Shooting the Hostage

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, October 04, 2023

 

On Tuesday I felt like an architect who realized that a building he designed has a catastrophic flaw …

 

… during a hurricane, after the building had already begun to sway and creak.

 

I wrote on Monday that Matt Gaetz’s weird grudge against Kevin McCarthy is one of the best things to happen to the now-former speaker as a politician. McCarthy is a contemptible figure, liked by some but respected by few, yet passes for downright statesmanlike when compared to the gentleman from Florida. From his energetic Trump toadying to his sneering populist grandstanding to his alleged, uh, personal eccentricities, no one embodies the repulsive amoral narcissism of the MAGA movement better than Gaetz. (Well, almost no one.) Pitted against McCarthy in a test of strength for control of the House, I assumed everyone to the left of Lauren Boebert would take sides against him.

 

I assumed wrong.

 

House Democrats met early on Tuesday to decide whether to help retain McCarthy as speaker. As news trickled out about which way they were leaning, a political hurricane descended on the House. Monday’s newsletter, so carefully designed, teetered horrifically as that hurricane made landfall. By mid-afternoon, nothing remained of my argument—or Kevin McCarthy’s career—but rubble.

 

Making an enemy of Matt Gaetz was not the best thing to ever happen to McCarthy, it turns out. How did I get it wrong?

 

I wasn’t wrong that Gaetz’s antics would alienate many right-wingers, including some who’ve made a career of pandering to MAGA types. Tomi Lahren was annoyed with him; Jeanine Pirro too; likewise Sean Hannity and Mark Levin. Rep. Chip Roy sounded like he was ready to brawl. Newt Gingrich published an op-ed calling for House Republicans to expel Gaetz from the conference, an idea that might be gaining traction. Moderate Rep. Mike Lawler wondered if all Republican members who voted to oust McCarthy should be excommunicated, never mind that doing so would risk handing control of the chamber to Democrats.

 

My catastrophic design flaw wasn’t a matter of overestimating GOP opposition to Gaetz. In the end, all but eight Republicans voted against his motion to vacate the chair. My mistake was the same mistake made by many others, apparently including Kevin McCarthy himself: I underestimated Democrats’ antipathy to the now former speaker. The House is in turmoil today because Hakeem Jeffries and his caucus preferred humiliating McCarthy to delivering a searing bipartisan rebuke to the Gaetz bloc.

 

To put that another way, if it’s true that the modern Republican Party is two parties under one banner, on Tuesday Democrats chose to empower the MAGA Party at the expense of the Conservative Party.

 

And lots of members of the Conservative Party—including acting speaker Patrick McHenry—are furious about it.

 

Did House Democrats have a civic or moral obligation to rescue McCarthy from Gaetz? Even if they didn’t, was declining to do so a strategic mistake? Those are the two most interesting questions in politics the day after.

 

One is debatable, I think. The other is not.

 

***

 

Democrats had no civic obligation to save McCarthy from Gaetz because they have no civic obligation to save Republican leaders from the awfulness of their own voters.

 

Absent that awfulness, this debacle wouldn’t have happened.

 

For eight years, partisan Republicans have sought to avoid confronting that awfulness by shifting blame for the Trump phenomenon to their political enemies. It’s the essence of anti-anti-Trumpism. The more the left is responsible for the right’s terrible choices, the easier it is for a partisan Republican to justify remaining aligned with the right as it rots away into post-liberalism.

 

It’s the media’s fault for elevating Trump in 2016 by offering him endless hours of free coverage. It’s the Democrats’ fault for alienating right-wingers by overreaching on “woke” nonsense. It’s the Justice Department’s fault for insisting on holding Trump accountable for stealing state secrets. It’s Never Trumpers’ fault for being so smug about placing their loyalty to classical liberalism over their loyalty to the party.

 

Eight years into this, I’m exhausted by the idea that the worst actors in the party owe their power as much to cynical left-wingers as to nihilist right-wingers. Many veterans of the party of personal responsibility have somehow convinced themselves that their own voters bear comparatively little responsibility for reacting to each of the things I just mentioned in a way that consistently benefits a demagogic authoritarian halfwit.

 

The plain truth is that if Matt Gaetz and the other Republicans who voted against McCarthy had reason to believe they’d lose a primary for doing so, they wouldn’t have done it. Gaetz proceeded as he did because he understands the nature of the populist base. He’s in constant communication with it via his appearances in MAGA media. He knows the modern right will reflexively support a rebellion against the leadership class entirely irrespective of whether it’s productive or not. Which, plainly, this one wasn’t.

 

He won’t be punished by them for embarrassing the party. He’ll be rewarded.

 

To watch people like Gingrich and Lawler navel-gaze about expelling him and his comrades from the conference leaves one to wonder if, even now, they fail to grasp which of the two parties under the Republican Party banner actually wields power. If GOP primary voters were given a choice between drumming Matt Gaetz or Kevin McCarthy out of the conference, is there any doubt they’d choose to keep the “fighter” among the two?

