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House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California.

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File

Members of Congress are speaking out about the myriad issues caused by the House speaker vote.
Some members have said that they cannot access classified information and intel briefings.
Following Rep. McCarthy’s sixth failed bid on Wednesday, there are zero sworn members of Congress.

Members of congress are speaking out about national security concerns amid a seemingly-unending attempt by Rep. Kevin McCarthy to secure the votes necessary to become speaker of the House of Representatives.

There are currently no members of the Congress, as swearing-in ceremonies have been delayed while the quest to elect a House speaker has dragged on. And on Wednesday, several members of Congress said that the procedural hold-up and GOP infighting have restricted their access to classified information and key national security intel.

McCarthy needs 218 votes to secure the leadership bid, and by the sixth round of voting Wednesday night, the number of Republicans voting against him had increased from 19 members on Tuesday, to 21 members. Many of the members of the America First caucus, including Reps. Matt Gaetz, Chip Roy, and Lauren Boebert, voted against McCarthy. 

The voting process has exposed deep rifts in the party and left McCarthy with apparent dwindling support from Donald Trump, who spoke up and encouraged GOP members to elect McCarthy on Wednesday, instead of emerging challenger Rep. Byron Donalds.

By Wednesday evening, McCarthy had failed in six consecutive bids to become House speaker.

In a press conference on Wednesday, one of McCarthy’s allies, Rep. Mike Gallagher, said that he and his colleagues were unable to receive intelligence briefings from the sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) because they have not received the clearance associated with being sworn members of Congress, according to NBC News.

“I’m informed by House Security that, technically, I don’t have a clearance,” Gallagher said in the press conference on Wednesday. “I’m a member of the Intel Committee, I’m on the Armed Services Committee, and I can’t meet in the SCIF to conduct essential business.”

Gallagher added that he was due to meet with Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley on Wednesday. Rep. Brad Wenstrup claimed in the same press conference that members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence “don’t have access to anything,” according to Politico.

“The secure facility that we work in every day when we’re here, we can’t go in there right now,” Wenstrup said. “We’re in there all the time. And right now, we can’t be in there at all.”

The House Armed Services Committee Democrats also tweeted about the lapse in clearance, saying that McCarthy and the GOP’s quagmire has ” hampered the ability of Congress to function in its oversight role, presenting a clear threat to national security.”

—House Armed Services Democrats (@HASCDemocrats) January 4, 2023

“Members of Congress can’t receive classified information until the Members are sworn in, leaving us in the dark on sensitive developments worldwide and unable to perform the oversight duties that the American people elected us to perform,” the account tweeted.

With voting set to resume tomorrow, Democratic lawmakers are being asked to stay in DC until a speaker is elected.

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Hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the ‘alt-right’ march down East Market Street toward Emancipation Park during the United the Right rally August 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia.

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Political scientist Barbara Walter said unregulated social media is increasing the threat of a civil war.
“Let people put whatever they want on social media,” Walter said in an interview on Wednesday.
“But don’t allow the tech companies… to push the most extreme material into people’s hands,” she added.

In a liberal democracy, people have the right to voice opinions that are wrong, ugly, and sometimes evil — and they often do. But that does not mean that corporations have a right to exploit those views for profit, and in the process contribute to the fracturing of societies and damage the rule of law, a leading political scientist argued Wednesday.

In her 2022 book, “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them,” Barbara F. Walter, a professor at the University of California San Diego, described contemporary social media as a boon to the “ethnic entrepreneur”: those who stoke resentment among a dominant group that fears its power is slipping away in the face of demographic and political change.

In Malaysia, for example, Facebook was used by such demagogues to help incite genocide against the country’s Rohingya minority, who were depicted as murderers and rapists in content that went viral.

Speaking to journalist Farai Chideya in an interview aired by The 92nd Street Y, a Jewish community center in New York, Walter said that in the United States, hateful speech is generally protected by the First Amendment. But she argued that tech companies have not been acting as simple, neutral stewards of the digital public square.

She takes issue with the way social media acts to recommend content to users and keep them engaged for longer and what she says is their role in amplifying incendiary comments.

She argues in her book and explained in a 2021 interview that “people tend to ‘like’ information that taps into their emotions, and that tends to be stuff that makes them angry, outraged, resentful. And what the recommendation engines do is not just recommend more material like that, but more material that’s even more extreme.”

Addressing that, she said, is a necessity.

“People ask me: ‘What’s the single easiest thing that the United States could do to reduce our risk of civil war?’ And my answer is always the same: regulate social media,” Walter said.

In the US, democracy is slightly stronger than it was this time two years ago, Walter said — not because any of its institutions are stronger, but simply because the White House is not inhabited by someone who disregards the result of a democratic election. But it is “very vulnerable to backsliding if somebody like [former President Donald Trump] were to be elected again,” she said.

Trump famously used social media to not just gain power, including with nativist incitement against Mexican immigrants and racially-tinged demands to see former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, but to try to hold onto power once he was on the verge of losing it. Russia’s Vladimir Putin, through his intelligence services and state-run media properties, has also used social media to pursue his own anti-democratic agenda.

“If Putin wanted to somehow weaken France, German, the UK, the United States — he could not do this in any other way except the backdoor way through social media,” Walter argued. “And as long as social media is unregulated, he has easy access to try to divide these countries and to undercut support for democracy there.”

Walter continued: “We also know that the rise of ethnic factions, of hate crimes, of political violence, have all tracked to the rise not only of the internet and social media as a main news source, but it’s tracked with the algorithms that the major tech companies have developed.”

The answer is not censorship, she argued.

“Let people put whatever they want on social media,” Walter said. “But don’t allow tech companies, in an attempt to keep people engaged on their devices as long as possible, to push the most extreme material into people’s hands.”

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