Government Dysfunction, 2023 Edition
For days, the House dithered, debated, deferred, demurred and demonstrated what dysfunction means in a mature democracy that has been a model of stability and an inspiration to the world for centuries. Two years after hoodlums brought the Capitol to a standstill, the country’s elected officials did much the same thing — without injuring anybody or anything but their own public image and, ultimately, the country they were elected to serve.
The Capitol standoff was one of the most peculiar spectacles in recent American political history, part of a quarter-century that has had its share, from a 36-day overtime election in 2000 to a months-long effort by a president to overturn the results of an election. Between the two were terrorist attacks, two wars in Asia, a pandemic and political divisions that had few antecedents in the life of the country.
The impasse on Capitol Hill was of a piece with these manifold factors. The 2000 election sowed dissent and distress among the public. The terrorist attacks and the pandemic might have drawn the nation together in a different time, but in this period challenged the fundamental unity that is essential to a civil society. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan further divided the country. The sense of civility that kept the country together in earlier decades was frayed by the culture wars and the emergence of new generations that were eager to revise the social contract on issues from gender identity to race.
Given all that, is it so surprising that lawmakers were unable to perform the fundamental congressional act of choosing their own leader?
On one side was a fairly traditional California conservative, steeped in the ways of the Capitol, familiar with the political arts required to pass legislation, attendant to those on the right but suspicious of their nihilism. Kevin McCarthy is a classic pol of the old school who made slight, and slightly insincere, bows to the populist right and then reverted, as political animals almost always do, to horse trading and log rolling.
All those factors repelled the muscular conservatives to his right — the horse trading
in particular. McCarthy thought offering a deal would placate them. They thought his offers proved that he was a craven opportunist. He thought he could paste together the 218 votes required to become speaker, but the very act of attempting to do so alienated the rebels. He regarded them as comic figures. They regarded him with contempt. His survival depended on making the speakership he craved so weak that it almost wasn’t worth having.
On the sidelines was Donald Trump. The former president didn’t create the rebellion on the right, but he rode it to the White House and then, in his Mar-a-Lago retreat, kept the fire alive. The rebels who sought to deny the speakership to McCarthy were all Trump loyalists. Trump, who found McCarthy sufficiently malleable to be useful to him, sided with the presumptive speaker and tried to rally his own people to the side of his wholly owned subsidiary.
But Trump has lost the vinegar of past years, and after the midterm congressional elections seems to be a spent figure. His House adherents no longer adhere to his pleas. Over in the Senate — where individual members have the same power that the insurgents demand for the House — GOP leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky just became the longest-serving party leader in American history, surpassing the revered Mike Mansfield of Montana, who was far more a conciliator than McConnell, who has neither time nor patience for Trump. McConnell blames the 45th president for denying the Republicans the Senate majority that Joe Biden’s low approval ratings might otherwise have assured.
So the country has an aged president determined to run for a second term against the wishes of the party, though the party has no obvious successor to the crown. It has a former president in exile in Florida, where the governor he helped win office is paying no attention to him. The House is a shambles. The Senate, ordinarily the most unpredictable element of the American political system, is a model of stability compared to the House. Who’d have thought?
We can only guess what the country looks like from beyond our borders. I recently spent four months in Canada. The view of our closest neighbor and ally: Canadians believe they are living north of a crack house. Every conversation begins with, “What is happening to your country?”
And that was before the House went into paralysis.
Here’s the tragedy. For decades — for centuries, really — the United States was a model for countries around the world, its Constitution actually used as a template for other nations’ charters, its values celebrated as the height of civilization. The country had problems (race chief among them, and poverty) and it had missteps (Vietnam, then Iraq), but its founding documents were at least aspirational. All men were not created equal on this continent, and women were excluded, but the country was established with the goal of making all equal and included. Slavery was a disgrace. The genocide of Native Americans was unspeakably horrific, a moral stain. But the country still stood as a beacon of hope and opportunity, not perfect but maybe, eventually, perfectible.
Those who fought the McCarthy candidacy are empowered; they saw how they could bring the House to a standstill. The Republican regulars are in retreat; recent presidential nominees such as Mitt Romney and John McCain increasingly seem like figures from a long-ago, grainy past. So do Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush and even George W. Bush.
The Republicans are undergoing the most dramatic transformation of any American political party since the Democrats, under Franklin Roosevelt and all the way through Lyndon B. Johnson, began to shed their small-government past. For a generation, even more, it had to deal with its Southern, segregationist rump. The movement toward its New Deal and Great Society ideas was slow, agonizing, disorienting. Biden entered politics when that transformation was incomplete. He will leave politics with a different Democratic Party entirely.
The Republicans are undergoing just as dramatic a transformation. They are changing the country even as they are changing themselves. This past week was a dramatic example of the tensions inherent in that process. The days of kinder and gentler are gone. We are in the era of Divisions R Us.