Congress

Sometimes the true power of someone new to politics is that they don't arrive in Washington with any of the preconceived notions about the possible. In a political moment that is decidedly post-norms, that's what made Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville's stance against an array of foes, including many on his own side of the aisle, so impressive. Tuberville came to Washington as a cipher. He was a Republican, certainly, and a conservative endorsed by Donald Trump by dint of the failure of Jeff Sessions's brief tenure as attorney general. But it was convenient to think of him as a former football coach who viewed being one of the hundred members of the United States Senate as a step down from the task of raising up some of the most talented athletes in the nation.

The Florida Man had a plan. It was obvious from the beginning, but this being Washington, despite all the bizarre outcomes of the post-Cold War political scene — interns, scandals, impeachments, Donald Trump in the White House and out of it, the Cheneys surrounded by cheering Democrats — normalcy remains the assumed status quo. Normalcy does not encompass a plan to vacate the speaker’s chair with the unanimous help of the other party. In fact, prior to 2019, anyone could have used the same tool the Florida Man would deploy to unseat a speaker. They just never tried it officially, because to do so would be crazy, risking handing control of the House to the minority. And it was that audacity which kept the Florida Man’s plan alive.

At long last, House Republicans finally selected their new speaker: Mike Johnson, the Shreveport native who resembles nothing so much as the pale casseroles ubiquitous to Baptist fellowship halls across the American South. They could be white cheddar cheese and boiled potatoes, they could be whipped cream and banana with Nilla wafers — you won't know 'til you take a scoop, but you won't have to chew very much to enjoy it. Mike Johnson is perhaps the furthest thing from Kevin McCarthy in experience. He has no record as a fundraiser. He is a strong social conservative, a version that has not been updated since the mid-2000s.

Will today be the day we get a permanent speaker of the House? It’s tough to say. House Republicans huddled this morning to figure out who they will put forward as their speaker-designee in the hopes that someone — perhaps, anyone! — can steer the rowdy House at a time of growing international strife. They eventually settled on Minnesota representative Tom Emmer. There’s no guarantee that Emmer will even get the required votes from the full House, however. To minimize that possibility, Representative Mike Flood circulated a “loyalty pledge” of sorts that all current speaker candidates signed, which requires them to support whoever the conference selects. Flood noted to me, though, that even Jesus Christ would struggle to get to 217 votes in this House GOP conference.

Forget boy math, forget girl math: focus on Speaker Math: getting anywhere near the magic threshold of 217 votes is proving almost impossible for any Republican. Back in January, even former speaker Kevin McCarthy couldn’t get to 217, clinching the gavel with 216 votes after some of his then-foes threw him a bone by simply voting present and therefore lowering the threshold. At that point though, he never dipped below 200 votes in his marathon bid to secure the speakership. Now, it’s former McCarthy foe turned McCarthy ally Jim Jordan who’s finding that getting to 217 is somehow almost harder than getting over 200. Following a second public ballot, Jordan is losing votes at a time when he needs momentum.

There’s an easy way out of the chaos in the House, led by a Florida man who’s leaning on lessons learned in his decades as a firefighter and basketball player: Representative Carlos Giménez, the general leading the Only Kevin charge. For some in Congress, the literal Only Kevin pins they wore back in January were as ephemeral as a Nancy Mace promise. But for Giménez, it’s about refusing to reward bad behavior and about loyalty to the man who recruited him to run for his current job. “There was an injustice done” in Giménez’s eyes, he tells me in his Capitol Hill office. “I think that the 96 percent [of House Republicans who voted to keep McCarthy last week] bent to rule of the 4 [percent]. Everybody talks about the majority here.

George Santos, the histrionic New York congressman, is under investigation once again. This time it doesn’t matter whether he is a drag queen or not, as the courts, not journalists, are leading this investigation.According to a new indictment filed Tuesday, the congressman stole the identities of his campaign donors, using their credit cards to send tens of thousands of dollars to his war chest. The twenty-three-count indictment comes after one filed in May charging Santos with various offenses, including lying to Congress about his wealth and embezzling money from his campaign.The new indictment claims the congressman charged over $44,000 to his campaign without the authorization of donors.

After the US House stole the spotlight last week, sources on the Hill say a similar, yet more “behind-closed-doors” brouhaha is brewing within the Senate. In the face of a government shutdown, conservatives have been in “constant” cross-chamber communication. For instance, when the Schumer-McConnell bill, with its $6 billion of funding for Ukraine, was on the table the weekend before last, Senate Republicans were apprised that House Democrats were filibustering to get it passed. As the House convened on Saturday September 30, and the Senate convened at noon for a 1 p.m.

Representative Nancy Mace, newfound foe of ousted speaker Kevin McCarthy, has been using a software for official work that is expressly not permitted by House rules. The South Carolinian chairs a subcommittee on CyberSecurity on the Oversight Committee, and recently passed the MACE Act, which unusually she named after herself — yet uses the work management site Monday.com to handle a number of tasks in her office. “We used it for everything and Nancy ran it,” a former Mace staffer tells The Spectator. All legislative and media planning work went through this platform, sources say; we’re also told by former Mace staff that her office has used it to conduct constituent services that could leave personal information of her constituents potentially vulnerable.

In Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, a posse of violent ne’er-do-wells forced by circumstance into a house together descend, through duplicity, avarice and lies, into bloody chaos which leaves everyone dead. The title is a fitting one for the eight Republicans who crossed party lines to vote with House Democrats, unanimous in their belief that they are better off without Kevin McCarthy as speaker. In doing so, they ensured the House is controlled by Democrats in all but name. As the speaker race begins, the odds favor Steve Scalise or Jim Jordan — both more satisfying to the right wing than McCarthy, but far less capable of fundraising as he did to protect the tenuous hold of moderates in blue states.

Et tu, Nancy Mace? The iconoclastic congresswoman from South Carolina put one of eight nails in Kevin McCarthy’s speakership — prompting a series of cascading events beyond any one person’s control and total uncertainty in the continuity of America’s government. Mace, first elected to Congress with support to the tune of over $4 million from McCarthy’s Congressional Leadership Fund, undertook quite a heel-turn from January, where she labeled her partner-in-chaos Matt Gaetz a “fraud” to today, when she teamed up with Gaetz and every single House Democrat to jettison McCarthy, leaving the country in uncharted waters and the House without a speaker.