The only good thing about Kevin McCarthy scheduling his supposedly triumphant 14th House roll call vote that would finally make him speaker for 10 p.m. Friday, is that it wasn’t a school night. McCarthy, of course, lost that 14th vote and 15th-round balloting went well past midnight. When McCarthy said, “Tonight, I want to talk directly to the American people,” it was 1:17 a.m. Saturday and America was asleep, just like when George McGovern’s 1972 Democratic nomination acceptance speech began at 2:48 a.m.
It was a pathetic display, not of democracy, but of factionalism, as James Madison warned about in Federalist No. 10. McCarthy had to bend, twist, beg and threaten to get a handful of Republican rebels to support him, but they never did. His victory, at 12:29 a.m., only came when the final member in the alphabetical roll call, Ryan Zinke, announced for McCarthy. And he still failed to garner the minimum 218 votes needed for a majority. The most he could muster was 216, so a handful of rebels skipped the vote or voted "present" to lower the threshold and let everyone go home.
It was fitting that Jan. 6 voting bled into Jan. 7, exactly what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, when Republicans rejected the 2020 election results.
