You’re starting to have pretty key members of the House saying the Republicans can’t elect a Speaker. Period. Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas said last night that the effort is “hopeless” and that they’ll need Democrats help to end the “fiasco.”
“There’s not a person in our conference, not a person in American that can get 217 votes out of this group.”
I suggested that this might really be a possibility last night. But I’d been thinking that when this really comes under consideration and Republicans start considering what Democrats will require, they’ll sober up and elect a Speaker.
But maybe not?
I’m getting the sense that the events of the last three weeks have created genuinely new realities in the GOP caucus, taken existing tensions and elevated them to levels in which different groups or individuals simply can’t work with each other. I don’t have a close enough read of these people to know if that’s really the case. But I think it’s possible.