The New Republican Majority Stretches From 'Nuts' to 'Nuts'

There used to be some sort of membrane between Republicans in Congress and the right-wing infotainment ecosystem centered around Fox News. Some elected representatives were always getting high on the supply, but many others considered it bread and circuses for The Base while they went about the sacred work of cutting taxes on wealthy people and corporations. That's gone now, as exemplified by the visual of Sean Hannity holding court in the United States Capitol on Tuesday, presiding over his flock with a portrait of George Washington in the background. Last week, as the House Republican caucus began a four-day food fight over who would be speaker of the House, one member of the flock told Punchbowl's Max Cohen that he hoped the whole mess could be sorted out that evening when Hannity and Tucker Carlson took to the airwaves.

The days since Kevin McCarthy became the first SINO have revealed that "food fight" may be a generous description. It may have been closer to pure theater. The holdouts who refused to back McCarthy were billed as the far right, the truly Out There, and they certainly are. It's not just that many of them voted to throw out the votes of millions of Americans in the last presidential election and install their preferred candidate in power based on insane nonsense, even after a mob stormed the Capitol calling for the vice president to be lynched while citing that insane nonsense. These are people who say truly wild things about how the government should be run. Take Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida's 13th Congressional District, who joined Fox News on Tuesday to declare that "taxation is theft."

The most obvious question to ask here is whether Luna will return the $174,000 in ill-gotten gains coming her way this year as a member of Congress. This seems unlikely, just as it's unlikely that Luna really thinks that all taxes are stealing. Maybe she really is an anarcho-capitalist who thinks police and fire departments and the military should be privatized and made into some sort of subscription service—Netflix! Hulu! Firemen!—but in this case it seems to be her justification for keeping the IRS underfunded so it can't police sophisticated tax evasion.

The agency was systematically defunded across most of a decade, which left it unable to tackle the more complex and large-scale cases that wealthier people and organizations present through their shell companies and foreign accounts. The IRS shifted to policing small-scale violations like misuse of the Earned Income Tax Credit by lower-income people, which was bad, but the way out of that is more funding for the agency. Republicans would never defund the police, but they did make it a top priority in this congressional session to defund the tax police. They will also reportedly vote on a bill to abolish the IRS entirely. Down the line, we can expect more of this Ayn Randian philosophizing to justify cutting the social safety net and earned benefits like Medicare and Social Security. Taxation is theft whenever it goes towards things we don't like, apparently. Can I file a police report regarding the F-35 program?

While Luna's was a particularly extreme formulation, there is no one in the House Republican caucus who would really disagree. Because the distinction between the extremists who tried to block McCarthy's rise to speaker and the putatively more reasonable factions is not exactly a difference. Take Steve Scalise, a longtime member of House Republican leadership who is now McCarthy's number two as majority leader. He never wavered in his support for the Californian, even if there were whispers he was ready to maneuver himself into the role if McCarthy truly failed. He is a Reasonable Republican In Good Standing. And yet you can find him saying stuff like this:

Republicans used to talk about "partial-birth abortion," a political term for certain abortions performed after the first trimester that, according to NPR, made up 0.2% of procedures in the year 2000, a few years before Congress passed a ban. But that characterization was apparently insufficient for the House majority leader while discussing one of two abortion bills his caucus has brought to the floor to kick off this session of Congress. He's outlining a scenario where a healthy baby is born and murdered. Where is this happening? Can we have some examples of such cases? Anyway, the current bill would compel "health care providers to provide life-sustaining care to infants born after an attempted abortion." This is just horrible stuff that paints women and their doctors as (incompetent) murderers, all from politicians and anti-abortion activists who will never have to deal with any of the fallout. But it's what we're hearing from the House Republican #2. At least Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, is proving there's some actual policy diversity in the caucus: "If you want to make a difference and reduce the number of abortions with a Democrat-controlled Senate," she said, "the No. 1 issue we should be working on is access to birth control."

Still, Mace is an outlier. Broadly, the House Republican spectrum ranges from nuts to nuts. Didn't these people run on fixing inflation and fighting crime? The speaker fight ought to have put that nonsense to bed. There were no policy differences in play, which is why Marjorie Taylor Greene was backing McCarthy and fellow travelers like Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz were on the other side of things. It was a fight over who would lead the inevitable efforts to shut down the government or refuse to raise the debt ceiling—the latter of which, again, has nothing to do with cutting spending. The money's already spent. All it will do is cause the United States to default on its debt, possibly kicking off a global economic meltdown. SINO McCarthy will lead that campaign just as surely as Speaker MTG would. In fact, thanks to all the concessions McCarthy made to get himself the title, she'll be one of a bunch of shadow speakers leading the effort.

It should be noted The Base liked the speaker fight, though, and it almost certainly goes beyond widespread disdain for McCarthy on a personal level. It's gross that he would do anything for the job, sure, but more than anything, right-wing politics are now all about spectacle. Donald Trump's gift to our collective political psyche was the understanding that the theater of conflict, of loudly saying you're sticking up for the little guy while bashing the Enemies and stuffing milquetoast allies in lockers, is worth far more than actual policy that would change the American political economy. That's been true since the days of Tiberius Gracchus, and it ain't changing anytime soon. Fitting, then, that Hannity has set up shop in what Republicans spent so much of last week calling "The People's House." He spends day after day performing the role of Independent Voice while serving up infomercials for Republican campaigns and even directly advising them behind the scenes. The real shadow speaker, then, for a bunch of people trying to get on TV.

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