With Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., making progress on the path to securing the House speakership (218 votes are required), having flipped a good chunk of the 20 previous GOP holdouts to his side, Republicans are convinced they're on the right path.
"Let's be clear about one of the concessions [made by McCarthy's camp]. Individual people can call on the speaker for a [floor] vote, if they don't like the job the speaker's doing," Ric Grenell, Newsmax's senior national security analyst, told the network Friday, while appearing on "John Bachman Now" with hosts John Bachman and Bianca de la Garza.
During the previous gavel regime of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Grenell said the former House speaker "locked it in" where other members of the House — either Democrat, Republican, or independent — "couldn't challenge her at all" on sensitive or timely matters.
Grenell, the former acting director of National Intelligence during the Trump administration, continued: Pelosi "was running a dictatorship [as House speaker], and the media was cheering that. It's so odd they would somehow want that."
If forced to choose, Grenell would prefer House Republicans be subjected to a few days of ridicule from the national press while trying to elect a speaker than be forced to rubber-stamp a spending bill adding billions of dollars to America's ever-expanding debt while driving U.S. inflation even higher without legislators having the time to read or debate the legislative proposal.
As an example of possible changes moving forward, Grenell said lawmakers representing numerous factions of the new Congress "will have a voice in the process," which might include ending the practice of approving trillion-dollar spending packages without a thorough vetting process.
"There'll be no more spending bills ... on voice votes, just because there wasn't anyone [present in the position] to challenge it," added Grenell.
When asked to predict exactly when McCarthy might clinch the speakership with 218 votes, Grenell avoided a concrete answer, other than saying, "I think the dam has broken ... the holdouts have gotten what they wanted."
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