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Don’t look now, but the Republican Party is coming apart at the seams. The rank-and-file Members of Congress are openly feuding with Speaker Johnson and resigning en masse. The president is busy falling asleep in cabinet meetings while polls show him facing Bush II levels of disapproval. Now the GOP is facing the reality of a double-digit Democratic overperformance in a special election in TENNESSEE.
It’s giving “catastrophic.”
Time to log on.
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Things haven’t been looking too great for Republicans for a while now. A government shutdown, a pedophile cabal scandal, and soaring inflation will do that. But the quiet revolt of Indiana Republicans against Donald Trump’s redistricting demands is a sign of deeper cracks within the GOP that are starting to split.
The issue at hand is Trump’s demand that state legislatures pass outrageous new gerrymanders that would eliminate Democratic seats by diluting red ones, a plan that wasn’t popular with either voters or Republicans in Indiana. In October, the Senate leader told Trump that he didn’t have the votes to implement this, which prompted a furious tirade from Trump threatening to support primary challengers against anyone who voted “no” on the gerrymander and subsequently inspired a wave of bomb and death threats from MAGA zealots against the lawmakers in question.
Almost as unpopular as Trump’s gerrymander demand was his tweet attacking Governor Tim Walz as “seriously r*tarded.” State senator Michael Bohacek, whose child has Down syndrome, vowed to oppose the new maps out of disgust for the President’s behavior. “Perhaps he can use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and behavior deserve a congressional majority,” he added.
State Sen. Greg Walker joined Bohacek in a public display of revolt. Walker refused Trump’s summons to the White House and accused the Trump official who extended the invitation to him of violating the Hatch Act, telling a local newspaper, “That individual works for me. He works for you. He’s on my payroll, he’s on your payroll, and he’s campaigning on company time. That’s a violation of the Hatch Act. He’s a federal employee. He works in the White House. But does anyone care about the rules anymore? Not that I can tell.”
“How does (Trump) have the time to mess with a nobody like me with all of the important matters that are to take his attention as the leader of the executive branch in this nation?”
The Indiana House just voted new maps out of committee, so it remains to be seen how this will all play out. But in the Trump era, this kind of open defiance is largely unheard of.
But the Indiana GOP aren’t the only Republicans thumbing their noses at leadership. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who sits on Speaker Johnson’s leadership committee, tore into Johnson this week for being a weak leader who is losing control of his caucus.
She told the Wall Street Journal that “he certainly wouldn’t have the votes to be speaker if there was a roll-call vote tomorrow. I believe that the majority of Republicans would vote for new leadership. It’s that widespread…Mike Johnson is a political novice and, boy, does it show…”
Stefanik has a personal axe to grind against Johnson; she blames him for tanking her chance to be Ambassador to the United Nations and is now mad at him because Democrat Jamie Raskins temporarily stripped her amendment to mandate congressional disclosure whenever the FBI opens an investigation into a Republican for being in cahoots with Russia out of the NDAA. “It is a scandalous disgrace that Republicans are allowing themselves to be rolled by the Dems and deep state on this,” whined Stefanik on Twitter.
Her public spat with Speaker Johnson comes on the heels of Trump’s feuds with former loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene (now a “traitor” to the MAGA movement) and Thomas Massie, whom Trump mocked for getting remarried after his wife tragically passed away.
All of this is just more evidence that the ever-rambunctious and self-serving GOP caucus is growing weary of their role of playing bootlicker to an obviously disengaged and uninterested Donald Trump… and after a string of humiliating losses and self-inflicted wounds, the sharks smell blood in the water.
“I do think that there’s a lot of frustration right now in the House with the effectiveness or lack thereof of this body in recent months. The House has … in some cases ceded its own authority, hasn’t taken the lead on a lot of important policy measures and has even taken steps now to limit the agency of individual members,” said Rep. Kevin Kiley to POLITICO.
Donald Trump has ruled the Republican Party with an iron fist, cowing the perpetually spineless Republicans into submission by way of bullying and primary threats. But now that the Mad King is showing weakness, these acts of defiance open the floodgates for more and more Republicans to push back and focus on what matters the most to them: their careers.
If there is one thing that we can reliably say Republicans in Congress care about, it’s protecting their “jobs” and their access to the lobbyist gravy train. That’s why all eyes were on Tuesday’s special election for Tennessee’s 7th district, where Democrat Aftyn Behn took on Republican Mark van Epps.
This is a district Trump won by 22 points, and van Epps was expected to cruise to victory. To the horror of Republicans, Aftyn’s affordability-based campaign propelled her into a single-digit polling gap that triggered millions of emergency GOP spending and the personal intervention of both Trump and Speaker Johnson to try to avoid disaster. After the disastrous blowout losses on Election Day, Republicans saw TN-7 as a major bellwether for next fall.
“If our victory margin is single digits, the conference may come unhinged,” one senior House Republican said.
Van Epps won by just 9 points.
A double-digit swing in a Trump +22 district that had national attention is the kind of very, very, very bad news that can set off a chain reaction in an already divided, frustrated, and increasingly panicked Republican Party.
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All of a sudden, the redistricting ordered by Trump looks like an incredibly short-sighted idea as deep-red seats turn to just red and possibly purple seats. When all the votes were counted, Behn’s swing was a 13-point shift blue.
There are *43* Republican House seats that Trump won by 13% or less.
Then comes the realization that the GOP is nowhere close to anything resembling a plan to deal with the healthcare premium apocalypse that hangs over the New Year or the political consequences that will follow.
Where is leadership? Oh, the President is falling asleep in his cabinet meetings with his approval down to just 36% — 25% with independents. Everything in the data says that voters are beyond furious about the economy, but Trump only regains lucidity long enough to complain that “affordability is a hoax” and a “con job.” That’ll be a fun subject to answer for during Republican town halls…if they held them.
Tea leaves and wall-writing are read. “Screw it, I’m out,” starts seems like a very attractive prospect, and many Republicans, with their characteristic cowardice, are dipping out en masse.
So far, over two dozen Republicans have announced they will not be running for re-election, which denies Mike Johnson a staggering 31 incumbency bonuses in an election that generic congressional polls show could be anywhere from Democrats +5 to +14pts (!) And, just to remind you, the current GOP majority is a meager six seats.
Add this all up, and you have the makings of a real Hitler-in-the-bunker moment for Mike Johnson and the Republican hopes of doing anything besides ignoring subpoenas for the rest of Trump’s term.
We still have a lot of work to do to wrest power away from the GOP and make their nightmare become a blessed reality for the rest of us. But the way things are looking now, a once-triumphant Republican Party is scrambling to stay afloat — let’s be the blue wave that sinks them for good.
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