I ask this question because I watched a complete report – several minutes – on the “Republican chaos in the house” on NBC – which talked about the fact that no Speaker has been elected yet.
There are 433 current house members (two seats are vacant). That means, if everyone votes, a successful candidate for Speaker Of The House needs 217 votes to gain a majority. And, so far, Republicans have not put up anyone who is able to get those 217 votes.
Now, let me ask the question in this blog’s title one more time: are Democrats allowed to vote for Speaker Of The House?
Because if they are – and there are 212 of them – you would never know it by the reporting of NBC – or, for that matter, just about every other member of our mainstream media.
Take the Kevin McCarthy vote as an example. The reason we do not have a Speaker Of The House is that McCarthy lost the vote by 216 – 210. Of the 218 Republicans who voted, 8 hard-rightists voted against him . In other words, McCarthy got over 96% of the Republican vote.
The reason he lost was that all 208 Democrats voted against him. Every one of them. No exceptions.
If just 4 Democrats had said “It is important that we have a Speaker of the House, and McCarthy is disliked by the right wing of his party because he has worked with us more than they want him to, let’s keep him there”, McCarthy would have remained in place and we would have had a Speaker all this time.
But NBC – and virtually all the rest of our media – somehow ignore this. They ignore the fact that the reason we have no Speaker Of The House is not the exclusive province of Republican chaos. It is that almost every Republican voted for one and EVERY DEMOCRAT VOTED AGAINST.
I rail a great deal about media bias in this blog. Do you wonder why? I doubt it.
