“Jeffries didn’t even whip the vote,” one critic said about the House minority leader, who wants to be speaker. “This is why people want a stronger leader.”
As House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries seeks to become speaker when Democrats retake Congress in January, critics questioned his leadership Tuesday after the Republican-led lower chamber effectively blocked a bid to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth by just seven votes—an outcome that may have been averted if more Democrats showed up to vote.
The 211-204 procedural vote effectively torpedoed Congressman Thomas Massie’s attempt to impeach Hegseth by sending the outgoing Kentucky Republican’s resolution to the House Judiciary Committee, where it will likely gather dust during the remainder of the GOP-controlled congressional term.
Is that a thing that can happen? Here in Australia our parliament is designed in such a way that the chamber (House or Senate) is no more than three minutes walk from every parliamentarian’s office and, when a vote is held where a formal division is required, they ‘ring the bells’ (literally a ringing bell with alarms in every office) for exactly four minutes so every parliamentarian has the ability to make it to the chamber for the vote before they lock the doors. To design a parliament or congress building in any other way seems insane to me.
That sounds like a good system set up in good faith. The USA government was set up in very bad faith, by men who thought they could own people like cattle
Id personally argue that this isn’t an issue of bad faith and moreso an issue of being out of date and then being used in bad faith. We are talking about a system that was set up when the steam engine was still very new and the fastest way to move around was by boat and by horse, your kinda hard capped on how fast you can move at the time. A lot of the federal systems in particular make a lot of sense when you factor in just how old a lot of it is, looking at you electoral college.
We designed our system in the 1890s, learning from both the US and British systems, and others. The writers of our Constitution did a pretty amazing job, but they had the advantage of hindsight.