Exhaustion May Set In for House Republicans

Matt Glassman: “By my count, the House GOP was in conference meeting for something like 20+ hours between October 10th and 20th. That’s insane. Imagine going to a 3 hour PTA meeting every night for a week, with 10 people you like and 200 you tolerate. Now imagine Matt Gaetz is there.”

“It’s honestly not surprising that Mike Bost almost fought him after a screaming match developed between McCarthy and Gaetz. They must be completely sick of each other. And now they are headed for a candidate forum bound to last at least two hours tonight, and right back at it tomorrow for a process that could go upwards of 3 hours if it takes a lot of ballots to get a majority winner.”

“I just don’t see them going back to this process for full do-over. This strikes me as the last chance for the ambitious set of Speakership-seekers. If the nominee fails on the floor, and then the obvious alternative second place finisher also fails on the floor (and it’s not hard to imagine a 1-2 failure of Emmer and Hern in this manner), my bet is they don’t reopen the candidate forums and collect hopefuls. Instead, they switch over to electing a Speaker pro tempore for a termed period (perhaps the remainder of the session), and while that would likely be McHenry, I could also see them heading to Tom Cole.”