation is paused until the speaker chair is filled.
https://www.nytimes.com/article/house-speaker-whats-next.html
5 comments:
This process of elimination described to elect a new speaker seems inefficient. I'm wondering if there is a specific reason why the process is not similar to the presidential elections, with one primary election and one general election. This way, the decision would be more quickly taken and it would remain a majority vote. I find it worrisome that representatives have still not resolved this leadership problem. I agree that the House of Representatives is necessary to pass legislation regarding the conflict in the Middle East, but beyond that, it is obviously essential that the conflict in choosing a speaker is over soon, to allow Congress to continue functioning.
Rep. Patrick McHenry is the speaker pro tempore (for the time being) until a new speaker is elected. Some representatives encourage him to expand on his powers to keep the House alive; however, an unelected official, he hesitates to exert power, as he has no precedent on which to operate. I agree with his hesitations that it might not set a good precedent, but I also want definitive action to be taken in order to move a resolution of this conflict forward.
https://apnews.com/article/house-speaker-powers-mchenry-875bebd218096a5252840cd8f52cc137
Today, Representative Ton Emmer dropped out of the race for speaker just hours after he was nominated. He mainly faced opposition from the hard right members of the party, and especially those who believed he did not do enough to support Trump. It's hard to believe that this chaos has been going on for over 20 days now, and like Carole has said, it is pretty concerning how far it still seems from being resolved and from allowing Congress to resume functions.
I think this also connects to what we learned in class about how, unlike in other countries with party systems, in the US, politicians often break from their parties to act according to their beliefs and preferences. In this case, it seems to have proven pretty detrimental to the function of the party and Congress as well.
The lengthy election process to determine a new speaker seems to simulate runoff ranked choice voting. In this system, each voter ranks all possible speakers. If somebody has a 50%+ majority of first choice votes, they are immediately elected. If not, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated. For voters who selected an eliminated candidate as their first choice, their second choice is now counted as their first choice, and the process repeats until one candidate has a clear majority. With increasing technological capability related to voting, hopefully this or a similar system will be adopted, allowing a speaker to be elected in one vote with the same outcome, avoiding emergency situations like this where no legislation can be passed.
With the recent election of Mike Jordan, it shows that the far-right members of the republican party will continue to not give in to the rest of the party since Mike Jordan is himself one of the far-right members of the republican party with his very socially conservative beliefs. This speaker race as a whole showed that this group in the republican party will continue to be an issue going forward as they showed they didn't care about what was going on in Israel and how urgent the need for a speaker was, they held out until they got one of their own elected as speaker. It is very concerning that these people who are supposed to be serving the people seem to be serving their personal self-interests over solving issues that will help not just America, but the world as a whole.
I think Ben means to say Mike Johnson and not Mike Jordan. That said, I agree with Ben's general sentiment. It was especially odd to see Johnson's response to a reporter's question about his efforts to overthrow the 2020 election (in which he played a VERY proactive role).
Source about his election overthrow efforts: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/mike-johnson-played-a-central-role-in-trying-to-overturn-the-2020-vote/ar-AA1iQZIj
Specifically, the response was a shaking of his head with a sly smile (Source: https://www.c-span.org/video/?531389-1/rep-mike-johnson-winning-house-republican-speaker-nominee-election). To be blunt, it was a very dismissive response to a pretty damning inquiry into his previous character. Republicans around him didn't respond much better, with one older representative telling the reporter to "Shut up".
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