most bipartisan Speaker of the House ever
Speaker Johnson made history yesterday as he survived an attempt to oust him by receiving 359-43 votes in favor of retaining him. A quick look at the history of the Speaker of the House doesn't find anything at all like this massive bipartisan vote to retain a Speaker. Almost exclusively, the Speaker has been a partisan position, and typically when a member has crossed party lines to vote for another party's candidate there have been serious punishments.
If Democrats had voted against Johnson, then the House would currently have no Speaker, and we'd be facing another series of Speaker nomination votes like we had when the House kicked McCarthy out of the job.
My own representative, a Democrat, voted to retain Republican Johnson.
You could say, this is great, the people's House has risen above partisanship and we now have a broad bipartisan coalition running things. But personally I'm not happy with what this broad bipartisan coalition has been doing lately -- it seems most focused on passing military aid, extending warrantless surveillance, and restricting speech against Israel. Johnson has referred to himself as a "wartime Speaker". I would have voted against retaining him.
But I'm feeling very much stuck on the outside these days as the number of people killed by war trends up and is now the highest since the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
If Democrats had voted against Johnson, then the House would currently have no Speaker, and we'd be facing another series of Speaker nomination votes like we had when the House kicked McCarthy out of the job.
My own representative, a Democrat, voted to retain Republican Johnson.
You could say, this is great, the people's House has risen above partisanship and we now have a broad bipartisan coalition running things. But personally I'm not happy with what this broad bipartisan coalition has been doing lately -- it seems most focused on passing military aid, extending warrantless surveillance, and restricting speech against Israel. Johnson has referred to himself as a "wartime Speaker". I would have voted against retaining him.
But I'm feeling very much stuck on the outside these days as the number of people killed by war trends up and is now the highest since the Rwandan genocide in 1994.