NPR (“This was supposed to be Kevin McCarthy’s moment. Instead, GOP chaos reigns“):
This one had to hurt.
“Maybe the right person for the job of speaker of the House isn’t someone who has sold shares of themself for more than a decade to get it,” Matt Gaetz, the hard-right Florida congressman, said on the House floor before nominating Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan for speaker before a second round of voting Tuesday.
This was supposed to be Kevin McCarthy’s moment, one he had contorted himself into political knots to get to.
The California congressman has wanted to be speaker – badly – for years. He seemed willing to do a lot of things to get the job, including burrowing into former President Trump’s good graces. [I see what you did there! – ed.]
But none of it has been enough. Congress adjourned Tuesday without McCarthy – or anyone – as speaker after three ballots of voting, the first time the voting has gone beyond one round in 100 years.
The House without a speaker cannot move forward, no other votes can be held, no legislation can be considered. How this gets resolved is an open question – either McCarthy somehow wins over the hard-right members who are steadfastly holding out against him or he bows out, clearing the way for someone else.
Who that is, however, also isn’t clear.
It’s an untenable position for the country. But how we got here is something of a Washington tragedy — for McCarthy and for governance.
NYT (“Speaker Fight Reveals a Divided and Disoriented House Majority“):
House Republicans began their new majority rule on Tuesday with a chaotic and historic debacle, an embarrassing failure to rally around a leader that showcased the difficulties they will face in performing even the basics of governing and their lack of a unifying agenda.
Handed narrow control of the House by voters in November, Republicans squandered the opening hours of the new Congress they could have used to dispel concerns about their capabilities. Instead, they feuded in a disorderly display over who among them should be speaker as the most extreme elements of the new majority repeatedly rejected Representative Kevin McCarthy of California.
Despite Mr. McCarthy’s prominent role in fund-raising and delivering the House to Republicans and his backing among most in the party ranks, about 20 Republicans refused to support him and for the first time in a century forced repeated rounds of voting for the speakership. After three flailing attempts at electing a speaker, Republicans abruptly called for the House to be adjourned until noon Wednesday as they scrambled for a way out of their leadership morass. The stalemate meant the usually routine organization of the new House did not occur and its members were not sworn in, nor could any legislation be considered.
The paralysis underscored the dilemma facing House Republicans: No matter the concessions made to some of those on the far right, they simply will not relent and join their colleagues even if it is for the greater good of their party, and perhaps the nation. They consider themselves conservative purists who cannot be placated unless all their demands are met — and maybe not even then. Their agenda is mostly to defund, disrupt and dismantle government, not to participate in it.
It means that whoever emerges from the messy leadership fight will face deep-seated resistance when trying to shepherd spending bills and other measures that are fundamental to governance. Tuesday’s spectacle reflected that House Republicans have grown more skilled at legislative sabotage than legislative success, leaving the difficult business of getting things done to others.
WaPo (“Kevin McCarthy faces open GOP revolt as House fails to elect speaker“):
Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) faced open revolt in the House chamber Tuesday, failing in three rounds of balloting to earn enough votes to capture the speakership in a once-in-a-century showdown that will now spill into a second day.
The stunning failure of the House to elect a speaker on its first round of voting came after McCarthy and his allies spent weeks working to secure the 218 votes needed for him to take the gavel. Republicans won back the House in November’s midterms, but with a slim, four-vote majority, requiring near-consensus among the conference to move votes forward.
By early Tuesday, it became clear that hard-right GOP holdouts had not been swayed. The failure was the culmination of an internal divide that had in the past helped bring down the speakerships of Republicans John A. Boehner (Ohio) and Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), with members of the staunchly conservative House Freedom Caucus asking for a range of demands in exchange for their votes.
Newsweek (“Republicans Savaged as ‘Clowns’ After McCarthy’s Failed Speaker Bid“):
Republicans are being branded “clowns” following Representative Kevin McCarthy’s failed attempt to become speaker of the House.
[…]
The GOP chaos was welcomed and celebrated by Democratic lawmakers, who quickly mocked their political rivals as McCarthy’s failure was unfolding.
Representative Jamie Raskin said in a tweet that Republicans had achieved a “once-in-a-century humiliation,” while Representative Ted Lieu shared a photo of himself gleefully holding a bag of popcorn just prior to the session.
As the day continued, a wave of circus-themed mockery of Republicans emerged from both ends of the political spectrum.
Fox News host Sean Hannity warned that “House Republicans now are on the verge of becoming a total clown show if they’re not careful” during his Tuesday night broadcast, while similar sentiments were expressed on social media.
“Republicans need to reach a consensus, and fast,” conservative commentator Tomi Lahren tweeted. “Y’all still have time to pull this together before the entire party looks like a clown show. Move it or lose it.”
John F. Harris, POLITICO (“After Another Failed Vote, McCarthy’s Speaker Bid Is Starting to Look Pathetic“):
Tuesday’s drama surrounding the GOP’s efforts to elect a speaker to lead its wafer-thin House majority is normal only in the sense that the past generation has made the politics of chaos, confusion and contempt come to seem normal.
By any historical standard, however, vivid evidence that one chamber of the national legislature is essentially ungovernable is a high-water moment. Kevin McCarthy, whatever the outcome of this contest in coming hours or days, can rest assured he has earned a legacy — as a symbol of pathos and ineffectuality, an emblem of the cannibalistic spirit of the age.
That age, McCarthy’s travails make clear, is not defined exclusively by former President Donald Trump. Recall that the first time McCarthy vied for the speakership — eight years ago, before dropping out in the face of right-wing opposition — occurred before Trump entered the presidential race and made himself the most important figure in the Republican Party. This time around, McCarthy is stumbling even as he holds Trump’s endorsement.
