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The Republican state of play: McCarthy snipes at McConnell, Senate Republicans patronize McCarthy [1]
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Date: 2022-12-15
Multiple Republican senators have said that McCarthy does want the bill passed, but he has to posture about it to get far-right votes for speaker.
”We should do a bill now because I don’t see a path for a bill in the next year. [Continuing resolutions] become more damaging the longer they last,” one Republican senator told The Hill. “Everything I know is that McCarthy is privately cheering us on to get it done but he’s in this position of trying to get the votes for Speaker.”
“He needs votes for the Speaker’s job but I’m told he wants it passed,” said another. “I just can’t believe he wants all these bills piled in his lap in February.” And that right there is a small hint of the tone coming from some Senate Republicans when they talk about McCarthy: condescension that the poor guy is out of his depth.
“I just think for Kevin's sake, even though he's not asking for it, I think some Republicans just feel like we should relieve him of that burden,” Sen. Kevin Cramer told Semafor, which put that quote under the headline "Senators aren't ready to let Kevin McCarthy negotiate a big boy bill just yet."
”I don’t think it’s of the interest of the House Republicans to have a [continuing resolution],” retiring Sen. Rob Portman told The Washington Post.
They really do not think much of McCarthy’s leadership. And for good reason—he’s incredibly weak.
But McCarthy needs those far-right votes for speaker, so whatever he thinks privately, in public, he has to take shots at Senate Republicans for daring to do the basic work of keeping the government funded. McCarthy is also looking at what additional concessions he can make to House extremists to get the votes he needs to be speaker—and one of the possibilities would be to give up even more power than he already has. He’s allowing discussion of reinstating the “motion to vacate” rule, which would make it much easier for him to be replaced as speaker. Issues like that came up at a fraught Wednesday meeting in which House Republicans tried to come up with rules to govern themselves by in the coming Congress; according to the Post, “The tensions threaten to delay the start of basic House functions.”
With Democrats still in charge, the House did on Wednesday evening pass a one-week continuing resolution to keep the government open while an omnibus spending bill is finalized.
Jenifer Fernandez Ancona from Way to Win is our guest on this week’s Daily Kos’ The Brief. When we spoke with Jenifer back in April, she was right about Democratic messaging—and had the data to prove it. More election data has been rolling in from the midterms, and Jenifer is back to talk about what worked and what needs to change in order for the Democratic Party to keep winning.
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