Paul Blumenthal is a senior reporter with the HuffPost Politics team based in Washington, D.C. He covers courts, elections, political economy and political history.
rebels did what no one had done before and removed the speaker of the House from office in a mid-Congress floor vote. These eight members, led by Rep.Subsequent efforts to find a replacement have failed. First, Majority Leader Steve Scalise won a closed-door party vote to be the party’s choice for speaker ahead of a floor vote. But he was immediately rejected by the same rebels who overthrew McCarthy, and he withdrew before he hit the floor.
When we talk about what’s new here, you’ve described the parties as being hollowed out and replaced by para-party blobs — an amorphous collection of nonprofits, think tanks, media companies and fundraising groups. Is this lack of structure fueling what’s going on in the House? You mentioned Fox News — who do you see among these para-party groups as the primary actors?
As for Jordan, he can’t make it because he’s just a very factional figure. Take a classic congressional analysis and look at the; that gives you a sense of a member’s ideology within the chamber, and Jordan is in the 93rd percentile most conservative in the caucus. It’s just really hard to be that far out on an extreme.
“You’ve got this conservative movement that survives on antics. They’re not interested in governing; this is what they’re interested in. You start with insights like those, and the patterns we are seeing start to make more sense. They see chaos as a strategy.”As to the solutions, because we can see the solutions are not going to work for them, it’s not worth going too deep down that road.