The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Speaker’s ouster by small group is a red flag
‘It should set off alarm bells that something is not right.’
When the House of Representatives voted to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker last week, it was the first such removal in American history, a vivid rebuke of his leadership and an escalation of the civil strife within the Republican Party. But historians and political scientists say it is something more: a warning sign for the health of American democracy.
“If you want to know what it looks like when democracy is in trouble, this is what it looks like,” said Daniel Ziblatt, professor of government at Harvard University. “It should set off alarm bells that something is not right.”
The vote reflected the enormous power that a small group of representatives camped on their party’s ideological fringe can wield over an entire institution, said Ziblatt, co-author of the book “Tyranny of the Minority.” It also showcased how difficult it will be for anyone to corral the House in a way that’s functional, with major decisions over the budget and Ukraine funding ahead.
Congress arrived at this point for myriad reasons, all of which build on one another, scholars say: Social media and cable news incentivized politicians to perform for the camera, not for their constituents. Aggressive gerrymandering created deeply partisan districts where representation is decided in primary contests, not general elections. Weakened political parties became captive to their loudest and most extreme members.
Taken together, those factors handed a small number of lawmakers the power to throw one of the three branches of government into disarray and, for now, paralysis.
The band of eight Republicans who rejected McCarthy, most of whom are members of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, were opposed by 216 of their fellow GOP representatives, all of whom voted to keep the speaker in place.
The rebels collectively represent just 1.85% of the country, all in safely Republican districts. But with Democrats voting in lockstep against a speaker who they said had repeatedly broken their trust, that was enough to secure McCarthy’s defeat in a closely divided House.
Led by Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, McCarthy’s antagonists said they were voting to end runaway federal spending and protest government dysfunction. “Washington must change,” Gaetz insisted from the House floor.
Scholars said the actions of Gaetz and his allies have only deepened the dysfunction, leaving the House rudderless and with no clear path to effective leadership. Although a government shutdown was narrowly avoided over the weekend, another looms next month. Future assistance to Ukraine as it fends off a Russian invasion is also at stake.
“We are watching a very small number of folks from the House Republican conference have an outsize role in promoting a lot of congressional dysfunction and fiscal dysfunction,” said Laura Blessing, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University. “This is a move for volatility and not a move to pass legislation.”
The GOP members who voted against McCarthy are in the extreme minority, not only within the House overall but within their own party, she added.
“They do not have the votes [for their own policy proposals], and they know that,” she said.
By voting en masse against McCarthy, Democrats highlighted the dysfunction in the Republican Party, which they have pointed to as a reason the GOP should not be trusted again with the majority after next year’s elections. But Democrats also risked contributing to the broader dysfunction in the House.
Some McCarthy allies urged Democrats to do something unprecedented and save a speaker of the opposite party out of concern for the stability of the institution. Democrats rebuffed their appeal: In their eyes, McCarthy had spearheaded an illegitimate impeachment inquiry, tried to subvert the House committee
investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and acted in bad faith during budget negotiations. He wasn’t worth saving.
McCarthy has not endorsed a would-be successor, leaving Republicans to scramble to find a viable candidate. Barring an unlikely and unprecedented consensus speaker who receives support from both parties, aspirants will need to earn the favor of nearly the entire Republican caucus, which ranges from relative moderates representing districts won by President Biden to the hard-right faction that just toppled one of its own.
Gaetz set off last week’s vote by moving to vacate McCarthy’s speakership. The fourth-term Floridian said he was acting in response to McCarthy’s decision to turn to House Democrats for help in passing a 45-day stopgap spending bill that avoided, for now, a government shutdown.
McCarthy had failed multiple times to win enough votes in his own party, with hard-right members — including the eight who voted against him last week — blocking his efforts.
The debate — and the conversations that preceded it — were unusual for the willingness of McCarthy allies to openly scold their own GOP counterparts for deepening the dysfunction in the chamber.
Many lobbed allegations of the sort normally reserved for
members of the opposite party, accusing McCarthy’s opponents of seeking attention, aiming to boost their fundraising and generally wreaking havoc.
“My colleagues here today have a choice: Be a chaos agent or get back to work,” said Rep. Ashley Hinson of Iowa, a McCarthy ally, ahead of the vote that ousted him.
After he was deposed, McCarthy himself voiced fears about how to legislate in an environment where the leader is captive to his own side’s most intransigent faction.
“My fear is the institution fell today because you can’t do the job if … you have 94 percent or 96 percent of your entire conference, but eight people can partner with the whole other side,” he said Tuesday evening. “How do you govern?”
It is a question that scholars are posing as well, seeking explanations and historical antecedents.
“If American democracy is already suffering and weak from various maladies, this unruly crisis in the House is just going to kick it a little further in that direction,” said Alex Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. “You are taking a set of institutions and you are weakening them and then pointing to their weakness.”
The eight Republicans who revolted against McCarthy represent districts that do not look like
the rest of the country, according to a Washington Post analysis. They are, on average, 71% White, compared with 59% of the U.S. population, and 8% Black, compared with 14% of America. Their districts are also deeply red: They averaged a score of +12 Republican on the Cook Partisan Voting Index, a measure of a district’s partisanship.
As unprecedented as Tuesday’s vote was, this moment is a continuation of a trend in American political culture, said Joseph Postell, a political scientist at Hillsdale College in Michigan. He pointed to the troubled tenures of previous Republican speakers of the House such as John A. Boehner and Paul D. Ryan, both of whom struggled with stiff resistance from their right flank.
“What McCarthy faced today is another domino in the many dominoes that have fallen over the last decade or so,” Postell said.
The House Republicans who objected to the budget and to McCarthy’s speakership may have had legitimate concerns about spending and deficits, Postell said. But “now they are no longer incentivized to bargain with one another,” he said. “They are incentivized to remain in conflict.”
He attributed those incentives in part to televised committee hearings that make legislators into budding social media stars.
Congressional committees “are no longer venues for Congress to have dialogue with administrative agencies. They are there to get viral memes,” he said.
McCarthy told reporters Tuesday night that he believed Gaetz’s motive was “all was about getting attention from [the media].” The speaker’s allies had earlier scolded Gaetz for fundraising off his effort to oust McCarthy even as the speaker’s fate was still being decided.
To some conservative thinkers, the failed vote to pass a spending bill that immediately preceded McCarthy’s ouster reflects a government that has grown so big it is imperiling the country’s health. The budget “is just too big for any democracy,” said David Ditch, senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.
“America is much larger in terms of population and geography than England or Japan or Germany, and we have more ideological and cultural diversity, which makes it harder for us to have consensus to agree on policy prescriptions,” he said.
Political backlash against the rise of a multicultural democracy has stoked the country’s divisions, academics agree. So has the tendency for people to sort themselves into urban and rural divides, as well as the way congressional districts are organized by partisan state legislatures — many of which are controlled by Republicans.
But that’s not to say the parties are ultimately in charge.
“The one big thing everybody tends to get wrong is most people look at the parties and they think the parties are very strong and polarized,” said Ian Shapiro, a professor of political science at Yale University. But the parties themselves have grown weaker, he argues, because they are controlled by those on the fringes.
The potential for primary challenges has long existed, but what is new is the steady rise of congressional districts that are reliably Republican or Democratic.
Such districts choose their representatives during primary elections, with the general election little more than an afterthought.
“The activists on the fringes of the parties are the people who turn out in primaries, so those are the people deciding those districts,” said Shapiro, co-author of “Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy From Itself.”