Powerful, and small, extremes
The week before he voted with seven other House Republicans and all House Democrats to remove Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif) as speaker, Rep. Matthew M. Rosendale (Mont.) said he had prayed his party would not win a big victory in the 2022 midterms.
His thinking: If Republicans had a sufficiently small majority in the House, then it would take only “six or seven very strong individuals” to “drag the conference over to the right.”
The 96 percent of House Republicans who voted to keep McCarthy are not happy with Rosendale or with his logic, which echoes Vladimir Lenin’s slogan: “Better fewer, but better.”
Rosendale’s colleagues see that a smaller cadre of elected Republicans has not enabled more conservative policy victories than a large House majority would have. But Rosendale was not wrong. Republicans’ poor showing last year has increased the influence of some conservatives in particular, including Rosendale.
Republicans lost several winnable seats in 2022. A Republican U.S. representative from Grand Rapids, Mich., who voted to impeach Donald Trump narrowly lost his primary. The winner then lost the November election. In a northern Ohio district, a scandal-plagued but Trump-backed candidate barely won his primary, then under-performed against the Democrat. In Alaska’s at-large House seat, Republicans placed their hopes in the polarizing Sarah Palin and got the predictable result.
If those three races had gone slightly differently, McCarthy would have been able to keep his job over the objections of eight House Republicans.
But in that case, Fox News wouldn’t be quite so eager to interview Rosendale.
The small-is-beautiful tendency does not affect both parties equally. Republican politicians are probably more geared toward individualism and less toward solidarity than Democratic ones are. Republicans in our era regard one institution after another as hostile to them—sometimes rightly—and have therefore become less interested in running them effectively. The Democrats never ousted a speaker of theirs when they had a narrow majority. They never even came close.
Democrats have also been forced to keep their tent a little wider. Americans who consider themselves to be conservative make up a larger percentage of Republicans than self-described liberals do of Democrats, so the Democratic coalition has to be more accommodating. And Democrats have learned from several national elections that they need more than a bare majority to win national power.
Because the vast majority of House Republicans wanted to keep McCarthy, they are understandably now expressing interest in institutional reform. It is perverse to allow a speaker to be removed without having been defeated by someone who had more votes. But the institution chiefly in need of fixing is not the U.S. House. It’s the Republican Party.