In a hysterical piece over at the Bulwark, Joe Perticone quotes Democratic congressman Ted Lieu, who is pretending to be extremely worried about how long the House is taking to choose a new speaker:
“We can’t even do basic things,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Cal.) told The Bulwark. “We can’t conduct any oversight. You can’t have an entire branch of government simply not function. And we don’t have a House right now because no one’s even sworn in.”
Wow, sounds serious! I must assume, then, that Ted Lieu, and a bunch of his Democratic colleagues, are backing Kevin McCarthy in the interest of bringing that “entire branch of government” back to life.
Wait, they’re not? Why not? Could it be, perhaps, because they don’t want Kevin McCarthy to be speaker, either?
Essentially, Lieu’s position is that not having a speaker is unsustainable, and so other people should vote for the candidate he won’t. But why should they? Structurally, there’s no difference between Ted Lieu and, say, Chip Roy. Both of them get a vote on this, and neither of them want to cast it for Kevin McCarthy. I’ve now heard both Republicans and Democrats arguing that “20 people should not be able to buck the majority.” But that’s not what’s happening, is it? What’s happening is that a majority of elected representatives keeps voting against Kevin McCarthy, and thereby depriving him of a win. Yes, Ted Lieu has a different alternative candidate in mind than do the Republican holdouts. But that’s irrelevant. To become speaker, McCarthy needs a majority, and he can’t find one.
If anything, there should be more pressure on Ted Lieu to help fix this than on the Republicans who are against McCarthy, because, by their own accounts, those Republicans do not believe that this delay represents a crisis and Ted Lieu does. If Lieu really believe what he’s saying, he can choose at any point either to actively vote for McCarthy, or to vote “present” instead. That he hasn’t done either — and does not intend to — shows you that, as usual, he’s full of it.