Be sure to Click LIKE at the bottom of this article, and share it everywhere!! By Craig Andresen – The National Patriot and Right Side Patriots – Commentary

The U.S. House of Representatives seemed to have turned into a shit-show.

While there are more eloquent ways to express that sentiment, I rather doubt there any more accurate ways to express it but to be honest, things aren’t always as they seem.

On Thursday, January 5^th, Kevin McCarthy lost his seventh ballot to become the Speaker of the House. Consistently, he had gotten in the neighborhood of 200-201 votes where he needed 218 to win the gavel. Consistently, there were in the neighborhood of 20 House republicans who simply would not vote for McCarthy…PERIOD.

Here’s the deal…

Nobody could be sworn in as a Member of the House until there is a Speaker of the House, and at that point, we did not have a Speaker of the House. None of the people’s business could be done until House Members elect are sworn in, and without a Speaker, nobody could be sworn in.

By early Friday, January 6^th, there had been 12 votes.

Same result each time.

Einstein said the very definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Congratulations GOP Members of the House…you met Einstein’s definition of insanity.

So, how did we get to that point? Well, it all started with the 2022 election. What was predicted to be a red wave turned out to be a red ripple in the House, and a red sinkhole in the Senate. Yes, Republicans did win a majority in the House, but not the sort of majority Kevin McCarthy needed to become the Speaker. McCarthy knew that if Republicans came out of the 2022 election with a 20-30 seat majority in the House, he would have no problem taking the gavel.

What Republicans ended up with is a 9 seat majority, and McCarthy knew at that point that he did NOT have the 218 votes necessary to gain the Speakership, but he wouldn’t admit it, and pressed on under the delusion that he could wrangle the votes needed from Members of the House he had alienated over the years.

McCarthy has always been a GOP establishment guy, and Conservatives do NOT want an establishment guy running the show in the House. We have all seen the sort of results we get from the establishment guy on our side of the aisle in the Senate, and while I believe Mitch McConnell is more RINO than simply establishment, neither Republican voters nor Conservative Republican House Members want McCarthy, the House version of McConnell holding the gavel.

When the margin of majority in the House was revealed to be razor-thin, McCarthy SHOULD have done the right thing, and dropped his bid to become the speaker. He didn’t, and so part of the blame for what we’re going through now falls directly on his shoulders.

Part of it, but not all of it.

Elected Conservatives in the House also have to share the blame for the circus we watched play out because, while they knew full-well that they could stop McCarthy in his establishment tracks, with nearly two months of warning, they couldn’t come up with a viable alternative TO McCarthy.

Jim Jordan? He didn’t want the gavel, and for good reason. He will be FAR more effective heading up the House Intel Committee than he could ever be as the speaker.

Jim Jordan voted for McCarthy.

Rep.-elect Byron Donalds?

Donalds would have taken the job if the House Republicans could have ginned up 218 votes for him, but that wasn’t going to happen thanks to the other faction on the right side of the aisle, the Only Kevin faction. They wouldn’t vote for anyone BUT McCarthy and therefore, due to a complete lack of foresight and preparation by the Never Kevin faction, Byron Donalds would not be the next Speaker of the House.

Steve Scalise?

The same result applies to Scalise as applies to Donalds.

Meanwhile, over on the other side of the aisle, the liberals were doing what the liberals always do, marching in authoritarian lock-step. They nominated Jeffries, and without so much as an eye blink, every liberal in the House voted for Jefferies.

Kevin Hern, the Republican from Oklahoma?

Hern and Donalds split the anti-McCarthy votes in the 9^th round of voting and as for Hern, he backed McCarthy.

As the House set about further proving Einstein right with a 10^th and 11^th round of voting last Thursday, with no end in sight, it became clear that neither side was prepared to blink. That of course led me to wonder who would blink first…eventually.

Honestly, I could see both sides. While I still don’t think McCarthy is the right choice to lead the House at such a pivotal moment in time, we have gained seats, albeit not as many as we should have under his minority leadership. On the other hand, he is the Mitch McConnell of the House who never seems to take a stand on anything with the possible exception being his own quest to become the speaker.

McCarthy is a deal maker, but he is obviously more apt to make deals with the left than provide a backbone for the Republican party.

President Lincoln once said, “A house divided cannot stand” and while he was referring to the country, we can and should apply that quote to the ongoing mess in trying to elect a Speaker of the House. The Republican Party is now the divided house, and as such, it will have a hard time standing, or ruling over the people’s House.

Late Thursday night, January 5^th, a framework for a deal between the two factions on the right side of the aisle began to emerge that would give the House Freedom Caucus nearly everything they want to eventually allow enough of them to vote for McCarthy. One key item on the list is a rule change that would allow for a single member to make a motion to replace McCarthy should the Speaker lean too hard towards the establishment or should he resort to deal-making with liberals in the House.

While that seems extreme, it isn’t, not in this case and for reasons that might be appropriate given the mandate, thin as it was in the 2022 election given to Republicans in the House.

