As the New Congress Begins We Are Forced to Talk About Force the Vote Again
As the New Congress Begins We Are Forced to Talk About Force the Vote Again
The conversation that won't just die.
Yes, it’s that time. The new congress has begun and we are once again talking about speakership votes and the leverage progressives have to get concessions from Democratic leadership. How exciting.
Let’s begin by discussing some very basic differences between what’s going on now, what happened in 2020 and what should be considered in future speakership negotiations. First, the GOP are in the minority. Currently, the Democrats control the Senate and the White House. This means that even if the GOP was trying to pass legislation, which they’re not, Democrats would kill it in the Senate or Biden would veto it if they disagreed. This makes the bar extremely low as to what concessions McCarthy would allow because there’s really nothing to lose. The only function that a GOP run House would need to serve is to be unified enough to block what they can of the Democratic agenda that they disagree with and try to extract concessions from the White House by using the debt ceiling fight as leverage. All factions of the GOP agree on these issues, these rebels just don’t want McCarthy. Second, a wide range of GOP pundits admit that this is hurting their party. Some might say, “who cares?” but if one is serious about passing policies Medicare for All you need Democratic votes to get it passed. This means you can’t say “fuck you Democrats” and expect to get their votes later. For example, AOC supported Jessica Cisneros in a primary challenge against Henry Cuellar. Later, when AOC tried to get on the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee Cuellar used his position on the Steering Committee (the committee that assigns the committee seats for congress) as a reason to vote against her nomination.
Third, while McCarthy is unlikely to look to Democrats for their votes to help him attain the speakership, Pelosi or another Democratic leader might make that deal if the demands from progressives are too much. Democrats and Republicans have different bases and therefore leadership is responding to different pressures. Even though both parties largely distrust the other, Democrats are more likely to say that they like political leaders who think the other party has good ideas on some issues and that they shouldn’t refuse to ever work with the other party.
Finally, there’s no guarantee that what these rebel Freedom Caucus members are asking for may be too much for any GOP leader and the GOP would have to turn to the Democrats for their support. Democrats are already floating ideas about a “coalition government” that splits committee chairs between the GOP and Democrats or where they find agreements about certain policy concessions. Perhaps the GOP can find a unity candidate, but so far none of the candidates that are being floated by the Freedom Caucus have garnered support from more than the 20 outside of their ranks. Some voters for McCarthy have not only voged in favour of McCarthy on the floor, but explicitly stated “only McCarthy” when voting.
That being said, what’s this argument of FTV about? In short, there is none. In 2018 the Progressives in Congress used the speakership vote as leverage to gain seats on the what’s known as the ‘A’ committees in congress. Pramila Jayapal, the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, did say the CPC did make a mistake because they didn’t specify which members of the CPC had to be on which committees, but they did secure some powerful committee positions such as Ocasio-Cortez, Katie Porter, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib being placed on the Financial Services Committee and Ilhan Omar being placed on the Foreign Affairs Committee. In 2020, AOC embraced what this group of online leftists were looking for and offered her own ideas.
What she disagreed with was asking specifically for a floor vote on Medicare for All.
One of the main protagonists of the FTV “movement”, Briahna Joy Gray, likes to pretend that this was about more than a floor vote on Medicare for All.
However, at the time she thought the major ask was a floor vote on Medicare for All.
Curiously one of the currents asks by the Freedom Caucus is a floor vote on limiting term limits.
The bill currently has only 44 cosponsors and is surely doomed to fail, just as was Medicare for All, so maybe we’ll see how the media and the public will respond to a group of 20 members of the House essentials holding the speakership vote hostage to gain a floor vote on a policy that they want. Will it generate outrage or will they be the laughing stock of the world? We’ll see.