Ronald Reagan famously quipped that the most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
Modern Republicans are one-upping Reagan. “I’m a Republican and I’m here to help” is now the equivalent of showing up at a barn-raising with lighter fluid and a flamethrower. Why build when you can burn? Why establish order when you can sow chaos?
The Republican pitch to voters during the 2022 midterm elections was “trust us” to bring inflation down, get illegal immigration under control, end the Biden administration’s unaffordable spending bonanza. Voters said okay. Democrats held the Senate, but Republicans took the House, enough to block Democratic legislation and establish a conservative agenda in the lower chamber.
That was the promise. The reality is that the Republican Party is so riven with internecine warfare that it’s incapable of fulfilling its promises to voters or serving as a responsible governing bloc. A competent operation would hit the ground running by quickly moving through the pro forma beginnings of each new Congress: electing leadership, assigning committee posts, setting an agenda, making a symbolic change or two. Republicans have begun by fragging each other amid a battle over who should become House Speaker and demonstrating that they’re more like a motley crew of competing cultists than any kind of organized assembly.
Kevin McCarthy of California, who’s been the House minority leader for the last four years, is the obvious choice to become speaker now that Republicans have control. But more than a dozen hard-line Republicans oppose McCarthy on the grounds that he’s too wishy-washy, too establishmentarian, and not a pure-enough conservative. Since it takes a majority of voting members to become speaker, and Republicans have just a five-seat majority, the 20 or so Republicans opposed to McCarthy are more than enough to block his ascendance, given that all Democrats are voting against him.
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In three rounds of voting on January 3, McCarthy came up roughly 15 votes short. On January 4, former President Trump weighed in, urging all Republicans to back McCarthy. Since the holdouts tend to be the staunchest, pro-Trump America First-ers in the party, Trump’s endorsement might have put McCarthy over the top, if he still had any influence over the party’s rabble-rousers. But Trump swayed no votes, and further rounds of tallies ended up just like the first three. The House must keep voting until somebody gets a majority and becomes speaker.
If not McCarthy, who? There are still some moderate Republicans who won’t vote for a bomb-thrower from the far right. A moderate Republican could get the votes if some Democrats went along. But why would they? Democrats seem completely content to step aside and let Republicans flounder for as long as possible. Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana has emerged as a non-McCarthy who’s conservative enough to appease the hard-liners and might be able to end what is becoming one of the most embarrassing self-owns in the history of Congress.
Then what? There’s a presumption that House Republicans will coalesce at some point and start to lay out a coherent agenda aimed at winning more voters during the 2024 elections, when full control of government will be at stake. But it now seems just as likely they’ll spend the next two years fighting among themselves and going to the mat for symbolic or even more pointless purposes.
The hard line “never Kevin Republicans” don’t just oppose liberals. They also oppose establishment Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and many of his colleagues. They’re not fighting McCarthy as a means to an end. For them, fighting the likes of McCarthy is the whole point. As if baiting them, McConnell appeared with President Joe Biden, the archenemy, at a Kentucky event to highlight the 2021 bill that will finance billions of dollars in infrastructure spending.
When politics works, it’s the art of the compromise, with factions giving up out-of-reach goals and accepting what’s attainable. An unlikely example of that is the left wing of the Democratic Party, which voted for the more moderate Nancy Pelosi as speaker in 2021, and during the following two years also voted for a raft of Democratic bills that didn’t go nearly as far as they wanted. Progressive such as Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York could have exercised de facto veto power over bills that didn’t contain their favored measures, such as the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Democrats had the same narrow margin in the House Republicans have now, and just a one-vote majority in the Senate. A few scant holdouts could have sunk Democratic legislation. Democrats did have problems with centrists sinking legislation they felt was too liberal. But Biden had no problem with left-wing Democrats, who relented on several bills that didn’t contain their favored provisions, giving Biden a surprisingly long list of legislative accomplishments.
The Republican outliers won’t compromise. They want veto power and they’ll use it ruthlessly. This will have real-world implications later in the year, when Congress must approve an extension of the federal borrowing limit and spending bills for 2024. The irony of this rabid Republican holdout is that it will empower Democrats during the next two years, since they will most likely end up teaming with moderate Republicans to get the necessary bills passed and demonstrate that they can save the nation from Republican mayhem.
The real Republican message for 2024 is that there are enough nihilists in the party to force the prioritization of absolutism over pragmatism, warfare over compromise and chaos over efficiency. The McCarthy Madness will abate, but other defenestrations will follow. The Republican party will continue to fail Management 101 until somebody corrals the coalition busters—or they lose control again in 2024.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @rickjnewman
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