Yesterday Republicans issued one of their periodic and predictable reminders of why they cannot be trusted to govern by allowing a dunderheaded backbencher to depose House Speaker Kevin McCarthy without any idea of who might replace him. McCarthy resisted overtures from Democrats who would've been willing to save his speakership in exchange for substantive concessions and who instead voted unanimously with eight Republican radicals to un-gavel him. The House is now without leadership and no one, including those who orchestrated McCarthy's ouster, knows what will happen next, or how to stop the clock from ticking down to what now feels like an inevitable government shutdown next month.
The petulant putsch happened yesterday, but it was set into motion back in January when McCarthy caved to the demands of his Molotov Cocktail Caucus and allowed any single knucklehead to force a vote to oust him for any reason at any time. Placing his head under a guillotine operated by far-right-wing dilettantes, he succeeded in getting himself elected speaker on the 15th ballot, but did nothing to put a long-term or even a temporary structure for passing legislation in place.
Working with the same slim majority that former Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi (CA) used to pass dozens of substantive bills through the House between 2021 and 2023, McCarthy has been paralyzed from the get-go by the presence of people like Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), whose cartoonish weirdness is matched only by their near-total lack of interest in competently governing the country. Inflexible miscreants can be hidden or ignored with a large enough majority, but McCarthy never had any idea of what to do with them once he paid their ransom to become speaker.
Yet despite the constant background threat of an anti-McCarthy rebellion since January, yesterday's congressional chaos was still something of a shock. For most of this year, Gaetz and allies were simultaneously McCarthy's biggest headache and also his best argument for remaining in power. What are the hardliners offering other than endless, unpopular standoff shenanigans? Using hostage-taking tactics during budget negotiations to score policy wins is a strategy that long ago ran out of practical and political runway. Every time Republicans have tried it in the past 10 years they have paid a steep price for it in public opinion surveys and gotten very little in return for their trouble.
Voters know perfectly well which party wants the government to work and which wants it to starve and die. And in a strange coincidence, every time the Starve the Government Party wins a seat at the budgeting table, something like this happens. It's not a huge mystery even to low-information voters. Yet the refusal to engage in yet another round of standoff-shutdown-capitulation is what ended McCarthy's short tenure as speaker.
At the same time, the basic problem with the House radicals' plan was always that Gaetz and his closest confidantes are deeply unserious people who shed ethics inquiries every time they comb their hair and who exude unmistakable "cross to the other side of the street when you see us coming" energy. Even for Republicans who are salty that McCarthy keeps cutting unfavorable deals with the Biden administration, the leap from somewhat disgruntled to joining this particular rebellion seemed like it would be too far. Would you board a flight piloted by Matt Gaetz? Neither would the 210 Republicans who voted to keep McCarthy as speaker. They see that the Freedom Caucus is ValuJet, and McCarthy is Delta—a run-of-the-mill airline that isn't fun to fly, but safe and no worse than the alternatives.
Those same rank-and-file Republicans didn't want a mess like a government shutdown on their hands, even over a year out from the election. That's why the overwhelming majority voted to retain McCarthy. They wanted McCarthy to be able to claim a couple of minor policy wins and then go back to barking about inflation and crime and immigration nonstop until November 2024. The last thing they wanted is for anyone to be reminded of the consequences of putting the modern Republican Party in power. They needed that particular circus to stay hidden in the tent until the next GOP president was inaugurated.
They had no such luck this time, and no clear place to direct the blame. Is it the fault of GOP elites who have again and again accommodated risible figures like former President Donald Trump and Gaetz? The primary voters who insist on forwarding hacks and charlatans to general elections in safe Republican districts only to see them rise in prominence and power? The general electorate that can't distinguish between sober leaders and cloying grifters? At a certain point it's hard to see the modern GOP as anything but what the House is this morning and for the foreseeable future: a creaky vessel made rudderless by the dimmest deckhands on board and drifting inexorably into an iceberg.
David Faris is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
