A reported plan floated by former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to end his party’s weeks-long struggle to agree on his successor drew an outburst of laughter from MSNBC host Joy Reid on Tuesday.
Under the plan, according to NBC News, McCarthy would get a second stint as speaker while Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), a more right-wing lawmaker who nevertheless failed to muster enough votes to obtain the gavel himself, would become “assistant speaker.”
Of the plan, floated three weeks since the speaker role was last occupied, one GOP lawmaker told the outlet: “We’re desperate.”
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After NBC reporter Ali Vitali informed Reid of McCarthy’s idea, the host of The ReidOut couldn’t contain herself, laughing for an extended period of time and tossing her show notes up in the air.
Eventually, Vitali said that one source she spoke to made the comparison to Rep. Catherine Clark (D-MA) being assistant speaker under Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in the prior Congress.
“There is technically a precedent for this,” Vitali said, “but there is also very much an Office reference here about Dwight being the Assistant to the Regional Manager, and I think that’s probably more apt.”
Indeed, after House Democrats voted for Clark in November 2020, Pelosi would go on to win the election for speaker on the first ballot. Pelosi created the role in 2018 after Democrats took back the House resoundingly in that year’s midterms, and in the following Congress she would go on to win that vote for speaker—also on the first ballot.
“As your laughter suggests, this is probably not going to happen,” Vitali continued, “but it’s being floated and we just report the news here, Joy.”
The notion of House Republicans’ problems being solved in part by having an assistant speaker—a role which had not been filled during McCarthy’s nine-month tenure—naturally drew plenty of allusions to the NBC sitcom’s recurring gag.
“Assistant TO the Regional Speaker,” as Reid’s colleague Chris Hayes wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
