Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), who chairs the Armed Services Committee, told reporters Thursday after a closed-door House GOP meeting that he wants Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) to tell Republicans what concessions they’ll have to make for Democrats to help them elect a speaker—underscoring the chaotic race to find a new House leader as Republican options grow short to overcome an intraparty impasse.
I was coming to the comments to quote the exact same portion, with similar thoughts, though I’m even less generous than you.
I question the numerical advantage too, since it doesn’t exist if it only exists in name, while in practice, they’re unable to act as a unified bloc.
I’d argue that, in practice, the GOP House majority isn’t deserving of that title, since they seem to be unable to operate cohesively and actually vote and pass resolutions as a majority. Instead, I’d argue that their internal struggles have (effectively, even if not yet nominally) created a splinter party within the GOP, so we now have a House with a Democratic plurality, with GOP-centrist a close second, and GOP-MAGA a distant third. Just like Independents like King and Sanders in the Senate align with Democrats, the MAGA reps broadly align with the GOP.
So we have a situation where the Democrats in the House have a de facto plurality, the largest single voting bloc…but the rules of the House only respect a majority, and at that, the House is so locked into the two party system that it seems to be clearly unable to function in this particular political situation.
No party ever has been 100% a unified block. Over the years some have done better than others at getting unity, but unity itself is a strawman. The odd part is the GOP can’t even unify on a leader which should be a low risk thing to unify on.
I had started to rhapsodize about the need to change the U.S. elections/governance rules to one that accommodates coalitions, and realized that by the time I got to the end of that thought, that I’d have a very long, nigh unreadable comment that the powers that be would never help facilitate, anyway.
So I left all that off, because the void is already full of similar screams.
But, yeah…. Meanwhile, the circus continues.
Let’s not forget that without gerrymandering and voter suppression they’d never hold a house majority ever again