That the McCarthy backlash both predates and postdates Trump’s presidency is a reminder that Trump was someone who exploited the politics of contempt but was not the cause of it, and suggests that he may be only glancingly relevant to some questions facing the future of the conservative movement.
McCarthy and his allies had signaled before the voting began that he was prepared to insist on vote after vote, for days if necessary, to grind down opposition and win vindication for his desperate plea, in a Monday closed-door meeting, that, “I’ve earned this job.” By early Tuesday evening, after McCarthy lost a third vote, that strategy was looking increasingly problematic. The Californian was effectively asking that his own party match him in tolerance for televised public humiliation. Still, no viable alternative to such self-abasement had emerged.
One must squint through the smoke of recent years to recall a time when the conservative movement was shaped by instinctual deference to authority — to establishment priorities and establishment values. When it came to selecting leaders, according to the old saying, Democrats needed to fall in love, while Republicans were content to fall in line.
By the third vote, 202 Republicans were willing to do that, including members who have privately questioned his leadership in biting terms. But 20 were not, and decisively so. That minority faction was acting with justifiable confidence that they were being faithful to the organizing principle of contemporary conservatism: Contempt for any figure who doesn’t also share an attitude of contempt or express it with sufficient purity.
Tim Miller, The Bulwark (“Never Trumpers Understood Kevin McCarthy’s Conference Better Than He Did“):
For years Kevin McCarthy, a blow-dried, donor-class Republican, has tried to maintain a hold on his increasingly bedraggled, QAnon-class conference by prostrating himself before Donald Trump—in increasingly ostentatious ways, so as to prove to his flock that he was an authentic convert to the One True Church of MAGA.
McCarthy calculated that this public self-abasement would be worth it because he would be rewarded in the end with the gavel and bust he had long coveted.
This afternoon he was rewarded instead with the type of humiliation we have not seen on the House floor in a century: Being forced to smirk through repeated public beatings at the hands of his own members.
Kevin is a man with many flaws, but on this day his fatal one was not heeding the lesson of the leopard-eating-faces allegory.
Those of us outside the party—whose faces were long ago masticated—had the distance to see this dynamic clearly. The days where “principled conservatives” huff and puff about CUTGO for a while and then surrender to an old guard master are long gone.
We knew that there was no sacrifice, no degradation that would satisfy Kevin’s leopards. He may have been able to cobble together the votes to get into the speaker’s office for a spell. And who knows, he might still? But he was never going to lead this party.
Because they were never going to put their trust in him. They would never give up one retruth, one Newsmax hit, or one scampac fundraising email for the betterment of the party. (Forget about the country.)
[…]
McCarthy and Crenshaw and their ilk convinced themselves that they could throw in with the world’s biggest grifter, tell lie after lie (after lie) to their own voters, campaign for a boat of shithouse rats so crazy that they make yesterday’s crazies blush—and at the end be rewarded with their loyal support.
[…]
He woke up on the biggest day of his life knowing he’d lose 5 votes on the first ballot and thinking he could lose 9 more. Throw in a wild card and the worst case was 15 no votes, when he could only afford to lose 4.
What he found is that crazy begets crazy. Once the floodgates opened the 5 Never Kevin votes had ballooned to an unthinkable 19. And then the same 19 voted against him a second time.
These 19 anarchists don’t have any tangible policy objections to a McCarthy speakership and neither do they have a realistic alternative. Their goal—their only goal—was to fight for the sake of fighting and show their constituents they are just as mad at the “elites” as they are. Their only alternative, Jim Jordan, is the man who oversaw the committee that expressed its vision for the party as “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”
In other words: exactly the type of members that this party has cultivated for the past eight years.
Responsible Republicans who want to run a governing party will eventually have to come to terms with the fact that there is no appeasing or accommodating their leopards. That no amount of submission to the orange idol that will do. That they are either in the boat with the lunatics or out here on the shore with the cucks.
In the meantime, the votes and the claw marks will continue until morale improves.
The meltdown has been a long time coming and the humiliation is so richly deserved. But what now?
Democrats are presumably enjoying the show but they would actually like to govern, which can’t happen until and unless a Speaker is elected.
POLITICO (“Biden world both humored and terrified by McCarthy meltdown“):
Staff throughout the West Wing wouldn’t cop to watching live coverage of Rep. Kevin McCarthy failing to get enough votes to become speaker of the House. But, to a person, they were more than aware of the fiasco that was unfolding on the House floor throughout the day, and on the TV sets in practically every office.
At Tuesday’s briefing, the first of the year, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierrerefused to comment on the speaker’s election, demurely batting away several questions about McCarthy’s humiliation and the new House GOP’s majority appearing to be every bit the chaos caucus many feared.
But make no mistake: this administration is about as distraught over all this as a flock of vultures happening upon a freshly killed gazelle. For whatever headaches a Republican-controlled House will create for President Joe Biden through investigations and its ability to control the floor, the disorder and rancor likely to characterize the new GOP majority, administration aides believe, will benefit the president politically.
Administration aides are confident that the president, by focusing on governing and working in a bipartisan manner, is delivering what the public wants — and that Republicans, as long as they’re continually bogged down by intra-party fights, are not.
“The Republican Party is almost non-functional right now,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas). “They can’t even agree on who should lead them. It’s not just a matter for the Republicans in Congress. It affects the whole country, and we can’t even take a vote on anything else until they decide who the speaker is.”
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.), who contemplated a Snickers bar dinner if voting ran into the late evening, marveled at the absurdity of it all as McCarthy failed to pick up more votes. He quipped that Republicans “should probably nominate Bill Murray at this point.”
I still think McCarthy should nominate Hakeem Jeffries. It would serve the idiots right.
Indeed, Jeffries received 212 votes to McCarthy’s 203, so he’s already got plurality support.
