October 20, 2023 12:23 PM UTC

Boebert Backs Motion to REALLY Break Congress

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• by: Colorado Pols

The House of Representatives will end its third week without a Speaker of the House after Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan failed (again) to receive enough support from Republicans to put his angry mug in the Speaker’s office. Republicans have reportedly decided not to give Jordan a fourth opportunity to fail, so at least we’re moving on to something else.

What might that be? Nobody knows!

One of the ideas floating around is to give Speaker Pro Tem Patrick McHenry more power to allow Congress to actually get some work done while Republicans duke it out over who should be the next person to not get elected House Speaker.

But as NBC News reports, McHenry is unwilling to attempt to take further floor action in his current positions unless the House votes to give him expanded temporary powers:

In a closed-door meeting Thursday, Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., told GOP colleagues he might resign as speaker pro tempore if Republicans push him to try to move legislation on the floor without an explicit vote to expand his powers, according to multiple lawmakers in the room.

“If you guys try to do that, you’ll figure out who the next person on Kevin’s list is,” McHenry told the room, three sources said, referring to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s secret list of GOP lawmakers who would serve as temporary speaker in the event of a vacancy.

McHenry’s comments underscore the quandary Republicans are in: They can’t really do anything until they choose a new speaker, but they can’t agree on someone who can get the votes to be that new speaker.

And McHenry is unwilling to set a precedent that would give future temporary speakers the full power of speakers who are elected on the House floor. It could mean that the House wouldn’t need to elect speakers in the future…

…McHenry “will not act in a manner he interprets as unconstitutional” as speaker pro tem, a third member in the room said. [Pols emphasis]

Democrats might be willing to vote to give McHenry expanded temporary powers…which was probably all that some Republicans needed to hear because they are children who instinctively oppose anything Democrats might support. In fact, one group of House Republicans now want to get rid of McHenry altogether. As Farnoush Amiri reports for The Associated Press:

👀Here’s Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., holding a resolution on the House floor to remove Rep. Patrick McHenry as temporary speaker. It has several pages of signatures. (AP Photo/@alexbrandon) pic.twitter.com/GagoId7qJO

— Farnoush Amiri (@FarnoushAmiri) October 20, 2023

To recap…because the MAGA caucus of House Republicans can’t figure out a way to get Jordan into the Speaker’s office, they are now working on a proposal to remove McHenry from his position…which really only exists because House Republicans — including Colorado Rep. Ken Buck — vacated the office when they ousted Kevin McCarthy in the first place. Rather than fix the first problem, these Republicans appear to be more interested in breaking something else. 

This all makes sense if you view it from a certain perspective. The only thing that House Republicans actually know how to do is to vote ‘NO.’ On everything.

And who would sign on to such a precedent-shattering proposal? If you zoom in on the second photo above, you can see that Colorado’s own Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-ifle) is among those who think this would be a great idea.

Here’s a glimpse of the first page of that resolution held by Florida Republican Rep. Greg Steube. It’s possible that there isn’t a second page since nobody really knows what would happen next. It’s also worth exploring whether these Republicans even bothered to consider what happens next. They might not care.

We’ll update this post as soon as we figure out what would happen if McHenry were removed from a job that probably shouldn’t really exist in the first place.

Regardless, it appears Republicans have more time to gather additional kindling so that they can burn everything down. The House is apparently calling it quits for the weekend. Republicans will have another internal candidate “forum” on Monday, with new Speaker candidates given a deadline of noon on Sunday to make their intentions known.

In the end, there is only one lesson from all of this chaos that truly matters: You simply cannot put Republicans in charge of anything, for any reason. The 2024 election can’t get here soon enough.