The House Republican Circular Firing Squad Over Who Will Be Speaker Is a Vision of Things to Come

The House Republican caucus kicked off its first day in the majority by engaging in precisely the kind of food fight we can expect to sit through for the next two years, the inevitable consequence of making your party a home for shameless fools and relentless self-promoters. Kevin McCarthy has been the House Republican leader since 2018, but by Tuesday's morning prelude to the vote for speaker of the House, it seemed at least a dozen Republicans would vote against him.

Following a Republican conference meeting in which the various factions were reportedly yelling and cursing at each other, the assembled loons of the House Freedom Caucus came out against McCarthy publicly. Matt Gaetz announced that, "If you want to drain the swamp, you cannot put the biggest alligator in charge of the exercise." McCarthy responded by saying Gaetz had told him the night before that he didn't care if Democrat Hakeem Jeffries ended up as speaker. McCarthy alleged some holdouts had demanded specific committee assignments or chairmanships in return for their votes. Gaetz said he'd been threatened with being stripped of his assignments if he didn't vote for McCarthy, a threat that reportedly came up again in the Tuesday conference meeting. The impressively shameless Lauren Boebert, who came within 500 or so votes of losing a seat for Republicans in a district Donald Trump carried by eight points in 2020, also declared her opposition. "Kevin McCarthy was taking the path of Nancy Pelosi," she said, apparently because he opposed a rule for the chamber that allowed any one representative to kick off a motion to unseat him. The hard right appeared to be in rebellion.

And so it proved when the voting went down on the House floor. McCarthy and Jeffries were nominated for the speaker post, but then Rep. Paul Gosar—whose family begged the residents of Arizona's fourth district not to elect him to another term—nominated fellow normal guy Andy Biggs. That kicked off the defections, which numbered at a dozen by the time the roll call vote got to the 'M' names. Biggs took down eight, Jim Jordan hoovered up a few, and McCarthy was short. He could only afford to lose four, which were gone by the 'C's. In the end, he got nine fewer votes than Jeffries, though neither got to 218. The House had a second round of voting for the first time since 1923, and once again McCarthy faced 19 Republican holdouts. They went for Jordan, who'd just nominated McCarthy in the second round, only to become the rallying banner for the holdouts. Many reps had brought their children (or grandchildren) to the ceremony, and the sound of one kid whining and moaning through a chunk of the vote felt fitting for the whole occasion.

House Democrats seemed to thoroughly enjoy the whole mess, as for once there wasn't talk of 'Dems In Disarray' or a circular firing squad in their caucus. Rep. Pete Aguilar twice said Democrats were "united" in his nominating speech, prompting cheers both times, and so it was in the vote. The notion that only Democrats would prosper from this disaster was fueling some (most? all?) of the rage from the Republicans' pro-McCarthy faction, which included Rep. Dan Crenshaw. He called the holdouts "narcissists" seeking "notoriety over principle." This has some linguistic similarities to an anonymous statement from a Republican congressman offered to CNN's Jake Tapper, in which we heard that "none of the demands these holdouts are making regard policies that affect your life. Their demands are purely inside baseball, procedural trickery that no one in America gives a damn about, but that might give these few loudmouths just a little bit more of the attention and power they crave."

It may be a surprise, then, to hear that Marjorie Taylor Greene has been on McCarthy's side throughout this extended mishigas. She is universally recognized as his only ally in the Freedom Caucus, and she came out swinging against all of her fellow normals, rattling off their names along with their various hypocrisies and indiscretions. She railed against their pursuit of personal interest above doing the people's business—quite a thing to see—though elsewhere on "Real America's Voice," she characterized the agenda these holdouts were jeopardizing: "I want to investigate Hunter Biden. I want to investigate Joe Biden." Look, any sitting president should face oversight, and Hunter Biden's foreign business deals should be investigated, but it's hard to be sanguine that the job will be done properly with these cops on the beat. We're more likely to see salacious presentations on Biden the Younger's lifestyle from the House floor.

What we aren't likely to see is anything productive regarding "policies that affect your life." Are these folks really going to fix the inflation situation, the key promise of their campaign to retake Congress this past year, or are they going to spend more energy on forcing a default on American debt obligations? Are they going to fix the situation at the border, or are they going to yell about more money for enforcement while doing nothing to actually fix the legal immigration system? Will they even pass a budget on time? The story is not that Greene is suddenly the most reasonable House Freedom Caucus member. It's that she's calculated that, if she is McCarthy's far right deputy, she can exercise significant control of the caucus and its agenda. Shadow Speaker MTG, if we should be so lucky. Maybe George Santos will take the job if he can find time out of his MVP season in the NBA.

Nobody knows what exactly will happen, except that McCarthy will do anything to become speaker. We shouldn't forget that this brain genius was on the path to the speakership once before, until he blew it by admitting the Benghazi investigations had to do with Hillary Clinton's poll numbers. What will he give the lunatics in his caucus for the privilege this time? And what will they do with what he gives them? What will he continually give them over the next two years? Boebert alone is proof that their actions have little to do with any public mandate: She barely won a red district and seems to think she should make the rules for everyone.

Then again, Republicans barely won the House and were denied the Senate in a midterm in which their opponents controlled the White House, a major historical anomaly. But they have somehow construed this as a popular mandate. At the risk of repeating ourselves, is America really so "divided," or does it have one political party with an extremist faction that is disrupting our entire system?

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