In November, the Republican Party had already been frustrated with the result of the mid-term presidential elections in the United States: contrary to the landslide victory that the opposition was projecting, the Democrats, President Joe Biden’s legend, maintained a narrow majority in the Senate and the opposition regained control of the House of Representatives, but with only ten seats more than the governing party.
However, the embarrassment for the republicans continued this week: until the beginning of the night of this Friday (6), after 13 votes in four days, the party had not obtained consensus to elect the president of the Chamber, since the leader Kevin McCarthy did not get the minimum number of votes to be chosen.
Deputies from the Freedom Caucus, the most conservative wing of the Republican Party, are allocating votes to other party nominees, preventing McCarthy from reaching the necessary count to win.
Even former President Donald Trump (2017-2021), who is not a congressman (American law allows people who are not congressmen to preside over the House), was voted on. He himself asked on Wednesday that his supporters among the Freedom Caucus rebels vote for McCarthy, but the dispute continued.
It is the first time since 1923 that the US House has not elected a president on a first ballot. On that occasion, it took nine ballots to come out a winner. This year’s election is already the one that demanded the most votes since 1859, when the winner only came out in the 44th consultation.
Without defining a president, the house cannot carry out any activity, such as inaugurating new deputies and defining the composition of its committees. That is, by an internal division of the majority party, a power of the main democracy in the world is paralyzed.
“Republicans won a not very large majority in the House, of 222 seats against 212 for the Democrats. Logically, they would have the majority, but there is an internal division: there is a group of conservative rebel deputies, more to the right, who refuse to vote for McCarthy because they consider him too centrist, too connected to the big Washington law firms and even close to the democrats, to business interests, and not so much to the conservative agenda they defend, in terms of taxes and customs”, explained Ricardo Bruno Boff, professor of the international relations course at the University of Vale do Itajaí (Univali).
According to information in the American press, McCarthy made concessions to the Freedom Caucus rebels to resolve the impasse, such as agreeing to the processing of a bill to allow only one deputy to call a vote to remove the president of the House and another to establish a limit of parliamentary mandates.
This Friday, most of the approximately 20 Republican deputies who had rejected McCarthy in the previous three days started to vote for him, but the leader still did not get the number of votes to win – 218, a number that can be reduced depending on the situation. participation of deputies in voting.
A new vote must be held from 22:00 local time (midnight in Brazil).
Help the Democrats
Republican lawmakers and supporters fear that the internal division exposed in the election for mayor will prevent the party from emplacing its agenda in the house and make it difficult to monitor the Biden government. “We are wasting our political capital, the capital that the American people gave us in November,” Maria Salazar, Representative from Florida, told ABC News.
Jim Geraghty, senior political correspondent for the conservative magazine National Review, noted in an article that the race “raises the question of whether certain House Republicans prefer the comfort of being in the minority and raging about their powerlessness, rather than the hard work and the difficult compromises that are required to operate in a majority”.
“The more time is spent debating the merits of Kevin McCarthy versus those of…well, nobody else right now, the less time is being spent debating what the Biden administration is doing to the country,” argued Geraghty.
In this sense, although Biden declared that the lack of definition is “embarrassing” for the United States, Boff believes that disputes between Republicans can strengthen the president in a scenario where his party has lost a majority in the House.
“The Democrats are united in the face of this, trying to regain space… if the opponent splits, automatically the Democratic Party is strengthened”, said the expert, who pointed out that a deepening of the internal division of the Republicans could even lead to the creation of a large American third party.
“Divisions occur not only between the two major parties, but also within them, which shows that in the near future the two-party system in the United States may come to an end. The political complexity, the political divisions are no longer properly represented by a bipartisan structure”, argued Boff.
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