Okay, Kevin McCarthy has been elected Speaker of the House. It took fifteen rounds of voting and concessions by McCarthy to gain the critical votes of his opponents in the House Freedom Caucus (“HFC”).

As the week-long deadlock continued, the congressional Democrats gloated and mocked what they called the “Republicans’ inability to govern”. The corporate media deemed the standoff to be a “farce” and a “spectacle”. But to us adults who can recall the long-ago days when Congress actually debated issues and engaged in floor fights to resolve disputes, it looked exactly like how the House should function.

So what was it all about?

From the beginning of the United States down to the reign of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a member of the House could make a “motion to vacate” which would lead to a snap vote on whether the Speaker should be replaced. Pelosi changed that rule to allow only a party leader or a majority party vote to force such a vote. The HFC demanded that the pre-Pelosi rule be reinstated. After bitterly opposing the change, McCarthy finally caved.

More importantly, McCarthy reportedly agreed to assign members of the HFC to the powerful House Rules Committee which decides which bills will be allowed to go to the floor for a vote.

In addition, this committee determines how long debate on a bill will be and whether it can be amended. In short, HFC members will have a pivotal role in deciding which bills and amendments can come to the floor as well as the length of debate on them.

Given this concession, it is anticipated that there will be no more trillion dollar, multi-thousand page unread spending packages moving through Congress at light speed.

McCarthy made other concessions, but you get the idea. Thanks to the opposition of the HFC, McCarthy’s will not be a Pelosi-style imperial speakership with concentrated, unchecked power. Instead the power aggregated by Pelosi will be spread among the Members of Congress, and the House will hopefully return to being a deliberative body in which proposed legislation is actually read and openly debated.

Being an overaged juvenile delinquent, I must admit that I thoroughly enjoyed watching the congressional food fight play out. To me the shut down of Congress which brought federal spending to a dead halt and shifted power from the Speaker to the Members has been a boon to the nation. And watching the corporate media stamp their feet and vapor lock only made things sweeter.

But, despite following the fevered media coverage, I still couldn’t understand how the public standoff between McCarthy and the HFC came about. After all, the parties had had since the election in November 2022 to work out their differences behind closed doors. So why did the impasse have to be hammered out on the floor of the House?

I found the answer to that question in a brief but remarkably informative video of Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO), a stalwart of the HFC, in which she sorted out the reasons for the standoff. Since she is an outspoken conservative, Boebert has, of course, been dismissed by the corporate media as an ignoramus. While I know little about her, I found her explanation to be articulate, lucid and easy to follow. You can see what I mean by clicking on the following picture.

As for my references to the congressional food fight, click on the following picture for an instructional video in which John Belushi plays the role of the HFC.