MICHAEL KNOWLES (HOST): So, who -- the holdouts on Jim Jordan, 22 of them, they're virtually all squishes. Maybe not every single -- pretty much every single one of them, though. They're squishes, they're liberals, they're saboteurs. They're just awful. And they need to get on board because, if they don't, then the Republicans will be ceding the very little control that they currently have in the government. And maybe that's what these squishes wanted the whole time. Maybe that's what these limp Republicans, impotent Republicans always kind of wanted. The reason that being the Republican speaker of the House is the worst job in the country, in -- certainly in Washington, DC, is because the Democrats are all on the same page. With the exception of Joe Manchin and maybe Kyrsten Sinema, they're all progressive leftists. There is barely a blue dog left in the bunch. So they're all on the same page and they can join together and act and and throw their weight around because they're unified. The Republicans are not. The Republicans have conservatives. The Republicans have libertarians. The Republicans have liberals. The conservatives have the self-styled moderates. The conservatives have the Chamber of Commerce people. They're disparate factions, and they don't have a ton bringing them together. So, they're gonna hang apart.
And what these squishes are saying is -- they're saying, look, I would rather give Democrats much more control over the House of Representatives and have nearly unified control over the government, than empower one of those mean old conservatives. Jim Jordan, too, by the way, because Jim Jordan has very conservative beliefs, but he is as respectable a guy in Congress as there possibly could be. He's as decent a guy as you're gonna find in the House of Representatives. And if he is too far and crazy and right-wing for them, then they're just not conservative. Which means that the five person Republican majority was largely illusory, because we weren't able to get a speaker.
Yes, they kind of agreed on Kevin McCarthy, but the only way that Kevin finally got his speakership the first time -- the only time, I guess -- is when he conceded so much of his power that they were able to depose him nine months later. Basically, the same thing happened with Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan was a compromise candidate. He didn't ask for the job. He wanted to remain chairman of the budget committee. He was drafted as the only person who could bring the factions of the GOP together, and then he left in ignominy. Nobody liked him by the time he left. How about John Boehner? John Boehner, deeply unpopular speaker. No one likes him now. He basically just shills for Democrats while he's sipping red wine and smoking a cig on the cover of his tell-all book bashing conservatives. We just don't have any ability to function as Republicans at the national level in Washington, DC.