After four votes in the Congress over who will be the next Speaker of the House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has still been unable to pick up enough to be elected to the leadership position.
Every member of Alabama’s GOP Congressional delegation voted in support of McCarthy, including U.S. Rep.-elect Dale Strong (R-Huntsville). Strong spoke out in favor of the California congressman Wednesday during an appearance on WVNN’s “The Dale Jackson Show.”
“Well the thing that I look at is there hasn’t been a credible or serious alternative than McCarthy,” Strong said. “He’s the only one who’s got a game plan.”
The newly elected lawmaker believes McCarthy has been more than willing to make compromises with his fellow Republicans.
“(Y)ou look at these rules, you’ve got the most conservatives rules package probably in the history of Congress,” he said. “That’s the one thing that was presented today, saying ‘we want the power to go back to the committees in original order,’ and here’s the thing, he gave in on all that … when he relented and gave all that power back to the committees, I said ‘here we go, this ought to go good.’”
Strong thinks this fight is about more than what’s being presented to the public.
“I think what we’ve done is we’ve walked into a spit wad fight of a couple years that’s gone by of hard feelings and things of this nature,” he said. “But I’m optimistic that hopefully today we’ll get going in the right direction.”
He also said some of those who oppose McCarthy are being “disingenuous.”
“In conference that morning before we went to the House floor,” he continued, “McCarthy stood up and said ‘ok what else do you want?’ And whenever he said that, they looked at each other! They didn’t even respond. They couldn’t even answer the question. That’s whenever I know that it appears to be a little more disingenuous than people probably see.”
Strong is still hopeful that the party will be able to unify and start accomplishing things for the American people.
“We’ve got to come together,” he said. “You can’t go in here and solve problems if you’ve got people that just want to throw bricks at each other. You’ve got to find commonality, and that’s kind of what we’re looking for. I guess this is welcome to the United States Congress, this is not the Madison Country Commission anymore.”
