January 4, 2023
13:08 MST.
Five rounds of voting, 20 GOP votes against McCarthy. He obtained 201 votes. He's still behind Democrat Hakim Jeffries, who came in with 212 votes. One Republican is voting "present".
15:15 MST
Six rounds, same results.
January 5, 2023
11:44 MST
McCarthy has lost a seventh time.
13:21 MST
McCarthy has now lost an eighth time.
18:30 MST
And now McCarthy has lost ten rounds of voting, exceeding the nine rounds it took in 1923. Nobody has taken more than nine rounds since that time, which means that we're back to 1859 when 44 rounds were taken, or depending upon how you look at it, 1839 when 11 rounds did the trick, although whether 11 rounds will work here is another matter entirely.
McCarthy has been making concessions to the far right on top of it, which effectively means he's selling his authority in order to attempt to get the job. If he gets it, he'll be the weakest Speaker of the House in history.
18:45
And now it is eleven.
This is now the longest contest in 164 years. The most recent tally was:
212 for Rep. Hakeem Jeffries
200 for Rep. Kevin McCarthy
12 Rep. Byron Donalds
7 for Rep. Kevin Hern
1 Donald Trump
1 present vote.
They will reconvene at noon on Friday, as McCarthy seeks a deal. The problem is that any deal he enters into now is likely to so compromise his position, he may regret taking it.
Indeed, at this time, it might be worthwhile for McCarthy to withdraw his name and see what happens. The far right doesn't have enough votes to nominate somebody else, and if somebody else was actually chosen, they'd be likely to be a temporary compromise.
What this does do is to demonstrate what an absolute mess the Republican Party has become. When Trump was nominated, we warned that there was a real chance that he'd destroy the GOP. He may very well have done so. It is so fractured, it can't do something that's been routine for a party for a century, and we are now looking back well into the 19th Century for precedents.
January 6, 2022
12:42
McCarthy picked up 14 votes, including the one Congressman who had been voting "present". Up until now, 21 votes were cast against McCarthy in the last several rounds.
It still isn't enough, however. He is now at 213, to Jeffries 212. If I'm correct, McCarthy needs to pick up five more votes.
16:31
After thirteen rounds of voting, it's 214 to 212 in McCarthy's favor. He's closing in, but still lacks enough votes to put him over the top.
Congress was set to reconvene at 10:00 p.m.
21:16
And McCarthy takes 216, and is therefore still short. Matt Gaetz voted present, which kept McCarthy from winning.
January 7, 2023
The 15th time proved to be the charm. McCarthy secured enough votes to become Speaker of the House last night at midnight.
He is, however, now completely beholden to his opponents, who extracted such significant concessions from them that he may well prove to be completely ineffective. Should he stray from the agenda of the far right, he'll be immediately challenged, and the process must begin again, under the rules he condescended to, in order to secure the job.
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