We owe debt to GOP
In the melodrama that saw Jim Jordan coming all too close to being elected speaker on Tuesday and Wednesday, the country witnessed some of the best of what the U.S. House of Representatives used to be — and the worst of what it is becoming.
It does not say much for the narrow Republican majority’s capacity to govern that it is entertaining the idea — much less that nearly 90% of its members voted in favor — of putting in the speaker’s chair a man who prides himself on having one of the thinnest legislative records in Congress. “I didn’t come to Congress to make more laws,” Jordan, R-Ohio, has said.
Even more shocking was that so many were willing to hand power to a conspiracy theorist who worked to overturn an election, who encouraged an insurrection and who, less than three weeks ago, voted to shut down the government.
This reckless lurch by the vast majority of House Republicans would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Trumpism has seized the House.
And yet, as Jordan fell short of a majority in votes by the full House this week, it was heartening to see a handful of his GOP colleagues stand up not only against their increasingly destructive colleagues but also the pressure of the right-wing noise machine — including the fury that was unleashed on Jordan’s behalf by Fox News megahost Sean Hannity.
These 20 or so Republicans might pay a price for the fact that they have genes of rationality and responsibility in their mitochondrial DNA. Those in deeply red districts might draw challenges in next year’s Republican primaries. The country owes them a debt.
They had different reasons for their refusal to buckle. For some, particularly those vulnerable members who represent districts that Joe Biden won in 2020, it was a calculation of political survival.
Others — including a handful of institutionalists on the Appropriations Committee — saw in Jordan’s speakership the prospect of regular government shutdowns and budget cuts so deep they would threaten national security at a time when the world is a particularly dangerous.
Still others voted against Jordan out of personal loyalty to former speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., whose Oct. 3 ouster was engineered by a small number of lawmakers who have become known as the Chaos Caucus.
“What has gone on this past two weeks is stunning,” said Rep. Doug LaMalfa, a staunch conservative whose friendship with McCarthy goes back to their days together in the California legislature and who voted against Jordan during the first round in protest but not on the second ballot. “Some people don’t appreciate being bullied on how they are going to vote, whether it’s by a TV host or a flood of emails. … What the heck do they want? Do they want to just tear the speaker down?”
As a matter of fact, some do, which is how we have reached the point where the House has ceased to function.
The selection of a speaker is something that traditionally has been a rote exercise and an insider’s game. But everyone should have seen this debacle coming. In January, it took McCarthy 15 rounds of voting to win the gavel, which was the first time something like that had happened since the Civil War era. Then he was the first speaker ever to lose his job by a vote of the House.
The backlash against the members who voted to remove McCarthy has been so intense that “I have a hunch you won’t see another motion to vacate in this Congress,” former speaker Newt Gingrich told me last week.
I don’t share Gingrich’s confidence that the Republicans in the House will settle down any time soon. It’s more likely that this experience will only increase the belligerence of small factions within the party.
These hard-right members and their ideological allies didn’t succeed in their efforts to install one of their own as second in line for the presidency, but that doesn’t mean they will give up on their radical goal of undermining the processes of legislation by consensus for which Congress was designed.
“Every time lawmakers use these innovations, it becomes easier to use it the next time,” notes Clemson University political scientist James Wallner, a Capitol Hill veteran who worked for Republicans in the House and Senate.
Some on both sides of the aisle are trying to cobble together an agreement under which Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick T. McHenry, R-N.C., will have the power to bring at least some legislation to the floor, particularly aid that is urgently needed by Israel. But the fact remains that the Republican majority has ushered the House into an era unlike any it has ever experienced — one in which lurching from crisis to crisis is the only way it operates, when it operates at all.