A couple of weeks ago, Republican John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives, announced his retirement, and this Thursday the Republican party was scheduled to have a closed party election to fill the position. However, the election has been indefinitely postponed. Supposedly, the reason for delay was that the House Majority leader Kevin McCarthy, who was widely expected to win the election, unexpectedly withdrew from the race yesterday: McCarthy had admitted that the purpose of Benghazi investigations was to lower Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers, and this unfortunate episode of truth-speaking called McCarthy’s political competence into question. However, this wasn’t the only reason, and here are 10 other reasons why the vote was postponed.
1) Every Republican politician who could have been interested in the Speaker job is already running for president.
2) The Republican Party has other priorities – the government isn’t going to shut down itself, you know.
3) Since Americans deserve to see a fresh new face in the Speaker role, several leading candidates are busy getting their plastic surgeries.
4) Before Republicans elect the next Speaker, they want to research the possibility of putting any potential Speaker’s speech on a seven second delay.
5) The Speaker is second in line for the presidency, immediately after the Vice President, and no Republican wants to become Joe Biden’s Joe Biden.
6) Having an elected Speaker may cause the House of Representatives to accidentally accomplish something.
7) Being the Speaker involves a lot of handshakes with Barack Obama, which means a high probability of getting Islamo-communist cooties.
8) Many Republican congressmen are so used to voting against everything, that they were having trouble figuring out how to vote for something.
9) Republicans realized that there is a potential for widespread voter fraud, and if it’s not addressed immediately, Democratic congresspeople would be able to vote in the Speaker election.
10) Since the job of the Speaker mostly consists of banging a gavel and holding pointless bi-weekly votes to repeal Obamacare, it was decided that a trained monkey could do the job. However, the monkey training hit a snag when the monkey began questioning the value of these Obamacare votes.
Reblogged this on The Militant Negro™.
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Too funny X – lots of material there. I would like to suggest that no one wants to run because they know Trump has an ego big enough to be the President, the VP and The Speaker all at once.
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…and the whole Senate, House, Attorney General, Secretary of State and every other department, and the Pope, for good measure.
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An unfortunate episode of truth-speaking is a beautiful turn of a phrase. I hope they find someone as weepy and moist as Boehner. I’ll miss that. Not everyone from Ohio is that delicate. Just sayin’.
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I think I know what you’re referring to, and the good news is, you don’t actually have to be in Congress to be elected Speaker.
But maybe the tears come with the job.
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Brilliant, as always. Have you ever tried selling this series to your local newspaper? You should.
As an outsider looking in, will the Republicans even control the House after the next election?
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They will likely retain control of both the House and Senate. That’s why they have such a bug up their ass about winning the White House. That would afford them almost overwhelming control of the government.
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I expect they will win the House, but may well lose the Senate, because there were a lot of Republicans elected to Senate in 2010 Tea Party wave, and some of these seats are in blue states.
But regardless of who wins the Senate, as long as both parties have 40+ votes required for filibusters, barely anything is going to get done.
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Well, if that happens, I think the world will just consider the US “Out of Order” for 4 years… Pop back in after then to see if anyone survived
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I though the world considered us out of order for quite some time now. Our last fully-functioning president was Bill Clinton. That was a long time ago. Obama’s heart is in the right place but he’s a terrible politician. Bush was a moron.
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Considering the shit-storm served to him, i think Obama has done as best as he can. He is frightfully pragmatic, though. I guess, however, that’s a good thing when you have your fingertips the capacity to annihilate the world a couple-of-hundred times over.
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Bill Clinton was (is) a master politician. He’d have taken that same shitstorm and turned it into a gentle spring rain.
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I’m not sure if Clinton would be able to handle a shitstorm of this intensity.
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The Republicans will definitely control the House even if they get fewer votes in the House election (that already happened in 2012). The reason is that many voting districts are intentionally drawn to be so party-safe, that a bag of rocks can win a House seat assuming it can win the majority party primary.
The real question is whether my local newspaper would want to buy it. 🙂
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Gerrymandering = democracy killer.
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I would agree, if not for the fact that we don’t have a real democracy anyway.
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No, we don’t. But we’re a hell of a lot closer to it than MANY places on the globe. I’ll take our corrupt system over their corrupt system any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
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Having lived in one of these many places myself, I can tell that the US system is much better. But at the same time, it is painfully obvious that there are so many things that can be improved in our system to make it even better – gerrymandering is one, unlimited and barely regulated campaign funding is another, un-democratic Electoral College is three. Some would add term limits, too.
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I think they’d be mad not to! No harm trying, right? Salon would be a good door to knock on, too.
