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Knowles Interviews Boebert: Context and History of Speaker Fight
This interview of Rep. Lauren Boebert (below) is the most cogent explanation I have heard for the anti-McCarthy position. I’ll spoil a bit of it for you: last summer, McCarthy thought there would be far more Republicans, and that he would have enough squish votes to run over the conservatives, so he ignored their concerns. Remember conservatives trying to get a platform out of GOP leadership last year, but they were too smart for all of that? “Red wave!” Then the election came, and Republicans eked out a bare majority in the House and a loss in the Senate. Ouch.
On Monday, the House Freedom Caucus (HFC) whipped votes all day (canvassed the Republicans, negotiating to solidify a platform). In the afternoon or evening, Boebert and Co. approached McCarthy with a list of 218 YES votes for him, provided that he assent to a list of initiatives. These were mostly promises to hold a series of votes on specific issues.
This list was less ambitious than Gingrich’s wildly successful Contract With America. Another thing was some accountability, including the return of the one-member Motion to Vacate. One member? Shocking! Nope — that’s how Jefferson wrote it. It’s not a one-finger “eject” button for the Speaker’s chair, for crying out loud. It just allows filing a motion.
There’s more — watch the whole thing, as it’s only 13 minutes long. Yes, this is the pro-regular order, anti-McCarthy side of the story. Heaven knows we are all hearing the pro-McCarthy argument on every channel.
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Published in General
BY THE WAY…
If this Speaker fight breaks for conservatives, it could help loosen the Big Money death-grip on the House. More thoughts on that some other time.
This is good. Thank you for posting it.
McCarthy’s candidacy is dead.
I’ve been bouncing around the web — you may even deserve the h/t for this one too. Or maybe I got the link from the glorious (but toxic) PDW asylum. No telling.
Also, a good history lesson there. I’d forgotten that McCarthy couldn’t seal before, and that’s how Paul Ryan became the compromise choice.
Looks like he can’t seal the deal this time either. And he’s getting petulant about it.
He’s done in Washington. Even if he finally gets his dream position, it’ll be a Pyrrhic victory.
With each additional long form interview I see with members of Group of 20 (Chip Roy, Matt Gaetz, L. Boebert), the more respect I gain of them and the more reasonable they seem. I posited when this first started that McCarthy was acting as though ‘they’d come around’ (like all GOP voters do), just ‘lay back and think of Reagan’. He’s moving in to Pelosi’s old office without securing the votes or even agreeing to their demands – cocky.
I think we’ve been getting a whole lot of spin & leaking from long-time GOP pundits, center-Right media streams along with the predictable MSM media and the GOP Leadership. Recall how it was all about 5 members/holdouts and the night before the first vote, it jumped up to 20? They were spinning Big Time.
I think he may been done and that we’ll see a trickle, then large defection. Why not get someone better? I owe nothing to him or any other politician.
Watch it.
Thank You, BDB.
I found it helpful, too.
Now that is a fascinating premise and makes a certain kind of (sick) sense.
Yep. I’ve heard from several of them now, and it seems that McCarthy is quite a snake. He was sure he wouldn’t need them — just like he was sure the GOP didn’t need an agenda in order to sweep the House — and then suddenly he discovers that he can’t get the votes. (Gosh, fella. I guess you should have worked harder to get some of your fellow Republicans elected, eh? Or did Ronna spend all that money on shopping sprees and spa visits?) So now instead of deal-making, he just demands to be given the job.
Guy? Deal-making is the job. If you can’t make deals within your own party, you’re going to be rolled by the Dems. And that’s why you’re getting opposition.
Eleventh ballot done — still not speaker.
Tee-hee!
Don Bacon is worried that it’s “bad, bad for the GOP brand!”
Don, what is the GOP brand? What does it stand for? Anyone know!?
But actually, does anyone really care about the GOP brand? I care about America, and I’ll support whoever helps return it to the original factory settings.
I made up my mind about McCarthy back around Halloween. Before that interview I hadn’t watched him closely. What a windbag.
Republican citizens are like Lincoln during the early days of the Civil War. We need generals who will fight. Trump did and we were glad he did. He might have been taken down permanently, or maybe not, but we need others who can continue the fight. It has been said “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog” . (To mix a couple of metaphors) Twenty representatives are making a difference. Win or lose, at least they are trying, which is more than I have seen coming out of Washington for quite a while now.
