A Few Thoughts On The Speaker Vote
Coverage of the vote for US Speaker of the House has been remarkably shallow. Breitbart observes , "No speaker race had lasted 15 rounds or more in 163 years, according to House records." Simple arithmetic puts the last time that happened in 1860, which Breitbart's own crack writers failed to acknolwedge. Hmm. What happened the next year? Any students know? Following the 2020 election, some commentators compared the debate over the outcome to 1876, which resulted in the Compromise of 1877, whereby Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was awarded the White House on the understanding that he would remove federal troops from South Carolina. This effectively ended Reconstruction, which was one of a series of events that bookended the US Civil War. My own view for a while has been that the US is approaching a need to resolve issues nearly comparable to those that caused the 1861-65 Civil War, although I don't think armed conflict will be involved. If we look at events that...