re: #14 Eclectic Cyborg

If no one can get enough votes who becomes speaker?

Per Jason Linkins:

And, as the Atlantic’s Russell Berman reports, while Chaffetz does not have enough support to compete with McCarthy at the House GOP’s informal vote, Chaffetz believes that the 30 or so members of the House’s mysterious “House Freedom Committee” (a sort of semi-secret society in the House that apparently reckoned that naming themselves “The No Boehners Club” was a touch too juvenile) will collectively vote against McCarthy, prevent him from hitting the magic number, and transform an orderly handover of power into a prolonged debacle:

That scenario is precisely what frightens rank-and-file Republicans.

The House could become institutionally paralyzed until it found a candidate that a majority of its voting members supported as speaker. And if the Republican leader fell short on the first ballot, there’s no guarantee the party would quickly settle on someone else. “We’ve got to figure out how to get to 218 before we get to the floor. Because otherwise we could be literally doing this through the fall,” said Representative Tom Rooney, a McCarthy ally from Florida.

How bad could that be, for Boehner? In 1923, it took nine rounds of voting to finally give Frederick Gillet the gavel, but these votes all took place over the course of three days, which would leave Boehner plenty of time to get home for Thanksgiving. As Berman notes, however, back “in the 19th century it took as long as two months for the House to agree on a leader.” In a similar situation, that would mean Boehner is stuck as the House speaker through the next debt ceiling vote.

But again, let’s underscore that this would just be a crazy and unlikely nightmare scenario, okay? The only thing that needs to happen for Boehner to start his retirement is for the House Republican caucus to arrive at a consensus position in a peaceable and timely manner. Which is ironic, because if Boehner’s colleagues had done this specific thing with something approaching “regularity,” the Ohio representative might not be trying to get the hell out of town right now.