Democrats shouldn’t have voted for a speakerless House
Timothy P. Carney
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The leader of congressional Democrats thinks it is bad that there is no speaker of the House.
So it might surprise you to know that this same man, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), voted that there should be no speaker of the House. In fact, he brought his entire party unanimously along with him, and provided 95% of the votes for the first-ever successful motion to vacate the chair.
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The motion was sponsored, of course, by Republican Matt Gaetz, and eight of the 216 yay votes were Republicans. But the vote that made the House speakerless — that “closed” the House, to use Jeffries’s terminology — was overwhelmingly carried by Democrats.
If Jeffries thinks a speakerless House is very bad for America, he shouldn’t have led his whole party to vote to kick out the speaker of the House.
There’s a good argument that Republicans as a party deserve more blame for the current dysfunction in the House. A Republican introduced the motion. What was unprecedented was not that the opposing party would oust the speaker, but that enough of the majority party would go along with the motion. Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) had agreed to rules that made his ouster easier. And in general, the party’s embrace of Trumpist quackery created a smaller majority and a more quack-dominated majority.
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But even if Democrats lag the GOP in blameworthiness, they still bear blame, because, again, they provided 95% of the votes to make the House speakerless.
It’s an interesting idea that a party isn’t responsible at all for the result unanimously supported. It’s almost as if some people think the Democrats have no agency in politics, and only Matt Gaetz does.