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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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Give the current state of the Republican electorate, it would be political suicide if any of them voted for a Democrat for Speaker. They may as well announce they are leaving the party at the same time.
OTOH, A handful of Democrats steering the post to a much more moderate Republican Speaker won't see nearly the same amount of blowback from their electorate, and it may even help them get reelected, since Democrats value a functioning government.
Can you name a moderate republican in the house?
Someone without a history of bigotry, anti climate, or covid conspiracies? Someone that never supported Trump, or Russias invasion of Ukraine?
There are groups that claim to be moderate, such as the "Main Street Caucus" referred to here, which claims to have 70 members:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/moderate-us-republicans-call-change-rule-that-eased-mccarthys-ouster-2023-10-04/
They may not tick all your boxes, but I suspect of they did, they couldn't win any Republican primary these days.
then no one should be considering them moderate anything. North Korea calls themselves democratic, doesnt make it the case. Im well aware a moderate republican couldnt win an election these days, that what makes your call to nominate a moderate republican as speaker is nonsense, one doesnt exist.
You act like there's no House seats that will likely swap to D in the next election...
There's enough Rs that are going to lose their seat regardless and them voting for a D speaker is the only thing that will keep them in office.
Don't appeal to their good nature (they don't have that) appeal to their personal greed and how much they crave power.
They can be the "Manchins" of the House.
There is no possible way this will ever happen. And if it does, the Ds who vote for it should be thrown out on their asses.
First, there's no way they'd be able to get the entire Democrat party to go along with this, as those who are in far left districts would be thrown out on their ass just as quickly as a GOP representative voting for a Dem speaker.
Second, you'd have to find someone in the GOP that's (a) willing to take the job, and (b) palatable to both Democrats and moderate Republicans. Who the hell would the GOP even put up that would be palatable? Their 3 biggest candidates are a slimeball, a pedo, and a racist. You think there's a chance that a single Democrat would be able to vote for someone with the baggage of McCarthy, Jordan, or Scalise while still being able to keep their own seat?
Third, because of the rule that any single person can push a motion to vacate, there would be nothing stopping Gaetz or anyone else from just filing another motion to vacate, knowing there are probably enough on both the extreme left and right that would vote to remove him and put us right back in the position we're in now.
And even if you could get past all of that, there would be absolutely nothing stopping whoever the new speaker is from reneging on whatever promises he made to win the speakership and telling Democrats to go pound sand, as Democrats wouldn't have the votes necessary to do anything about it.
In more "normal" times, this may have been a possibility. But the political realities and climate in this country have made this nothing more than an absurd fantasy for at least the past couple of decades. Democrats need to stop saving Republicans from thesmelves, moderate Republicans need to stop acting like its the Democrats' sworn duty to bail them out every time one of their crazy stunts backfire, and Republican leadership needs to start taking a hard line against the most extreme wing. I mean yeah, their voting base may be pissed off, but what are they going to do? Vote for a Democrat in retaliation?
I agree with all your points, but assuming the GOP starts to pivot toward cleaving themselves from their radical fringe (which will take time), what's the immediate next step? You've made a great case that there's literally no GOP rep that can thread the needle, so are you suggesting that the only path forward is Speaker Jeffries?
Honestly, I don't see a realistic path forward for anybody right now. Of course, at some point, somebody is going to have to fall on their sword, but there's no real way of knowing who's going to have to be the one to do that right now as everybody has their heels dug in. If you put a gun to my head and forced me to make a prediction, I'd say 5 Republicans voting for Jeffries is the "most likely" way to go, but when I say "most likely" in this case, I mean "has a slightly better chance of happening than me getting blown by every Dallas Cowboys cheerleader in alphabetical order".
I'd love to see Vegas put odds on which side is going to cave first: Dems, GOP, or MAGA. I don't even know what the result would be, outside of knowing that somebody would be making a fuckton of cash off it.
