The Fight for the Speakership: About a Dozen Votes Away from High Drama

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The Fight for the Speakership: About a Dozen Votes Away from High Drama

Now we've got three Republicans interested in being Speaker of the House -- John Boehner, Ted Yoho, and Louie Gohmert.

Gohmert says they'll need 29 House Republicans to say that they're not supporting Boehner. In November, Americans elected 247 House Republicans; Representative Michael Grimm resigns today. That leaves 246. Boehner needs 218 votes to remain as Speaker.

Representative Walter Jones said he had been talking to 16 to 18 House Republicans in an effort against Boehner. Presuming his count is correct and they stay unified, the anti-Boehner forces will need another 11 to 13 to not support the current Speaker, either by supporting another candidate or not voting. (In 2013, nine Republicans voted against Boehner and three didn't vote.)

Members of Congress who have said publicly they won't support Boehner include Jones, Reps Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma,

Paul Gosar of Arizona, freshman Gary Palmer of Alabama, Steve King of Iowa, and Yoho and Gohmert.

Are there another 11 to 13 members willing to cross Boehner? As the old saying goes, if you're going to strike at the king, you had better not miss. Boehner has demonstrated he's willing to throw members off committees for being too loudly and openly rebellious.

Yoho and Gohmert are correct that the first hurdle is preventing 218 votes on the first ballot. Note that neither Yoho, in only his second term, nor Gohmert, one of the most conservative members of the conference, will have an easy time cobbling 218 votes together. (It's easy to wonder if the effort to replace Boehner would be better with one candidate instead of two, or whether it's inevitable that one will withdraw quickly Tuesday.)

Odds are Boehner will remain as Speaker come Tuesday evening -- but it's worth counting heads and seeing how close the number of openly anti-Boehner members gets to 29. There might be some drama yet.

Urban Elites Contemplate the Unthinkable: Red States Do It Better

In the New York Times this weekend, Richard Florida asks a question on the op-ed page that many readers would find heretical: "Is Life Better in America's Red States?"

Blue states, like California, New York and Illinois, whose economies turn on finance, trade and knowledge, are generally richer than red states. But red states, like Texas, Georgia and Utah, have done a better job over all of offering a higher standard of living relative to housing costs. That basic economic fact not only helps explain why the nation's electoral map got so much redder in the November midterm elections, but also why America's prosperity is in jeopardy.

Red state economies based on energy extraction, agriculture and suburban sprawl may have lower wages, higher poverty rates and lower levels of education on average than those of blue states — but their residents also benefit from much lower costs of living. For a middle-class person, the American dream of a big house with a backyard and a couple of cars is much more achievable in low-tax Arizona than in deep-blue Massachusetts.

This is all the more stunning if you recognize the name Richard Florida, who has spent the past decade or so telling cities that they can enjoy an economic boom and better quality of life by catering to the "creative class." Who are the creative class? Artists, musicians, performers, often young childless couples and gays. Some would say, "hipsters." Folks who have a lot of disposable income and are looking for urban parks, trendy bars and restaurants, performing-arts centers, and other urban hangouts.

Richard Florida's "creative class" vision rarely includes parents, because they value a) good schools, which usually cost a lot of money and a lot of big cities have struggled to build good school systems and b) space, in the form of bigger apartments, condos, or houses, front lawns and backyards, and so on.

It seems like a pretty standard transition of life -- starting as a single urbanite in an efficiency or with roommates or housemates, then shacking up and/or getting married in a one-bedroom, then moving out to the suburbs when the kids are on the way. Parents weren't a big part of the picture in Florida's vision, and he seemed to be fine with that. He seemed to cheerfully urge others towards that family-free urban future.

Joel Kotkin, among others, continued to point out that Florida's utopian vision for cities amounts to heaven for an elite demographic and something quite grim for the rest:

The sad truth is that even in the more plausible "creative class" cities such as New York and San Francisco, the emphasis on "hip cool" and high-end service industries has corresponded with a decline in their middle class and a growing gap between rich and poor. Washington D.C. and San Francisco, perennial poster children for "cool cities," also have among the highest percentages of poverty of any major urban center—roughly 20 percent—once cost of living is figured in.

