After Five Rounds Of Horse Trading Kevin McCarthy Still Cannot Grasp The Speaker’s Gavel…

There is a real-time dra­ma play­ing out in the United States House of Representatives on this sec­ond day of what should be the sec­ond day of the 118 Congress. Before any new Representatives can be sworn in, there is the lit­tle house­keep­ing for­mal­i­ty of elect­ing a house speaker.
Having won a small major­i­ty in that body, it fell to Republicans to elect a speak­er, and there­in lies the problem.

A can­di­date for speak­er must secure a min­i­mum of 218 votes to become speak­er of the house. Although Republicans won 222 seats in the 2022 midterms, Kevin McCarthy has not got­ten 217 of his col­leagues to elect him speaker.
On the right flank of Kevin McCarthy stands Twenty or so hard-right Republicans who have refused to budge from their nev­er-Kevin stance.
Until the writ­ing of this arti­cle and the fifth vote to elect a speak­er, Kevin McCarthy could only sit and look at the speak­er’s gav­el but could not grasp it.
On the oth­er side of the aisle, the Democrats have main­tained a unit­ed pos­ture, with every cau­cus mem­ber sup­port­ing Hakeem Jefferies, their new­ly mint­ed leader, for speak­er of the house.
Sadly for Kevin McCarthy, Hakeem Jefferies of the minor­i­ty par­ty has secured more votes than he has. Unfortunately for the American peo­ple, the speak­er is not elect­ed on the plu­ral­i­ty or who­ev­er gets the most votes, or Jefferies would have already been sit­ting in the speak­er’s chair. The speak­er must get a min­i­mum of 118 votes.
At the end of the fifth round of vot­ing, the unof­fi­cial count was.
McCarthy 201.
Jefferies 212.
Donalds. 20.
Others 0.
Present 1.
Enough to make Kevin McCarthy’s head itch.

This uncer­tain­ty in the US con­gress has­n’t hap­pened since 1923. According to NBC news, the last time a speak­er vote went to mul­ti­ple bal­lots was in 1923, when Speaker Frederick Gillett, R‑Mass., won re-elec­tion on the ninth ballot.
Kevin McCarthy has three options as the house con­tin­ues to vote, (a) hope his emis­saries can con­vince the hold­outs to stand down, (b) ask the Democrats to give him the votes he needs or © remove him­self from con­tention, a humil­i­at­ing prospect that is dif­fi­cult to imagine.
A uni­ty gov­ern­ment with the Democrats sole­ly to make McCarthy ful­fill his dream to become speak­er would seri­ous­ly frac­ture the Republican par­ty and have even more far-reach­ing neg­a­tive con­se­quences for Mccarthy and his caucus. 

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.