Get ready for McCarthy witch hunt 2.0 – By Joan McCarter (Daily Kos) / Dec 30, 2022
The hapless House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s path to the House speakership is involving making deals with some real devils. In order to get that seat, he’s apparently agreeing to be speaker in name only with the worst of the worst in his conference calling all the shots. That starts with agreeing to make it easier for the maniacs to oust him if he strays from the path they set out for him.
The California Republican has agreed to making the process for booting him easier. According to CNN, six sources say he has agreed to lowering the threshold of members required to force a vote on the “motion to vacate the chair,” basically a no confidence vote. That’s the mechanism that the Freedom Caucus used to force out former Speaker John Boehner in 2015—they didn’t have the vote, but the threat of one was enough to secure Boehner’s resignation. When Democrats took over in 2019, they changed the rule to require a majority of either of the House party conferences to bring the motion to the floor.
They are talking about lowering that threshold to just five members, according to CNN’s Melanie Zanona’s reporting—five being the same number of ultra-far right members who are in the “never Kevin” caucus, and five being the number of Republicans that could work with Democrats on discharge petitions that would force bills to the floor. That’s the only way Democrats or the supposed moderate Republicans would have to advance a legislative agenda. So it would take five Republicans to give Democrats power, and five to take out McCarthy; as Zanona says “mutually assured destruction.” She also reports that “some McCarthy critics tell me they think 5 is still too high,” for the motion to vacate threshold. Whereas some of the not-as-radical Republicans think the threshold needs to be set at 50.
CONTINUE > https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/30/2144511/-Get-ready-for-McCarthy-witch-hunt-2-0
