Black remains
The House Democrats emerged after three hours from their caucus meeting Tuesday night, sometime before 10:30 p.m.
The bullet points seem to be this:
- Black will remain Speaker for this session, at least as far as the Democratic caucus is concerned.
- There will be several people – more than four if you believe the chatter – who are interested in being Speaker when the new session convenes next year.
- A lot of other stuff like the minimum wage and health care got talked about but no one is going to write about that in Wednesday’s papers because we’re all obsessed with the leadership thing.
I think the most telling quote came from Rep. Joe Hackney, an Orange County Democrat and the majority leader in the House, when asked if the Democrats talked about opening up leadership elections Tuesday night:
“There was a lot of feeling that if you open this up right now, it affects our agenda for the short session and that’s not a good thing.”
In other words, they’re going to push through the session that begins in May with the leadership they have, hope nothing else goes wrong before they can adjourn for the year and deal with the leadership questions again after the November elections.