On one hand, I'm glad the chickens have come home to roost and that it's come to be this fucking bad so the GOP finally has to deal with the monsters they and Fox News helped create. They spent decades feeding into hateful, unhinged hysteria, and they abandoned anything even approaching a semblance of rationality because it played well with a right wing whose allegiance they decided they couldn't afford to lose. The Freedom Caucus scared the everloving shit out of them, and rather than spend their billions in dark money to put those dumb motherfuckers back in their holes, they gave them podiums and let them spew their bile across international airwaves. GOP donors overtly and covertly fueled (and funded) groups like Judicial Watch, Project Veritas, PragerU, CPAC, InfoWars, Gateway Pundit, among others. SCOTUS seats were all they cared about, and they were willing to do anything to get them, including ignoring the collateral damage that we warned would come from pandering to certifiable fucking nutcases. They decided it was better to build a brand ecosystem that could amplify conservative tropes at scale than it was to come up with viable and rational policy positions to help the American people. On that hand, I'm glad the hydra is now eating itself, and I hope it never, ever recovers until a new brand of decent human being can re-make something viable from the blood-soaked ashes of this Party.
On the other, gods help us all.
Nitpick. They decided it was better to allow these nutjobs to spew their bile because it made them a fuckton of cash. When even people at Fox News started saying "Hey, you think we may be going just a wee bit too far here?", the response was to continue doing it because they were making a fuckton of cash and becoming more moderate would cede viewers to Newsmax and OANN. CNN held that Trump Town Hall specifically to cater to these people (Granted, that backfired on them spectacularly). Even CNN now has started catering to a limited degree to these people because there's just too much money to be made placating idiots and their conspiracy theories.
They know it's all bullshit. They even knew this would happen. They just didn't care because they were swimming in cash.
It'd be funny if it weren't so goddamned depressing.
I think there are three key things you are missing here.
First, the Motion to Vacate is just a rule, and those rules can be changed my a majority of the House - conveniently the same threshold that is needed to elect a Speaker. It is quite possible that a bipartisan coalition to elect a Speaker would also negotiate a change to the rules for the Motion, similar to what Pelosi did when she was Speaker, and wanted to make sure her thim majority could be effective.
Second, I am assuming that any hypothetical support of a moderate Republican by Democrats would not be in conflict with Democratic leadership or a challenge to their authority. On the contrary, it would be done with their blessing, extracting concessions from the new Speaker that the Democratic Leadership would find acceptable. And there are ways to hold that Speaker accountable that stop short of firing him.
Third, I am assuming that any coalition support would be done in favor of a Speaker who is actually interested in governing, and not in burning the place down. So all they really need to fundamentally agree on is to not hold the government hostage every other vote. All the other stuff is noise compared to that. Once the "burn it all down" Caucus is relegated to the minority side in the House, there is much less damage they can do. (Compare this to the Senate, where one "Coach" can dictate the entire playbook.)
Remember, as I said in my original post, there are some Democrats who would be either unwilling or unable to actually go along with all this without themselves committing political suicide. If, for example, you have 5 Democrats who can't go along with this, that means you now need 9 Republicans willing to put their own standing in the party at risk. The more Democrats that either can't or won't go through with it, the more Republicans you need, and therefore the less likely any of this is to actually happen.
And how do you go about doing that in any meaningful way that the GOP can't just shut down with a majority vote? How do you do that without threatening to oust that speaker and putting us right back in this position, only without a bipartisan coalition next time as Democrats say "see? I told you this wouldn't work."
The ones who might be willing/able to do it while still being palatable to Democrats wouldn't want to be within 10 miles of that gavel right now. Notice how all the ones willing to step up to the plate are the ones that are just as bad or worse than McCarthy was.
And while we're at it, we can ask serial killers to just not kill people every other day. Heck, can't we just ask criminals to stop doing crime stuff? I'm sure doing so will be just as effective. These people are here specifically to hold the government hostage on every other vote. Why do you think no sane Republican (an oxymoron, I know) wants to go anywhere near that gavel right now? They'd be in the same position McCarthy was, if not worse.
I think this is the main reason. Also, you don't become speaker just to be speaker. You do it to advance further, either to higher elected positions or, more likely, to lucrative party fundraising, consulting, speaking engagements, writing books, and/or private sector positions. In today's world no speaker who is elected with the help of Democrats has a future in the Republican party, anywhere. It's career suicide. Not just losing elected office. They will be blacklisted everywhere. It won't happen.
It all depends on how willing the rest of the Republican Caucus is to force out the Freedom Caucus nutters. I don't believe a majority of their caucus is aligned with them, because if they were, they would have never moved the Debt Ceiling or CR votes forward. Both votes were overwhelmingly bipartisan, with a majority of Republicans specifically voting against burning it all down in both votes.