McCarthy and the GOP have only themselves to blame for their humiliation

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Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield), left, walks away after speaking with Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) after the seventh vote for president. Clyde is among those blocking McCarthy’s bid for the house hammer. (Alex Brandon/Associated Press)

Tight-fitting bookends framed the first week of House Republican majority check/uncheck in a new Congress. Between them lies a history of party radicalism and dysfunction past, present and, almost certainly, future.

Fittingly, the week ends on the second anniversary of the January 6, 2021, pro-Trump attack on the Capitol. It’s a reminder that in one of the first acts of House Republicans in the previous Congress, two-thirds of them two-thirds! voted hours after the failed coup to do exactly what the insurgents wanted: nullify electoral votes for President-elect Biden. Most of these Republicans are still in power, bolstered by newly elected Holocaust deniers. Many of them, the evidence now suggests, conspired with the defeated Donald Trump to keep him in power, even by force (Marshall Law!).

Biden planned to mark the Jan. 6 anniversary at the White House by awarding the Presidential Citizen’s Medal to a dozen state officials, election workers and police officers who, unlike Trump’s Republicans, have defended the Capitol and the democracy. House Republicans do not intend to observe the date; instead, they swear to investigate the investigators of the January 6 betrayal of the nations.

As for how this week started? Republicans made history in humiliating fashion from the start, as the first House majority in a century not to elect a speaker with a single roll call. Vote after vote, day after day, they exposed their divisions and all but confirmed their folly: to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result.

Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, who had dreamed of becoming a public speaker since arriving in Washington from Bakersfield 16 years ago, sat with a game smile through his nationally televised embarrassment, even when he was mocked by his far-right enemies speaking into a microphone a few feet away. .

Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, seemingly unshakable by her near-rejection in the midterm elections, noted Trump’s pleas for her and other Never-Kevin fanatics telling them to take this down and support My Kevin. She defiantly suggested that Trump call McCarthy instead and tell him to stand down.

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So much for the power of approval Trump touted, which McCarthy sold his soul to get. After Trump posted VOTE FOR KEVIN on his social media, McCarthy kept losing by nearly identical counts.

Though it turned out to be inconsequential, Trump’s attempt to put his thumb on the speaker scale and McCarthy’s welcome for his help shattered another political norm. Historically, neither current presidents nor former presidents have interfered in congressional leadership elections and lawmakers have not sought their help out of respect for the constitutional status of Congress as an independent branch of government and control of the legislature. executive, not a parliamentary partner.

One thing is almost certain after the absurd uncertainty of the week: dysfunction will be a feature of the Republican-controlled House going forward. The same narrow majority that allowed anti-McCarthyites to hold the institution hostage this week portends more cabals ready to repeatedly block congressional action, including on spending and key debt restraint measures to maintain open government and the stability of the world’s largest economy.

With their slim majority, the radicalism of today’s Republicans announces problems of governance.

Their humiliation this week is the consequence of a nihilism that party leaders have sown for more than a generation, dating back to the days of Newt Gingrich’s revolution in the mid-90s, through the tea-party years. until the Trump takeover. When Republicans and their right-wing media allies feed voters anti-establishment, anti-compromise red meat, they reap a base that is hooked on this stuff.

And yet, once Republicans take power in Washington, by definition, revolutionaries become the establishment and must compromise to govern. But the radicalized base does not buy it, and the new powerful end up being driven out.

For a quarter of a century now, we have seen a succession of Republicans rising to be overthrown by pressure from the right: former orators Gingrich, John A. Boehner and Paul D. Ryan; former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. And now McCarthy, who even if he wins this week, has conceded so much power to his antagonists that he will likely be sentenced to a short run as president.

As a former revolutionary Gingrich told me, after leaving Congress exasperated by the members of his ever more radical party: they don’t give a damn about governing.

Gingrich this week called McCarthy’s haters 20 deranged troublemakers. He wondered: Have they “answered or even pondered the question: So what? (Republican leaders once tormented by a disruptive young Gingrich must have been rolling in their graves.)

For a radicalized Republican base that has been a generation in the making, and for its anti-establishment foot soldiers in Congress, it’s all fighting, all the time. And so it was that the new Republican majority in the House failed for days to accomplish its first essential task of governance: electing a president.

One long roll call after another, the Clerk of the House read the previously so unfamiliar words at the opening of a Congress: A speaker has not been elected. Even the house chaplain seemed to have had enough; logging on, she prayed, Free us from intransigence and impudence.

Amen? Don’t count on it.

For the next two years, all would be captive to the intransigence that McCarthy helped to stir up.

@jackiekcalmes

This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

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