A Bad Time to Be Ruled by Children
With the world and the United States at the brink of a widening and potentially catastrophic war, Republicans continue to dither about which of their number can best stand up to that evil socialist, Joe Biden.
The divisions in the Republican Party, which have been festering ever since their candidates were trounced in the 2018 midterm elections, have, thanks to that brilliant tactician Matt Gaetz, hit their Big Bang moment at precisely the wrong time. As a result, electing a new Speaker of the House with the requisite 217 votes (there are two vacancies) will involve compromise and at least a pro forma healing of the rift, for which at the moment there is no clear path.
Nonetheless, Republicans must settle on someone. The question becomes whether the new Speaker will have any more success than the old Speaker in discharging the House’s responsibility to help govern the nation. For that, the signs are not good.
Donald Trump, the man who pried open the worm can, was not directly responsible for the current blow-up, although his influence on both Gaetz and other GOP House members impacted their decisions. But Trump is deeply involved in what comes next. In choosing a new Speaker, Republicans will let their indicted leader know if his hold on the party is as strong as he thinks or whether it is more illusory than it appears.
Currently, there are three candidates, all of whom to those outside the party seem more or less interchangeable, but to the various intra-party factions represent the difference between power and impotence. Jim Jordan, the preferred candidate of the Trump/nihilist wing, is trying to convince less hard-line colleagues that he won’t burn down the House if he is handed the matches. Steve Scalise, who compared to Jordan almost passes for mainstream, is trying to convince more hard-line colleagues that he will be sufficiently divisive and inflexible to prevent any legislation unacceptable to Gaetz and his fellow commandos from coming to a vote. Kevin McCarthy, while officially sitting the contest out and asking not to be nominated, is clearly hoping to be the deadlock alternative and thus become the once-and-future Speaker.
The first two will compete for support at a forum after which, in theory, the party will choose the official nominee by secret ballot—at the moment by gaining a simple majority of the caucus. That will be the easy part. Whoever is chosen will then have to get nearly all of the Republican votes in an open election in a full House, which will require some members to vote—on television—for an alternative they will likely loathe.
(To head off a public sandbox fight, Republicans are reportedly considering a rule change that will require their nominee gain the 217 votes in private caucus…which could take some time. However they do it, while it might solve the immediate problem, it is also an ideal recipe for bitterness, acrimony, and more dysfunction down the road.)
Petty politics will play a greater role than policy. Trump, convinced he is still the kingmaker, has endorsed Jordan. If, therefore, Jordan is ultimately elected, Trump’s power in the party will be reinforced; if not, it will be diminished and roil the GOP further. That is not an outcome that Trump, who cares about nothing but his own aggrandizement, will take lightly.
Republicans are aware of these alternatives and, as a result, many, especially among the small but pivotal group of moderates who would very much like to be re-elected, are anxious to pull back from Trumpism, for which they blame the party’s underperformance in 2018, 2020, and 2022. If Trump proves an equal drag on the party’s candidates in 2024, many of them will lose their jobs and Republicans will lose the House.
The hard-right members, on the other hand, are totally tied to Trump and if his influence is decreased, so is theirs. True, they can again try to bring Congress to a standstill, but that might impel a more reasonable Republican caucus to make bi-partisan deals with Democrats.
As such, the recent Hamas atrocities in Israel have complicated the Republicans’ problems, in ways both obvious and less so. For the former, there is overwhelming sentiment both in Congress and among the citizenry that the United States should provide immediate and substantial military and logistical aid to Israel, which cannot be fully achieved if one house of Congress is paralyzed, as the House is now. There are even some who advocate the United States taking action against Iran, which, at the least, provided materiel and training to the Hamas terrorists, if not directly dictating the timing and targets of the butchery.
The Republican caucus is therefore under immense pressure to either settle on a Speaker among the current entrants or find a compromise candidate for whom most will vote only reluctantly.
But the Israeli crisis also undercuts the intransigence of some Republicans on providing continued aid to Ukraine, one of the sticking points in their current intra-party squabbles. If the nation believes Hamas to be a terrorist organization bent on killing for its own sake, egged on by the rogue state that is Iran, why would Russia, which has indulged in widespread terrorism and even genocide in Ukraine, be viewed any differently?
Most Republicans, like most Democrats, favor continuing to provide Ukraine the means to defend itself. But many of the hard-liners, who will vote for Jordan, are on record as opposing further aid for Ukraine and, as recent events have pointed up, they do not take to moderating their stubbornness easily. Jordan, whose ambition and hypocrisy are a match for McCarthy’s, is unlikely to stand up to those who maneuvered him into power.
Regardless of how events play out and who gets to wield the Speaker’s gavel, a Republican caucus that has allowed itself to degenerate into a cult, pandering to an overgrown child who has not a drop of genuine patriotic blood in his body, has left the nation weaker at a time when it very much needs to be stronger.