The U.S. House is still without a Speaker, and if you want to know why, you need to ask our local congressmen, Ben Cline and Bob Good.
“Our work for the American people continues this week with the consideration of candidates to be the next House Speaker, and I am proud to support House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan for the role,” Cline, a Republican who represents the Sixth District, the western part of the state from the Winchester area down the I-81 corridor to Roanoke and Salem, wrote in an email to constituents on Wednesday.
Good, who represents the Fifth District, which runs from the northern tip of Albemarle down Route 29 to the North Carolina border, is also a Jordan guy.
“I voted for Jim Jordan in the Republican Conference today,” Good wrote on Twitter on Wednesday. “I also voted for us to stay in conference until someone gets the required support of 217. No one received a majority of 221 eligible voting members. I am still supporting Jordan. The country cannot afford the status quo.”
Thing is, Steve Scalise, the current House Majority Leader, won a majority of the House Republican Conference vote, by a narrow 113-99 margin, on Wednesday.
What normally happens next – normally being, throughout the rest of U.S. political history – is, the party in the majority coalesces behind the internal candidate that wins the majority and moves forward to elect that person House Speaker.
Today’s Republicans are anything but normal. A small cabal of far-right Republicans forced out the Speaker that the party voted in earlier this year, Kevin McCarthy, who got the nod in January after 15 ballots, earlier this month, punishing him for making a deal with moderate Republicans and Democrats to avert a government shutdown.
Good was among the eight Republicans to vote McCarthy out; Cline, notably, was not, but Cline has been a fence-sitter on the internal divide in the GOP from the get-go, so that was no surprise.
Why this is at all important is, the House can’t do business without an elected Speaker, meaning, no action on the budget, which is still in limbo, and hurtling toward a mid-November deadline to avert the next possible government shutdown; and then there’s the war between Israel and Gaza, which could very well expand into a regional Middle East conflagration.
With the House on the sidelines, the U.S. can’t be involved in the Middle East in terms of providing material support to our Israeli allies, because any money from the U.S. would require approval from both the House and Senate.
But what’s most important, of course, is that guys like Ben Cline and Bob Good get an ideological ally in the position of power.
“Chairman Jordan is a man of integrity, intelligence, and principle. He is the only choice to unify Republicans, rally us around a conservative agenda for America, and begin to address the serious challenges our nation faces,” Cline wrote in his note to constituents, missing on the obvious – that Jordan has done anything but “unify Republicans”; he wasn’t even able to get a majority of the conference’s support.
“I cannot vote for the status quo while there is the possibility for real change,” Good wrote on Twitter in a message posted on Thursday morning. “We will live with the impact of this decision for decades to come, and I believe it is worth a few days if needed to try to save the country.”
Meanwhile, as Republicans fiddle around, the world burns.
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Chris Graham
