Who’s really going to be Speaker of the House

| 9:09 am EDT October 5, 2023
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House Republicans have now advanced two headlining candidates for Speaker of the House: Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan. They’d each be even worse than Kevin McCarthy. But given that they both exist in far right la la land, they might make an even worse mess for their side than McCarthy did. So which of them is more likely to be become Speaker? Or is it neither?

If you’re trying to figure out whether this or that House Republican can become Speaker, here’s the math: can they win over the fourteen House Republicans running in toss-up districts (who hate drama and want the Republican Party to look “normal”), and win over the eight House Republican loons who just voted to expel McCarthy, and only lose four votes along the way?

The House Republicans in the toss up races would see loons like Donald Trump, Matt Gaetz, or Marjorie Taylor Greene as too much of a liability and would therefore never vote for them (these are the same fourteen House Republicans who just got done forcing McCarthy to cut a budget deal). So you can automatically eliminate these kinds of names from contention. It’s why Gaetz and Greene haven’t even bothered to throw their names into the ring.

This brings us to the actual candidates, like Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan. They’re pretty embarrassing, so can they get the House Republicans in toss up districts to vote for them? Maybe. Even if so, will the eight loons who just expelled McCarthy now allow Scalise or Jordan to have it?

In other words, how long are Gaetz and his suicide cult looking to forcibly keep the speakership vacant? That’s what it really what is comes down to. What is this lunatic Gaetz’s plan? He knows he’s probably getting expelled at the end of this, no matter how it plays out. But what’s he going to do to amuse himself first?

If Gaetz decides to support someone like Scalise or Jordan, and the fourteen House Republicans in toss up races also get on board, that’s the ballgame. That’s 218 votes. There’s the new Speaker.

But if no such Republican coalition comes together, then there will be no Speaker for awhile. The only way we end up with a Democratic speaker is if no Republican can get to 218, and the Republicans in toss up races start to worry that the vacancy looks so bad it could end up costing them reelection. then they’d talk with the Democrats about something.

So we’ll see what happens. It’s easy to figure out who all won’t be Speaker. Any Republican can’t get 218 votes is automatically out, no matter how popular they may be with a certain subset of those 218 votes. It’s trickier to figure out who will be Speaker and how long it will take. That would require reading Matt Gaetz’s mind, a toxic waste dump of incoherent self destructive hubris. He may get to screw with this process, but he has the most to lose in the end.