Concessions

As I mentioned before, there were essentially two “schools of thought” and two scenarios which Kevin McCarthy was facing when his path to the speakership was being roadblocked or stonewalled by the twenty or twenty-one hardline House Republicans over the course of the last few days. For one, McCarthy could have pursued a negotiations strategy with the twenty or twenty-one hardliners and make concessions to them in order to enable and open his path to the speakership. Or the opposition to his speakership would have probably grown had he not pursued an effective negotiations strategy whereby McCarthy “closed the deal” with these folks per se.  

Hence, the fact that McCarthy was able to bring down the registered number of the opposition to his speakership from twenty-one to six over the course of the last few days means that McCarthy has most likely conceded a number of favors to a certain portion of the hardliners. One may ask, what exactly are these concessions or favors? The answer, most likely, is the pursuit of investigations against Joe Biden and his administration as a sort of payback for the Democratic investigations and politicking of the last few years against Republicans. 

One must note that the path for McCarthy towards the speaker position has not fully opened up as of yet. The deadlock is still intact by virtue of the remaining six Republicans who are opposing his speakership. But if McCarthy can pick off at least two of them, then it appears as though McCarthy will be able to open up his path to the speakership, and as mentioned before, the manner by which he can pick these two individuals off is by conceding certain things to them.

I was told that these twenty or twenty-one individuals were able to display outsized and disproportionate power over the course of the last few days because the number twenty or twenty-one does not truly attest to the amount of popular support that is behind them. The fact of the matter is that these twenty or twenty-one individuals actually have about 70 or 75 million Americans behind them, and perhaps even more. As mentioned before, polarization has enabled these twenty or twenty-one individuals to hold all of Washington captive over the last few days, and the way in which they were able to hold Washington captive is because of the latent and hidden popular power these handful of individuals actually wield.

Because Congress “can do whatever it wants” as one scholar once said, it follows that the investigations against Biden and his administration which will most likely take place in a Republican-led House have an undetermined scale and scope at the moment. In terms of what the intent and purpose of Congressional investigations actually are, it has been written that: “Hearings and investigations, in short, are valuable devices for making government accountable to the people. They can spawn new laws or their functional equivalent: unwritten laws that change bureaucratic operations.” 

What it is that the people who have put the Republicans into office want Biden and his administration to be held accountable for remains to be seen. What also remains to be seen is the exact and specific “bureaucratic operations” which the Republicans will be going after and thwarting, and that is if McCarthy can “close the deal” with the six remaining Republican holdouts either tonight or sometime in the near future.