 

And if so, isn’t it the eight who voted to dump McCarthy more so than the 200+ who declined who should properly call themselves “Republicans”?

 

One way to look at Monday’s vote is as a request by the Conservative Party for Democratic help in whitewashing the state of the GOP. McCarthy and his allies want to create an illusion for voters that responsible actors remain firmly in charge of the American right, an obvious lie given the latest Republican presidential primary polling. Jeffries and his caucus declined to help them tell that lie. How morally offended can we plausibly be at their insistence upon revealing the truth?

 

Figures like McHenry understand all of this but they can’t punish their voters for having delivered them here. Whining about Democrats is always the easier play, and members of the Conservative Party almost always opt for the path of least resistance politically.

 

There’s another reason Democrats ultimately bear no moral blame for ousting McCarthy, I think: Kevin McCarthy is awful.

 

Not awful in the way Matt Gaetz is awful, granted, but awful in his own right.

 

I was lulled by reports of chumminess between McCarthy and Jeffries into thinking the Democrats might grudgingly save the speaker’s bacon if and when it came to that, but the left’s list of grievances against McCarthy is long and has gotten longer lately. Jeffries spelled out a few of them in a statement he issued on Monday but there’s more where that came from for those with long memories like Peter Wehner and Charlie Sykes. All you need to do to grasp why McCarthy didn’t deserve rescuing is to remember his conduct after the 2020 election.

 

He voted against certifying Biden’s electoral votes on January 6. After condemning Trump for inspiring the insurrection, he quickly reversed course and pledged his renewed fealty at a visit to Mar-a-Lago. He turned against Liz Cheney for trying to hold Trump accountable, attempted to sabotage the January 6 Committee, and ultimately made an ally of Marjorie Taylor Greene. He did all of this, nakedly, for the sake of winning and holding power.

 

Even on Monday evening, with nothing left to lose after being ousted as speaker, he answered a question about January 6 from The Dispatch’s own Haley Byrd Wilt by somehow condemning … Democrats.

The final straw for Democrats may have come a few weeks ago when, having promised to hold a floor vote to launch an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden, McCarthy turned around and ordered one unilaterally instead. That was his way of trying to bribe the MAGA Party into giving him and the Conservative Party some grace in the upcoming negotiations with Biden over federal spending.

 

You can understand why that was on Democrats’ minds Tuesday when they held McCarthy’s fate in their hands. The impeachment “bribe” was a reminder that, for all of its pretensions to normalcy, the Conservative Party remains beholden to Trump and the MAGA Party. By no means are they entirely distinct factions, as McCarthy’s post-election behavior demonstrates. If anything, the Conservative Party often operates like a PR front that aims to put a “respectable” face on Trumpism. It falsely reassures wary swing voters that the adults in the party are, if not in charge of all of it, still in charge of enough of it for serious people to be able to support it in good conscience.

 

They aren’t. From the beginning of his speakership to the end, McCarthy was stuck making concessions to the MAGA Party that all but guaranteed he’d end up dumped ignominiously. He earned the job only by agreeing to right-wing demands that any individual House member be permitted to bring a motion to vacate the chair. He curried favor with his detractors by spending on their campaigns and wooed them with plum committee assignments. He ultimately lost the job because he refused to offer Jeffries and the Democrats anything in return for their support, knowing that any concessions to the left would be treated as partisan treason by the MAGA Party and cause his support among House Republicans to collapse.

 

“I think Speaker McCarthy made a decision to get as close as he possibly could to the radical wing of his party and by doing that he made it virtually impossible for the Democrats to come to his aid,” Mitt Romney said on Wednesday when asked about Tuesday’s hurricane. McCarthy recognized that he’d be serving at the pleasure of some of the worst actors in politics, chose to do so anyway because he craved power, and made numerous moral compromises to placate his masters. He’s a perfect specimen of the GOP’s Conservative Party. In the end, having offered Democrats nothing more than Speaker Matt Gaetz would have, he wanted them to save him simply because he’s “one of the good ones”—relatively speaking.

 

Go figure that they felt no great civic calling to do so.

 

***

 

There’s no moral case for rescuing McCarthy. But there might be a strategic case.

 

Tell me, are you a Democratic voter who likes the idea of Speaker Jim Jordan?

 

No? Well, try to get comfortable with it. It’s now a live possibility.

 

Do you like the idea of supplying weapons and aid to Ukraine?

 

You do? In that case, I have bad news.

Bill Scher of the Washington Monthly made the case succinctly for why Democrats should have saved McCarthy. For all his faults, the former speaker did the right and reasonable thing when facing a fiscal crisis. He made a deal with Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer to avert a debt-ceiling standoff earlier this year, then turned around last weekend and pushed a clean short-term spending bill to prevent a shutdown. (Although he may have stumbled into that one.) He’s awful, but there are few House Republicans nowadays who aren’t. And McCarthy is decidedly on the “awful but rational” side of the spectrum.

