[ Turns out there are consequences for not having any policy ideas
or purpose.]
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THE REAL REASON HOUSE REPUBLICANS CAN’T ELECT A SPEAKER  
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Alex Shephard
October 20, 2023
The New Republic
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_ Turns out there are consequences for not having any policy ideas or
purpose. _

Representative Patrick McHenry, currently serving as speaker pro
tempore, (Tom Williams/Getty Images)

 

The House speaker’s race has entered its Groundhog Day era. Every
day, Republicans meet to try to elect a new speaker, and every day
they fail in new and more spectacular ways. It has now been more than
two weeks since Kevin McCarthy was stripped of the gavel
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a gang of disaffected right-wingers led by Matt Gaetz. Despite
numerous potential successors appearing—the three plausible
candidates include Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan, and the current Speaker
Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry (who some members of the House want to
make a kind of permanent temporary speaker)—none has enough support
to ascend into the role. Not only that, all three have a small but
stubborn opposition intent on blocking their path to the speakership.
At this point, there’s no unifying figure on the horizon, so we’re
caught in a loop: Republicans wake up, yell at each other, sometimes
cast votes, and sometimes not—yadda yadda—we never get a speaker.

Some have described this dynamic as a “civil war,”
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phrase that recalls the fissures between establishment figures and
insurgents during Donald Trump’s emergence. Those fissures still
exist: One major issue driving the conflict is that the House caucus
has long been controlled by extremists but also features nearly two
dozen Republicans representing districts that Joe Biden won in 2020
who favor a more moderate approach.

But there is another culprit as well. For all the talk about
extremists and moderates, there are almost no concrete policy demands
being discussed among Republicans. The party has a set of broad
priorities, sure: Cut spending, investigate Joe Biden, and own the
libs at every opportunity. But none of the factions vying for power
want to actually do anything in particular. This has resulted in a
conflict based almost entirely on personalities and vibes; it is no
wonder that it’s become intractable and endless. But this is the
natural end state of a party that has long since abandoned
policymaking in favor of weaponizing the government to fight
culture-war battles.

The simplest way to tell this story goes something like this: To
become speaker in January, Kevin McCarthy struck a deal
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members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, essentially allowing
them to call a vote to oust him whenever they felt like it. After
McCarthy made the cardinal sin of negotiating with the Democrats
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keep the government open, they did just that. Eight Republicans joined
with the entire Democratic caucus to strip the gavel from McCarthy.

But why this happened was rooted as much in the fact that these
members just didn’t like McCarthy personally
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in any political reason. That they didn’t care for him is why he was
put on an untenably short leash in the first place. Once McCarthy got
the ax, two candidates emerged: Jim Jordan, a Trump-backed bomb
thrower, and Steve Scalise, a hard-liner who was seen as marginally
more institutionally minded, given his long service in House GOP
leadership. Scalise narrowly but definitively won a vote to become his
caucus’s nominee for speaker but then quickly ran into a problem:
Enough Jordan backers decided they would never back Scalise because he
didn’t have the votes. And so, 30 hours after receiving his
party’s nominee to be speaker, he backed out of the race
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Then it was Jordan’s turn. The Ohio Republican had clearly hoped to
benefit from being the last horse in the race. Despite being
incompetent (Jordan is good at going on television and bad at
legislating) and unpopular (in large part because he is good at going
on television and bad at legislating), there was reason to think that
he could win by virtue of being the only option left. But Jordan went
about his business by cultivating the bad blood that had long been
flowing between him and other caucus members (his treatment of Scalise
was one of many ways Jordan exacerbated the enmity), which drove (at
least) two dozen Republicans to eventually decide they would never
back his candidacy.

From there, the party’s best hope was to turn to McHenry, who had
been serving as speaker pro tem ever since McCarthy’s
defenestration. There was hope that the party’s nonfringe members
could strike some kind of deal with Democrats
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extend McHenry’s status as temporary speaker. This, however, is
where it ran aground: Working with Democrats to resolve the situation
was deemed to be a nonstarter for too many Republicans; the
unprecedented nature of empowering the speaker pro tem as a long-term
solution alienated others. And so, by Thursday evening, we were all
back not-quite-but-close-to where we started from: with Jordan once
again whipping votes. There are zero indications he will be able to
flip enough of the 20 Republicans who voted against him on a second
ballot to become speaker. In fact, many are refusing to meet with him
or even take his calls.

In a normal situation, a speaker candidate would go to the various
factions within the caucus and try to strike a deal, making it clear
that they would move forward with various agenda items in exchange for
support. Holding a caucus together while making multiple agreements
with multiple factions is, more or less, the job of the party leader:
It is one at which Nancy Pelosi was particularly adept. (On Thursday,
Pelosi twisted the knife, telling reporters
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think [House Republicans are] taking lessons in mathematics and
learning how to count.”)

But the math isn’t the culprit. Given the slim majority the House
GOP possesses, such dealmaking is tricky but not impossible: You can
lose five Republicans (depending on absences or abstentions, that
number could be higher) and still become speaker. McCarthy’s
nomination was held up for 15 ballots until he made a deal.

The McCarthy deal was instructive, however, in that it was more of
a power-sharing agreement
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anything else: In exchange for their support, McCarthy gave Gaetz and
a band of like-minded yahoos a veto over the business of the House.
When McCarthy went around them to do that business, they got mad and
pressed the eject button, ending his speakership after just nine
months. More than anything, McCarthy’s crime was attempting to do
normal legislating, which requires some degree of communication and
collaboration with Democrats—two things Republicans are increasingly
against. McCarthy only did this twice in nine months, but that was two
times too many.

If House Republicans had any actual objectives beyond stymying the
Biden administration and blocking liberal priorities, we would likely
have a speaker right now. But without a set of tangible and material
policy goals to unite this party, they are unraveling. This is,
relatedly, what has empowered Donald Trump, a strongman who has been
able to transform a party without a vision into a cult of personality
using some simple carrots (nice tweets) and sticks (mean tweets).

That’s basically the story. With no productive purpose to set their
hands to, House Republicans have collapsed and turned on one another.
It’s possible that they will find some way out of this mess. They
might surrender to Jordan’s persistence and put him through what
they’ve already forced McCarthy to endure. Enough Republicans may
get fed up with the whole thing to strike a deal with
Democrats—though this strikes me as highly unlikely given the fact
that bipartisanship in any form has become an excommunicable offense.
No matter who or what emerges as speaker, however, they’ll still be
in the same mess because they lack a larger purpose. And while a
speaker may eventually emerge, the same dreadful conditions will
likely prevail. Who can say when the next anointed one will find
themself shoved under the bus?

_Alex Shephard is a staff writer at The New Republic._

_The New Republic was founded in 1914 to bring liberalism into the
modern era. The founders understood that the challenges facing a
nation transformed by the Industrial Revolution and mass immigration
required bold new thinking._

_Today’s New Republic is wrestling with the same fundamental
questions: how to build a more inclusive and democratic civil society,
and how to fight for a fairer political economy in an age of rampaging
inequality. We also face challenges that belong entirely to this age,
from the climate crisis to Republicans hell-bent on subverting
democratic governance._

* Republican Party
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* speaker of the house
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* Congress
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