Nowhere are the limitations of coolness more evident than in New York, our country's cultural capital and now one of Florida's three residences, along with Toronto and Miami Beach. Manhattan suffers by far the highest level of inequality among the country's 25 most populous counties, a gap between rich and poor that's the widest it's been in a decade. New York's wealthiest one percent earns a third of the entire city's personal income—almost twice the proportion for the rest of the country.

This geography of inequality is now extending to the outer boroughs. In nouveau hipster and increasingly expensive Brooklyn, nearly a quarter of people live below the poverty line. While artisanal cheese shops and bars that double as flower shops serve the hipsters, one in four Brooklynites receives food stamps. New York has seen the nation's biggest rise in homelessness; the number of children sleeping in the shelters of Mike Bloomberg's "luxury city" has risen 22 percent in the past year.

In an aside in one of his columns, Ross Douthat pointed out the practical effect of certain cities redesigning themselves as playgrounds for the creative elites:

Why, it would be like telling elite collegians that they should all move to similar cities and neighborhoods, surround themselves with their kinds of people and gradually price everybody else out of the places where social capital is built, influence exerted and great careers made. No need — that's what we're already doing!

Last year, Florida looked at the data and came to a painful realization:

Our main takeaway: On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits. Its benefits flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional and creative workers whose higher wages and salaries are more than sufficient to cover more expensive housing in these locations. While less-skilled service and blue-collar workers also earn more money in knowledge-based metros, those gains disappear once their higher housing costs are taken into account.

Florida reassures Times readers that the red-state model is economically unsustainable and is only driven by the fracking boom. But Americans have already voted with their feet:

It is the new pattern in holiday travel: Thousands of people raised in California, the Midwest or the Northeast will return, albeit temporarily, from their homes in Atlanta, Memphis or Raleigh.

It wasn't so long ago that the holiday exodus went in the other direction, and the reversal highlights a basic change in American culture. The Southeast has replaced California as the place where many people now go to find the American dream . . .

The main reason is a version of what economists call arbitrage: Growing numbers of people have realized that many of life's biggest costs — including housing, energy and taxes — are lower in the South, said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics, which specializes in regional economic data.

House prices, for example, were already lower in the Southeast in the early 1990s than in much of California and the Northeast — and the gap has widened significantly since.

House prices in the Atlanta and Charlotte regions have actually risen slightly less than economy-wide inflation since 1991, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index. In the Los Angeles area, by comparison, the inflation-adjusted price of housing has risen 31 percent over the same period. The increase has been 32 percent in New York and 50 percent in both Boston and San Francisco.

With incomes growing slowly for many American households over the past 15 years, the South has taken on a greater middle-class appeal. That the region has been more aggressive about building new homes plays a role in its affordability. It has expanded its housing stock more rapidly than other regions, avoiding a sharp run-up in housing costs.

The 2015 Motto: 'Don't Be Scary'

This makes sense, I suppose:

Mitch McConnell has an unusual admonition for the new Republican majority as it takes over the Senate this week: Don't be "scary."

The incoming Senate majority leader has set a political goal for the next two years of overseeing a functioning, reasonable majority on Capitol Hill that scores some measured conservative wins, particularly against environmental regulations, but probably not big victories such as a full repeal of the health-care law. McConnell's priority is to set the stage for a potential GOP presidential victory in 2016.

"I don't want the American people to think that if they add a Republican president to a Republican Congress, that's going to be a scary outcome. I want the American people to be comfortable with the fact that the Republican House and Senate is a responsible, right-of-center, governing majority," the Kentucky Republican said in a broad interview just before Christmas in his Capitol office.

After all, the American people already have had enough "scary" figures in Washington:

ADDENDA: With controversial non-decisions like this and a seeming obliviousness to wrongdoing right in front of him, Pete Morelli shouldn't be an NFL referee . . . he clearly has the skill set and mindset to serve in Obama's cabinet.

For my readers in the Hilton Head/Beaufort/Bluffton area, the Greater Bluffton Republican Club is honoring Sherri Zedd at its 2nd Annual Republican of the Year Dinner, February 16, at 6 p.m. at the Rose Hill Golf Club. Every time I've spoken in this part of the country, Sherri has had a hand in it. I won't be able to make this event, but I congratulate her on the well-earned honor.

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