Well, it's not often you make history on a random Tuesday afternoon, but Speaker Kevin McCarthy did that this week. Kevin McCarthy became the first Speaker in American history to be removed from office during a legislative session by his own caucus, rather than resigning of his own accord. I know that we're in the era of "nothing surprises me anymore," but honestly..96 hours ago, I would've been surprised by this. McCarthy seemed far likelier to cause a government shutdown than to be removed from office, but in a turn of events, he got his short-term CR passed, and it cost him his job. There's a lot ongoing here (we'll have another follow-up on this article for sure once we know more where Republicans are headed), but given the significance of this moment in history, I think it warrants its own article, and we'll do it in our "Five Thoughts" format.
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| Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) |
McCarthy having to face a Motion-to-Vacate vote seemed inevitable since it took him 15 ballots, but his removal from office wasn't always preordained. You're going to get a lot of articles about how badly McCarthy played the past week over the coming months, but I think two things are crucial. First, I think he could've gotten some Democratic support (more on this in a second) but his interview on Face the Nation where he blamed the Democrats for the shutdown made that impossible. McCarthy is one of the most craven, continually lying figures in American politics today, and basically trying to say that Democrats were the reason that the government shutdown nearly happened when A) the Democrats aren't in charge of the House and B) the only reason the CR passed was because of Democrats, was madness (and stupid). It's possible, in retrospect, that McCarthy was hoping it wouldn't pass (and that Democrats wouldn't bite at voting for it without the promise of a longer-term solution or a guarantee of Ukraine funding), and therefore his press tour would have some validity. That Dems did back it, and he did the press tour anyway shows how out of ideas he was.
Perhaps more crucially, his inability to see how dangerous his position was with Republicans was the biggest issue he had. McCarthy had 48 hours after Rep. Matt Gaetz filed the Motion-to-Vacate to go before the House of Representatives. If he was serious, he would've taken all of that time. Looking at the vote specifics, there were three Republicans (John Carter & Lance Gooden of Texas, as well as Anna Paulina Luna of Florida) that weren't there, and the former two probably could've been McCarthy votes, getting him to 216-212. It's also probable that he might've talked at least a couple of the Republicans who voted against him (like Ken Buck & Nancy Mace) out of it if he'd done a proper whip count to understand how close he was. Not doing so sealed his fate.
A lack of focus or principle will become McCarthy's legacy. McCarthy is not a politician who stood for anything, and will join Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, & Paul Ryan as Republican Speakers who were essentially run out-of-town (that the only Republican Speaker to not get thrown out by his caucus since 1955 is now a registered sex offender should not be lost on anyone). But McCarthy's lasting legacy will be Donald Trump. McCarthy had the opportunity after January 6th to stand against Trump, to put a line in the sand as the former president incited a murderous horde of his supporters to descend on McCarthy's house, threatening to kill his colleagues..he could've overwhelmingly backed impeachment, eliminating the Trump problem in that moment. But he only saw power, and his legacy is now intertwined with a man who was probably laughing maniacally Tuesday at McCarthy's humiliation.
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| Reps. Jim Jordan (OH) & Steve Scalise (LA) |
McCarthy's departure means that the Republican Party now needs to find a new Speaker. Despite this honestly being an opportunity for the caucus to (smartly) pick someone who might actually unify them for the next 456 days, it seems instead that they're settling on Reps. Steve Scalise (LA) and Jim Jordan (OH). Scalise is currently #2 in the House as House Majority Leader, while Jordan is House Judiciary Chair, one of the more powerful committee perches in DC. Scalise is the logical choice, as he's House Majority Leader, and should be next in-line to take the Speaker's gavel, but Scalise is also disliked by McCarthy, whom he regularly tried to undercut (one wonders if some of the disfunction over the past year is in part because Scalise & McCarthy never put aside their clear animosity to each other the way that Nancy Pelosi & Steny Hoyer did). It appears that McCarthy is whipping on behalf of Jordan, who is probably the favorite of the Freedom Caucus, but given that he refused to cooperate with the January 6th Committee, his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, & his connections to the Ohio State sex abuse scandal (where he has refused to participate in the investigations that Richard Strauss, as a physician for the school, had molested over 150 student-athletes, many during Jordan's tenure as a coach at the university) he could be a walking catastrophe. Making people like Don Bacon, Brian Fitzpatrick, & Anthony D'Esposito vote to elect Jordan as Speaker is tantamount to them conceding their reelection battle.
It's not clear that either Scalise or Jordan (both of whom would get no support from Democrats considering their extremely conservative political positions) would be able to get to 218 votes in the House. This was a problem in 2015 when it wasn't clear who would be able to succeed John Boehner until Paul Ryan finally acquiesced to run. But, honestly, there's no Paul Ryan in the House right now that might get all factions behind him. Most figures like Ryan have left or been beaten in recent years. Honestly, we usually get silly season when situations like this emerge, but Donald Trump floating his name as temporary House Speaker, while it would doom the likes of Bacon, Fitzpatrick, & D'Esposito, might be the only name right now that could get to 218 just out of sheer fear of losing a primary. And I don't know if there's a Republican name that the Democrats would help support that will realistically want to run. The House, as it were, is out of plausible options.
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| Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) |
All of this is to point out that the Republican Party is broken. There's a world where the Democrats do a little bit better in 2022, win both Houses (they were just a few thousand votes away from taking the lower chamber), and Republicans can run en masse against the Congress, knowing that Joe Manchin would be a thorn in Chuck Schumer's side & Kyrsten Sinema would've switched parties. But Kevin McCarthy did get a majority, and with it he proved something we've seen a lot of in the past few years-that the current Republican Party is incapable of running the government.