I know how to get McCarthy elected.
First, we’re going to need anonymous drop-box voting, preferably for several weeks. We’ll need mail-in voting as well, and some friendly courts to arbitrarily change postmarking requirements on the fly. Finally, for any members voting in person, those ballots will be counted until a presumptive winner emerges. If it’s not McCarthy, then we stop counting in public but continue in private. Somehow, it will just work.
You’re welcome.
Evict, Remove, Bar from Office (that he’s been holed up in before he’s even given the position)
Every time I see Boebert I’m impressed. The one thing I still wonder about is how many will never vote for McCarthy because of the trust issue. Of the 20 or so consistent no votes, some are on trust, some are on rules, and some are on policy. McCarthy may yet be able to get there if that trust number is five or less.
And that one, too.
Fantastic interview. I wish Boebert represented my district.
Some more context:
More good stuff at the link above.
Interestingly, I had heard this (inability to seal the deal last time around too) recently and STILL didn’t remember it. I have just realized that this is part of why networks like Fox shout and argue so much — it’s so you don’t remember what doubleplusbadthink guests even said!
This may be the first interview she’s had since this thing blew up in which she hasn’t been interrupted, talked over, shouted down and so forth — and that’s just watching Fox clips! Hannity is on the way out the blackwater pipe these days, and the whole Fox edifice is taking hits from the conservative side of the Republican party. This Speaker fight is opening a lot of eyes. I’ve been lukewarm on Gaetz until this week, when I finally saw him speaking at some length instead of being packaged by the jerk media. Gaetz is making good points, and seems to be taking the very stand that I like to think I would be taking given the opportunity!
Big Conservative Inc. may get taken down a peg in this process, which would be GREAT, as they are not very conservative. Jonah Goldberg is out there ridiculing the idea of an “establishment” and calling us a bunch of fart-sniffers for it on national TV. Look, I’m not above that sort of rhetoric, but I’m not on national TV! I will not miss that dude — he hasn’t done anything I liked since he wrote Liberal Fascism, which I am now afraid to re-read. Did I just not see it?
“Judge” Jeannninnne (bqhatevewr Pirro “ripped!” Boebert on her own segment of some shouty-shouty Fox show. Well Pirro is a damned fruitbat to begin with. Anybody can criticize Biden — congratulations “Judge”. Now what about when people actually want to change business-as-usual GOP shenanigans and OH BY THE WAY get Congress back to regular order?
Man, if I keep this rant up, I’ll just have to write another post.
I think the deal was that the Uniparty threat hadn’t been fully revealed yet. So a whole bunch of Conservatism, Inc. could cosplay as conservatives, and it was an easy sell. Just say the right words, and everyone would agree, and the books would sell, even if nobody ever moved the ball for our team in the end. Say the right words. Hawk your book on Fox News. Rake in the cash.
But the Obama years helped clarify things, and then the Trump years brought everything into clear focus. Pretty words weren’t enough. This was a fight. So whose side are you on? And Conservatism, Inc. picked the side of the Uniparty rather than the people.
By the way, I like that we have members of Congress now using the term “Uniparty.” It also helps clarify things.
Watch for “The Conservative Case for the Globalist Uniparty” coming to a New York Times opinion page near you.
Yup, that whole article is a keeper. I know why 20 people can have such impact while the whole government in GOP hands could not: they didn’t want to.
More context:
Maybe this will result in a Paul Ryan this time also….
This was a great interview, and I think she was very successful at articulating her principled opposition to McCarthy as Speaker. I had a gut feeling that the Freedom Caucus was right, but now I have a better understanding of the reasons for their opposition.
The propaganda arm is out in force now. My Father In Law was a big Trump supporter and yesterday he told me that these 20 were holding up the GOP and they needed to knuckle under. So, all he is seeing on OAN and Fox is opinion that is in support of McCarthy.
She and Chip Roy have been crystal clear in everything I have heard them – where they were actually allowed to express themselves – and make great cases for the real, substantive strides needed to return us to a path toward being a republic and away from the D.C. centered mess we have evolved into. This is a hill to fight on.
The gaslighting is strong — if the Freedom Caucus doesn’t get behind McCarthy, it’s the end of the Republican caucus. No, it’s the end of the Republican party! No, no, it’s the end of the republic!!!
Where have we heard that before?