Friends,

What was going to be a memorable week instead became historic.

For the first time since 1923, Congress failed to elect a Speaker on the first ballot.

In a new Congress, electing a Speaker is the very first thing that happens.

Oddly, it even comes before swearing in members - which means everyone casting a vote for Speaker is technically a member-elect.

(Yes, this seems backwards. It’s just a strange historical quirk for which there appears to be no good explanation.)

So this Tuesday we all showed up to the House floor and it turned out that there were about 20 members of the majority party who very much did not want their current leader, Rep. McCarthy, to become the Speaker.

McCarthy could only afford to lose four votes, so 20 holdouts were more than enough to tank the whole thing.

I had brought our three kids onto the House floor - expecting to be sworn in - only to have them all drift to sleep after several hours of failed Speaker votes.

The Speaker vote is done by roll call, which means they read our name and we stand up and announce our vote. That means every round of voting takes about two hours, since we have 434 members (one member recently passed away, which is why it’s not 435).

As mentioned, McCarthy could only afford to lose four votes. Well, he was losing his fifth vote by the time we were on the letter C - at which point the outcome was effectively certain, but it would still take another 90 minutes to complete the vote.

Once the vote was complete, the Clerk would announce the vote had failed, order a new vote, and we’d do it again.

It happened 15 times. Four straight days of sitting in the House chamber, waiting to hear my name called, standing to announce my vote, and then waiting two hours for it to happen again.

The upsides were that I spent a lot of time meeting other members, getting a sense of how the floor works (lots of specific procedure to learn), and also getting a sense for the different factions (and sub-factions) within the majority party.

Last night - just after 1:00 a.m. - we finally elected a Speaker. About 45 minutes later we were all sworn in as official members.

In the end, Speaker McCarthy won by trading away a lot of his power to the 20 holdouts who had blocked him all week.

Those 20 members are from the far-right group within the majority party, and I can call them “far-right” because - based on their numbers during the Speaker fight - it’s clear they are to the right of about 90% of their caucus.

And the truth is they got basically everything they demanded.

Why? Because at the end of the fourth day of being blocked by that group, McCarthy decided he was willing to do anything to get their votes, so he just took their wish list and granted it. The last holdout to drop his objection and clinch the vote for McCarthy was Rep. Matt Gaetz who said he “ran out of stuff to ask for” because McCarthy gave him everything.

There were over a dozen concessions to the far-right, but here are two big ones:

1. McCarthy agreed to change the rules so that it only takes one member of the majority party to call for a vote to oust the Speaker and potentially start this whole process all over again. Given that the far-right just spent the last week proving that they will vote in a 20-person bloc and that McCarthy can only lose four votes if he wants to remain Speaker, that means that if he ever stands up to the far-right, they can vote to remove him basically whenever they want.

2. McCarthy also agreed to put several members of the far-right group on the Rules Committee. The Rules Committee is the funnel through which all bills must pass and it’s the point at which bills can be refashioned completely or simply blocked. This is a major boost of power for the far-right that McCarthy resisted giving until the very last minute when it became clear he had no choice.

There were other concessions, like a vote on a term limits bill and a commitment to “single issue” bills, but those weren’t the major sticking points. The two concessions listed above were the real prize for the holdouts because it gives them far more power going forward.

Some of the people who are the most nervous about the implications for this deal are the members of the majority party who just barely won their elections. They’re in competitive seats and they know what it means for them when more extreme voices gain influence.

Other people are nervous about what this could mean when it comes to the possibility of defaulting on our debt. Pretty soon we’re going to have to vote on whether to pay our bills or default and - while it’s widely agreed that default would lead to an instant, severe recession - this group with a lot of new power has repeatedly shown a willingness to let our country go into default if they don’t get their way with budget demands.

Since we only have two parties in Congress, it can be hard to tell when there’s a big shift in power within a party - but that’s exactly what just happened.

Now I’m headed home with my family, will spend Sunday with them, and then will fly back to D.C. on Monday for my first full week as an official member.

See you next week,

Jeff Jackson

P.S. - Here’s a moment from our week I just wanted to share. We took the kids to the Lincoln Memorial on Monday morning and as soon as Owen walked up to it, he spontaneously rendered a salute. We never discussed this. He just felt like it was the right thing to do and I was lucky enough to snap this photo. Pretty great.

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Jeff Jackson for Congress
P.O. Box 470882
Charlotte, NC 28226
United States
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