Democrats are standing firm in their refusal to bail out the House Republican majority as it struggles to elect a new speaker 10 days after after booting Rep. Kevin McCarthy.
They’re also dialing up the rhetoric against the GOP’s new nominee for speaker, prominent Donald Trump ally Jim Jordan of Ohio, blasting him as an insurrectionist, election denier and extremist.
“House Republicans have selected as their nominee to be the speaker of the people’s House the chairman of the chaos caucus, a defender in a dangerous way of dysfunction, and an extremist extraordinaire,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said Friday on the steps of the Capitol, flanked by dozen of Democratic lawmakers. “His focus has been on peddling lies and conspiracy theories and driving division amongst the American people.”
At the risk of sounding like a hopeless optimist… Wouldn’t it make sense for the Republicans to nominate more of a centrist with promises to work on common ground with the Democrats (whatever narrow terrain that may consist of now) and thereby sideline the MAGA crew to irrelevancy?
Yeah they would take a lot of heat from Trump & co., but maybe they could actually pass something for their constituents.
On the one hand, yes, but the Republicans made it so any one person can call for a vote to oust the speaker, so it only takes one unhappy rep to restart the cycle.
So I think the current plan is to just sit back and let the American people see that the current batch of Republican reps has as much ability to work together as a bag of weasels until the Republicans are willing to actually admit that they fucked up and ask for help fixing it.
So this could take a year to resolve.