TX Democrat Joaquin Castro on GOP Speaker Chaos

GOP Congressman Kevin McCarthy shocked political insiders by dropping out of the race for Speaker. The representative from California was plagued by his admission that the Republican Benghazi hearings were simply a tool to bring down Hillary Clinton's poll numbers.

Turns out that the overtly political Benghazi committee hearings finally took down a politician - but it was a Republican.

Texas Democratic Congressman Joaquin Castro responded to the breaking news with a series of tweets:

Rep. Castro has made similar remarks before, in an interview with the Texas Observer in May 2014:

TO: If you could change that, do you really think we’d see a change in the way Congress works?

JC: I think you could make changes that would be conducive to bipartisanship and to productivity, yeah. I’ll give you a perfect example. Look at what happened in 2009 in the Texas Legislature. In 2009, there were 76 Republicans and 74 Democrats [in the House] and about 60-something Democrats teamed up with 11 Republicans and elected a moderate Republican speaker. Here, you vote by party—Republicans vote for Boehner, and we, of course, vote for Nancy Pelosi.

It’s crossed my mind that we could essentially do what we did in Texas that time. If you were able to get a group of moderate Republicans to vote with Democrats, you could elect a new speaker of the House. The challenge is, of course, the traditions and customs of this place are so partisan that, at the moment at least, that seems beyond the vision of many folks.