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As the year got underway, the House Republican majority went with its Plan A: GOP members elected Kevin McCarthy as speaker. That, we now know, didn’t work out well: The California Republican last week became the first speaker to ever be ousted in the middle of a term.
This week, the party went with its Plan B: House GOP members held an intraparty election and nominated House Majority Leader Steve Scalise as their next speaker. That failed, too.
As things stand, there is no Plan C. Republicans could try rallying behind House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan — the one who lost this week’s election — but at least for now, he doesn’t appear to have the votes. GOP members could try sticking with Patrick McHenry, who’s already serving in an acting capacity. The party could consider someone entirely new who isn’t currently part of the conversation.
Or Republicans could try something completely radical and look across the aisle. Semafor reported overnight:
As Steve Scalise’s gavel bid went down in flames, desperate House Republicans began publicly musing Thursday about working with Democrats to finally pick a speaker. But behind closed doors, there appears to have been little effort so far to hatch a bipartisan deal.
It’s best not to overstate the likelihood of such an agreement. To know anything about congressional GOP politics in recent years is to realize that the party’s bipartisan muscles have long since atrophied.
But it’s also fair to say that the door is not closed. The next speaker, whoever he or she might be, will need 217 votes. As of last night, much of the Republican conference came to believe that no GOP member can reach 217.
It’s against this backdrop that the House Democratic conference is just sitting there — with 212 votes. The Semafor report added:
Rep. Maria Salazar, R-Fla. ... suggested Republicans might be willing to parlay with Democrats, telling a reporter that “we’re open to anything that’s reasonable.” Meanwhile, Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., one of the chamber’s higher profile moderates, told a gaggle that “in the end a bipartisan way may be the only answer because we have 8-10 people that do not want to be part of the governing majority.”
House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers also told reporters, in reference to Democrats, “We’re willing to work with them, but they gotta tell us what they need.”
From a Democratic perspective, there is a rather obvious solution to all of the drama: Five House Republicans could break ranks, back House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries for speaker, in exchange for some kind of bipartisan, power-sharing agreement. Indeed, for all the talk this week about no member being “close to 217,” the fact remains that the New York Democrat is, in fact, quite close to the threshold: Jeffries is sitting on 212 votes.
Realistically, those five votes will almost certainly not materialize — GOP members backing a Democratic candidate for speaker would immediately end their careers in Republican politics — but there are plenty of other alternative arrangements in which a mainstream GOP contender gets the gavel with some Democratic support.
House Majority Whip Katherine Clark told NBC News on Thursday afternoon, “[O]ur door is open.” Around the same time, Jeffries appeared on PBS’s “NewsHour,” and declared:
“[It’s] urgently necessary that the Republicans get their act together and elect a speaker from within their own ranks, as it is the responsibility of the majority party to do, or have traditional Republicans break with the extremists within the House Republican Conference and partner with Democrats on a bipartisan path forward. We are ready, willing, and able to do so. I know there are traditional Republicans who are good women and men who want to see government function, but they are unable to do it within the ranks of their own conference, which is dominated by the extremist wing. And that’s why we continue to extend the hand of bipartisanship to them.”
Last fall, as McCarthy struggled to lock up GOP support for his own speaker bid, he warned the House Republican conference that internal divisions risked creating a dynamic in which “Democrats could end up picking who the speaker is.”
It would be extraordinary if, a year later, his warning proved prophetic.