 

His successor may not be. Even if he is, the dynamics of yesterday’s vote were such that the new speaker may have no choice but to deal with the “awful and irrational” side of his conference to form a majority. If Democrats refuse to provide the votes needed to get to 218, Republican leadership will have to meet Matt Gaetz’s demands to find them.

 

That’s not good for America.

 

But is it good for Democrats? And if it is, is that good for America long term?

 

Arguably, sure. The Republican conference could descend into (even more) clownish dysfunction. Moderate Republicans in the House might get itchy having to follow a Speaker Jordan’s lead and start thinking about working with House Democrats on discharge petitions. Jordan could find that the demands of leadership require him to disappoint and antagonize his comrades in the House Freedom Caucus, sparking a civil war within the MAGA Party to complement the one within the larger Republican Party.

 

Ousting McCarthy has also halted all House business for the time being, including the impeachment inquiry into Biden. The GOP will be consumed by jockeying for the speakership in the near term, leading to infighting and hard feelings. Meanwhile, the new November deadline to fund the government before it shuts down will draw closer. If House Republicans haven’t fully made peace by then, how messy could things get?

 

Will they be forced to swallow whatever bill the Senate jams them with, simply for the sake of avoiding a shutdown? Will Speaker Jordan resolve to have a shutdown anyway just to prove that he means business, panicking the centrists in his conference? Or will he reluctantly make a deal with Chuck Schumer to show that he can govern, enraging the Gaetz bloc and conceivably drawing yet another motion to vacate the chair?

 

There’s real comedy potential here. Liberals will relish it, albeit not as much as they’ll relish swing voters drawing the conclusion that the Republican Party is a chaotic mess. All of that is good for Democrats.

 

In fact, the “dump McCarthy” strategy can be understood as a variation of the strategy Democrats used in last year’s midterms of promoting kooky MAGA candidates in Republican primaries because they’d be easier to beat in a general election. I found that cynical and abhorrent. When a candidate as illiberal as, say, Doug Mastriano is on the ballot, it’s unconscionably risky to help him get closer to power for any reason. One can’t trust general election voters to do the right thing in a country that made Donald Trump president.

 

But the cynical, abhorrent approach worked. Democrats cleaned up in races against the kooks they promoted.

 

Hakeem Jeffries and his caucus took a similar approach with Tuesday’s speaker vote, defeating a somewhat more rational Republican in the belief that elevating a less rational one will lead to Democratic victory in the next election. But this time there’s a catch: The new speaker will wield real, meaningful power over the next 15 months. This isn’t a matter of helping Doug Mastriano win a Republican nomination; it’s tantamount to making him governor and hoping that he runs your state into the ground.

 

I don’t think that’s good for the country. But if you believe the MAGA Party is too dominated by Trump and the Conservative Party is too dominated by the MAGA Party, rendering each grossly unfit to govern, then I suppose you can talk yourself into believing otherwise. If Speaker McCarthy is the reasonable-ish face of an unreasonable party and Speaker Jordan is the ugly truth, isn’t it better that American voters know what they’re voting for next fall?

 

And isn’t it possible that McCarthy’s political demise will be good in the long term for the Conservative Party too?

 

I often compare the GOP to a hostage crisis. Populists have taken the party hostage and are forever threatening to shoot it by boycotting elections if conservatives don’t support their preferences, which in practice means supporting Trump unthinkingly. Conservatives could shoot the hostage themselves by boycotting elections until the Trumpists relent, ending the crisis. But they can’t bear the thought of Democratic victories. They’re too partisan to let the other party win. Populists are not. And so the crisis grinds on.

 

On Tuesday, a bloc from the MAGA Party took Kevin McCarthy hostage. Rather than offer Democrats something to help free him, McCarthy dared them to let Matt Gaetz have the satisfaction of shooting him. Instead of prolonging the crisis, Jeffries and his caucus dared Gaetz to prove that he was willing to shoot. And now that he has, right-wingers who’ve gotten used to watching people on their side pay ransoms to populists are shocked.

 

Sometimes you need to see a hostage die to understand what his captors are capable of. Some conservatives, belatedly realizing that populists have too much power and are willing to use it to harm the GOP, may think better of further empowering the MAGA Party in the next election. Which might get us closer to the end of the Republican hostage crisis.

 

I wouldn’t bet on it. They’ve been cowardly partisan zombies for eight years. Their instinct, as Tuesday’s fiasco reminded us, is always to grasp for ways to blame the left when the Frankenstein they’ve built starts wrecking the lab. But if McCarthy’s demise helps scare some conservatives straight about the fact that Trump’s acolytes not only have no desire to govern but are willing to sabotage Republicans who do, that might be good for the country in the end. That’s the best I can do for optimism at this moment.