Chaos in the House and the biggest problem Republicans have
As of this writing, we do not have a Speaker of the House (Speaker). After twelve ballots, Kevin McCarthy still has not gotten the number of votes he needs. The last time a Speaker was not elected on the first ballot was 1923.
Electing a Speaker is the first order of business in swearing in the House on January 3 of every odd year. Without a Speaker, there is no House. As of now, the House is not in session and there are no members, only members-elect. Since the House is not in session, it cannot do anything.
Republicans have a small majority of 222 and so can only afford to lose 4 votes from their own caucus. Democrats had that same issue two years ago, but because they were not at the mercy of attention seeking lunatics and entertainers, electing a Speaker was not a problem. Republicans have a problem with roughly 20 of their members who have refused so far to back McCarthy. Most of them probably will back him, but a handful insist they never will.
In his desperation to become Speaker, McCarthy has given in to every single demand made by the holdouts. That includes allowing any one of them to demand a vote on removing him or any Speaker at any time. If he does manage to get their votes, he will be the weakest Speaker in a long time, if not ever. His hold on the office will be tenuous at best and could be taken away from him at any time.
It is not every day that the incoming majority party is divided and in disarray while the minority party is united and having a blast, but that is where we are. Democrats are enjoying the spectacle and are not offering to help out Republicans, nor are they under any obligation to. It would be nice if a handful of Republicans formed a coalition with Democrats to elect a Speaker that could ignore the crazies and focus on governing for the next two years, but that is not likely to happen.
Technically, there are no rules for who can be Speaker. It does not have to be a member of the House. It can literally be anyone. I am not aware of that ever happening, but it would not be against the rules. One Republican from Nebraska has talked about forming a coalition with Democrats if the holdouts against McCarthy remain obstinate, but that is likely just meant to scare the holdouts and not a serious proposal.
Some of the commentary I have read since the chaos began has referred to it as being embarrassing for the country. I do not agree with that at all. It is embarrassing for the Republican Party, but not for the country. On the contrary, it is democracy at work. House rules require 218 votes, or a majority of those present, for someone to get elected Speaker. Since McCarthy has been unable to do that, he has not been chosen to be Speaker. Whenever someone is chosen to be Speaker, it will be because they were able to get the necessary number of votes, just as the rules say. That is the system working as it is supposed to.
Some might think that what is going on with Republicans being in charge but not able to elect a Speaker is unsustainable, but it can go on for several months at least. Sometime over the summer, the debt ceiling will need to be raised and so the House will have to vote on it. The government will also run out of money to stay open on September 30 and so the House will have to vote on that, too. Other than those things, the House does not have to be in session at all. This Congress was not expected to do much anyway legislatively, so not much is being lost right now from not having it in session.
Sooner or later, there will be a Speaker and it may not be McCarthy, but it will almost certainly be a Republican member of the House. One factor that may force the stalemate to end soon is that committee staff will not get paid starting the week after next although they may just be hung out to dry. Maybe the realization by Republicans that they cannot investigate anything or anyone will prompt them to elect a Speaker.
The last few days have been great entertainment. I have certainly been enjoying it. McCarthy has sucked up to Trump arguably more than any single individual, all in the pursuit of becoming Speaker. He went from yelling at Trump as the Capitol was being stormed two years ago to voting against certifying the election results the next day. Within a few weeks, he was hanging out with Trump at Mar a Lago and attacking his Republican critics. That is a lap dog if there ever was one.
If he does not become Speaker, it would not be the first time he failed in that effort. When John Boehner resigned in 2015, McCarthy was supposed to replace him. He was going to be Speaker until he opened his mouth and inadvertently told the truth about the real reason for the Benghazi investigations. Paul Ryan wound up taking the job instead.