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As I started reading the post, the question about the job (if any) that post does started bubbling. Thankfully you covered it in point no. 10. Of course, requirement of training can be debated.
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It’s really a pretty thankless job, because one party hates you for not being conservative enough, and the other for being too conservative. It’s so bad that it could actually qualify as animal abuse.
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I can’t choose a favorite. If I diplomatically say that all 10 are my favorites, do you think they’ll nominate ME as Speaker?
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I think the proper response from a Republican speaker would be that they didn’t like either of 10 and would call the vote to repeal this list.
But you might qualify as ambassador.
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#’s 6 and 8 are almost too true to be funny. Maybe they are just funny sad. Another hit list, X.
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Maybe what we need instead of a good Speaker is a good Listener. – all the women
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I don’t know about listening skills, but in Boehner we had a macho alpha male yet deeply in touch with his emotions (google “crying Boehner”), so it would be tough to top that.
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Great list, X. As for McCarthy’s exit, I am conflicted. Any guy who can read gobbledy-gook as thought it meant something, as he did, is disingenuous to the extreme. He would have been the ultimate oxymoron, a Speaker who spoke like a character on the other side of the Looking Glass. On the other finger, I cringe to think of what kind of character the GOP will come up with to fill the gap. I think we are seeing the two-party system becoming a three-way, and that’s bad for the country.
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Thank you for the reblog!
As for the Speaker, this will be someone who will obviously bend to the will of the Tea Party (he even needs them to get elected) and not work with Democrats, but as far as lawmaking goes, relatively inconsequential, since anything too partisan will be filibustered by Senate Democrats, or if that fails, vetoed by Obama. But considering that the Speaker would be a very public face for the GOP, I actually would prefer someone as radical as possible.
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Darn good point, X! I hadn’t thought of it that way. Let’s see, Tea Party, NRA zealotry, government shutdown, dysfunctional Congress, GOP primaries with 16 clowns. What’s not to like?
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Exactly. The caveat is – as long as they aren’t in the position to actually govern 🙂
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Reblogged this on Still Skeptical After All These Years and commented:
The split in the GOP is so historic, mere prose doesn’t do it justice. Here is a post by List Of X that sums it up brilliantly!
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Eight. Definitely number eight.
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It might be easier than I think it is, because some of their “Nay” voting buttons are probably worn down to the wires now.
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Joe Biden’s Joe Biden!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! oh heck yeah…
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Actually, the Republicans might think about it as being Dick Cheney’s Dick Cheney.
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scariest thought ever…
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The very idea of Dick Cheney’s Dick Cheney makes me shudder…
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it makes my udder shudder
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The Republican party is seeking diversity. Now that they’ve had an orange Speaker, they’re looking for a different exotic color.
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They probably think that it’s time for a pale pink colored one.
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#4 and #9 are effing brilliant! And your commenter indicating that they need a Speaker of Color! Whew! (Black is the new Orange? Brown? Yellow?)
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Well, there IS a show”Orange is the New Black”….
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Baaaahaaaaa
#7, I think this might be the real reason.
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Or maybe they just don’t want to be caught in the same photo with Obama and become a target of Fox report “Barack and (Republican politician), sitting in a tree, N-E-G-O-T-I-A-T-I-N-G!…”
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I literally burst out singing.
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There’s so much truth in your lulz.
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It might just mean that I don’t have great imagination. 🙂
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excellent as always!
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Thank you!
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Haha! These are brilliant. #10 is by far my favorite though. It makes sense that even a monkey would get tired of constantly trying to repeal obamacare. If a monkey can figure this out, our republicans must be…ah…not smarter than a fourth-grader?
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Many Republicans don’t believe they evolved from monkeys, so there’s no pressure for them to be smarter that the monkeys.
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Haha! 😀
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Excellent, as ever! I specially loved the bit about Congress accidentally achieving something! Reblogged.
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Wouldn’t we all love if Congress actually achieved something? 🙂
Thank you for the reblog!
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Reblogged this on Corporate Life 101 and commented:
Check this out for ‘political’ entertainment that seems to rival and, often beat, corporate humor.
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Who needs CNN with you around, X?
Well done – again!
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Well…. I do. I have to get my news stories from somewhere, and occasionally that happens to be CNN. 🙂
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How about Jerry Springer for Speaker? At each house session, Jerry could bring down one representative, point out a committed travesty (“He once thought about voting FOR Obamacare!”), and the others could beat the crap out of him.
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That sounds like a great idea! Not only C-SPAN will become watchable, but these regularly scheduled beatings could actually reduce the size of the government.
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