covid lockdowns was anti science. tonight i can tell you that democracy is grinding through its process and there could be a speaker of the house elected tonight. now, i know that s a change from what you ve heard all week but we can report that in the next few hours, it could actually happen. the house is reconvening any second, and the ingraham angle is hearing from a high level source kevin mccarthy does have the votes to get elected. let s go live to capitol hill, things are very fluid they can change but senior congressional correspondent who has been working very hard this week, chad perfect gram is standing by. chad what can you tell us? laura good evening, kevin mccarthy gained support as speaker on two roll call votes today. he did not gain any support on 11 votes for speaker over the previous three days. the question is whether mccarthy can close the deal tonight. we are told he should have the votes later on and be sworn in as speaker. two of his supporters are b
committee, you control ultimately, under this new scenario, what bill gets to the floor, correct? what bill and how it s dealt with. you control whether there are amendments to the bill. in other words, representatives could add and have voted on amendments on the floor. you control how many minutes are debated, how many what the threshold is, what the quorum looks like. if you control the rules committee, you control everything in the house of representatives as far as bringing legislation up. i think chad did a great job describing it in his only the way chad can because he s a big baseball guy saying it s 85 feet or 90 feet to first base depending on what the rules committee says, and that s true. so the debate on the rules tonight is really important. but i just didn t want to overstep the historic nature of this moment for kevin mccarthy. and, you know, longest serving speaker was sam ray burn, 17 years two months and two days.
very opaque so they aren t held accountable for votes on immigration or votes on covid or votes on, you know, pick your poison. they d rather say oh, i just voted to keep the government open. right, laura. in fact what ace a real tragedy is media all over the country that described what s going on here as being chaos and dysfunction. no. what you ve seen the last 15 or more years the way this place operates, that s dysfunction. doing the same thing the same way will not produce any results. what s happening here is exactly what should happen, men and women of courage standing up to make changes so this institution functions properly and we meet our responsibilities of the american people. it s going to be tough because we ve got to control spending, we ve got a provision that i m most excited about to have a genuine frank church style committee. i personally have been fighting over every detail of that to make sure that committee can get access to everything that it
budget, the changes that would give us time to look at bills instead of getting them the day of, and as chad was talking about, the rules committee which will be controlled by conservatives that will allow the bills not to be in secret in committee meeting but on the open floor and have an open process where you can put amendments on it. it s interesting, all the ones that said during this week particularly the commentators that, you know, we were withholding government, we were some people said we were basically terrorists and now they re praising what s going on, which is balancing this budget and getting this country back on track. everybody agrees that the process is broken. this goes about fixing the problems that we have. laura: congressman, how important or how del tearius to people s trust in government has this omnibus bill process
more traditional process of including more voices. can you explain that for us? the rules committee is the gateway for bills to get to the floor. it s often called the speaker s committee. the speaker kind of controls that committee and the idea that every day that they come into session you re going to debate a bill. it s like playing baseball. today the distance from home plate to first base is 90 feet. today it s going to be 95 feet. it s going to be five balls to get a walk versus four balls. you set the terms of debate. so, in other words, if you have a bill coming to the floor, the rules committee first adopts a rule which says, this is how we re going to handle this bill. this is how much time we re going to spend on the bill, this is how many amendments we re going to consider. we might not consider any. and republicans frankly over the past couple years under democratic control and republicans used to do this to the democrats when they were in the majority a few years ago, t