Speaker Showdown Hot Take No-Memes Edition
No More Joking Around
I hearbye revoke my candidacy for Speaker of the House.
It was short lived, sort of on the ‘inside track’, but it’s over. We’re out of options.
Republicans have started from scratch. Today they had a 5-round runoff vote in which everyone who voted for Scalise (pretty much) ultimately for Scalise 2.0 (Tom Emmer), and the rest eventually settling on a Jordan 2.0. Then McCarthy Scalise Tom Emmer has dropped out of the race when it became apparent he couldn’t get to 217.
That’s all fine and stupid. The joke is getting a bit old, but maybe after another two weeks it’ll circle back to being funny again.
I know at least one person who is dying to hear the words ‘Somehow, McCarthy has returned’
As for Emmer, it was surely too good to be true that he’d be speaker. The first thing I checked with him, as with others, was whether he voted to ‘certify’ Biden’s election.
McCarthy, of course, like the majority of the house GOP, did not vote to ‘certify’, but between a) his now-documented private actions at the time, where he generally freaked out over how insane the situation was, and even said at one point that Trump should resign and b) his general amorphous squishiness, I don’t think anyone would expect knives-out moves from him.
So back to Emmer. I saw that I agreed with him on the 2020 vote, and that made him someone I could be happy to see win.
Evidently the insane caucus looked at the same votes and this makes Emmer unacceptable. At first, I saw an MTG quote taken somewhat out of context that suggested the 2020 vote was the main reason she ‘could not support him.’ In context, it was one of 4-5 issues.
If I were in Congress, I’d have voted for McCarthy under these circumstances, I’m sure, and Scalise too. So, surely, you may think, there must be someone from the other caucus, like them, that I could decide was at least obstructionist as a matter of circumstance rather than conviction.
But you know what, not anymore. If the 2020 election vote is as important as to the other side as to me, at this point I can only assume it is precisely as preparation for ‘contingencies’ if the next election is similarly close.
Attention seeking doesn’t explain it after a point. I think a certain crowd won’t be happy with anyone who is not prepared to steal the vote. Trump’s preferences are obvious here as well.
So, ok, fine, they win: if we are going to decide the speakership on the basis of the 2020 election, then it’s gotta be Jeffries for speaker.
And by the way, to all of the haters in the comment section, I unironically will challenge any of you to a debate about the vote in 2020. We can go through state by state, issue by issue, allegation by allegation. I READ ALL ABOUT 2000 MULES AND ZUCKERBUCKS. I DO MY OWN RESEARCH.
We can talk about it by state, or in chronological order.
We can talk about the legal debate in Pennsylvania over whether ballots need be postmarked by election day or received by election day, and over whether the Pennsylvania Supreme Court could nullify a state law deciding this, and over whether a vote cast under the guidance of the court should be revoked, but most of all over how it didn’t affect the outcome and such votes were omitted from the tally anyways until a week later.
We can talk about the bait-and-switch headlines of ‘financial fraud expert sees signs of foul play in Wisconsin’, and I can explain how the article tricked you and why the expert in question had real credentials but was obviously not following the results as closely as he thought he was.
We can talk about:
Press statements from the Trump campaign alleging exact counts of votes believed to be fraudulent in each of a dozen or so categories from the dozens to the thousands (Georgia and Nevada especially)
The ‘blue shift’ effect observed, along-side the completely forgotten red-shift that occurred in other states
My Pillow Theories (lol this is just dunking I won’t hold these ones against you)
The Arizona audit and its findings
2000 Mules
Zuckerbucks, and why this story, while a real story, represents a total acknowledgement from planet MAGA that the vote was legitimate
Honestly, reader, this rant goes on for quite a bit longer in my head, pages, even. Suffice to say, if you choose to debate me on this, you won’t have to do any research to brush up on the allegations because I remember them ALL TOO WELL.