It is bizarre.
On their first day in the majority, instead of going to war against Democrats as they’ve long said they would, Republicans in the House went to war against each other. Congress opened with Republicans fighting Republicans. As an exemplar of their dysfunction, in each of the six ballots so far to elect a Speaker, the leader of the now-minority Democrats actually got more votes than the presumptive leader of the majority Republicans.
As Dan Rather pointed out a few days ago in his own Substack commentary, the Republicans used to be seen as the party of stability. The Democrats were the ones who formed circular firing squads. Now those roles are reversed. The Democrats, who certainly have had their own ideological altercations between the middle and the far-left, have shown rock-solid unity. The Republicans, their ranks ruptured by extremists, have become the laughing stock.
I don’t know how it will work out. Perhaps no one does. The Not-So-Grand-Old-Party-Anymore probably will find a way to run the House of Representatives. They have to. There are tricks that could lower the threshold for Kevin McCarthy to win his coveted post. But from the looks of things so far, all they will do is run it into the ground. Because whether McCarthy ultimately grabs the Speaker’s gavel or somebody else does, the new leadership of the House is probably is going to have to cave and abide by the rules that these extremists have demanded to secure their support, rules that will mean they can remove a Speaker with just a handful of votes. The significance of that is, it’s not just a procedural change. It’s a change that would enable the fanatics, like highway robbers, to hold up any Speaker to get what they want.
And maybe “fanatics” is too weak a word. The core of this group, which after the 6th ballot still numbered 20, is in fact the core of what I’d call the congressional delegation to the January 6th insurrection. These are the ones who condemn law enforcement, not the rioters. The ones who plan to probe the committee that investigated the insurrection, not the politicians who played a role in it. They’re the ones who forced a promise from McCarthy to cut the Office of Congressional Ethics (which would sit well with newly-elected serial liar George Santos), and to refer to the mask mandates of the pandemic as “unscientific.”
If you need convincing that these Republican House members are hard-liners, look at an analysis The New York Times came up with today. Twelve of the 20 who have voted against McCarthy continue to deny that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential vote.
But it’s even worse, because it’s fair to say that most of the Republicans in this new session of Congress, who of course served in the last session too, have already sold their souls. Don’t forget, on January 7th, 147 of them voted to overturn the legitimate Electoral College results. Then in the impeachment of President Trump for inciting the insurrection, 197 voted against impeaching him. In The Times’s analysis, a full 180 Republicans in the House have at least questioned the 2020 election results (except, of course, their own).
One of the remarkable things about all this is, the radicals are railing against Kevin McCarthy for being part of the “establishment.“ The reality is, neither he nor his loyalists even bear a resemblance to the establishment of the Grand Old Party that has ceased to exist. That was the party that sent a group of principled leaders to the White House to tell their own president who was chin-deep in the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon, that the gig was up and he should go.
In today’s Republican party, paragons of principle have been largely hounded out of office. What happened yesterday might be a glimpse of the future. Total discord, total dysfunction, total dishonesty. It’s not funny, but as I wrote a week ago, it’s still a clown show.
Yet it’s hard to know in today’s Congressional chaos which clowns to root for. Certainly not the fanatical right-wingers who are behind it. But Kevin McCarthy is no prize either. After briefly wiping his hands clean of Donald Trump following the insurrection that Trump inspired, he changed his tune and went crawling back to Mar-a-Lago to genuflect, apparently flushing whatever principles he had left down the toilet of the aircraft that flew him to Florida.
Who knows, maybe today or later this week, the fanatics will fold. But if you read between the lines of their rhetoric, it looks for now like the odds are against it. Especially after Tuesday night when word got around that despite his failure to win election as Speaker, McCarthy had presumptively started moving his things into the Speaker’s office, and renegade Representative Matt Gaetz wrote to Capitol authorities, “How long will he remain there before he is considered a squatter?”
The stated intent of the Republican House for the next two years is to defang the Democratic administration in the White House. Defanging their own majority is a strange way to start.
Over almost 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 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 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
the anti McCarthy claque hark back to the lost side of the Federalist debate, settled by the Constitutional convention....an absolute conviction that the Federal gov't had ONLY 2 inherent functions: security and foreign policy...all other functions are reserved to the individual states...and this claque are absolutist in their demands of McCarthy and their fellow republicans. On the Senate side, Ron Johnson and Mike Lee voted NO on Mtch McConnell...and eventually lost...but they too were absolutists and blamed McConnell (not trump or weak candidates) for thwarting the "red wave."....The sooner they use live ammunition in their circular firing squad the better.