Speaker of the House

The current lack of a Speaker of the House crisis is a symptom of the failure of our current system which puts too many extremist partisans in power and a sign that we could really benefit from more moderate, centrist representatives voting across party lines to help us move past this stalemate. The Constitution says “The House of Representatives shall choose their Speaker and other Officers (source).” It does not require that the party that holds the most seats will elect the speaker, but right now that’s what happens because both parties choose one main candidate to put forward for a floor vote; the minority party members usually vote for one of their candidates while the majority party members usually vote for one of their candidates while the winner must win a simple majority of the the votes (right now 217 votes out of 433 filled seats)- these days, there is very little to no chance of any members voting for the other parties candidate. There are currently no independent or third-party members of the House. With this arrangement, its easy for extremists to exert their power when there are enough of them as there are today. The Republican Party knows that only a candidate that is accepted by the extremists will win the simple majority vote so they put forward mainly extremist candidates like Representative Jim Jordan. But the more moderate representatives within the party, correctly in my opinion, are highly reluctant to give in to the extremists and vote for someone too extreme. So we have stalemate and no legislation can move forward which will lead to a very likely government shutdown in November. In my opinion, a short-term answer and a smart move by Democrats would be for most Democratic Representatives to suddenly and surprisingly vote for the most moderate Republican in the field hopefully combining with enough Republicans to reach 217 votes (unlikely Democrats would do this but seems like a smart move to me to get a speaker they would like more than the others). In my opinion, the long-term answer is to set up elections in such a way that people have moderate candidates to vote for, but the current primaries often only put forward extremists because less moderate voters vote in primaries than general elections. What do you think?