On the two-year anniversary of the invasion of the United States Congress, the House of Representatives opened this Friday (6) still steeped in chaos. After four days and 12 rounds of voting, the Republican Party has still not managed to reach a consensus to elect the President of the House.
Each round has turned into a session of public humiliation for the leader of the party in the House, California Representative Kevin McCarthy. As the party has a majority in the House in the legislature installed this week, with 222 of the 435 seats, in theory it should elect the president without surprises. But McCarthy, the natural candidate, faces strong opposition from the ultra-right wing and has always won around 200 votes in the first 11 ballots, well below the 218 needed to reach office.
At a dead end, Republican deputies held a large conference call this Friday morning, and the result proved positive for McCarthy. Even though he did not reach the necessary number of votes, he turned 14 seats in his favor, resuming the hope that he could still be elected – in all, he had 213 votes in the 12th round, just 5 less than required.
If he takes office, however, he will be a weakened president.
That’s because he made a number of concessions to the radical wing. The main one was to promise to change the bylaws to allow that, at any time, a deputy may propose the dismissal of the President of the House. In addition, he hinted at giving more space to extremist names in the Rules Committee, which regulates how bills are submitted, and putting on the agenda a project so that deputies have a limit of three terms, of two years each.
That would make him a much weaker legislative head than Democrat Nancy Pelosi, 82, who left office and has among her main marks the fact that she united the party under her leadership. On Thursday night (5), McCarthy was asked about concerns about giving too much power to the radical Republican wing. “I’m really cool with it,” he said. “I will not be a weaker president.”
So far, however, it remains the biggest impasse in the House since 1859, when deputies took two months and 44 votes to elect a president — fellow Republican William Pennington.
The third Groundhog Day in a row in the House ended up overshadowing the two years of January 6 – the date that marks the invasion of the Capitol, by a crowd of supporters of Donald Trump, to try to forcibly prevent the confirmation of Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election .
On the first anniversary, in 2022, the Democrat went to Congress to make a speech to mark the date, full of attacks on his predecessor and appeals to “ensure that an attack like this never happens again”. This year, however, with deputies focused on the election for the presidency, the ceremony was much more limited, with a minute of silence in honor of the police killed in the invasion.
The two years since the attack on the Capitol and the blocking of McCarthy’s election are in a certain way related: who has stopped the nomination of the leader of the party is the most radical wing of the Republican Party, which repeats the allegations without evidence that the presidential election of 2020 was rigged-same speech that led to the invasion of Congress.
Trump ended up thrown into the center of confusion. On Thursday (5), he was nominated by a deputy, Matt Gaetz, to be the new president of the House – it is not necessary to be a deputy to be chosen for the position. The action, only symbolic, had no result, and the former president ended up with just one vote.
Thus, the House election became another direct reflection of Trump’s difficulties within the party that dominated from 2017. He stepped in to try to help McCarthy get elected, but even his appeals did not deter the Trumpist wing from blocking the candidacy of the California congressman.
Gaetz himself went so far as to say that it was sad that Trump supported McCarthy. Another congresswoman, Lauren Boebert (Colorado), said it was time for the former president to ask the leader to withdraw from the candidacy.
“I think a big Republican victory, after going through countless ballots, made the position and process of becoming president bigger and more important than if it were done in the more traditional way,” wrote the former president on Wednesday. , always with words in capital letters here and there, without their pleas being heard.
In the same publication, he repeated again that it is a “big lie” that he lost the election to Biden.
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