Samuel Beckett’s House

The lower house of Congress can neither convene nor adjourn.

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As I write, the House has just completed its sixth balloting for Speaker, and in the sixth vote, like the third (yesterday) and the fourth and fifth (earlier today), 20 Republicans have continued to cast their votes for someone other than Kevin McCarthy. Today’s alternative of choice is Rep. Byron Donalds, who is just beginning his second term in Congress, representing Florida’s hurricane-ravaged southwest coast.

McCarthy didn’t want any balloting today, but his plan to adjourn for today ran afoul of the Gang of 20 and House Democrats, who quite reasonably believe that further floundering on the part of the GOP can only help them with anyone inclined to a compare-and-contrast exercise. Lacking the votes of the 212 House Dems and the 20 self-seeking Republican dissidents, McCarthy didn’t have the votes to adjourn, nor quite clearly the votes to win the Speakership and convene the House.

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Did I say “self-seeking”? It turns out that many of the 20 want plum committee assignments or chairmanships, though that means ousting various more mainstream Republicans from their posts. This has not endeared the dissidents to the roughly 200 members who’ve thus far stuck with Kevin. The dissidents also have three less directly self-interested demands that McCarthy has refused to meet. The first is that the House Republican campaign arm—the National Republican Congressional Committee, or NRCC—stay out of Republican primaries, in which it routinely intervenes on behalf of incumbents facing primary challenges. Republicans being Republicans, those challenges invariably come from the very far right (the incumbents already being far-right themselves).

The second, which Donalds resurrected while meeting with the press on the Capitol’s steps today, is that it should require just one (1) Republican House member to compel the Republican caucus to hold a vote of confidence on its leader, who in this session of Congress would be the Speaker if said caucus ever gets it together to elect one. If granted, this demand would empower the Speaker at roughly the level of a visitor taking a tour of the Capitol, which, when you think about it, is damned egalitarian.

The third, relayed by Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), is for McCarthy to commit to demand drastic reductions in federal spending as a condition for raising the nation’s debt limit, no matter the consequences. As this is a demand to end this crisis by plunging the country directly into a greater one, risking an economic calamity that would make the Great Depression look like a spring weekend on the French Riviera, that has yet to be agreed to, although it’s probably a gambit the Republicans, no matter who leads them, will try anyway.

So far, the only Republican who’s actually come out ahead in the past two days is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Not, I hasten to add, because of the inaugural address he delivered Tuesday on beginning his second term as governor, which was a platitudinous rant against woke-dom, both real and imagined. No, it was a good day for DeSantis because his presumptive rival for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, Donald Trump, bestirred himself on Wednesday morning to phone some of the 20 die-hards, urging them to support the guy he’d called “My Kevin,” only to sway the votes of exactly zero of them. When Trump carries no weight with Lauren Boebert—who, in giving one of the nominating speeches for Rep. Donalds, mentioned that Trump had called her, to no apparent effect—he has clearly become Yesterday’s News among the Republican officials he once routinely cowed.

All that said, there’s an alternative explanation for the past two days’ circus that’s gone largely unexamined: that it’s merely an anniversary celebration of the January 6th insurrection. Then, loony-right enraged insurrectionists kept the Congress from tallying the Electoral College votes for the better part of an afternoon. Now, loony-right enraged members of Congress have kept Congress from convening for the better part of two afternoons. What lumpen outsiders began, lumpen insiders continue. The first time as tragedy, the second time … well, you know the drill.

As things stand now, there’s no end in sight to House Republicans’ inability to elect a Speaker and proceed to swear in the members and convene. The so-called “People’s House” is stuck in Godot-Land, with the Speaker-To-Be much heralded but nowhere in sight. Herewith, the concluding lines of dialogue and the following stage direction from Beckett’s play:

Vladimir: Well, shall we go?

Estragon: Yes, let’s go.

They do not move.

Curtain

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