by Daisy Luther, The Organic Prepper:
Last month, Congress was thrown into shambles when the Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, was ousted from office. Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan, and Tom Emmer all tried (and failed) to become Speaker. Finally, this past week, Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson was voted in.
This month without a speaker put the Republican Party’s dysfunction on stage for the world to see. The chaos seems to be over for now, but how long will this last? Do we have reason to believe Johnson will be much different from McCarthy?
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It wasn’t easy to get McCarthy installed, to begin with. It took fifteen ballots last January to get him installed as Speaker. A messy Speaker election like McCarthy’s had only occurred once since the Civil War.
Is history repeating itself?
It’s worth noting that, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, there were numerous messy appointments to the Speaker of the House, and in many cases, the drama revolved around abolitionists who refused to play politics. The election of Nathaniel Banks in 1855 was the longest in history, requiring 133 ballots and taking over two months.
In fact, during this time, tensions were running so high over the Speaker election in American politics that a pro-slavery Representative, Albert Rust, physically assaulted one of Banks’ supporters with a cane. This was a year before the more famous caning of Charles Sumner by two South Carolina representatives in the Senate Chamber in 1856.
I suppose we should be happy that our politicians aren’t whacking each other with their canes and walkers. But that day may come.
The fall of McCarthy
McCarthy had never been very popular despite his adeptness at fundraising. For the 2021-2022 election cycle, according to Open Secrets, he was the House member who raised the most money. Approximately 38% of his contributions came from small donors and 36% came from large donors. But 24% came from “Other,” which may be part of the reason so many conservatives view him as a swamp creature.
His final ouster came about as a result of his compromising with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown.
Government shutdowns are bad. People rely on the federal government.
But the out-of-control spending needs to be addressed. The Federal Reserve started printing like mad during Covid, and since then, it’s just been one crisis after another. It’s not unreasonable to think of the federal government as a junkie and politicians like McCarthy as enabling family members who keep trying to patch things over rather than admit the seriousness of the problem.
The eight Republican House Representatives that voted to oust McCarthy all quoted his lack of willingness to demand fiscal responsibility as a reason for their vote.
The battle to be Speaker
After McCarthy’s ouster, Rep. Steve Scalise from Louisiana hoped to be the next Speaker. In 2017, Scalise was shot when a gunman opened fire on Republicans practicing for an annual charity baseball game. Like McCarthy, Scalise is an innovative fundraiser.
Looking at Open Secrets data on Steve Scalise, you can see that most of his money in the 2021-2022 election cycle, 79%, came from the “Other” category. He had relatively small amounts of large or small individual donations.
So what does “Other” mean, anyway?
Well, in Scalise’s case, it might have been Bill Gates. Campaign finance information dating back to 2016 show him accepting money from Bill Gates. In more recent years, he has accepted money from anti-Trump billionaire Paul Singer.
But money didn’t help him get elected Speaker of the House. Steve Scalise exited the race when it became clear he wasn’t going to get the required votes.
After Scalise, Rep. Jim Jordan from Ohio attempted to become Speaker. Jim Jordan is an interesting character; unlike McCarthy and Scalise, he took very little money from large, unspecified groups in his 2021-2022 campaign. Open Secrets reports that 58% of his donations came from small (under $200) individual donations; 37% came from large individual donations. Businesses may not love him, but considering that he managed to raise the 8th most funds in that election cycle, obviously, his constituents do.
While the mainstream press regularly refers to Jordan as a pro-Trump, MAGA extremist, the alternative press has shown a different side. When Jim Jordan found out that IRS agents had been sent to longtime Democrat Matt Taibbi’s home as he testified to Congress about the Twitter Files, his office demanded accountability from the IRS, as Taibbi discusses here.
Furthermore, he headed the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Federal Government to prevent these kinds of intimidation tactics from happening in the future.
Jim Jordan looks like one of those rare politicians who actually believes he is there to serve the American public. The First Amendment does not have a lot of ardent defenders these days, but Jim Jordan seems to be one of them. This probably explains why so many individuals are willing to support him when the typical political donors are not.
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