Today is an eventful day in American politics.
From early evening Finnish time, the country’s congress will open its session in a new situation created by the election results of last November.
Democrats have a small majority in the upper house of Congress, the Senate. Republicans, on the other hand, have a narrow majority in the lower house of Congress, the House of Representatives.
All eyes are on the House of Representatives, which will begin its session after the election of a new speaker.
Or start anyway?
The House of Representatives cannot start its activities without a Speaker, and the next Speaker is not yet known.
Kevin McCarthy wants to be Speaker and everyone knows it
The Speaker of the House of Representatives is one of the most influential politicians in the United States.
Democrats Nancy Pelosi relinquishes his seat after four years as Republicans won the House of Representatives with a 222-213 majority.
The leading candidate for the new speaker is Kevin McCarthy. He is a 57-year-old Republican from California who has served as House Republican Caucus Leader since 2014.
In the voting, McCarthy needs a simple majority of the votes cast, i.e. the vote of almost every Republican, as there is no known support from the Democrats.
McCarthy already ran for speaker in 2015, but at that time there was not enough support from within the party. Since then, however, all of Washington has known that the man’s dream as speaker was washed away.
Are the cow deals offered by McCarthy enough?
In November, after the election result was confirmed, McCarthy was already venting in a liberated way, but then the congressmen on the right wing of the Republicans found out that they have the decisive votes in choosing the speaker.
Usually, the election of the speaker is handled behind closed doors within the party that won the election, well before the actual voting day.
This time, however, McCarthy has not managed to get the support of all representatives of the party’s radical wing. There are at least a few opponents of McCarthy going into voting day.
The most radical representatives are especially annoyed by McCarthy’s way of pleasing every side of the party. They see McCarthy as a hypocrite and a product of the establishment.
Because of this, there has been evening milking in the Congress for the last few days. As a concession, McCarthy has promised the radical wing, for example, good committee seats.
McCarthy has also promised to be ready for the fact that in the future the vote of no confidence in the speaker could be initiated with the votes of five Republican representatives.
That is, in the future, party members who are not satisfied with McCarthy could start smoking the speaker right away if they don’t like the line he is taking.
For the first time in more than a century, the election of the president may be prolonged
Today, McCarthy will either manage to negotiate the necessary votes behind him just before the vote, or alternatively, Congress will be thrown into chaos.
If McCarthy does not get a majority in the vote, there will be runoffs in the chamber until a candidate gets a simple majority.
In this situation, it could take a long time to choose a new speaker, as challengers to McCarthy would quickly appear from within the party.
A likely new entrant may be the current whip of the Republican group Steve Scalise, but anyone can register as a candidate. It is even possible to elect a chairman from outside the congress representatives.
In the United States, there has not been a runoff in the election of the speaker for more than a hundred years. However, the precedent is also about a prolonged process. In 1855, the president could only be elected after two months and 133 rounds of voting.
The session of the House of Representatives cannot begin before the election of a new speaker. The newly elected congressmen cannot even take their oath of office if the speaker is not clear.
The activities of the US legislative body will therefore come to a complete halt today if the Republicans do not gather their ranks and elect a leader during the day.
Only Kevin vs. Never Kevin
The public dispute over the choice of speaker has revealed the power struggle within the Republican Party.
A group opposed to McCarthy has been named Never Kevin in Washington. Some Republicans, meanwhile, have been walking the halls of Congress in recent weeks wearing OK lapel pins, referring to the words Only Kevin.
The Republicans in the House of Representatives are currently arguing more with each other than with the Democrats, even though the Republicans vowed after the election to start investigating the next president Joe Biden actions of the administration and related parties.
Aide to the previous two Republican Speakers Brendan Buck severely criticized the activities of the party’s radical wing in The New York Times newspaper published yesterday in his writing (you will switch to another service).
According to Buck, the election of the speaker drifting into chaos would weaken the entire country’s trust in Congress. He writes that the only goal of those who oppose McCarthy’s election is to embarrass the new speaker so that they can get a weak and manipulable leader in the House of Representatives.
Punchbowl News journalist who has followed the US Congress for a long time Jake Sherman wrote as morning dawned on voting day in the United States that he had never seen Republican congressmen more uncertain about what would happen next.
You can discuss the topic until 11:00 p.m. on January 4, 2023.
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