Whaaaa!
That is the sound Representative Matt Gaetz and seven of his colleagues made when they did not get exactly what they wanted from Kevin McCarthy. The now former Speaker had the audacity to side with the majority of the Republican caucus to raise the debt ceiling in May 2023 (149-71) and again side with the majority of the GOP to avoid a government shutdown last Saturday (126-90). So Gaetz and his gang of merry children did what children do: they pouted. But Speaker McCarthy had already made a mistake many overwhelmed caretakers do: he gave into their unrealistic demands last January and granted any single House member the power to call a vote on his tenure.
So, despite having over ninety percent of his caucus behind him, McCarthy was ousted.
I’ll shed zero tears for Kevin McCarthy as he enabled, and was an active participant in, the very behaviors that threaten foundational processes in American politics. He became an institutionalist only when facing personal embarrassment.
I will shed a tear for another blow to American institutions and the infantilized expectations of far too many Republican elected leaders (as well as some Dems). Last night’s ouster of McCarthy is but one in a troubling string of actions by Republicans who seem to think that there should be a one-to-one relationship between their policy wants and all governmental outcomes. They claim to revere the Framers, to practice originalism, but refuse to compromise. That equation doesn’t balance or, as we say in the Midwest, that dog don’t hunt. But this logical inconsistency did not begin last night. The pouters, the my way or the highway crowd, the institutional arsonists have been stoking fires long before McCarthy’s exit:
- Justice Antonin Scalia passed in February 2016. President Obama’s term had roughly eleven months left. But Mitch McConnell and the Republicans didn’t “like” that. So rather than doing what we do in a democracy – sucking it up even when we don’t like the rules – they stoked an ember and refused to give Obama’s SCOTUS pick a hearing. But when President Trump was in office and Justice Ruth Ginsberg died in September 2020, with the election in November, McConnell and his brethren saw to it that Amy Coney Barrett got a quick hearing and ascended to the highest Court. Ya know, just like the Framers set it up…
- Former President Trump lost the popular vote and the electoral college in 2020. But he just didn’t like that. And no wonder – no person or party likes losing. But instead of taking his marbles and going home, he encouraged an insurrection on the People’s House. Gas on flames.
- Good ‘ol Kevin McCarthy was one of 139 House Republicans who, along with 8 Republican Senators, voted for at least one objection to the electoral vote counts. They lost the election and that hurts. But in American politics one respect’s the will of the people even if they disagree with said will. Not these members of the GOP. They didn’t get what they wanted, so they voted to light it up.
We are being governed by too many elected officials who wanted the red popsicle, got orange instead, and subsequently decided to melt the entire box in protest.
Importantly, the prior list is far from a complete accounting of where substantial elements of the GOP, including leadership, refuses to abide by the norm of hard-fought compromise. This isn’t Aaron Sorkining — one need not like each other but one does need to govern. Hard to do without a Speaker of the House.
American politics is structurally set-up so that incrementalism is the norm – one can thank separation of powers and, to a lesser extent, federalism for that. But too many in the GOP seem to confuse the process by which we govern with the process by which one’s kitchen renovation gets done. In the latter, the contractor is beholden to your precise wants. In American government, however, no one entity and certainly no one person can reasonably expect to get precisely what they want all of the time. The modern GOP is dealing with precisely this kind of reasoning from too many of its members. And that’s a threat to democracy. The call is coming from inside the House, the GOP House.
Last night Rep. Gaetz actually did what I thought was impossible – he united commentary on Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. His move was so absurd, a neon sign for of a broken set of expectations. The Republican House caucus may prove ungovernable because too many are unrealistically, and dangerously, entitled. We’ll see as we wait at least a week – a week! – to get a Speaker of the House. But let us not think last night was so anomalistic, just the inevitable culmination of personality conflicts between Gaetz and McCarthy. The Speaker’s ouster was a result of petulant children being enabled so much, expecting nothing less than the red popsicle ever damn time they legislate, that America’s ability to sustain itself hangs in the balance.