He 100% deserves the humiliation he is getting now. He wanted to be Speaker so badly that he was willing to do anything and everything to get it no matter what. Now, he either will not get it or if he does his hold on it will be by a knife’s edge, his authority will be almost non-existent and he may not last very long. He made a deal with the devil and now the bill is due.
A deeper problem with the GOP
What has been happening since Tuesday is not random and is much broader than McCarthy, Trump or any individual. It is a commentary on where the Republican Party is and has been heading for nearly four decades. Simply put, the Republican Party, as a group, does not care about governing. What unites them, more than anything else, is a dislike of Democrats and the left. They have elevated their entertainment wing over their governing wing (which barely exists today) and the current shitshow is just one of many consequences of that.
I do not remember where I read this in the many articles and tweets I have read since the chaos began on Tuesday, but one Republican member of Congress was quoted as saying that the impasse over who will be Speaker would be resolved when Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Ben Shapiro weigh in. Think about that. According to that member, cable news and online entertainers will be the ones to decide who gets to be Speaker. That is what happens when entertainment is elevated above all else. Entertainers are supposed to parrot elected officials, not the other way around, but here we are. For the record, that member was wrong. Not even the entertainers can agree on who should be Speaker.
That is one of many major differences between Democrats and Republicans in Congress. It is not uncommon for Republicans in Congress to be dependent on people like Tucker Carlson to weigh in on disputes for one side to gain momentum. When Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity talk, Republicans in Congress listen. There is no universe where Democrats in Congress would be looking to Rachel Maddow to settle a dispute, let alone determine who should be Speaker. MSNBC hosts can say whatever they want and no Democrat in Congress is going to care.
Only a party that values entertainment more than governing could find itself at the mercy of people like Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar. Having them in office is no different from having a cable news host there. They are not interested in governing and never have been. Their goal is to get attention and put on a show. Moments like this are what they live for. To the extent they have a worldview, it was best explained by Alfred Pennyworth in The Dark Knight.
This has been going on for a long time now. Some might argue it began in the 1980s, but I would argue it really took off with Newt Gingrich in the 1990s. He did everything he could to demonize Democrats as the enemy and to promote brinksmanship tactics. It has only gotten worse since then. Trump was the culmination of all that, but what is going on now has little to do with him. He has endorsed McCarthy for Speaker, but nobody seems to have noticed or cared. His endorsement has had no effect on the holdouts at all.
When your main thing in life is hating your opponents and you stand for little to nothing else, you are going to find yourself in the kind of situation Republicans in the House are in now. Republicans have been willing to align themselves with anyone and everyone who has the same enemies as they do. When you do that, you will find yourself in bed with all kinds of lowlifes.
In their pursuit of beating Democrats and “owning the libs” at all costs, Republicans have welcomed into their ranks the likes of Trump, Herschel Walker and George Santos (assuming that is his real name), to name a few. They have made common cause with conspiracy theorists and extremists of all sorts. In elevating entertainment above all else, they have found themselves at the mercy of the Tucker Carlsons of the world. That crowd does not care about winning elections, let alone governing. If anything, it would be better for them if Republicans lost elections so they could have something to rail against.
None of this is to say Democrats have no problems, they most certainly do, which I have written about before. This is a country with 330+ million people and only two major parties. Both of them will always have problems going on. There is no way around that.
The McCarthy episode brings into focus one big misconception that seems to have taken off lately. That is the idea that the only serious problem Republicans have is Trump. As soon as he goes away, the thinking goes, Republicans will cruise to victory. If all they do is nominate someone besides Trump in 2024, they will win in a landslide.
Anything is possible and 2024 is an eternity away. That said, the notion that the only problem Republicans have is Trump strikes me as pure fantasy. He certainly is a problem for them, but is hardly the only one. The problems Republicans have long predate Trump and will still be there when he is gone. A Republican Party that had appealing ideas and was responsive to its own voters would never have nominated Trump in the first place.
