(Dobbs) The "Big Tent" Is Now More Like An Isolation Booth
Someone must win the seat without giving away the country.
The United States House of Representatives is a mess. An embarrassing mess. An angry mess. A dangerous mess. It is imploding, not from policy differences between Republicans and Democrats, but from personal differences between Republicans.
It is open warfare. Kevin McCarthy, who lost the speaker’s gavel two weeks ago, calls Matt Gaetz and his band of bomb throwers “crazy,” and not in an affectionate way. Phrases like “clown show” and “sh#t show” have been openly used to characterize today’s Congress, not from the other side of the aisle but from fellow Republicans. Even Ron DeSantis, who will need broad support from the GOP if he’s to achieve his elusive presidential dream, called his own caucus in Congress “the gang that can’t shoot straight.”
And it has turned ugly. Hard-right factions, pushing the past three days for the fire-breathing Jim Jordan to grab the gavel, took a page from the playbook of Donald Trump. They resorted to threats against fellow Republicans who opposed Jordan. Georgia representative Drew Ferguson said, “When the pressure campaigns and attacks on fellow members ramped up, it became clear to me that the House Republican conference does not need a bully as the speaker.” So he voted against Jordan. Death threats have been called in to him. His family has been targeted too.
Iowa’s Mariannette Miller-Meeks voted for Jordan on the first ballot but supported someone else on the second. Since then, “I have received credible death threats and a barrage of threatening calls.” Don Bacon of Nebraska, who outspokenly announced that voting for Jordan would be “rewarding bad behavior,” says that after menacing messages to his office and home, his wife is sleeping with a loaded gun.
But in the final analysis, the bullies’ tactics backfired. As Jordan kept putting himself forward for speaker, the opposition kept growing: 20 votes against him on the first ballot, 22 on the second, 25 on the third. It got so bad that in a secret ballot yesterday afternoon after Jordan’s third defeat, the House Republicans voted to drop him as their speaker-designee. You don’t see that every day. Matt Gaetz, a bully-in-chief, had the gall to say that Jordan was “knifed by secret ballot” and called that vote “truly swamp tactics on display.” But Jordan lost, Gaetz lost, the bullies lost.
This once was the party of the big tent. Now, as opinion columnist Glenn Altschuler recently wrote in The Hill, it is more like an isolation booth.
Of course they brought it all upon themselves. Whether you blame the hard-right bloc that demanded unworkable House rules when Kevin McCarthy was fighting to be speaker, or McCarthy and his leadership team who gave away the farm to appease them, they deserve what they got.
There is some silver lining. First, Trump stuck his nose in the mess and endorsed Jordan, who genuflects at the ex-president’s feet. His influence was impotent. This shows that even among politicians who might need his favor the most, there are limits to Donald Trump’s power. In what already has been a bad week in courts of law, chalk up another loss for Trump.
Second, it’s a great big maybe but maybe some of the less radical Republicans in Washington will come to their senses and demand that there are better ways to govern than hand-to-hand combat. Another big maybe is, maybe some of the saner members of the House will gain influence and bring order back to Congress. That doesn’t mean the likes of Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene and, yes, Jim Jordan, who wouldn’t have the grace to show contrition. But Jordan’s defeat yesterday led to a free-for-all for the speaker’s chair and if we’re lucky, something akin to the cream will rise to the top.
Personally I’m having trouble reconciling my own feelings about this mess. On the one hand, I can’t help but delight in seeing these people at each other’s throats. It’s been a long time coming. They have no one to blame but themselves. I won’t lose a night’s sleep over it.
On the other hand, I will lose a night’s sleep if they push this nation closer to a cliff. There is still no progress on keeping the government open past November 17th. There is still no consensus, let alone action, on new funding to help Ukraine defend itself against Vladimir Putin, and even if Congress does get around to voting on it, there is no guarantee that the politicians who show a preference for the Russian despot over American democracy won’t somehow block the money. Also hanging in the balance are security money for our ally Israel, defense funding for democratic Taiwan, and dollars to deter migration from Mexico. These things are all on hold until the Republicans can get their act together, and so far, despite the urgency, they haven’t managed to do that.
I could also lose a night’s sleep if I do the math and come to the conclusion that while an extremist like Jim Jordan didn’t reach the pinnacle of power in Congress, he still got more votes than anybody else because the hard-right of the GOP still holds a hammer over the House. All those votes mean there still is a large block of Republicans who think a guy like Jim Jordan, a “legislative terrorist,” would be the best person to set the agenda for the country.
However, when I write that Jordan still got more votes than anybody else, that’s anybody else in the Republican Party. Dating back to the 15 ballots it took Kevin McCarthy to win the speaker’s gavel back in January, Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has gotten every vote from every Democrat every time. And since McCarthy got dumped, more votes than any Republican. His colleagues have their differences, but when it’s important to speak with one voice, they have their act together. I can’t remember the last time we could say that about the Republicans.
We need a speaker who will make things, not break things. He or she will come from the ranks of the majority party, which means it will be a Republican. There are good Republicans in the House. One of them will have to figure out how to win the seat without giving away the country.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Thanks Greg. When US elected GOP representatives and their civilian allies behave like Hitler’s brownshirts during the Weimar interregnum, it has to end with this chaos-- proving the majority are tired of tnd maga effort to destroy American democracy.