© Reuters A once-in-a-century crisis: the mess in the House of Representatives reveals the depth of the crisis in the Republican Party
| Neta Bar, Israel Hayom |
Political crisis in the United States: The House of Representatives, the lower house of the American Congress, was held today (Wednesday) for another round of voting in order to elect a speaker, when three rounds of voting failed to achieve the majority needed to elect the majority leader in the house.
Kevin McCarthy, the Republican candidate, won 203 votes in one of the voting rounds, 15 less than the number needed to be elected, after members of the “Freedom Assembly”, a far-right legislative body, rejected McCarthy’s compromise proposal and voted overwhelmingly against him.
The process of electing a chairman was extended by a day and the previous chairwoman, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, remained in office for a full day after that, a symbolic blow for the Republican Party whose major achievement in the mid-term elections that took place late last year was turning over the majority in the House of Representatives.
McCarthy himself reacted with disappointment to the results of the voting rounds but announced that he would not give up the nomination and even called for his help a particularly controversial figure in the Republican Party, former President Donald Trump. During the long voting day, Trump called McCarthy and told him that he was standing behind him, hoping that this public sponsorship would convince the members of the “Freedom Assembly” to change their vote.
“Is this the voting day I wanted? No. Trump wants me to stay in the race in order to end the disorder in the party’s ranks,”
McCarthy said in a statement to the Politico news site.
The last time such a crisis hit the House of Representatives was no less than a hundred years ago when, even then, the Republican Party faced a deep crisis. She managed to win a narrow majority in the House of Representatives after losing a staggering 77 seats in the midterm elections. So the struggle continued for no less than nine rounds of voting spread over three days when in the end one of the party’s candidates managed to obtain the required majority.
Read the full article on the Israel Today website