Let me start this post by asking people to start working on two things as we move forward through these, shall I say, interesting times. 

We all need to become better students of history and become rigorous critical thinkers. Set aside the tribal emotional vapid arguments that so many people get sucked into and actually question people and their actions vigorously. If it sounds too good to be true and it rolls off the tongue too easily, lean into your questioning of it even harder than you previously had been.

I start my post off with that because I'm going to bring up some things here that I want you, the reader, to question what I'm saying with that type of curious and enlivened passion.

I don't have any problem at all with the House of Representatives or the Senate removing or adding somebody from leadership in their individual bodies. That happens in the private sector all the time, and at one time or another, we have all bemoan the fact that government does not work as efficiently as the private sector.

The one thing I question, though is the timing.

The same people could have prevented Kevin McCarthy from becoming speaker back in January. Setting the tone at the beginning of a 2-year cycle is different than changing horses in the middle of the stream with 13 months to go until a national election.

My colleague Bonchie wrote earlier today that now that the action is finished, the ones who put it into motion better have a plan. What's Done Is Done, and Republicans Better Come Up With a Plan

From that article:

On Tuesday, for the first time in the nation's history, a sitting Speaker of the House was ousted. That came after eight Republicans joined with the entirety of the present Democrat caucus to boot Rep. Kevin McCarthy from the post. 

Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is certainly up for debate. On its face, it seems unlikely any consensus Speaker candidate will be markedly different from McCarthy. Rep. Steve Scalise is currently undergoing chemo treatments for an aggressive cancer, but he has indicated (at least according to reports) that he would accept the job. Does shifting the number two Republican and a close ally of McCarthy into the top spot really change anything? Probably not. 

Any analysis of this also has to include all the different variables. What happens to the impeachment inquiry given it was McCarthy who orchestrated it? Is there any chance of ever uniting Republicans to vote for articles of impeachment given the division that this motion to vacate caused? Are you really going to see those who despise Rep. Matt Gaetz with the fire of a thousand suns join forces with him? Again, the answer is probably not.

Just before I submitted this post, I saw that my colleague Jeff Charles posted this: Jim Jordan Announces Run for House Speaker After McCarthy Ouster. The race is on.

Now my whole contention on this from the get-go has once again been about timing. I wrote earlier this year when McCarthy had to do 15 roll call votes to win the gavel if he would possibly drop out like he had years earlier: FLASHBACK: Kevin McCarthy Dropped out of the Speaker Race in 2015 - Will He Again?

Anyway, that got me thinking about the last time Kevin McCarthy was up for the Speaker of the House job back in 2015 after John “Crier” Boehner stepped down and the next guy in line in the GOP for the top job was…Kevin McCarthy.

Yet he never became Speaker back then.

I happened to mention this in my article earlier today right here Newt Gingrich’s Expert Analysis on the Speaker Vote Is Eye-Roll Worthy about this historical event that lots of GOP types seem to not know.

From that amazingly insightful article that went back in history a whole seven years ago:

I continued:

Now, I’m not going to get all wound up about whether or not Kevin McCarthy becomes Speaker of the House. I have written about the problems that the Republican Party has nationally and back here in my home state of Michigan and that is long-term-wise to me more critical than this moment about who leads the Republicans with a five-seat lead in the House of Representatives. More articles on that subject along with discussions on my radio show upcoming this year.

However, I am curious as to why McCarthy is still in leadership and running after not having enough votes to become Speaker back in 2015 to replace John Boehner because of lack of votes. If you recall Paul Ryan skipped over the GOP leadership at that time and became Speaker.

Interesting huh?

The time to prevent McCarthy from becoming Speaker was done even before that vote was to happen, and Paul Ryan was brought in, who was NOT in leadership at the time. That is how you do it, in my opinion.

However, we all know that it took McCarthy over 15 votes to gain the gavel this past January, and if there was this much distrust for him, then he should have been prevented from taking the chair then. So what if it took 30 votes to block him—that is when you do it.

I'm going to take a guess that it was a bit more than the debt and broken promises or continuing resolutions, as I said earlier this morning on my show Duke Over America on Facebook, which you can check out right here.

However, let's go over a couple of those things just to give you an idea of why my overall premise is that no matter who is going to sit in the speaker chair, the same reasons given to get rid of McCarthy will be used against that person and they will be equally despised.

The End of Continuing Resolutions

This is something so common sense that it's hard to believe that we're still talking about it in 2023. 

However, we are discussing a body politic in Washington, DC, that treats common sense like sunlight treats a vampire. They seemingly run from it as fast as they can, and this is not just Democrats but some Republicans as well as this is a common theme among all of them.

I know there was a moment within my lifetime when individual appropriation bills were still being done, and we weren't having the hodgepodge of funding bills on top of funding bills to get something passed to keep everything moving. But this ended a very long time ago and there's a reason why.

Individual Appropriations are much easier to scrutinize than having to go through 1,500 or 2,000 pages of something dumped on you at 2:00 in the morning.

