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OCTOBER 12, 2023
On the Prospect website
* Harold Meyerson: Investing in disinvested America
* Robert Kuttner: How the big banks are resisting
new capital standards
* Chase Woodruff: The clean-energy economy
comes to Pueblo, Colorado
Dayen on TAP
In the Future, Everyone Will Be Speaker for 15 Minutes
The never-ending story of who will lead House Republicans
There was no House floor vote for Speaker yesterday. There won't be a
Speaker vote today either, in all likelihood. Any reasonable
calculation, in fact, would lead you to the conclusion that there will
never be a vote for Speaker.
The numbers are simple. To become Speaker requires a majority of the
House. Democrats will vote for their own candidate, Hakeem Jeffries.
That leaves the 221 Republicans, out of which you'd need 217, given
two current vacancies. At first glance, there is nobody alive and
eligible in America today who is able to corral those 217 votes.
What about Donald Trump, you may say. Lost in the struggles of Steve
Scalise to garner the necessary support after winning yesterday's
straw vote
is
the fact that Jim Jordan had Trump's full endorsement. This allegedly
lockstep, top-down, authoritarian party heard the call from their
leader, the man currently sweeping the GOP presidential primary, and
that endorsement couldn't even garner Jordan a majority of House
Republicans. Maybe if it weren't a secret ballot, the fear of crossing
Trump would surge Republicans into the arms of his handpicked selection.
But the idea that 99 measly votes for Jordan is a "serious showing
"
for a political movement that won the presidency and ran the government
for four years is really grading on a curve.
Scalise won with 113 votes, after boasting that he would get 150 in the
first round. He won a temporary reprieve when the caucus rejected a rule
requiring 217 votes of support for the Speaker among Republicans before
coming to the floor. But there are enough hard no votes to deny him the
gavel many times over, and everybody knows it. The Speaker Steve Scalise
era is as over as the Speaker Jim Jordan era. Kevin McCarthy is about
two minutes from putting up posters throughout Capitol Hill that read
"Miss Me Yet?" but that era is over, too.
The era of atomized self-aggrandizement is upon us. There is no
advantage in the Republican Party for reaching consensus among
themselves, let alone the opposition. Republican members of Congress are
essentially influencers who dabble in policy on the side, and when faced
with the choice they're all too happy to give up the side hustle of
policy in favor of the influencing.
Some circles of the left have informed me to stand in muted praise of
this small-d democratic effort to change the rules of the swamp, in
contrast with the tendency for progressive Democrats to cede to their
leadership. But what's being fought for is about as fanciful as
fighting for the right to wear ice cream as a hat. The hard-liners,
rooted in anti-government principles, see the opportunity to grind the
institution to a halt. The conflict is the intended goal, with nothing
beyond it. That's why this could really go on indefinitely.
Caught in the crossfire are the millions of federal workers who are
increasingly likely to be sent home without pay after the government
almost certainly shuts down on November 17. And they may be there a
while. Any foreign aid the White House wants to bundle together
is just wholly unlikely to move. Border security funding, which the
hard-liners profess to want, won't move either. Neither will the
sundry programs that need reauthorization, like national flood insurance
and the Federal Aviation Administration (good luck with those
Thanksgiving plans).
It turns out the country needs a minimally competent legislature to keep
these exceedingly normal engines of government moving, or some changes
to government funding rules
that account for political dysfunction and don't take out that
dysfunction on innocent bystanders. We are seeing a preview of a kind of
post-governance state, a taste of anarchy. Unfortunately, we've lost
much capacity for revulsion.
~ DAVID DAYEN
Follow David Dayen on Twitter
or Bluesky Social
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Investing in Disinvested America
The Biden administration's manufacturing subsidies are
disproportionately flowing to red states and districts. BY HAROLD
MEYERSON
Capitalists Against Capital Standards for Banks
How the biggest banks are using community bankers to front for the
self-interest of Wall Street in trying to weaken the rules BY ROBERT
KUTTNER
Low-Key Green
Pueblo is a world-class model for the clean-energy economy envisioned in
the Inflation Reduction Act. But its residents may not feel it. BY CHASE
WOODRUFF
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