Joe Biden described Wednesday as “embarrassing” the difficulty of elected Republicans to agree to elect the president of the American House of Representatives, where they nevertheless have a majority.
The “rest of the world” is watching what is happening in Congress, the US president told reporters before a trip to Kentucky, adding that he remained focused on “getting results”.
The elected members of the House of Representatives must resume their ballot on Wednesday to elect a president, after having failed the day before – a first for a hundred years – during a session marked by strong tensions in the Republican ranks.
Big favorite to replace Nancy Pelosi, the 50-year-old Kevin McCarthy failed on Tuesday after three successive votes to calm the revolt emanating from a group of Trumpists who consider this elected representative from California too moderate.
The elected officials agreed to suspend their votes for the time to negotiate behind the scenes.
The House should resume the vote from midday and it is not excluded that a new candidate arises. The last time it took representatives more than one vote to appoint a president was in 1923.
The Republicans, who seized the majority in the lower house in the midterm elections in November, had promised to use their new counter-power by opening a series of investigations into US President Joe Biden.
But the launch of such hostilities is paralyzed by these internal quarrels: the elected members of the House of Representatives cannot officially take the oath, and therefore open any investigation, as long as a president has not been appointed.
Former Republican President Donald Trump criticized Tuesday at the end of the day a “superfluous agitation” within a party which he wishes to obtain the nomination in order to reconquer the White House in 2024.
The election of the “speaker”, the third most important figure in American politics after the president and the vice-president, requires a majority of 218 votes. A threshold that Kevin McCarthy could not reach, twenty elected Trumpists having decided to play the spoilsport.