What Next - McCarthy’s Road to Speaker
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 2023
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On Friday night, Representative Kevin McCarthy was elected Speaker of the House—but not before a far-right revolt kept Congress in a weeklong deadlock. As he begins his tenure as Speaker, will these sorts of standoffs be the rule, not the exception?
Guest: Jim Newell, Slate’s senior politics writer.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | For as long as he's covered Congress, Slate's gymnual says the day-to-day proceedings have |
| 0:12.2 | been a kind of choreographed dance. |
| 0:15.4 | Bills come up in an orderly fashion, and usually only when they've got enough votes to pass. |
| 0:20.6 | The speaker rules the chamber like a strong armed den mother. |
| 0:25.6 | But it is now clear, after a brutal fight to simply get the 118th Congress started, that |
| 0:32.8 | is not going to be what Kevin McCarthy's Congress looks like. |
| 0:36.7 | I mean, I had thought, you know, in the weeks and months ahead as he was trying to get these |
| 0:41.6 | stragglers to vote for him. |
| 0:42.9 | I thought, you know, he'll figure it out by January 3rd because we'd be humiliating |
| 0:47.7 | to have to go through multiple ballots on the floor. |
| 0:51.0 | Apparently, yeah. |
| 0:57.2 | Humiliating didn't seem to be a concern when it came to electing Republican leadership. |
| 1:02.3 | In the end, it took 15 votes to get Kevin McCarthy elected Speaker of the House. |
| 1:07.3 | It's not the kind of history Republicans were hoping to make. |
| 1:11.1 | Tonight, for the first time in 100 years, failing to elect a Speaker of the House. |
| 1:15.8 | This eighth vote for House Speaker is expected to end the same way the previous seven did |
| 1:20.5 | with Kevin McCarthy falling short of the 218 votes that he will need in order to win the |
| 1:25.8 | top job. |
| 1:26.8 | No member elect haven't received a majority of the votes cast. |
| 1:30.5 | A Speaker has not been elected. |
| 1:35.4 | I did not expect it would last this long. |
| 1:42.7 | Members themselves were at loss, you know, if you tried to ask them how this is all going |
... |
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