[share your voice in poll at end]
Now that 20 Tea Party Caucus House members won’t vote for Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House as things currently stand, the gauntlet of leverage has been played. Their expectation, of course, is that McCarthy will eventually fold, grovel to accede to their demands, forcing the Republican Party further out on the limb of mindless extremism.
But what if leverage came from a different angle?
Hiding quietly in the back benches of the GOP side of the House floor, there are members the #SecretSaneGOPCaucus who don’t mix with the #TrumplodyteCaucus. And Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under President Clinton, has found one that he would like to see ascend to the House Speaker role with the help of the entire Democratic House Caucus. He said on his Substack feed:
There’s an alternative, and I urge House Democrats and the few remaining “moderate” Republicans to take it: Make Ohio’s Republican Rep. David Joyce the Speaker of the House.
House Dems and moderate Republicans could come up with the 218 votes to put Joyce over the top.
Why Joyce? He’s the new chairman of the Republican Conference Group, a group you probably never heard of (years ago it was called the “Tuesday Group”) because it flies under the radar. It’s a collection of the remaining 40 or so Republican moderates. I say “moderate” only in comparison to the rest of the Republican House. The Conference Group at least wants the government to function.
While I don’t know much about Joyce’s politics, he must know the long game of what this proposal could yield:
- Severing all levers of the Trump agenda, purging #TheBigLie forever from the party platform.
- Immediately provide power and voice to honorable members of the Republican Party who have the courage to force out the lying zealots who’ve sent their GOP into a nose-dive.
- Purge the #CORPservative agenda of current GOP power brokers which promotes only racism, division, hatred, and false piety - all to appease corporate and billionaire donors.
- Steal the focus for the GOP presidential race; bringing sane voices to the fore.
But it’s not all about power. It’s also about Joyce and his fellow moderates finally being free to actually help people without fear of being primaried, because he could prevent the purse strings opened against his incumbents.
Ultimately, these few dozen moderates could do their party a favor if they rose together, perhaps as the #GOP2020TruthCaucus, and made this connection to new Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries more than a fleeting moment of convenience for both sides.
By actually choosing to continue this bipartisanship, Joyce and his friends could deliver on that goal of helping their constituents. In so doing, they’d do what decades of Republicans never could allow: having evidence of tangible accomplishments to run on. The outgoing GOP didn’t want Democrats to have any successes. Funny how they’ve never seen that they could bank on them too.
With those bipartisan improvements echoing throughout our nation over time, they could join Liz Cheney and Adam Kinsinger as some of the first potential leaders of the next iteration of the Republican Party after the Trump scourge is purged. TFG’s days of skirting litigious disaster are just about over.
What would Jeffries ask for in return for his caucus’s help? He should demand that the next House session doesn’t spend two years trying to impeach Biden for nothing or hound Hunter for whatever they dream up. Secondly, there must a quick, clean bill - with no amendments to hold over America’s heads - to raise the debt ceiling, with two years until the next vote. Better yet, eliminate the debt ceiling entirely.
The deal would be the beginning of all manner of negotiations. Each would probably have to be watered down a bit so that this new brand of honorable Republicans could say that got something on their side.
But this budding caucus could grow, as more Republicans see the writing on the wall. And soon it will be readily apparent just how slippery it is standing on Trump’s coattails.
And combined with Democrats on the other side of the aisle, another beautiful thing could happen.
The babbling voices of Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, and even Speaker hopeful Kevin McCarthy could be expelled with a two-thirds vote. Speaker Joyce, of course, wouldn’t let these temporary depletions swing House control. Expulsions would come at a pace where replacement Republicans might be seated after winning special elections before the next head rolls.
And if this new wave of Republicans wants to clip the tentacles that have kept almost all of their party’s representatives beholden to billionaires for decades, they could end private funding of campaigns altogether by joining Democrats in passing versions of the outgoing session’s HR 1 and HR 4, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
By turning all campaigns into publicly funded affairs, there would no longer be the GOP necessity for catering to big business and billionaires. And moderate voices could finally survive the primaries.
That support for election reform though, would likely come at a price as most deals do. Expect the partisan gerrymandering restrictions written out of what the House version takes to the floor. After all, a GOP 2020 TC will want to leave themselves a chance at retaining power once the cranky wankers like Boebert are sent packing.
Of course, Democrats have been lulled into bad deals by Republicans before. All one has to do is look to Mitch McConnell for countless examples of that. But Reich feels that this time it would be different:
But Joyce is not a MAGA Republican. He refused to sign the Texas amicus brief that tried to overturn the results of the presidential election. He was also one of the few Republican House members who did not object to the counting of electoral college votes on January 6, 2021.
Since Biden became president, Joyce has voted in line with Biden’s positions over 30 percent of the time. He was one of 35 Republicans who joined all Democrats in approving legislation to establish the January 6 commission to investigate the storming of the US Capitol. He and 46 other Republicans voted for the Respect for Marriage Act, codifying the right to same-sex marriage in federal law
Yes, I know it would be strange to hand the opposition party a fabulous way to drastically improve their brand.
Ultimately, that’s OK for Democrats. Risking an erosion of their power is worth saving the planet and civilization for future generations. But this new wave championing Republican integrity will have to be clean house - in both capitalized and non-capitalized senses of the word.
When the expulsions start, Dems will know that Lucy won’t be pulling back the football. And finally, most of America, and the world as a whole, will finally be able to exhale in relief that Trumpism will never threaten American democracy again.