“Good morning and happy Groundhog Day,” said Democratic Representative Katherine Clark this Thursday morning (5), the third straight day of chaos in the US House of Representatives.
A split in the Republican Party, which holds control of the House in the legislature that started this week, has prevented since Tuesday (3) the leader of the party, Kevin McCarthy, from getting enough votes to be elected president, which has plunged the Legislature into an impasse that not seen since 1923.
In the first two days, there were six votes for office, with a minimal difference in the final results. McCarthy needs 218 supporters to be elected, 4 less than the party’s 222 seats, but has faced resistance from 20 deputies in an open war against him by the ultraconservative wing of the party. Hence the comparison with Groundhog Day from the movie “Groundhog Day”, in which the days are repeated, in the same way and endlessly, for Bill Murray’s character.
“We’ve already voted six times for [eleger o] President, and the results speak for themselves,” said Clark, number 2 of the Democratic Party in the House. The party, which became a minority after the result of the November legislative elections, has added fuel to the fire of political opponents. “The Republicans are in historic turmoil, unable to organize, govern and lead.”
For two days, consensus was reached only to postpone the choice for one more day. This Thursday (5), the seventh vote ended again with McCarthy’s defeat – 20 colleagues voted for Byron Donalds, 1 abstained.
The lack of consensus blocks the agenda in the Chamber, with deputies obliged to vote as many times as necessary until the new president is chosen. The last time there was no first-round election was in 1923, when selecting a Republican required nine ballots.
McCarthy faces opposition mainly from the ultraconservative wing of the party. Of the 20 colleagues who have been voting against him, 19 are linked to the Freedom Caucus (freedom bench), the most right-wing Republican group; most still repeat the lying speech that Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 plea to Joe Biden was rigged.
The former president, by the way, entered the circuit this Wednesday, making an appeal for the deputy from California. He did not help, in a reflection of the wear and tear he himself faces, inside and outside the party.
McCarthy, in any case, has waved to the radical wing in hopes of fulfilling his dream of being Speaker of the House. Negotiations have not stopped since Tuesday, and the American political press reports, based on sources in the Republican Party, that he has been making more and more concessions – which in practice only weaken him.
One of the demands would be to put on the agenda a project so that deputies have a limit of three terms, of two years each. Another, that any congressman can propose a vote to remove the president of the Chamber – in another concession he had already made, the idea was that a group of five names could do so. McCarthy also reportedly promised to give the Freedom Caucus more space on the Rules Committee, which manages bylaws and how bills are passed.
If everything is accepted and the leader is finally elected, the 2023 Chamber will have a president much more weakened than the Democrat Nancy Pelosi, who left office in December at the age of 82 and has among her main marks the fact of having united the Democratic Party under your leadership.
The republican question is even more complex because, in the midst of the impasse involving McCarthy, there is also no clear name in the party that can defeat him – the competitors so far only meet the desires of the radicals.
The lack of consensus, however, raises speculation. The most quoted so far is Steve Scalise, congressman for Louisiana and the party’s number 2 in the House. Unlike McCarthy, he faced no domestic opposition in the leadership election in November and is seen as more conservative, which would please the Freedom Caucus.
A California native, McCarthy was first elected to Congress in 2006 and quickly rose to prominence in Republican domestic politics. At the beginning of his career, he was seen as a representative of the moderate youth wing, the “young guns”, and even released a book with that title, calling for more bipartisan consensus to advance important agendas for the country.
During the Trump administration, he approached the conservative agenda and became a strong ally of the then president. Days after the 2020 election, still during the investigation, he even told Fox News that the Republican had won, before the official result appointed Biden as elected.
The tide turned following the invasion of the Capitol, when a crowd inflated by Trump tried to forcibly prevent confirmation of the Democrat’s victory. McCarthy turned against the then president and, in private conversations leaked to the press, called for his resignation. From the lectern of the House he delivered a scathing speech, in which he claimed that Trump was “responsible for the attack” and “should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was happening.” Throughout the Biden administration, however, he reconnected with the former president.
He promises that his tenure at the head of the chamber will open a series of investigations against the Biden administration, targeting the Secretary of Homeland Security for the immigration crisis on the border with Mexico to the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and the business of one of the president’s sons, Hunter Biden. The deputy also promised to investigate what he considers limitation of freedom of expression by technology companies and what he calls indoctrination in schools.
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