Now this is in my opinion only my opinion is why 9 percent of Congress is totally happy with this because stuffed inside those bills are things that they can go back home to the taxpayer and say, "Look at what I did." Ultimately every congressperson is judged on how much bacon they bring back from the slaughterhouse of Washington, DC.

Now the reason why this will not change under the new speaker is because of a little process that is hardly ever talked about called reconciliation. 

The act as defined by the Congressional Budget Office:

Budget reconciliation is an expedited process for considering bills that would implement policies embodied in a Congressional budget resolution. Since 1980, the first year the process took place, many laws have been enacted through budget reconciliation—for example, the 2017 tax act (Public Law 115-97) and the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (P.L. 117-2). This page shows CBO’s publications related to the reconciliation process that has occurred since the fall of 2021, pursuant to the budget resolution for fiscal year 2022 (S. Con. Res. 14). That process culminated in the enactment of P.L. 117-169 on August 22, 2022.

The Senate loves reconciliations and currently a Democrat from New York, Chuck Schumer, is the Senate Majority Leader. So whatever bill or resolution comes out of the House has to be reconciled in conference with the Senate, and they are not going to move off this process. 

So you can have a government shutdown, and I'm not one of these people who is going to fret that federal employees are not going to be able to do the work of their overlords in Washington, DC, and cry over it. However, I have been through a couple of government shutdowns, and the media does a wonderful job of painting the Republicans as the bad guys. So no matter who is the Speaker—Jim Jordan, Steve Scalise, Donald Trump, or any name you want to throw in there—they will be forced to do this process, and if they decide not to, they will get a noose wrapped around their neck politically and the independents in this country will blame the GOP.

Now I understand many supporters of what Matt Gates did yesterday are fine with this but you have to recall that for every action there is a consequence, and if you were willing to do this 13 months out of the next national election, don't be surprised when it goes south in November 2024.

The  End of Debt and Deficit Spending

Believe it or not, the last time we technically had a balanced budget in this country was during the time of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. Now of course I still think they did some budget trickery to do it, but there was no question that money coming in was closer to money going out, much closer than it is today.

This was correctly brought up yesterday by the people who were supporting the motion to remove McCarthy as Speaker. I heard lots of talk about the $33 trillion in debt, which is such a huge, mind-numbingly large sum none of us can truly comprehend it. 

Once again, let's go to the Congressional Budget Office for why this is not talked about:

In CBO's projections, the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund will be exhausted in the fiscal year 2032, and the Disability Insurance Trust Fund is exhausted in the calendar year 2052.

CATO  breaks it down a little more

The Financial Report of the United States Government (also known as the Financial Report) raises significant concerns about the country’s long‐term financial health with increasing deficits and debt levels. Over the next 75 years, U.S. taxpayers face nearly $80 trillion in long‐term unfunded obligations. What’s more, 95 percent of this unfunded obligation is driven by only two federal government programs: Medicare and Social Security.

The overall takeaway here is this:

The Financial Report of the U.S. Government deserves more attention. The report’s findings are especially relevant in today’s political climate where politicians from both parties feel pressure to distance themselves from benefit cuts to Medicare and Social Security. The report makes it painfully obvious that Medicare and Social Security spending are the primary drivers of government debt. Adopting sensible reforms to old age entitlement programs is both necessary and urgent.

Occasionally when I have some time in the winter living up here in the Midwest surrounded by the Great Lakes, I'll dive into this stuff and just read it. Having done this for the past 10 years, I can tell you this: the date of 2032 as the time that social security takes in less than it's paying out continues to dwindle, and with the way that we are deficit spending happily, I'm predicting it'll be 2025 or 2026 when it actually happens. 

Now of course I'm not an economist, but I'm also somebody who's not an elected public official and not worried about my constituents coming to rip my face off if I tell them that the one thing that they've been paying into for all their lives is going to have to be cut for the overall program to survive.

So when I heard yesterday that the $33 trillion of what we already have in debt is going to have added on to it $80 trillion of future obligations, I'm going to take what is being said by those people who wanted to replace McCarthy with a little grain of salt. 

They didn't want to have THAT fight right now.

No matter what unlucky soul gets elected to the speakership, it is going to be a miserable task.

Even though there's the prestige of being a head of one of the Article 1 institutions or being third in line for the presidency and being able to fly back to your district courtesy of the United States military, they will come to most likely hate the job.

The reason why?

The very people who were cheering this move yesterday have not fully thought out what needs to be done here.

The quick little hits and quotes on the platform formerly known as Twitter, YouTube Rumble, or even Facebook are all neat and nifty. 

Yet not one soul yesterday talked about the reconciliation process and the overall outlook with continuing resolutions and negotiations with a Democrat-led Senate. No one talked about the $33 trillion in debt, a pimple on the you-know-what compared to the obligations that the government is going to have to start paying out much sooner rather than later.

The next speaker, whoever it is, will be doomed to fail, and I would wholeheartedly support them in their attempts to get the job if they were at least honest with their colleagues first.  The American people are watching.

If I'm wrong, let me know by scrolling down to my bio below and checking me out on Twitter or Facebook for my radio show page. I'm looking for some hope, so send it along.