Thread by @Fritschner

While I was writing this a reporter asked (paraphrased) "isn't the problem that the next Speaker won't be better?" Many would add "and will likely to be worse" to that, and I think this is a fair question. Democrats did give this thought and consideration, and I have thoughts—

https://twitter.com/fritschner/status/1709559909488976279

Now again, start by looking at this from Democrats' POV on Tuesday morning. McCarthy is Speaker, you're looking ahead. The two most urgent things are funding and Ukraine and he's refusing to give assurances on either. So choose the other adventure- keep Kevin.

What happens next?

Wait we just voted to keep him, why are we back in the same place? I thought we settled this, how come we're voting on it again? Someone should change the rules to make it harder to do this, just like it used to be last year. Who made that change anyway?

https://twitter.com/MeetThePress/status/1708941049492541650

We'll be trying to figure out funding+Ukraine guessing what McCarthy will do, and MTV votes can happen any time. We're trying to game that out and now other guys who represent more votes are saying menacingly they don't want to toss McCarthy YET because it's not "the right time."

On Sunday and Monday McCarthy was trying to isolate what seemed to be a relatively small rebellion. He kept Perry and Roy and their many followers onside, even Norman and Bishop. But they're telegraphing "if you do this again it's the old heave-ho." What's Kevin gonna do then?

So you're back at the best possible outcome is McCarthy is lying to his people and not us. The guys who want bad things have ever-increasing leverage over him, the supposed "moderates" are cowering in a corner, and these MTV votes are happening constantly
x.com/Fritschner/sta…

Some are writing about this as if we chose to overturn a status quo of Kevin McCarthy playing the part of Speaker Scarlet Pimpernel secretly fomenting plans to do the right thing. We had plenty of reason to think things could get worse quickly. It was unstable and unsustainable.

Will the next Speaker be worse? Nobody can possibly know who it'll be or what the dynamic will be. But at some point - this phrase has been trotted out in bad faith many times lately so lets try to use it well - you have to think about the institution. And, you know, the country.

Their so-called "moderates" who enabled McCarthy's empowerment of the right because he campaigned and raised money for them could've acted at any time to correct that course. Not one of them did so much as sign a discharge petition. They made a choice and they're still making it.

Kevin McCarthy spoke to the Republicans behind closed doors after he lost and referred to running the House in a bipartisan manner as "selling his soul to the Democrats," a thing he said he'd rather lose his job than do. Can we really not do better?

https://twitter.com/BenjySarlin/status/1709342843582439827

Maybe we can't, but by Tuesday morning there really wasn't any good or compelling reason not to try. People who think the CR spoke of some impending era of good feelings are entitled to that opinion but I'm confident they're wrong and literally none of our members believed that.

Defending a status quo in which McCarthy was at best dishonest and unreliable ensured we would have no ability to improve any of this. That's not what any of our members came here to do. Republicans put Dems in the position to decide and they all chose to try make it better.

People ask "who will it be" or "who is the best R we can get" or "what's the worst outcome" and I have no idea. I don't think anyone can game this out. Their conditions are very bad and seem unlikely to change. But I can say (and it matters for the future) that we've got our guy.

Yesterday before the vote we didn’t *know* Kevin would choose to burn over ever working with Dems. Maybe he’d choose reason, principle, or strategy instead. In the event, whether by intention or miscalculation he made us believe we had no reason to help him; it sealed his fate.