‘Someone Better’ Is Nobody

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, October 04, 2023

 

When Representative Matt Gaetz set in motion the vote that ended Kevin McCarthy’s time as speaker of the House, he wrote his own name into history, too. One is tempted to look to real-life political assassinations for analogies. Was it madness, like John Hinckley? Or politics, like John Wilkes Booth?

 

McCarthy refused to take the bait of asking Democrats to help him overcome the tiny minority of Republicans who joined Gaetz’s rebellion. Republicans who stuck with McCarthy, even the most conservative, are understandably bereft. They don’t know how long it will be until the House is functional. Many of their colleagues are in swing seats and needed desperately to establish their reputation as series officeholders, not as political kamikaze pilots. Republicans in the House are now losing time that could be spent making further inquiries into the Hunter Biden matter or our disastrous Covid response. They are losing leverage, too. During the budget showdown that just ended, the majority of the House Republican Conference voted against further aid to Ukraine. The Senate then overruled Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s instincts and passed a bill separating Ukraine aid from the bill funding the continued function of the government. To members of the Republican base, it looked like the Republican House under McCarthy was just starting to punch above its very limited weight. It was just starting to insert the spanners into the workings of Democratic governance from the White House. Now, it’s being accused of being part of the “uniparty” by Gaetz? C’mon.

 

Gaetz is not without political talent. He has shown that in recent hearings. When pressed on why he is doing what he did, he laid out all the ways in which McCarthy had breached promises made about how legislation would work under his speakership. McCarthy had denied representatives sufficient time to read bills before their votes. He had broken the Hastert Rule, an informal deal which obliges speakers not to use the opposition party to overcome a “majority of the majority” on an issue. So McCarthy is not entirely innocent. He did break some of these commitments. But other commitments agreed to by McCarthy and his antagonists in the House Freedom Caucus were plainly impossible at the time they were agreed to. Who’s at fault for believing in them?

 

Asked by reporters if he was worried about “throwing this institution into chaos, paralyzing the institution your party runs,” Gaetz replied with a short speech that, in 2023, has an almost grandiloquent quality:

 

You know what I think paralyzes us? Continuing to govern by continuing resolution and omnibus. You know what I think throws this institution into chaos? Marching toward the dollar not being the reserve currency anymore. You talk about chaos as if it’s me forcing a few votes and filing a few motions. Real chaos is when the American people have to go through the austerity that is coming if we continue to have $2 trillion annual deficits.

 

You know what? I agree. And that would have been a fine banner to march under — if you had a reasonable alternative to McCarthy. Asked whom he would support as the next speaker, Gaetz says that there are more than 100 Republicans that would suit him; that the caucus deserves “someone better” than McCarthy.

 

Maybe. But “someone better” is not an answer. It’s little different from “I have nobody.” A great moral crusade for running the House’s business more transparently and balancing the books only works if you have the soldiers to wage it effectively. Without that, it’s just empty moral vanity.

 

The head of a house doesn’t want the mangiest outdoor cat to have a veto over the business of the other members of the house. Someone better than Kevin McCarthy won’t put up with this nuisance from the backbenches, or he won’t be able to do the job at all.