By Chris Stirewalt
Tuesday, January 03, 2023
The reason there is so much drama around the question of
the House speakership vote today is that it’s an extremely low-stakes contest,
at least for everyone other than Rep. Kevin McCarthy.
The Republicans’ itty-bitty House majority will instantly
obtain most of the possible advantages for the GOP—a blockade of any Democratic
initiatives in the second half of President Biden’s term, control of
congressional committees by their most-senior Republican members, and the power
to set the House schedule—regardless of who wins today or in the days to come.
Whether it is McCarthy or anyone else, the potential advantages for the party
pretty much end there.
When your party controls the lower half of one branch of
the government, you don’t do much of anything. And when you control that half
of a branch by just five votes—a 1.03 percent advantage—you do your best just
to hold on. But the speeches you hear today will suggest that there are serious
consequences to whether McCarthy or someone else has the profoundly dubious
privilege of wielding what will be a feather-light speaker’s gavel. These
people are either full of it, or so stricken with Potomac fever that they’re
hallucinating.
The arguments have and will center on who can best “stop
the Biden-Harris agenda” or some other focus-group-whittled phrase. Voters
already did that in November, insofar as Democrats hadn’t already done it to
themselves in their own delusional infighting of the previous two years. The
rest of the talking points will come down to “messaging,” i.e., talking points
about talking points. Who gets to decide which politicized hearings to hold and
who gets to go on TV with more-important-sounding titles are matters of little
consequence. Voters will continue to correctly understand that these things
should mostly be ignored.
But I hear you saying, “What if one of the real lulus
gets to be speaker of the House?” What if Rep. Andy Biggs—Publishers’ Clearing
House winner, K-Pop
beefer, staunch foe of Swedish NATO membership, and author of The
Doctrine of Liberty: Insights From the Book of Mormon—becomes third in line
for the presidency and gets to go sit in the photo-ops they convene when
pretending to have meetings about fiscal cliffs and whatnot?
If by some freak accident it did happen, it probably
wouldn’t matter much in the administration of government. A kooky speaker with
a barely there majority and the Senate and White House in the hands of the
other party would be easy enough to maneuver around until he was ultimately
ousted by his own party. Which brings us to the second point: It won’t happen.
The mantra from McCarthy and his team has been “only
Kevin,” which is certainly true, but only in answer to the right question:
Which member of leadership is willing to humiliate himself in a series of Fear
Factor-like challenges to win the votes of people who openly despise him in
order to get a truly terrible job? Only Kevin, indeed.
But, if McCarthy isn’t able to get it done on the first
ballot, it won’t be a mega-MAGA radical who wins. The next in line would be
Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana and then Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York. If
McCarthy is thwarted, the next frontrunner will get there in minutes, not over
the course of four agonizing years. That makes the job more appealing and the
bargaining easier. Either Scalise or Stefanik could get the majority of the
caucus behind them, and little advantage to the Biggs five for staying united
as Democrats celebrated Republican dysfunction so potent that it triggered only
the second multi-ballot speaker election since the Civil War. The holdouts
would have their scalp and would happily declare victory.
If you doubt it, just think of this: The leaders of the
various caucuses of the Republican Conference of the U.S. House of
Representatives have a weekly meeting they refer to as the “Five
Families,” an homage to the Profaci, Mangano, Luciano, Maranzano, and
Gagliano organized crime families of New York who tried to share control of the
city’s criminal underworld from the 1930s until the 1980s. Aside from the whole
brutal-mobster part of it, this is such an odd thing to say because they
were frequently engaged in murderous wars with each other. But most
of all, it tells us that these are, again, not serious people with useful
understandings of how legislative power is exercised.
McCarthy’s new enforcer, Rep. Marjorie Taylor
Greene, loves
the term. But while she may imagine that the Freedom Caucus is powerful
like a mafia don, that’s not what’s happening here.
The Freedom Caucus is made up of MAGA hucksters like Rep.
Matt Gaetz of Florida and Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado along with longtime
members who date back to the caucus’ Tea Party origins, like Rep. Paul Gosar of
Arizona, as well as serious radicals from the Doug Mastraiano-wing of the GOP,
like the group’s new chairman, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania. They are in
many ways the reactionary heirs of the John Birchers of previous
generations: cranky, confrontational,
and often
paranoid. Not surprisingly, the group is secretive in its operations,
factious among itself, and bombastic in its pronouncements, but it seems that
there are probably at least 40 members. It seems equally clear that they cannot
function in favor of anything other than chaos.
What about the second “family,” the Republican Study
Committee? These are the grandchildren of the Gingrich Revolution, but without
the real rebellion of their forebears. With about 160 members, the RSC is about
as mainstream as it gets in the GOP: Too big to be decisive and too diverse to
be dangerous. The résumé polishers who fill out the ranks tend to be Tracy
Flicks these days. The new chairman, Rep. Kevin Hearn, a successful McDonald’s
franchisee from Tulsa, has been in Congress for only four years. Not exactly
Lucky Luciano.
Two of the other “families,” the Republican Main Street
Caucus, led by Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota, and the Republican
Governance Group, led by Rep. Dave Joyce of Ohio, together comprise maybe 70 or
so members with lots of overlap between them. These are the traditional Chamber
of Commerce kind of pro-business Republicans, many from swing suburban
districts who are interested in showing legislative success. The fifth “family”
is the Republican side of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, led by Rep.
Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania. Lots of overlap here, too, with members like
Rep. David Valadao on the rolls of all three of the more moderate groups.
These men aren’t bosses, and a weekly gum-suck in the
leadership offices is not a summit between powerful factions. It’s a calendar
filler and a public-facing effort to show solidarity, not a place for
meaningful negotiations. People who don’t understand those things aren’t likely
to understand the real consequences of today’s vote and the actual situation of
the Republican Party, circa 2023.
If the stakes were higher—if there was a big House
majority and a Republican Senate and/or White House—we would be seeing a much
different fight for the speakership. That would really be a job worth having. Not
only would the kook caucus be less powerful in a big majority and therefore
less able to make extortionate demands, the speaker could actually set an
agenda and make a mark. For the next House speaker, the marks will mostly be
left on them. It’s a bad job at a bad time for the party—the white elephant
prize, if you’ll excuse me.
Seldom has Samuel Johnson’s line—“small things make mean
men proud, and vanity catches small occasions”—fit better.
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