Rep. Steve Scalise is dropping out of the speaker’s race after House Republicans failed to coalesce behind him in the aftermath of Kevin McCarthy’s historic ouster.
House Republicans met behind closed-doors for more than two hours Thursday afternoon, where the Majority leader urged his detractors to explain their opposition to him in front of the conference. After the meeting ended, Scalise huddled with those opposed to him in his office. And Republicans scheduled a second members-only conference meeting for Thursday evening.
But the opposition to Scalise as the next speaker only grew Thursday, with roughly 20 Republicans publicly opposing him. Scalise needs a majority of the House to be elected speaker, meaning he can only afford to lose four votes.
The republican party is currently an optics nightmare. I don’t have words for how awful the optics will become if the government shuts down and they don’t even have a speaker. Republicans LOVE blaming democrats for shutdowns even though it’s always republicans that refuse to negotiate, but this time it will be truly 100% on them, and unavoidably so.
I don’t doubt for a second that they won’t still try to blame Biden somehow. As we’ve seen with Fox News, it doesn’t need to be true, they just need to repeat it enough times and people will believe it’s true.
Republican leadership seems to know now that it doesn’t work, and they get the majority of the blame.
The party is in an existential and optical nightmare. Polls show the Republican base fairly split on McCarthy’s removal. I think it was something like 37% approving. McCarthy was an incredibly tenuous compromise candidate, and everyone knew he wouldn’t be able to govern without that gavel going away.
McCarthy was just a bandaid on a festering wound, and now Republicans are paralyzed to address it.