This isn't just about partisanship. The Republicans have historically run governments I have disagreed with politically, but the functioning of the government remained intact. Ronald Reagan, both Bush's...the government functioned and was funded during their tenures. But Trump changed the conversation to being "feed into the masses' conspiracy theories," and that meant running on things like totally eliminating the IRS or saying Covid vaccines don't work. This is dangerous nonsense, but it was only nonsense on a federal scale as long as you had grown-ups in the room (Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Anthony Fauci) to ensure that Trump's musings were just that-musings. We didn't see things like what Greg Abbott & Ron DeSantis & Idaho Republicans have done, essentially running their states into the ground, knowing that the state's conservative lean won't punish them for actually destroying their electric grid systems or public education or medical infrastructure. But McCarthy this week proved that the House Republicans can't function...the parents are away, and the kids burned down the house. At this point, it's clear that the only true answer to how to get the House of Representatives fixed is by having another election and the Democrats' winning to get Hakeem Jeffries in charge. I've said this before, but the difference between Cori Bush & Henry Cuellar is entirely on policy (so there's a common ground to be had)...the difference between Don Bacon & Matt Gaetz, though, is whether we should have a government at all. There's no common ground there.
The Senate is the last rock on this ship where Republicans have some semblance of normalcy or at least competence, but even that's slipping. Tommy Tuberville has basically put at a standstill the entire military, placing our Defense Department at serious risk, and (so far) without punishment from Mitch McConnell. People like JD Vance put America's standpoint on democracy at risk (with him threatening funding for Ukraine), and Freedom Caucus conservatives continue to grow in number in the Senate, with people like Kari Lake, Matt Rosendale, & David Clarke looking at (or already in) major Senate races next year that will decide the majority. Mitch McConnell has been able to keep things under-control in his caucus (he & Schumer delivered a bipartisan funding bill), but McConnell is very old, probably on his last term, and it's not clear that any of his potential successors have the kind of standing to keep the coming Rosendale/Tuberville-driven majority at bay.
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| House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) |
This has invited perhaps the stupidest argument from the media I've seen in a while (even if it's not unexpected)-that somehow this is the Democrats' fault. The Democrats did, indeed, back Gaetz's motion-to-vacate...but of course they did? McCarthy has spent much of the past few months criticizing the Democrats, blaming them this past weekend for the shutdown (which was entirely the Republicans' fault...in fact, the Democrats voted for the CR that ended up averting the shutdown). He's opened a baseless (even by his own caucus's admission) impeachment investigation into President Biden, and has strongly backed Donald Trump even as Trump's supporters came and stormed the Capitol, some wanting to kill McCarthy's colleagues. And when he was asked this weekend what he'd give the Democrats (who probably still could've been talked into saving him) in order to help him keep his job, he said "nothing." There was no reason for Democrats to back a man they hate, who was being thrown out by his own caucus, and who is giving them nothing.
Yet the media repeatedly said "Democrats will regret this" and "did Democrats contribute to the chaos?". This is an example of what's been coined "Murc's Law" which is the assumption that the only party that has the power to actually fix a problem is the Democrats. The idea behind it is that Republicans are incapable of doing something on their own, that the only reason that a Republican has made a mistake is because the Democrats didn't help them. You see that here, where the Democrats were the ones who were expected to fix the government shutdown...even though the Republicans won the House. You see it in a lot of things, actually. A lot of press/pundits blame Donald Trump's victory not on the Republicans who voted for him, but on Barack Obama for "not being nice enough to Mitt Romney, which caused Trump supporters to be mad." That's absurd, but it's also dangerous. The expectations of a Republican government are so low that when even they boot their Speaker over funding the government, countless members of the media want to find a way to pin that on the Democrats. Make no mistake-the reason Kevin McCarthy lost this week is because eight member of his caucus refused to vote for him. That was the unprecedented part; every Democrat voting for their own leader...that's the norm.
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| Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) |
It's difficult to make pronouncements this far out from an election, but you have to wonder if Hakeem Jeffries isn't seeing the writing on the wall here-he's going to become Speaker in 2025. National polls between Joe Biden & Donald Trump remain close, and Trump, indeed, could still win (in fact, polling shows him in the lead more than in second right now). But the assumption is that Biden will close that gap once the rematch is inevitable, and the Democrats have an institutional advantage that Republicans don't in the House. With the redraw of the Alabama US House map this morning, there are 227 seats that Joe Biden won in 2020 to only 208 seats that Donald Trump did. That means that, unless we see more redistricting (which is certain, but it's not clear which side it favors), the Democrats are in a position where they can lose nine Biden seats...and still take the House.
I think the McCarthy nonsense, on top of the Trump indictments, & the impending chaos in the House makes the Democrats the heavy favorites to win the House next year, more so than even the White House. Republicans are already running extremely tough races in New York, Oregon, & California that I doubt they can hold. Throw in the chaos of McCarthy's ouster, and the potential that these Republicans would have to defend both Donald Trump AND Steve Scalise (and in states like Arizona & Wisconsin, with several competitive House races, they'd also have to defend Kari Lake or David Clarke if they get the nominations)...it's hard to see that much ticket-splitting. I honestly wonder if, when the dust settles here, if we'll start to see a few retirements. People like Don Bacon, Dave Schweikert, & Brian Fitzpatrick might honestly be better off just leaving rather than ending their careers in a defeat. If a quick resolution doesn't happen (and it may well not), I wouldn't be stunned to start seeing some press releases from blue/purple-district Republicans who have had it.
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