Somehow, someway, the vote for House Speaker kept becoming more and more of a debacle this week.
We wrote about it after six failed votes for Republican nominee Kevin McCarthy, and yet that proved to be nowhere near the end of the road. A bloc of rightwing — further rightwing, that is — representatives were steadfast in their push to deny McCarthy the Speaker role in the House. Come Friday afternoon, when this story was written, there had been a total of 13 ballots, and McCarthy still hadn’t crossed the 218-vote threshold for victory. It promised to be a late night for the GOP and was still unclear if the barrier would ever be broken.
The GOP holds a slim majority in the House, but they couldn’t seem to get on the same page for the Speaker vote. McCarthy, in an effort to win himself the role, has given away serious concessions to the most rightwing members of the party. What is usually a formality has become some mix of debacle, food fight, and hilarious farce.
Needless to say, the jokes and memes online about the whole thing have been great. We’ve collected 11 of our favorites that proved to be the absolute best of the very strange week in Congress.
