Explaining The House Speaker Episode To A Non-American

 I sat last night and watched ARD (Channel One of public TV in Germany) and the word 'chaos' must have been said twice in the first 2 minutes.

To put this into prospective for a non-American, as each session starts up....the two parties (Republicans and Democrats.....that's it....no third party) have a internal meeting and vote for a party leader in the House.  Then later comes the Speaker nomination and vote.

Typically....party leader of the majority party....gets the House Speaker 'win'.  It's not written in stone, and you could write up a hundred scenarios where party boss would not get the job.

What has developed since the 1990s....Political Action Committees (PACs) and they have various lobbyists attached, with a leader (thug might be an appropriate word to use) who hands out the PAC money to his favorite 'friends'.  This means you need $400,000 for the campaign and the PAC delivers that, with the expectation that their guy (the party boss) gets the House Speaker job.

So we've come to 2023, and the Republican party boss in the House is this guy McCarthy (from California).  If you pulled up his record....he doesn't always vote for Republican Party ideals (say 25 to 35 percent of the time).  

So this group of 20 Republican members have said no....they want someone else (anyone else would generally be acceptable).  

A lot of harsh words have been said ('payback' is one), and the twenty are now pretty concrete in their anti-McCarthy situation.

Here's the thing.....without a Speaker, no oaths will be made, and business cannot be done.  

But this simply isn't the end of the world.  They could easily go two weeks in this vote-revote-revote situation.  I doubt if anyone would really notice other than the TV journalists hyping this up.

Polls by most American voters?  McCarthy barely gets 50-percent approval....so there's this problem as well.

Could Democrats cross over and vote for McCarthy?  Yes, but this would open a lot of discussion about your dedication to your own party.

The fact that the last time something like this occurred was 1859 (the year prior to the Civil War)?  For probably a decade, I've suggested that a Civil War of sorts is already brewing in the US....caused by lobbyists, people with various agendas, and social media.  

What'll end this?  A written agreement by McCarthy, which forbids any threats to the 20-odd folks, and some extreme promises that he would not normally make.  To be blunt.....legislation doesn't occur unless he blesses it (yes, that's how much power the House Speaker has). I would suggest by Monday morning....that probably will occur.