Speaker of the House 2023, part deux - 15 January 2023

Mr. McCarthy has won his Speakership on the fifteenth (15th) voting round.  This is a 100-year-old record, that is, more voting rounds required than any Speaker in 100 years.  In fact, it has taken one (1) voting round in each opportunity in the last 100 years.  The final holdout seems to have been Matt Gaetz, R-FL.  The House immediately adjourned and then took up foolish votes on the Monday when they returned to the chambers.  We now face a vote on the debt ceiling and the Republicans are again threatening a default.  Yes, there are a few playing games that border on default (e.g., "pay debt interest, military, Social Security, and Medicare bills first" and some are proposing to postpone paying foreign debt holders), but none of these proposals are taken seriously.  In particular, the US payment obligations are so complex and intermingled that it is not clear how to separate out these types ("interest, military, ...") of payments from other types of payments.  Mayhem.  

There have also been a handful of Secret documents found in old offices that were used by President Biden after he left the VP position.  Biden has promptly searched for additional documents and handed them all over.  This is in sharp contrast with Trump's troubles wherein he keeps documents that he is supposed to turn over, and he does not seem to look for documents when asked (he says he looked for documents, but then a search under subpoena finds more documents).  Anyway, Trump obstructs, Biden complies, and the press seems to think the two are somehow equivalent.

The real problem is  Representative George Santos, R-NY.  He appears to be a serial liar, have some real money problems, and running from Brazilian authorities for fraud there.  So Santos hogs headlines that should be about Trump's problems.  Santos is also important because he was a critical vote for McCarthy (in the opening paragraph), and it is not clear McCarthy would be Speaker today were it not for Santos and his vote.  As a result, McCarthy and his team are just ignoring the Santos problem.  The Santos Problem?  Yeah, a demonstrated liar was seated as a Republican Representative in Congress.  The seating of Santos should have been postponed until the legal troubles were sorted out, but this would likely require a replacement and the replacement would likely be a Democrat and so McCarthy et al are just ignoring the problem.  with Republicans, it is always projection.  Today, fraud, tomorrow voting fraud, and so on.