How the right took joy and profit in Mccarthy’s misery
WASHINGTON — In creating a humiliating, dayslong spectacle that delayed the election of Kevin Mccarthy as speaker of the House until the early hours of Saturday morning on the 15th ballot, the far right of the Republican Party has won.
Mccarthy and his lieutenants went into the 14th ballot late Friday night confident of victory and were shocked when he fell a single vote short. A near scuffle broke out on the floor as Rep. Mike Rogers, R-ala., had to be restrained during an argument with Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-fla. The confrontation will come to symbolize the transformation of a normally solemn democratic process into a political bazaar.
Thus did members of an extreme minority of the GOP make themselves into its dominant force, confidently claiming to represent the will of the people even though 90% of their own party’s members and better than 95% of the entire body rejected the various candidates they put forward for the speakership again and again and again.
For the most recalcitrant among them, personal hostility to Mccarthy was enough to hold back their votes until giving way at the bitter end — either by supporting the new speaker or, in the case of six members, by casting “present” votes that did not count against him. And never mind how much Mccarthy had already prostrated himself before the ultras to get the job.
But all of the initial holdouts were motivated by a sense of grievance against what most everyone else sees as mainstream politics; a longing for government shrunken to pre-new Deal levels; an insistence that Washington is an alien place; and a view of “the people” shaped by those who nominate, elect and sustain them in office — and pretty much no one else.
Most of the drama played out on Friday, as President Biden was honoring democracy’s protectors at an event marking the anniversary of the 2021 attack on the Capitol. This only brought home that a majority of House Republicans, and not just Mccarthy’s foes, voted to reject the outcome of the 2020 election.
The power that the extremists will yield over the next two years bodes ill for normal governance. “I came into this Congress concerned that Republicans would play with fire on the debt ceiling,” Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, the ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee, said in an interview during one of the first 13 ballots. “Now, I’m 10 times more concerned.”
Mccarthy, Boyle said, “might not even permit a debt ceiling vote” for fear that right-wing members would drive him from office, made easier by rules changes he bowed to.
Not all the rebels represent safe Republican districts (Colorado’s Lauren Boebert was reelected by just 546 votes), but most do, and this influences how they view the country. From the standpoint of Deep Red America, the 2022 election was defined not by far-right GOP defeats in swing state races but by a surge of anti-biden, anti-democratic feeling in areas that were already very Republican.
Consider these statistics provided at my request by the respected election analyst Dave Wasserman. This past November, in elections for the 191 House seats that were already held by Republicans and that Donald Trump carried in 2020, the median Republican candidate outperformed Trump’s 2020 popular vote margin by 7.4 points.
In the GOP heartland, there really was a
red wave. This empowers the radicals who see themselves as representing the true faith and the soul of their party.
In the remaining 244 House districts, the median Republican candidate outperformed Trump by just 2.7 points. In other words, the GOP was weakest in the places it needed to be strong if it wanted a bigger House majority. But the right wing writes off most of these districts as, well, the land of Big Government infidels.
This, in turn, helps explain why there is no equivalence between the Democrats’ left — proudly and boisterously united with the rest of the party behind its new leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York — and a Republican right more invested in blocking and disrupting government than in making it work.
“We don’t have an anarchist wing, they do,” said Rep. Jim Himes, D-conn. One his party’s top moderates, Himes vigorously defended its left in an interview between ballots. Despite major policy differences in the last Congress, progressives “have been remarkable team players,” he said, and voted with their colleagues even after they failed to get “even a fraction” of the $7 billion in spending for Biden’s Build Back Better program that they originally sought.
“The extreme wing of the Republican Party launched an insurrection against our government,” Rep. Jim Mcgovern, Mass., a progressive and outgoing chair of the Rules Committee, told me on a break during votes. “We want to govern, Democrats of all stripes — conservatives, moderates and liberals.”
As a practical matter going forward, he
said, the concessions Mccarthy made to the rebels, including expanding far-right membership on a Rules Committee that determines what gets to the House floor, will hollow out the speaker’s power, enable a radical right agenda and make it far more difficult to get anything done in a politically divided federal government.
Mccarthy’s capitulations demonstrate how much the GOP has changed since it took control of Congress in 1995 under Newt Gingrich. While Gingrich was anything but middle-of-the-road, he understood that his majority was built in significant part by suburban moderates — and they were moderate — who won in swing districts. Virtually all of those moderates are gone. Suburbia, even in parts of the South, has become steadily more Democratic.
But it was also Gingrich who taught Republicans to be merciless. In an oft-quoted 1978 speech to a group of college Republicans, Gingrich derided an old Republican Party that encouraged its supporters “to be neat and obedient and loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words which can be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.”
Kevin Mccarthy finally prevailed, but only after learning what happens in a party that abandons those Boy Scout virtues.
The GOP’S loudest voices now direct their unrestrained ire against not only the opposition but also one another. The result will be a new House majority that is not much of a majority at all.