Forget the House vote — the damage is done
WASHINGTON >> On the fourth of 12 (and counting) failed attempts this week to elect Kevin McCarthy as speaker, Mike Gallagher, RWis., complained that Democrats and the media were enjoying the House Republicans’ meltdown too much.
“In some ways they’re salivating,” the lawmaker complained in his speech re-re-renominating McCarthy, R-Calif. “The schadenfreude is palpable.”
No doubt some are taking pleasure in the Republicans’ pain. But as a longtime reviewer of political theater, I can’t find anything enjoyable about this performance.
This is what happens when a political party, year after year, systematically destroys the norms and institutions of democracy. This is what happens when those expert at tearing things down are put in charge of governing. The dysfunction has been building over years of government shutdowns, debtdefault showdowns and other fabricated crises, and now antigovernment Republicans have used their new majority to bring the House itself to a halt.
This is insurrection by other means: Two years to the day since the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol, Republicans are still attacking the functioning of government. McCarthy opened the door to the chaos by excusing Donald Trump’s fomenting of the attack and welcoming a new class of election deniers to his caucus. Now he’s trying to save his own political ambitions by agreeing to institutionalize the chaos — not just for the next two years but for future congresses as well.
On Thursday, the day McCarthy failed on an 11th consecutive ballot to secure the speakership, he formally surrendered to the 21 GOP extremists denying him the job. He agreed to allow any member of the House to force a vote at will to “vacate” his speakership — essentially agreeing to be in permanent jeopardy of losing his job. He agreed to put rebels on the Rules Committee, giving them sway over what gets a vote on the House floor, and in key committee leadership posts. He agreed to unlimited amendments to spending bills, inviting two years of mayhem.
Perhaps worst of all, the McCarthy-aligned super-PAC, the Conservative Leadership Fund, agreed that it would no longer work against far-right extremists in the vast majority of Republican primaries. Essentially, McCarthy tried to placate the crazies in his caucus by giving up every tool he had to maintain order in the House.
It’s not clear at this writing whether even this abject surrender will secure McCarthy the speakership. But it hardly matters. Regardless of the outcome, the saboteurs have already won.
McCarthy’s allies on and off the floor have freely admitted that the leadership pratfall has been “messy.” But this goes well beyond messy and into the realm of stupidity.
One of the 21 anti-McCarthy holdouts, Ralph Norman of South Carolina (the one who urged Trump to declare “marshall [sic] law” before the Jan. 6 insurrection), told me and others Wednesday that he would support McCarthy only if he agreed to “shut the government down” rather than “raise the debt ceiling.” In reality, one has nothing to do with the other.
But such people now run the show. McCarthy clearly can’t control them. Even Trump can’t control them. Rebel Lauren Boebert of Colorado, just a few seats away from McCarthy on the floor, told the House that Trump, rather than lobbying for McCarthy, “needs to tell Kevin McCarthy that, sir, you do not have the votes and it’s time to withdraw.”
McCarthy’s leadership has been lacking, if not utterly absent, throughout the crisis.
First, he stiff-armed opponents, delaying for weeks before responding to their demands.
Then he and his allies tried to fight the rebels, shaming them publicly and threatening to take away their committee assignments.
Next, Team McCarthy tried to beat them through attrition, forcing the 11 votes over three days that McCarthy lost by nearly identical tallies.
The one thing McCarthy didn’t try? Negotiating with Democrats. But bipartisanship is a nonstarter in McCarthy’s caucus.
Ignoring the reality on the floor, McCarthy kept smiling, back-patting, waving to his family in the gallery, pumping his fist. During one roll call, he was so distracted that he didn’t respond at first when the clerk called his name — and for good reason: He had already begun the process of surrendering.
The concessions began to flow Wednesday night, and they flooded out during talks Thursday. As the GOP rebels held the line on the floor, rejecting McCarthy five more times, McCarthy’s representatives were one floor below, in the office of Republican Whip-elect Tom Emmer, giving away the store.
They had been given essentially everything the holdouts had asked for — and still, the extremists demanded more. “A deal is NOT done,” Perry, head of the House Freedom Caucus tweeted Thursday afternoon.
Would enough rebels accept McCarthy’s surrender? Would McCarthy’s mainstream supporters balk at his capitulation? In a sense, McCarthy’s fate had become unimportant, because whoever occupies the speaker’s chair will now be irrelevant. McCarthy’s surrender has condemned the House to two years — or more — of anarchy.
This dysfunction is what happens when those expert at tearing things down are put in charge of governing.