The House Divided

David Super

      John Nance Garner reportedly declared that the vice presidency “isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit.”  One must wonder how Kevin McCarthy today would evaluate the Speakership of the House. 

     As September ended, I wrote that Democratic votes provided the only path to funding the government and that we would not have funding bills until Speaker McCarthy recognized that.  I expected that he would allow a government shutdown to run for a couple of weeks to show his Members just how politically damaging it was and then push through a “clean” continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government at current levels until appropriations bills could be written. 

     House Republicans’ ability to message about a government shutdown, however, had a catastrophic week, with them failing repeatedly even to pass bizarrely right-wing CRs because a handful of Freedom Caucus Members refused on principle to vote for any CR.  They also had only mixed luck passing regular appropriations bills, even after loading them up with transformative cuts to domestic funding, throwing Ukrainians to the mercy of Vladimir Putin, and inserting extremist provisions that could never win Senate approval or President Biden’s signature.  Senate Republicans also voted overwhelmingly for a clean CR, with Senate Republican Leader McConnell sternly cautioning against a government shutdown.

     Without any conceivable basis for persuading voters that a government shutdown was anyone’s fault but the House Republicans’, Speaker McCarthy concluded that the folly of an indefensible government shutdown was too obvious to require demonstration.  After yet another round of failed negotiations with Freedom Caucus hold-outs, he put a clean CR on the floor and passed it with 126 Republican and 209 Democratic votes. 

     Crucially, however, he did not negotiate with Democrats – or even give them a heads-up on what he was planning.  He just wrote a bill he expected they would not have sufficient reason to oppose, dropped it on the floor with no warning, and dared them to vote against it.  Minority Leader Jeffries had to hold the floor with a long, pointless improvised speech to give his Members and staff time to read Speaker McCarthy’s bill and ascertain that it contained no tricks or surprises. 

     This course Speaker McCarthy took was uniquely self-destructive.  By relying on Democratic votes, he ensured that the Freedom Caucus would move to unseat him, but by treating Democrats so contemptuously – and making no overtures to them once Representative Gaetz moved to vacate his chair – he ensured that almost none of them would skip the vote to give him a survivable margin for error.  (Former Speaker Pelosi is a hard-nosed politician who surely would have flown back for the vote had she wanted to do so, but she seems to be the only Democrat to deliberately dodge the vote.)

     Weirdly, Republicans have tried to distract from their internal chaos by blaming Democrats for voting against Speaker McCarthy.  Nobody claims that Democrats had promised to vote against the motion to vacate, and minority parties typically vote against the majority’s speaker candidate.  Some Republicans say that Democrats should have rewarded him for “reaching across the aisle”, yet he deliberately refused to do that:  he brought up a clear CR solely to save his party from disaster when they could not pass anything with their own votes.  Nor could he be said to have shown any general openness to bipartisanship:  the entire government shutdown crisis was the result of Speaker McCarthy’s refusal to keep the promises he made to President Biden and congressional Democrats in resolving the debt limit deal, and he had just launched an impeachment investigation against President Biden with neither any evidence of the President’s wrongdoing (despite several years of searching) nor a floor vote. 

     To be sure, Speaker McCarthy’s replacement will be someone much more personally committed to a hard-right agenda than he was.  That may not, however, be an altogether bad thing.  Speaker McCarthy won the gavel only by making promises to the Freedom Caucus that he knew he could not keep, and his pattern of serial repudiations of promises he made to one side or another rendered him incapable of leading and incapable of negotiating.  One may condemn Sen. McConnell’s political priorities and lament the political skills that allow him to realize so many of them, but he does keep his word.  When he promises votes for a bill, he delivers.  Speaker McCarthy could not deliver anything, and everyone knew it.

     The views of a leader matters when that leader has discretion that they may exercise to advance their personal priorities.  We care about who is president, governor, or mayor because of their appointment and agenda-setting powers as well as their discretion about when to provoke fights.  We care about congressional committee chairs and ranking minority members because of their discretion over how to draft legislation and negotiate differences.  A party leader with significant sway over their caucus may follow their policy preferences in making committee assignments, negotiating larger legislative packages, and determining on what issues to fight.  Kevin McCarthy never could do any of those things and spent the past nine months further diminishing his personal power. 

     A new, more passionately right-wing speaker will enjoy a bit more stature, but not enough to matter in the climate of distrust that is the House Republican Conference.  Ultimately, the fundamental dynamics remain the same:  on most major legislation – appropriations and taxes, Ukraine, the farm bill, and others – nothing that could possibly become law can get 218 Republican votes.  The Freedom Caucus’s demands are so extreme that no version of any significant legislation that is acceptable to any of them will be acceptable to any Democrats, no matter how moderate those Democrats may be.  And once legislation is moderated enough to gain Democratic votes (and to pass the Senate and get signed), it will lose dozens of Republicans and therefore need many or most Democrats.  To get that many Democratic votes, the legislation will have to be far more moderate than any Republican leader would prefer.  In the end, however, the new Speaker will have to make concessions to Democrats not because they want to but because they cannot make law any other way. 

     The immediate result of Speaker McCarthy’s ouster is that the House recessed for the week, planning to return next week and try to elect a new speaker.  Many Republican Members are seeking to modify their party’s rules to ensure that they do not move a candidate to the floor without already having secured 218 votes.  That would avoid a repeat of the humiliating fifteen ballots required to elect Speaker McCarthy.  It seems likely that whomever gains a substantial majority of the Republican Conference will quickly have 218 votes because even Republicans that voted to oust Speaker McCarthy will not benefit from alienating their colleagues again so soon.  (Some of them also need a new speaker installed so that they can begin another cycle of outrage-fundraising against that person.)  And with only very far-right candidates running, the numerous Freedom Caucus and adjacent Members that voted for Speaker McCarthy have no obvious reason to rebel. 

     Some commentators’ hopes for a new dynamic in the House are unrealistic.  The House Republicans representing districts that President Biden won could at any point take over effective control of the House by working with Democrats.  They could do so formally and elect one of their own as Speaker or informally by working out moderating amendments to Freedom Caucus-inspired bills and signing discharge petitions to get constructive legislation (including year-long appropriations bills) to the floor.  But those Members have made very clear that they are not prepared to do so.  In the final week of the fiscal year, they voted for one extreme, far-right appropriations bill after another, even after it became clear that their votes would not be enough to save those bills.  They rejected some hard-right amendments but supported many others.  After casting so many votes for extreme legislation, their prospects for plausibly posturing as “moderates” in the general election may be unsalvageable.  They clearly have decided that the threat of a MAGA primary challenge is worth undermining themselves with swing voters.  So this country will not be adopting a parliamentary system of government quite yet. 

     I remain dubious that any new speaker can avoid a government shutdown November 18.  To do that, the speaker must persuade House Republicans that the Democrats will not allow them to repudiate the debt limit deal or accept extremist policy riders.  I think that lesson will require a fairly lengthy government shutdown doing enough damage to their Members’ political prospects that those Members become desperate.  If the new speaker can pull the Republican Caucus together well enough to at least pass their own extremist appropriations bills, Republican messaging may not be quite as hopeless as it was last month.  If so, the government shutdown may have to continue longer to inflict enough political damage for enough House Republicans to insist on bringing it to an end.   

     @DavidASuper1