Gaetz Goes All In...With No Cards

It would be fortunate for Matt Gaetz if he did not play poker for any discernible stakes, because real players would be lined up to take his money.  At the very moment that his goal of fracturing the government beyond repair was in sight, he blundered into providing the perfect means of bestowing power on his enemies.

He did so in the classic manner of those who lose their fortunes, their homes, and the respect of their loved ones at the card table—he overplayed a weak hand.  Late Monday, he introduced a motion to vacate the Speaker’s chair, which will set off a chain of events in which Gaetz has an only one-card-in-the-deck chance of coming out ahead.

Although Gaetz introduced the motion, he was not alone in undertaking what will almost certainly result in a disastrous outcome for Republicans.  He was, however, the one who seems to have succeeded in elbowing his way to the microphone past other spotlight seekers such as Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs, and Lauren Boebert—who, after Beetlejuice, may have had her fill of the spotlight for the moment—to become spokesman for the fervent call to collateral damage.

Now that the resolution has been filed, the only outcome that will be favorable to Gaetz is the least likely—that McCarthy is voted out and another conservative, such as Steve Scalise or Tom Emmer, can unite the Republican caucus and gain sufficient votes to be handed the Speaker’s gavel. 

For this to happen, the many Republicans who are loyal to McCarthy would have to abandon him, which in turn, would acknowledge that Matt Gaetz and his hard-right colleagues are the new party kingmakers, a position they actually held after the fifteen scorched earth votes in the first election for Speaker but have now abdicated.

 Gaetz has floated the possibility that Democrats will balance out recalcitrant Republicans and help him oust McCarthy, which is possible of course, since Democrats are furious with McCarthy for blaming them for the shutdown crisis only hours after they saved him from humiliating defeat by the very ultraconservatives who are now seeking to kick him out.  But Democrats will be of no help to Gaetz in gaining sufficient votes to elect a new Speaker. He will need the McCarthy bloc to provide the margin of victory, hardly likely given the seething fury within the caucus.

As such, the odds for Gaetz turning this into a win are, to say the least, quite long.

Every other outcome leaves Gaetz and his cohorts severely damaged.  If the vote on the motion to vacate fails, he will totally look the fool and forfeit all his power and influence.  If the resolution succeeds and Democrats sit out the ensuing votes for Speaker, the result will be a repeat of the first fifteen-vote debacle—or worse—that will make Gaetz personally responsible for allowing his party, yet again, to appear laughably inept.

As a result, Gaetz has either handed Democrats a crowbar to pry some pretty hefty concessions from McCarthy to allow him to remain Speaker, or gave them the option of sitting back while House Republicans once more descend into the sort of head-shaking public display of ineptitude that will hardly gain them any votes in swing districts.

And sane Republicans know it.  Mike Lawler, a freshman from New York, who won in a huge upset and is already highly vulnerable, denounced Gaetz as a charlatan and “mealy-mouthed and, frankly, duplicitous.”  Texas conservative Dan Crenshaw blamed Gaetz for siding with Democrats “to kill the only conservative temporary government funding measure on the table,” which “included our Border Security bill…a hardline stance that focused our efforts on the border... You can’t justify this.” Even Newt Gingrich, the original right wing arsonist, has inquired whether Gaetz is a covert agent of the liberals.

Democrats have been searching for a way to exploit the widening rift in the Repubican Party. It is unlikely that any of them thought Matt Gaetz would be the one to hand it to them.

The great German philosopher Hannah Arendt believed that the most effective terror was that which never needed to be used, that fear was most heightened with the threat rather than with the reality.  If correct, then Matt Gaetz choosing to abandon a daunting threat for an uncertain reality was an immense bungle spawned of hubris, pushing all his chips into the middle of the table without having spent any time trying to figure out what cards his opponents were holding.

This leaves Democrats with quite an advantage.  Whether they raise or merely call, the pot is almost certainly theirs.