FOX 7 Debate: Who will be the next Speaker of the House?

We’re already seeing a little of what’s in store once they figure out who is third in line to the presidency.

“This ought to be something that everyone should aspire to in the way people aspire to be president”, said Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Those ambitions have been reduced to ashes.

She said that Paul Ryan is now being looked to by many moderate Republicans and Speaker Rep. John Boehner as the right man to try to bring the Republican conference together. They may not like the idea of Ryan being Speaker, but they also realize that their influence will only take them so far. “A banana republic”, said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. But it is his family that will be impacted the most should he become the next speaker. “The speaker is about leadership and not policy, and we’re at a point in our nation’s history where we’ve had a speaker resign, we’ve had a presumptive speaker resign and quite frankly we’re facing what I think is a leadership crisis”. Otherwise, congressional Republicans are declaring their intention to give up on doing anything significant and to be mere office-holders until a new president is elected-and indefinitely after that, if a Democrat gets into the White House again. During the September 29 interview, Hannity pressed McCarthy on what House Republicans had done to earn the trust of conservatives. The only threat to conservative House members is the possibility of someone coming along in a Republican primary who is even more conservative.

Republicans never figured out how to defuse the weapon of the government shutdown. More and more Republicans claim he’s the only one who can do it, the “consensus choice”. Mr. Boehner told them that was impossible, so they pushed him out (or thought they did). The gambit failed. In 2013, they shut the federal government for 16 days in an attempt to force the repeal of Obama’s health insurance program; that gambit failed too.

“You have to build a sense of trust and personal loyalty”, said Catholic University associate professor Matthew Green, who has written extensively on the evolution of the role of speaker.

Both lawmakers say they have a close connection to Paul Ryan. They cite votes during his 17-year House career to revamp education, expand Medicare and buttress financial institutions during the Great Recession. They want confrontation and expect capitulation.

The GOP’s insurgent impulse, in other words, isn’t merely a result of gerrymandering or conservative microclimates in rural America.

Nobody’s arguing that the House can be governed in a fairytale state of complete individualism, with every representative acting on his own. Boehner occasionally defied the malcontents, but he eventually chose to quit rather than to seek a coalition with Democrats that would sideline the conservative holdouts.

Now McCarthy has been deposed by a conservative rebellion before he even got to hold the speaker’s gavel.

Ryan, 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate and chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means committee, would likely become speaker with limited opposition. McCarthy would have been insane to say yes. He had a strong majority of the caucus backing him for speaker, but that wasn’t enough.

Don’t be bamboozled by the mainstream media’s snarky coverage of the overthrow of Speaker John Boehner. Asking Democrats to vote for him, McCarthy said wisely, isn’t a viable option.

That won’t happen in our system. They’ll have the satisfaction of telling their constituents that they refused to compromise.