Conservative MSNBC political analyst Brendan Buck critiqued House Republicans’ inability to unite against a nominee for Speaker after Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan forced a third vote Friday that most correctly predicted he would lose, and by an even greater margin. On Tuesday Jordan lost by 20 votes. On Wednesday he lost by 22 votes. On Friday he lost by 25 votes.
“This is all a game. It’s a game for a lot of them,” said Buck, referring to House Republican lawmakers. Buck is a former top communications aide to both former GOP Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner.
House Republicans “can play as long as they want because there’s no real consequences for it,” Buck added, noting that “despite all of this chaos, 95% of these people are going to get reelected without a problem.”
MSNBC host José Díaz-Balart observed that America is “16 days, 18 hours, 42 minutes and 35 seconds without the Speaker of the House of Representatives. And kind of like, there are a lot of things happening around the world and certainly a lot of things happening in our country that need to be dealt with. Brendan, do you see any solution going forward in the next days, weeks? Months? I mean, what are we talking about?”
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“You know, you would think that there would be a lot of urgency to figure this out,” Buck replied. “But I actually I don’t know that they actually do that at this point. There’s a lot of hurt feelings. There’s a lot of tempers. I don’t think they’re going to start feeling like they really need to resolve this until you get it maybe closer to a government funding deadline. Maybe the Senate passes a package with money for Israel in it, that they feel like they need to do something.”
The federal government is set to shut down at 12:01 AM on November 18, four weeks from tonight. Friday morning President Joe Biden sent Congress a $105 billion national security request for Israel, Ukraine, and the southern U.S. border.
“There’s a lot of things going on in the world and I think the world is looking at us right now and just hopefully, you know, hopefully just shaking their head is not worse. So I think at some point soon, they will realize that they can’t do this any longer. But we’re not probably at rock bottom yet. Unfortunately.”
Buck also noted that if the Republican majority ever do elect a Speaker, that Speaker will have their hands full.
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“Whoever becomes Speaker, you know, say somebody emerges and, oh, my goodness, all of a sudden, 220 Republicans are excited to vote for them. That person still has to oversee this conference and try to keep them together. It is almost impossible at this point, and whatever cohesion we had before, whatever structures kept us in place before, it’s completely fallen apart. Everybody is on their own now, there’s not going to be any significant legislative going forward, you can forget about it, it’s going to be just whatever the bare minimum that absolutely has to be done is. Because as you said, there are some people in this in this conference who care only about their primary in their district.”
“They are so hyper-obsessed with such a narrow slice of the electorate that they can’t even see straight. There’s a comment from Eli Crane, a freshman who said, you know, he’s representing his voters,” Buck said, referring to the Arizona Republican U.S. Congressman. “He said, ‘I’m representing the American people who want Jim Jordan.’ I had to stop and think, in what world are you living, that the American people, of all other things that Congress can be doing right now, what’s the American people are demanding is Jim Jordan. I think just 30% of the country only knows who Jim Jordan is, and probably most of them don’t like Jim Jordan. But that is the mindset that a lot of these people have and they convince themselves of their righteousness. They convince themselves that their cause is so good and so right that the American people are behind them, but they’re just completely hyper and actually focused on such a narrow, narrow portion of this country. That’s why we can’t get anything done.”