Voters wanted change. Not just a change from Pelosi and liberal rule in the House, but change in the way Washington does the people’s business. When one takes that into consideration, what the 20 Members of the House have done in preventing a Speaker from being seated, and thus holding up congress from doing the people’s business, suddenly takes on a new light.

I believe an argument can be made that in preventing the House from getting down to business, those 20 roadblocks have actually been doing what voters sent them there to do. Another way of putting it would be to say that those 20 holdouts were doing the people’s business by not allowing business as usual to continue unabated, or unchallenged. Those 20 were doing what nobody from either side of the aisle in the Senate, or the House have been willing to do…they have held one of their own accountable.

Could it be that there’s a new “squad” in the House?

Could it be that the 2^nd American Revolution will start within the hallowed halls rather than in the streets?

The end of the era of Republicans vs Democrats took place when the last Speaker of the House who was accountable to the people, Newt Gengrich held the gavel. While the democrat party continued to move to the left to liberalsism, then socialism, and now into Marxism, elected Republicans, not all of them but far too many simply inched more to the left themselves and continued with business as usual, never challenging the status quo, never standing up to the Washington establishment much less the establishment within our own Republican party. And what has that gotten us? More of the same ol’ crap and Republican establishment House Speakers like Boehner and Ryan.

What we saw last week…what seemed like a shit-show, laughable and unorganized may actually have been anything but. It just might be that 20 Members of the House with a backbone might be able to spur the growth of a set of moose balls on an establishment Speaker of the House.

Will the gambit for the gavel actually work? It’s too early to tell, but should McCarthy become the Speaker, and I believe eventually, he will, he will have a choice to make. He can either be the aforementioned SINO (Speaker In Name Only) or he can evolve into a true leader, not just of the House, but FOR the American people by standing up to the Marxists on the other side of the aisle rather than cutting deals with them.

The real question is…how will the 200 republican establishment Members of the House, those who been voting for McCarthy react? How will the usual suspects behave when business is being done in anything but the usual way? Will they put aside the old-school establishment good ol’ boy DC status quo and start turning this country around?

There are three timeframes we need to recognize here.

In the immediate term, while what we’ve seen over the past week may seem frustrating, stupid and embarrassing, we need to understand that change to the system was only going to come about by shocking the system and the system hasn’t been this shocked for 100 years.

In the short term, thanks to that god-awful spending bill that never should have happened, we now have a few months to line up our Republican ducks before the next spending bill is due which means that McCarthy has the opportunity to get the House Republicans into lockstep behind cutting the spending and eliminating wasteful programs and agencies. McCarthy and the House Republicans had better be ready to grind government to a halt if necessary, and they had better hone the messaging to a razor’s edge to explain it to the voters.

In the long term, 2024 is coming faster than anyone wants to believe, and if backbones and moose balls win the day in the House over the next two years, the future looks brighter for retaking the Senate, expanding the majority in the House and seizing control of the Oval Office. When you can run on your position and your House and Senate votes, even if you lost because you don’t currently hold the majority or via White House veto…you’ve got a platform that shows that you are fighting for the American people…not the DC establishment.

Sadly, all of this, the days on end and countless vote trying to get a Speaker seated in the House could have, and should have been avoided with pre=planning leading up to the vote and the blame there falls squarely on the shoulders of Kevin McCarthy who burned rather than built bridges leading up to the red ripple.

Finally, after a nearly endless series of concessions by McCarthy to the House Freedom Caucus Conservatives, the longest gambit for the gavel in 164 years came to an end in the wee hours of Saturday morning, January 7^th as House establishment Republicans now wonder if the whole thing will make it harder for their side of the aisle to govern effectively.

Only those establishment sorts can answer that question. If they continue to engage in the status quo, yes, it will be harder for them to govern however, if they’re willing to put America first, toss in the status quo, business as usual towel, and do what’s best for the people rather than what’s best for the swamp…good things will happen.

I don’t believe that the Founders and Framers even meant for gaining the Speakership to be an easy, drama-free coronation. They meant for vigorous debate, maybe a few arguments and above all, the will of the people in the People’s House to be the primary concern.

The ball is now in Kevin McCarthy’s court.

Let the true investigations begin, and let the liberal’s tears start flowing.

Copyright © 2022 Craig Andresen / thenationalpatriot.com all rights reserved

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For more political commentary please visit my RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS partner Diane Sori’s blog The Patriot Factor to read her latest op-ed The Continuing Covid Cover-up

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RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS…LIVE!

Tomorrow, Tuesday, January 10th, from 7-8:30pm EST, RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS Craig Andresen and Diane Sori discuss ‘The Continuing Covid Cover-Up ‘; ‘The Gambit For the Gavel’; and important news of the day. Hope you can tune in to RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS on https://rspradio1.com. Click ‘LISTEN LIVE’ starting at 6:50 pm EST with show beginning at 7pm EST.