Who was NOT on the List
Are the remnants making a stand?
After yesterday’s vote, I, like probably every Democrat in America, heaved a huge sigh of relief. I felt a brief moment of almost giddiness that there were a handful of TWENTY rational Republicans who would save our nation from a 15-month-long paralysis of legislative work, weaponization and impeachment circuses, destruction of government institutions, and vicious cuts aimed at the vulnerable and working class in this nation. There were more voting against Jordan than had been against McCarthy in his initial round of voting!!!
I was exhausted. I took a nap.
When I woke up, I felt uneasy. I googled to see who was on the list of TWENTY. I wanted to see which Republicans voted against Jordan and who they voted for. I wanted to see the possibilities for a consensus speaker.
Here is the list from CNN:
1. Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska voted for former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy
2. Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon voted for McCarthy
3. Rep. Anthony D’Esposito of New York voted for former Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York
4. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida voted for Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana
5. Rep. Jake Ellzey of Texas voted for Rep. Mike Garcia of California
6. Rep. Andrew Garbarino of New York voted for Zeldin
7. Rep. Carlos Gimenez of Florida voted for McCarthy
8. Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas voted for Scalise
9. Rep. Kay Granger of Texas voted for Scalise
10. Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania voted for Scalise
11. Rep. Jennifer Kiggans of Virginia voted for McCarthy
12. Rep. Nick LaLota of New York voted for Zeldin
13. Rep. Mike Lawler of New York voted for McCarthy
14. Rep. John Rutherford of Florida voted for Scalise
15. Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho voted for Scalise
16. Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas voted for Scalise
17. Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado voted for Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota
18. Rep. John James of Michigan voted for Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma
19. Rep. Doug LaMalfa of California voted for McCarthy
20. Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana voted for Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky
If you are a constituent of any of these, and you believe they are looking for sanity, please show your support and urge them to hold the line.
Who are the twenty Republicans looking at instead of Jordan? McCarthy got 6 votes, Scalise got 7, Lee Zeldin of NY, who lost his last race for the House (in a district that includes the Hamptons and has a median family income of over $125,000), got 3 all from the NY delegation, with Mike Garcia, Tom Emmer, Tom Cole, and Tom Massie getting one each.
Thirteen of these votes are pure “FU” votes to stick it back to Jordan for leading the party into this circus.
To get a reading on who, of Zeldin and the others, might be the most amenable to a working bipartisan speakership, I turned to the data at Voteview. Voteview is a database that has analyzed the voting records of members of Congress and classified them along an ideology metric from liberal to conservative based on their voting records in the current Congress. I’ve color-coded it. The scale goes from -1 as pure liberal to 1 as pure conservative.
I read this as Cole being the most amenable to bipartisanship. At this point, all of the alternative nominees in the circus voted for Jordan. To get a reading on Zeldin, I have to go back into the data for the 117th Congress.
The bigger question is, where are those who cast the votes against Jordan on the ideological scale?
What I can glean from this is that the less doctrinaire conservatives, whom I have dubbed “remnants” in my Substack analysis of the fracturing of the FRG (Former Republican Party) are not yet showing any evidence of coalescing around a consensus candidate that would work with Democrats in a bid for sanity. Also interesting was that not a single one of the Republicans who had bruited around extending McHenry’s powers nominated him.
As we wait for the wheel to turn, I will be working with the Voteview database to try to pull out other insights.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/17/politics/republicans-who-voted-against-jim-jordan/index.html
https://voteview.com/data
Lewis, Jeffrey B., Keith Poole, Howard Rosenthal, Adam Boche, Aaron Rudkin, and Luke Sonnet (2021). Voteview: Congressional Roll-Call Votes Database.
Great research! Will the "20" dwindle or grow? There is no logic in the "FRP" - if there was, they would see that Jordan will become the face of the party in Democrat's ads - as HCR pointed out just now.
A party's spiral dive into insignificance?
Thank you Georgia