that a lot of people don’t want to talk about. Two points: 1) Democrats don’t care who is Speaker, if the Speaker has to follow bipartisan regular order, and 2) Democrats have a proposed rules package to allow and enforce that. They need a few Republicans from among those who do sometimes support bipartisan bills to join them, and then to choose a Speaker candidate from among their number.
Leader Jeffries on NBC's Meet the Press
NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, PBS, others, covered this, but other Dems have not picked it up, and Rs aren’t even screaming about it.
NYT [paywalled]: Hakeem Jeffries received the most votes, so why isn’t he speaker?
House rules require that the speaker receive a majority of votes cast, a threshold that Jeffries, the House minority leader, failed to reach despite receiving the most votes.
WaPo [paywalled]: Hakeem Jeffries: A bipartisan coalition is the way forward for the House
PBS: Jeffries: Moderate Republicans can join Dems to end deadlock
Politico: Hakeem Jeffries pitches coalition governing in the House, and major changes to the rules
Coalition governance is a foreign concept in Congress, but Jeffries wants to bring it to the House.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries isn’t just talking about changing the motion to vacate.
The New York Democrat wants to change the House rules to keep broadly popular legislation moving through the House and deemphasize the power of the small group of hard-line conservative members with sizable control over the GOP conference.
One path forward toward this is a proposal made by the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress to convene a legislative process task force to discuss rules changes to “reciprocated consideration for widely supported, bipartisan legislation,”as outlined in the panel's report on fostering collaboration and civility in Congress.
The Hill: Jeffries says ‘informal conversations’ taking place for bipartisan solution to Speakership
Jeffries was shown on All In with Chris Hayes reiterating this plan yesterday.
There are two things that were important for us to accomplish this week. First, stop Jim Jordan, who is a clear and present danger to our Democracy, and the poster child for Republican extremism. Second is to re-open the House, so we can do the business of the American people. And our preference is to re-open the House in a bipartisan way, so we can govern in an enlightened way moving forward.
Watch this space.