In the end, he couldn’t even get 218 votes, a simple majority. The GOP’s Kevin McCarthy gained the House speakership in the dead of night early Saturday, but the last winner of a 15-rounder who emerged this battered and bloody was Muhammad Ali, who told reporters after 1975′s “Thrilla in Manila” that “it was like death.”
Pundits were quick to portray McCarthy’s grueling and at times comically pathetic 3 1/2-day slog to victory as a symbol of weakness and dysfunction within the not-quite-post-Donald Trump Republican Party, but the reality of what just happened on Capitol Hill is far worse than that, and I’m not sure if it’s fully set in.
The ambitious but low-wattage Californian was finally elected speaker on that 15th ballot — in the kind of gridlock that America hasn’t seen since the run-up to a Civil War that killed 600,000 people — with just 216 votes that amounted to less than 49.8% of the total, since 218 House members cast ballots for either Democratic leader Hakim Jeffries or “present” as a final show of anti-McCarthy animus.