More than anything else, the biggest non-Trump problem Republicans have is that their economic agenda is toxic and appeals exclusively to their big donors. Even Republicans who are not crazy still advocate for ideas that nobody besides that crowd likes. Virtually all of them favor cutting Medicare and Social Security to finance tax cuts for those at the top. They just differ in the kinds of tactics they want to use in pursuing it, i.e., whether to hold the debt ceiling hostage, and how they talk about it.
Trump, for all his personal awfulness, jettisoned some of the most unpopular ideas coming from Republicans. That is one major difference between him and his imitators. The latter still cling to Paul Ryan’s vision for the role of the federal government. The most hardline Republicans in the House all favor the draconian cuts to federal programs that Trump disavowed. They are combining Trump’s worst personal traits with the Republicans’ most unpopular pre-Trump ideas, which is a great way to appeal to nobody.
The problem that Republicans have long had when in power is that cutting programs is very unpopular, including with their own voters. It is a familiar pattern going back to the Gingrich years. Republicans campaign against spending and promise to cut it. Upon taking office, they realize how unpopular that is (or never really cared about it) and spending is never cut save for some marginal amount that later gets reversed. Other Republicans come along and call the previous leaders a failure and promise that they really mean it. They get elected and run into the same issues and then are called a failure by future Republican leaders. Rinse and repeat.
Grand ideological ambitions are nice and fun, but being in office means having to govern, which is usually boring. It involves basic stuff like attending meetings and hearings, not the kind of things that get people riled up. Hating the government, but not being able to cut it down and having to run it is a real pickle to be in. The solution Republicans have gone with for the last few decades is to just not even bother with governing at all and focus on entertainment. Since they cannot cut spending and do not want to run the government, they have basically opted to cede power and influence to cable news, talk radio and now the internet.
That is, I would argue, the biggest problem Republicans have that goes far beyond Trump. Their grand ambitions are unpopular, even with their own voters, and they have no interest in boring things like governing. Still, the temptation to want to cut programs is always there. The last two Republican presidents attempted to do so. Bush tried a partial privatization of Social Security and Trump tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Both efforts were toxic and flopped. Last year, Republican candidates were toxic in many key races and one of the reasons was for advocating for things like privatizing Social Security and cutting Medicare.
I would argue that Republicans ceding authority and influence to entertainers is a byproduct of having an agenda that almost nobody likes. Since their agenda will not pass and they are not interested in governing, they have to keep people excited somehow. Nobody watches cable news, listens to talk radio or goes on social media to hear about committee meetings. Entertainers need something to talk about and members of Congress have to keep them engaged and interact with them.
That is where the culture wars come in. There is no better setting for entertainers to thrive in. Nobody ever got excited about budget appropriations, but gender affirming care? That’s a gold mine. Rather than entertainers echoing elected officials, it is elected officials echoing entertainers. I am focusing on the national level here, but it runs true on the state level, too, arguably even more so.
How many voters are worried about gender affirming care, critical race theory, transgender athletes or the latest culture war fight of the hour? Probably close to none, but that is okay. Entertainers do not have to be popular with the general public. They just need a small slice of it to be ratings king/queen or to make a fortune from subscriptions.
The problem Republicans have with caring more about entertainment than governing is not going away. As long as they are unwilling to abandon grand ideological ambitions and focus on governing, they will continue to be at the mercy of their entertainment wing. What it would take to get them to change course, I don’t know. Losing a series of elections often helps, but Republicans have lost plenty of elections recently, many of which they should have won, and that does not seem to have made a big difference so far. While many Republicans are turning on Trump after the midterms, they are still pursuing the same unpopular ideas he moved away from.
As much of a liability as Trump is, he had some good insights about what Republican voters and many working class voters were looking for. His moderation on some key issues is a significant part of what allowed him to make inroads in some traditionally Democratic areas. Other Republicans might want to take note of that and try to combine his more popular ideas with candidates who are not personally radioactive. For now, they seem content to do the opposite.