In Ohio’s state House of Representatives yesterday, Democrats and some Republicans voted to elect Jason Stephens, a moderate Republican, as speaker of the House, defeating a bid for speaker by the Republicans’ preferred candidate, rightwing state Rep. Derek Merrin, who sounds like a guest star in The Rural Juror. That’s the second time this week that an unexpected moderate candidate has suddenly won the speaker’s gavel in a state legislature: Tuesday, the Pennsylvania House chose (former) Democrat Mike Rozzi to break a stupid deadlock; Rozzi pledged to approach the job as an independent, not caucusing with either party.
Why yes, the two surprise speakerships have fueled some pundit speculation that maybe Democrats and a few “moderate” Republicans in the US House might pull off something similar if Kevin McCarthy’s bid to be speaker flames out and Republicans can’t agree on anyone else. As Yr Wonkette has already argued this morning, that’s a pretty crap idea, no thank you, unless maybe six Republicans step up and vote for Hakeem Jeffries, and then only if no one is injured by the monkeys flying out of Matt Gaetz’s butt.
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In Ohio yesterday, Democrats nominated Stephens as a surprise alternative to Merrin, who had already been picked for speaker in a non-official, Republicans-only vote back in December. Stephens had been one of two challengers in that caucus vote. He decided that breaking with the party leadership was worth working with Democrats, who were happy to have him as speaker.
“They needed our votes and we took the opportunity to make sure that we were going to be working with the speaker who we felt at the end of the day would work with us on the issues we could agree on,” Democratic Minority LeaderAllison Russo said.
All 32 Democrats in the Ohio House voted for Stephens yesterday, as did 22 of the Republicans; that beat the 43 Republicans who voted for Merrin. Republicans still have a supermajority in both houses of the Ohio Lege, but joint reporting by the Ohio Capital Journal and News 5 Cleveland says Stephens pledged to put the brakes on some of his party’s more radical ideas, like a so-called “Backpack Bill” that would change school funding formulas to allow parents to spend taxpayer money on private, religious schools, instead of allocating funding to public schools based on enrollment.
Also too, numerous Democrats told reporters that Stephens had agreed to drive a stake through any attempt to revive last session’s creepy anti-democracy proposal that would have required constitutional amendments to win 60 percent of the public vote in a referendum, instead of the current simple majority. That bill, proposed after voters in other states voted in the midterms to preserve abortion rights, was a transparent attempt to keep voters from undoing Republican-passed laws to ban abortion and gerrymander district maps to favor Republicans.
Stephens didn’t directly address any deals he may have cut to secure Democratic votes, but promised to pursue “common ground” for all Ohioans and to focus on governing instead of hot-button issues.
Not surprisingly, more right-leaning Republicans who supported Merrin were outraged at being STABBED IN THE BACK by the moderate minority of their caucus. While Merrin wouldn’t comment for the Journal/News 5 story, one of his close allies, Aaron Baer of something called the “Center for Christian Virtue,” said the vote was a betrayal of the caucus’s vote last month to elect Merrin, whose candidacy Baer said was about “issues and policies and doing what’s right for religious freedom, doing what’s right for family, doing what’s right for life.” Oh no! Now the forces of DEATH have taken over, we guess.
Not surprisingly, the choice of surprise moderate speakers in Pennsylvania and Ohio got some in the punditocracy thinking maybe that trend might extend to the current fuck-tussle in the US House. After the Ohio vote yesterday, the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake wondered aloud about the chances of some sort of bipartisan coalition springing up if Kevin McCarthy keeps failing as hard as he’s failed so far. We aren’t going to waste a gift linky on that one; Blake notes that such compromises are far more likely at the state level, and adds that for anything like it to happen at the federal level, things would have to devolve far beyond the current GOP clown show, especially since any Republicans who did would be primaried, and possibly tarred and feathered.
Republicans voting for a Democrat would be pretty unfathomable at the federal level; it would be tantamount to those members sacrificing their political careers.
But that doesn’t foreclose the possibility of enough congressional Republicans joining with Democrats to pick a moderate Republican speaker, as happened in Ohio.
And who knows, maybe some Republicans who plan to retire might join in. But it would only happen if the GOP turdfight drags on a lot longer, particularly given Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries’s sensible statement that Democrats want to “solve problems for the American people, not save the Republicans from their dysfunction.”
So while any “coalition” speaker is extremely unlikely, Blake says, it would be “political malpractice” if Democrats don’t at least give it some thought. To which we’d mostly just remind Blake, as Stephen did earlier, that “The West Wing” really is fiction. An actual Republican compromise speaker will have very little chance of keeping their party in line. A speaker elevated by a compromise with Democrats would probably make January 6, 2001, look like an actual tourist visit to the Capitol.
[Ohio Capital Journal and News 5 Cleveland / WaPo / Image: video screenshot, News 5 Cleveland on YouTube]
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