The House Speaker Election: A View From The Peanut Gallery

Like many of you, I've been checking the live blogs and C-SPAN to see how the GOP, with its very slim House Majority, would handle the vote for the Speaker's gavel. Our major parties are very broad coalitions, and so one expects negotiations ahead of a new session of Congress to be heated, but probably mostly settled by the time January 3rd hits. 

Not this time.

Kevin McCarthy has been jockeying for the Speaker's gavel for a good couple years, and is the GOP House Caucus Leader. However, he has never quite been able to close the deal. He's tried to become Speaker before in 2015. That effort failed when he did the equivalent of shooting himself in the foot. His sin that time? After the GOP leaders had taken great pains to present the Benghazi hearings as non-partisan, McCarthy let loose with how much the hearings had hurt Hillary Clinton's chances to become President. In other words, he could not be trusted to refrain from crossing the party line. His support evaporated. This time, he's running in a weakened position. He's not well-respected (at least that's my perspective) within his own party, and after initially showing some understandable anger after the Trump-led insurrection attempt in which the Capitol Building was breached quite violently, he subsequently went down to Mar-a-Largo to kiss Trump's ring. He's also capitulated to practically every demand the GOP's radical Freedom Caucus has made, with nothing to show for it. With a very slim majority, he can only lose four of his caucus members in order to succeed in his quest to be Speaker. 

As of this writing, McCarthy has been nominated for the Speaker eight times, and has failed each time. The ninth vote is now in progress. He has the public backing of Donald Trump, the disgraced former President. That was supposed to move the 20 to 21 holdouts among the GOP House caucus to support McCarthy's bid. That has not come to pass. At this point, the approach seems to be to repeat the same vote and expect different results. That, my friends, is the definition of insanity.

The GOP has been in disarray for a while. The party has not had a functioning platform since Trump effectively took control of the party. There are some GOP legislators left who actually are serious legislators. They are in the minority. The party has been overtaken by extremists on the right, and they've demonstrated little interest in legislating. They show little interest in the sort of compromise that is necessary to do even the bare minimum to keep the government functioning. And we are watching the consequences play out in real time out in the open. 

In a way, we are watching the chickens come home to roost. The GOP began to actively court right-wing extremists at least as early as 2008, when Palin was named McCain's running mate during that year's Presidential election. We've seen the Tea Party era come and go, and then the Trump era. Perhaps the establishment leaders of the GOP and any of its corporate allies believed they could keep a lid on the worst excesses of their extremist wing. If history is any guide, they were doomed to failure. The GOP is in disarray, and that is now on full display.

I have no idea of how this all plays out. In the near term, the best advice for the Democratic Caucus is to stay united and stay out of the way as their colleagues on the other side of the aisle implode. I doubt there is a single possible candidate who could appease all the disparate wings of the GOP Caucus. It won't be Scalise. The doomsday scenario of Trump being Speaker is a non-starter, if for no other reason than there would be enough "moderate" Republicans in the House who are already fed up with him and his grievances. There is no critical business to be accomplished at least for a few months. The consequences of being Speakerless are relatively minimal for now. Eventually, however, some sort of governing coalition is going to have to form (Martin Longman of Progress Pond has been arguing that point for a while now). I don't know how that happens, but it will probably have to happen soon enough in the event of an event that requires both chambers of Congress to be functional.

Assuming a governing coalition comes about, I have minimal expectations. If the House, during the 118th Session, can keep the lights on, that's going to be best we can expect. This won't be like the 117th Session, in which the House and Senate, with very bare majorities, were able to accomplish quite a bit more than I would have reasonably expected. Keeping the government funded, the debt ceiling from being breached, and addressing any emergencies that may come up will be about the extent of my expectations. The best case scenario is a compromise Speaker and a governing coalition that steers the more extreme members away from making spectacles of themselves (arguably a tall order).

In the meantime, pass the popcorn.


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