What Did Our Speaker Thing Get?

Market-Ticker ^ | 9 Jan, 2023 | Karl Denninger

[MtnClimber]

Don't kid yourselves folks, there were substantive changes that came out of the US House speaker "fight."

This came across my feed before the final votes, so I can't vouch for it. But enough of it was leaked that I suspect its real, and any attempt to not follow through by McCarthy is likely to lead to an endless set of motions to vacate the chair, which is a privileged motion and stops all other activity in the chamber until disposed of.

McCarthy really didn't want that threshold to be one Representative, but absent agreement he was not going to be Speaker and it was quite-clear as the days wore on that those who were opposed were not going to bend no matter how much he yelled or threatened them. He had no choice but to consent.

That request is not radical; it in fact is how The House has run for most of the last hundred years.

It exists for the specific purpose of putting a stop to the Speaker abusing his or her position in that if you run crap like refusing to allow floor amendments the Representative(s) that you anger can tie the chamber up in knots until you cut it out.

The Speaker, in short, is not King yet that is exactly how it has been treated since the 2016 elections. Pelosi turned that into an art form; exactly zero non pre-screened amendments were allowed to be offered on the floor during her tenure. She's not alone; Ryan did the same sort of thing and the reason the "one vote motion" rule was killed when Pelosi got the gavel was that members of the House repeatedly attempted to eject him from the chair for doing it.

Restoring that capacity is absolutely a good thing. The House is a body of 435 members and in order to represent the people members must be able to proffer both legislation and amendments. If you cannot do so without the prior approval of one person then there is no representation of the people at all; we have what amounts to a monarchy in the US House. Legislation can be forced onto the floor for vote out of committee by a discharge petition (although it takes a supermajority to do it) but if you can't offer amendments then half the process is absolutely held hostage to the whim of one individual. This should have never been allowed in the first place and it was the big sticking point with McCarthy.

[Paperpusher]

Silly rabbits, the “terrorist” /s Republicans that held up McCarthy’s nomination can do/will do the same thing again if what they negotiated for isn’t in the rules package.
The House will again be at a standstill until it is fixed.

What I was getting at was that McCarthy may well put the agreements in the rules package but a majority of the House needs to vote for it to pass, and it was approved 220 to 213 on a party-line vote with one Republican opposed. This surprised me. It would only have taken a change of four more votes to fail.