The battle for the next Speaker of the House has been going on for weeks. By the time you are reading this, that battle may very well be over. Or it may not, as history has shown that contentious Speaker elections do not always end quickly.
Regardless, we would do well to look past the daily headlines in this fight and dig into the deeper meaning of the issue. As Mark Meadows said in a recent interview when asked why he made the unpopular decision to take on Speaker John Boehner, a decision that led to Boehner resigning as Speaker of the House in 2015, Meadows insisted it was less about John Boehner and more about what the Speaker of the House had become.
The same issue remains: This battle is—or ought to be—less about Kevin McCarthy and more about the power of the Speaker.
